Looking for Original Music

The Winner: Charles Ives

Through a kind’a thorough, maybe a flimsy thorough, but a thorough consideration, I have decided that Charles Ives, Charles Edward Ives, of West Redding, Connecticut, was the best-ever American composer. When he died in 1954, I was but a tad, though a tad who had a record player (that’s what they were called in those early days of yesteryear) and who eventually got his hands on a well-played Columbia Blue Label LP (long playing—33 1/3 rpm) recording of pianist John Kirkpatrick playing Charles Edward Ives’s Piano Sonata #2, mostly known as The Concord Sonata. I didn’t know it at the time but this was the first important recording ever of a Charles Ives’s masterpiece of this caliber and difficulty of play—it was written in the early 1900s—Ives quit writing music around 1915. This was recorded in 1938 and that was the historic recording I got my little mitts on and that was the most fascinating music I had ever heard since I’d first heard my brother’s 78 rpm recording of Artie Shaw’s band playing a thing called “Traffic Jam” a fistful of years before.

[I got the life privilege of personally letting Mr. Shaw know how much that recording meant to me as a musician and I have a letter back from him before me here in which he thanks me for my letter and says the business is tough and for that reason the artist has to be tougher.

I had met Artie Shaw back right after I got out of college in Dallas. He was promoting a “horror” film he had produced under his Seven Arts banner (I think he named it that for the “seven lively arts” and not seven guys named Art, though I could be way off on that one). At that time my brother was a big-shot newspaper guy in town so through his influence I got an invite to the premiere of that movie and a private party afterwards in the penthouse apartment of the Stoneleigh Hotel, over on old Live Oak, and it was in that magnificence, it was the apartment of a young Dallas banker who I think later got shackled and sent up the river for some kind of banking irregularity, but please don’t quote me on that, while sipping a flute of champagne and eating a Ritz cracker heaped with Beluga caviar, I met Artie Shaw. It was a brief meeting, a handshake, then bang he was gone and I was left with my sister-in-law who loved high falutin’ parties like that and also told me, with whispery stars in her eyes, she thought Artie Shaw was the most divine man, next to my…er-ah… brother, of course, she’d ever met—she was goo-goo eyes over Artie Shaw.

After that movie premiere, Artie Shaw became my brother’s best friend for the rest of their lives—Artie outliving my brother by two years before finally giving up the ghost out in the Hollywood Hills in December of 2003 at age 92. One time after my brother had visited Artie out in L.A., he told me he had finally gotten Artie to talk about all the women he’d had, and, bless his young handsome heart, he’d had, like little Mickey Rooney, some of the hottest babes in Hollywood, including Ava Gardner, a hillbilly beauty from the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina, barefoot and dumb as hell but bright. Artie told my brother that by the time he and Ava broke up, he had her reading every kind of book there was from Shakespeare to Physics to abstract philosophy. My brother said he also confessed to him how Billie Holiday drove him nuts and how he did everything under the sun to get in her pants—my brother said Artie left him hanging but had a twinkle in his eye when he dropped the subject, so my brother conjectured that Artie must had finally gotten her. In her book, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie politely mentions Artie hitting on her, how instead of riding in the band bus she rode with Artie in his Rolls-Royce up in front of the bus. She says Artie was the smartest man she’d ever met and that he was handsome and was after her but she, too, drops the matter at that; besides, Billie quickly moves on to admit Count Basie’s guitar player Freddie Green was the prettiest man she’d ever laid eyes on and a pretty good rumor had it that she and Freddie were a thing all of their lives.

The irony here; I never really liked Artie as a clarinetist though I did recognize he had a much different style than anyone else playing the clarinet at that time or anytime since; very different from Benny Goodman, Artie’s arch rival in the late 30s up until WWII ending killed big bands and swing music, more kind really to the style of my favorite clarinetist then, Buddy DeFranco, who stayed my favorite clarinetist up until I heard Tony Scott; now Tony Scott could play the clarinet…and still can as far as I know.]

So, I've been through a lot of dudes and ladies looking for the foremost American composer. Some finalists, maybe: William Grant Stills, Aaron Copland, Paul Creston, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Douglas Moore, Ezra Sims, George Walker, David Baker, Dave Brubeck, Aaron Copeland, Lennie Bernstein, Howard Hanson, Roger Sessions, Leroy Anderson, Charles Wakefielde Cadman, Gunther Schuller, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris--Jesus, do I have to name them all!

Still, I haven't listened to John Cage. Nor Lou Harrison, though I know one of his symphonies very well.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler