“Because 95% of the great jazz musicians have been black,”
was Nels Nelson’s clutter-cutting reply at “The Philadelphia Jazz Legacy: Past,
Present and Future,” held during the Mellon Jazz Festival.
Nelson, dean of local jazz journalism by virtue of
criticizing the art form for the Philadelphia Daily News since 1959, is no
sensationalist. And the question is no “pushpin is as good as poetry” issue,
because jazz’s strange status as a cultural orphan in its own country cuts to
the heart of Americans’ ambivalence toward fulfilling their cultural destiny as
the Land of the Free.
The majority American flees from the pleasure of jazz
because it too painfully reminds him of the unfinished business of freedom.
Lawrence Welk is an acoustical cocoon; rock and roll is a hyped-up alternative
to the more sober agenda of social justice; high culture is perceived as
perennially more permanent than America’s only original contribution to the
world’s musical culture.
The first time I got flack as a high school teacher, for
example, was when a Michigan State English professor complained to the
principal that I was wasting his children’s time playing Stan Kenton’s “This Is
an Orchestra” in tenth-grade English, even though the LP was a brilliant
metaphor for creative democracy—in jazz, the players pick a key and a tempo,
then solo, each relishing the others’ differences as much as getting off on
creating their own.
Judging from the insights of the Mellon panel gathered (it
thrilled me to note) on Walt Whitman’s 167th birthday, the climate of belief
has improved immeasurably from East Lansing in 1953. Still, the audiences for
jazz are miniscule, though they are inching forward on radio.
Ted Eldredge, manager of jazz station WRTI at Temple
University, revealed the startling statistic that among the biggest givers to
their recent beg-athon were the Friday morning fusion fans—10% of the take. But
the all-jazz format may be sailing into rough demographic weather: 70% of the
fusion givers are between 25 and 49 years old.
When I told my black neighbor that, he moaned: “What are
those kids going to listen to when they’re our age? The music of their youth
simply won’t age.” I told him it wouldn’t matter, because they’d all be deaf by
then anyway.
Eldredge has been a broadcaster for 33 years, 20 of them in
commercial radio, and he brings a hard, pragmatic, even cynical attitude to his
starry-eyed students at Temple: If it pays they’ll play it, alluding to the
surprising news that commercial WMGK is testing the jazz waters for two hours
every Sunday morning at 8 a.m.
When needled by the audience, afraid that the fusion
contributors would take the purism out of WRTI’s jazz, he backed off, saying
only two cuts out of ten or twelve an hour were by the likes of Jeff Beck, the
guitarist the panel used as a whipping boy for the “crime” of fusion.
Put a Muse’s Nine of a panel together and the debates over
purist versus “compromised” jazz tend to become semi-theological, sounding like
medieval disquisitions over how many angel-haired hipsters can dance on the end
of a diamond stylus. Luckily, the audience contained 66-year-old Cleo Robinson
Anderson, who chided the more Utopian spielers: When she was three in 1923, her
daddy gave her a crystal set and by the miracle of radio she heard her first
swatch of Kansas City Blues.
She allowed as how even now she could hear the influence of
guitarist Charlie Christian in the work of the Grateful Dead. This
self-identified mental-health professional warned the deep thinkers not to get
too far away from the people in their lucubrations.
Happily, there’s solid evidence that more and more
Philadelphians will have access to jazz. Diana Klinkhardt of the Philadelphia
Jazz Society described her group’s success in getting PRISM cable to air a
half-hour program financed ($10,000) from National Endowment for the Arts and
State Humanities Council funds. PJS is also investing in the future with its
McCoy Tyner grants to promising young players such as Joey DeFrancesco,
Jonathan Cesar and Antonio Parker.
Spencer Weston, the articulate programmer for the
Afro-American Historical Museum, criticized the panel for concentrating so much
on radio, to him, an antediluvian medium. Instead, go after TV (European jazz
festivals run on prime time, sometimes live), videos (you miss too much of the
gestural in jazz on a 1-D medium like radio) and, better, press coverage
(though when the two dailies featured this symposium up front in their weekend
leisure guides, fewer than 50 showed up to listen).
Weston also programs one of the two most consistently good
live jazz series, with $45,000-a-year support from Kor-brands, the distributor
of Beefeater’s gin. (I’ll drink to that!)
Ludwig van Trickt has $20,000 in arts grants to program the
Painted Bride jazz series. He was the most irredentist of the black spokesmen,
mocking mainline media for allowing “assorted minstrels” like TV’s “Mr. T” and
“Webster” to flourish whilst Downbeat hasn’t given the nod to a black jazz star
in five years.
That Ludwig van may be a trifle impossible to please
devolved later in a soporific interlude on the need for more “role models” for
young musicians. Whenever everyone else thought (and spoke) Wynton Marsalis, he
described the two-track genius as “boring.”
Once again, Spencer Weston got the thinkers back to reality
by reminding them that more people heard Louis Armstrong do “Hello Dolly!” than
his legendary Hot 5 stuff: and that the greater world knows Duke Ellington more
for “Satin Doll” than for his more highly regarded symphonic suites.
Such distinctions don’t interest the entertainment lawyer on
the panel, one Lloyd Remick—who reps Grover Washington, Jr., so he can’t be as
bad as the Apple Pie Theory of Life he says he lays on his students at Temple
Law.
This “slice of living” paradigm rests on the
incontrovertible truism that 90% of a thousand bucks is less than 40-50% of a
million. It is not sinful. Remick insisted, to use your God-given talent to
make a lot of money doing what you love to do. But it takes talent, luck and
contacts (make that CONTACTS) to make a superstar.
So give a slice to a lawyer. Another slice to a PR person.
Yet another to a manager (“to show you how to bob and weave your way through
the jungle out there”). I couldn’t help imagining what the Duke or the Count or
the other musical royalty of America would make of the conglomeration of their
art.
I was mulling these immeasurables while walking down
Chestnut Street when, yo and behold, I heard the sounds of jazz emanating from
in front of the Beneficial Savings Bank. When the alto player finished, I asked
him if he knew the Duke’s “Satin Doll.”
“That’s an easy one,” he countered easily and played two
choruses, separated by his own baroque inventions. The best buck I spent that
day I slipped into his instrument case.
How long had he been busking? Since 1977. After graduating
from George Washington Carver High School in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1969, he
came up to Philly. He plays his appointed round every weekday lunch hour, June
through September. In October, he descends into the more salubrious clime of
the subway, a kind of musical vent performer.
He is given $10 plus carfare a day by pleased listeners. Not
much for Remick to slice up there. But 32-year-old Tommie Taylor struck me as a
happy man.
From Welcomat: After Dark, July 9, 1986
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