Partial Mosaics

A few years ago, I had an interesting email exchange with Michael Cuscuna, Blue Note Records expert and historian, co-founder of Mosaic Records (the great Jazz reissue label), producer extraordinaire. I sent a suggestion to Mosaic, that the enterprising company should compile a definitive, multi-label box set documenting the late-Thirties to mid-Forties transition from Swing to Bebop, pushing beyond Bird and Diz to trace the changing sounds of Monk, Howard McGhee, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt; the orchestras of Billy Eckstine, Jay McShann, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman, Claude Thornhill, etc., with new-style arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, Ralph Burns, and others; modernist jam sessions at Minton's and Monroe's, and the increase of small combos in the clubs on 42nd Street; exciting developments on the West Coast, and much, much more. "A complex story has been oversimplified and needs to be corrected," was my claim, "preferably by the dedicated Mosaic group."

I was surprised to hear back from Cuscuna himself, that I had a fine idea which indeed should be explored, but that it involved too many small and large record companies, functioning or defunct, for even a Mosaic to accomplish. I responded that box sets from Europe--specifically a 4CD box I'd recently bought devoted to the early work of tenor Wardell Gray--seemed to be creating very interesting compilations by ignoring U.S. copyrights, or at least going by European rules rather than the excessively protective American ones.

And Michael then quietly exploded, lambasting quasi-legal activities abroad, pirate labels avoiding royalty payments, the blind stubborness of U.S. corporations, the greed of Disney and Congress and artists' descendents, the poor sound of overseas sets compiled from records rather than original session tapes, the shady characters involved in such fly-by-night companies, and more. I commiserated in another email and apologized for touching on such a sore subject, but he didn't respond further.

Since then I've found more and more Jazz reissues, creative compilations, and exciting live performance CDs--all on relatively small non-U.S. labels--that seemed worth purchasing, so I did (as will be shown below). None of them was available, assembled thus, from an American record company. If the minimalist address information offered in CD credits can be trusted, then Gambit, Lone Hill, Fresh Sounds, and other Jazz entrepreneurs are manufacturing their discs mainly in Spain (on some rainy plain maybe), but most also with a possibly non-existent company headquarters located in the nearby tiny tax haven and copyright infringement-sheltered nation of Andorra, which consists of a few square miles of mountain terrain that most Americans couldn't find even with a talking GPS!

Yes, the companies are somewhat shady by U.S. legal standards, with a typical single CD offering the equivalent of two, related-in-some-way albums--good sound, "borrowed" liner notes, uncredited photos, and a nice layout combining angular design with cheap "press" type. These... well, I started to say "mini-Mosaics," but Cuscuna would surely take umbrage, so let's call them azulejos instead (handsome blue-and-white tiles,but limited to those colors only). By whatever name, the labels operate successfully within European boundaries--and they are releasing some very choice stuff.

Just to cite three recent acquisitions, I am happy now to own the never-before-issued Jazz Lips Music 2CD set titled Bill Evans Trio & Guests Live in Nice 1978, which actually offers full sets from festivals in both Nice and Umbria, played by an unrecorded Evans trio (Bill, Marc Johnson, and Philly Joe Jones). Even better, the Nice cuts add Lee Konitz for three long quartet tracks, Lee plus Curtis Fuller for a quintet performance, and Fuller plus Stan Getz as another unexpected group of five. Bill plays lyrically, of course, but Philly Joe's presence always lifts the Evans energy level too (somewhat ironic since both men were junkies). Anyway, a major live-album addition to the Evans discography!

Now consider this amazing package on Gambit: a 4CD box of the Complete Studio Recordings of the Jimmy Giuffre/Jim Hall Trio (with Ralph Pena, Bob Brookmeyer, even Ray Brown completing the uncommonly structured, changing threesomes), comprised of Atlantic's great classics The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Trav'lin' Light, The Four Brothers Sound, and Western Suite, plus Verve albums Seven Pieces and The Easy Way, plus outtakes, rejects, and miscellaneous other live trio or differently configured performances, adding up in total to about 300 minutes of clarinet-guitar-and-whatever brilliance--"The Train and the River," "Crawdad Suite," "Pickin' 'Em Up and Layin' 'Em Down," "Four Brothers," "Gotta Dance," "Down Home," and many many more, 61 tracks in fact and in excelsis.

And maybe topping that, another Gambit release, but of un-released Monk, officially titled Thelonious Monk Trio & Quartet Unissued Live at Newport 1958-59, but fortunately including three cuts from Newport 1962 as a bonus (and what a bonus!). Here's what's been unleashed on the Monk-craving world: from 1958, four performances by a threesome featuring Roy Haynes, with the pianist and the drummer having a high old time, very up and at 'em. (They be boppin' around!). Then, from the following year, a quartet of tracks by the now-foursome of Monk, Charlie Rouse, Sam Jones, and Art Taylor, but this is a heated and happy four, energetic, funny, loosey-goosey rather than fixed-fast and settled-in--very much not the later-Sixties, too-cool, shards-of-ice, heard-it-all-before sound of Monk, Rouse, and interchangeable rhythm.

Finally, the bonus tracks: in 1962, Monk sat in with the Ellington Orchestra (or vice versa!), and some enterprising fan taped them off the radio; and these two pieces of music ("Monk's Dream" and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-Lues Are") with light arrangements by Billy Strayhorn and a long verbal introduction by Duke constitute the big piece de resistance, a joyous once-in-a-lifetime 10 minutes of Jazz history, with bootleg-quality sound but the elegant Ellingtonians playing Music of The.Sphere's, and never the Strides again shall meet!

There are many more azulejo issues worth discussing, but I prefer just to post a visual selection for your delectation and delight and debate. Should these geodes of Jazz be forgiven their rocky path and trespass on copyrights? Are they acceptable because ultimately serving the elusive history and ephemeral artifacts of improvised music?

King and the King

My father was stationed at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, during the last half of 1955 and the first half of '56--which just happened to be the timeframe for the lengthy Bus Boycott kicked off by exhausted rider Rosa Parks and turned into a defining Civil Rights event by the young, then-unknown Reverend Martin Luther King and his followers.

Meanwhile, a future "King" with the odd name Elvis was all over the airwaves too; I listened especially for "You're Right, I'm Left, She's Gone" and "Mystery Train" (Sun hits preceding his move to RCA and "Heartbreak Hotel"). But I was 12 going on 13, not smart enough to go see that new singer when he showed up at the Alabama State Fair...

Mainly I felt like a lagging misfit in the highly social 7th grade I was attending. Several factors, but mostly my own immaturity, made that year of Black people walking and Elvis swivelling very much a year of teen angst too as I tried to come to terms with the precocious no-longer-kids all around me with their Southern fixations on sex and race.

Three decades later I wrote a poem expressing some of those feelings, looking back also on the important history--social, racial, musical--we didn't realize we were experiencing. I was slow to think of reviving this poem in conjunction with Dr. King's celebratory day just passed, but maybe it doesn't hurt to expand our remembrance beyond a once-a-year holiday Monday...

(Note: Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy, with "President" Jefferson Davis in residence. And the poem's title makes punning reference to a phrase, "Et in Arcadia Ego," from an Eclogue by Latin poet Virgil, his words meaning a rather elaborate "Even in Arcady I am," with Arcady a sort of nymphs-and-shepherds paradise, and the mysterious "I"... Death.)


Et in Alabama Ego

“Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery”:
John Prine warbled that, long after I’d gone
And fled for good... Turning thirteen, I'd nary
A clue compared to junior high’s Rebel debs--
Southern new belles whose angora’ed
Shapes could halt a Crimson Tide,
Or breed an Auburn horde:
Dana Jo, Jewel, and languid Lenore
Running the ’55 fast lane
While Bigger girls Rita and Bonnie Gay
Coyly maintained the country-club ways.

Eddie-come-never, I was plain dazed
By training bras and formal drags,
Tri-Hi-Y functions and making out. Chubby outcast
In baggy pants, I’d more to do with j.d. trash
Like Bubba Beauchamp--“Beech-um,” he’d snarl,
A snaggle-tooth bully pure coonass-mean--
Battered by him twice for not crying “Uncle!”
Which made strong-arm Johnny, our own James Dean,
Train me hard for some future rumble.

The "sosh"-scene kids scared me more,
Filled with their ‘Bama-style rage
At most things black: Negroes called spear-
Chuck and jungle bunny; boys my age
Gone nig’-knockin’. “You ain’t a man
Till you’ve dipped your pen in ink,” they’d brag.
“And me with a pencil,” I’d mumble--
Small-time loser at Deep South love and hate.

Was Wallace the governor yet? I disremember.
Hank Williams' Caddy lay in the state rotunda,
But some whites gave rides to Boycotters
Stubbornly trampling on. While two Kings rocked
The Confederacy's Cradle, I trucked
With Dixie dreams, Old Jeff's unfinished curse.

Cajun Cookin'

Back in the late Sixties when Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records was regularly traveling across the South, searching for old 78s and recording all the Americana/Roots musicians he could find, he was sometimes accompanied by documentary filmmaker Les Blank (Les's company soon called Flower Films). Chris would tape the artists performing in living rooms,
on front porches or wherever, and Les would follow the folks around, attempting to capture their lives on film in some scaled-down but essential way. And he succeeded; he assembled brilliant portraits of Lightnin' Hopkins (The Blues Accordin' to...), songster/sharecropper Mance Lipscomb (A Well-Spent Life), Zydeco star Clifton Chenier (Hot Pepper) and others.

I got to know Les somehow, and we stayed at each other's houses occasionally. Once I had stomach flu and a serious fever, holed up at his place in L.A. for several days while still trying to peddle my screenplay on Robert Johnson; a year later, Les drank a beer too many and fell asleep on my living room couch with a lighted cigarette in his hand, burning a serious black scar in my first wife's favorite antique table. Blank was banned from the house after that--which I should have realized meant divorce was lurking in my future too!

During that time Les also made a maybe 20-minute picture--expanded later, I think--called Spend It All, which aimed to introduce Southwest Louisiana's then still-unknown, backwoods (but French Acadian derived) culture to the world. I remember a series of wacky scenes with roving bands of Cajuns on horseback riding out for some Christmas shenanigans, and also one crazed "coonass" with a major toothache who pulled out the offending molar himself using a pair of pliers! Les went on to do other documentaries on Cajuns over the years, but that's the one I always think of when I hear that distinctive music driven by squeezebox accordion, sawing fiddle and, yes, triangle.

I had that experience today playing the CD Evangeline Made in the car--released back in 2002 and Grammy-nominated later, but I'd not heard it before. Well, my new used copy sounds great! The album is subtitled "A Tribute to Cajun Music," and it's an attempt by the revered resident Savoys of Eunice, LA--author-historian Ann and musician-instrument maker Marc--to keep the flame (that would be "les flammes d'enfer") alive by teaching non-Cajuns to play the traditional songs and sounds. Willing participants range from ex-punk, ex-glam star David Johansen (kinda like a post-Katrina crawfish washed outta his bayou), and Nick Lowe-and-getting-lower for "Arrette pas la Musique," through famed singer Linda Ronstadt harmonizing neatly with Ann Savoy twice, and skittish folk star Linda Thompson in her contrary contralto mode (but still compelling), to a handful of major performers whose cuts are way beyond adequate.

Houston-born country star Rodney Crowell does a sort of Western Swung version of "Blues de Bosco" full of whoops and hollers and good times, while authenticity-driven rocker John Fogerty channels fiddler Doug Kershaw to deliver an amped-up, tres-hot Cajun stomp, cher, hauling "Diggy Liggy Lo" off to a Clearwater swamp. Country-rock songbird Maria McKee sings a sweet rewrite of Harry Choates's "Jolie Blonde" (titled "Ma Blonde Est Partie" here) and an even sweeter lullaby, "Tout un Beau Soir en me Promenant," chosen to close the album with crickets and a twilight tune. Alt.folkish Patty Griffin chirps une vraie beaute called "Pa Janvier, Laisse Moi m'en Aller," and Prince of Folk/Rock/Twanging Chinese Outer-Space Guitar, Richard Thompson (a regular pal of the Savoys), shows up twice, adding lead to one of the Ronstadt-Savoy duets, then picking his way--one-man way, at that--through the Cajun standard I mentioned earlier, "Les Flammes d'Enfer."

Aside from his nimble fingers, Richard's solo show stands out because every other track, whether with guest vocalist or instruments only, boasts backing by changing combos drawn from the Savoy-Doucet Band (with Marc's accordion work both jaw-dropping and beautiful), slide-maitre Sonny Landreth, special guests Steve Riley and Jimmy Breaux, and such Southwestern parish names as Balfa, Broussard, Gaspard, Vidrine... In other words, calmez-toi, ma jolie, you're in good gar-catching, rice-farming, coon-hunting hands. This fractious-French tribute is really a Cajun all-star cookout, fish fry, and fais-do-do. Allons au bal!

Meanwhile, for contrast I'd like to call attention to one of the most ruckus-raisin' remarkable LPs ever issued, one which I've happily held onto since the late Eighties--a sort of balls-to-the-wall, and that wall busting wide open, cross between traditional Cajun and punk-metal rock. If you can imagine the wild Irish band The Pogues as Cajun punksters instead (but, hey, one Pogues song sparks up a family-car commercial these days!), then you're half-way to grasping the sound of the group and album called Mamou, on Jungle Records out of Austin.

This is a concept LP, really, and the concept is to start out with a "Jolie Blonde" that soon explodes into speed metal, and eventually end the album in strictly traditional mode, with triangle ringing, horse hooves clopping, and a fading-off tempo more transport than two-step... and in between to burn up the recording studio with a cadre of Cajun youngsters (led by slide/electric fuzz guitarist Steve LaFleur) free to take the music anywhere they choose, as rapidly and noisily as they choose. Fiddler Jonno Frishberg (he bellows a mean accordion too) and drum-crashing Joe Granger are on fire from first to last, while LaFleur shouts and moans and his guitar snarls and sizzles, sounding on "La Valse de Balfas," for example, like Jimi Hendrix drowning in Bayou Teche.

The band "plays" LaFleur originals, Dewey Balfa standards, and traditional tunes too, but they all sound alike--loud, fast, and proud of it--screaming "Hurricane, I hear you howling," chanting "Madame Bozo, don't shoot me," and moaning a surprisingly lovely "La Louisiane, jamais d'la vie." LaFleur fights off the fires of hell too, via his own four-times-faster version of "Les Flammes." And the album delivers a final one-two punch with "'Tit Galop a Mamou" (kissin' cousin to "Diggy Liggy Lo") and the six-minute, fuzztone folkrocker "La Danse de Mardi Gras," which starts stately, goes to speed-warped, then finally slows, reverts to traditional accordion sounds and effects, and drifts off into the night... Whew!

Don't play this at home. You might just be irrevocably altered, from Acadian sad and accordion cool to plain-crazy Cajun.

Pillar to Post

I had this bee in my bonnet--well, "G in my gullet" might be more to the point--thinking about John Steinbeck's novels on film, specifically The Red Pony in its televised version from the Seventies (starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara), with a near-mythic film score by much-lauded composer Jerry Goldsmith, which has never been (legally) issued on LP or CD. That brought to mind Of Mice and Men, the version televised in the Nineties with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise and a wonderful Americana score composed by sometime Jazz trumpeter Mark Isham. (I actually met Mark back in 1983 or so when his earliest film soundtracks were being released on Windham Hill Records, but that's not part of this scrambled tale.)

Both Steinbeck novels when first filmed had famous landmark scores composed by Aaron Copland during his populist music period, stretching from the Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring and Rodeo ballets, to his great Lincoln Portrait (one Copland recording has actor Fonda dryly perfect as the narrator), and beautiful opera The Tender Land, and late-Forties film scores, the period when Copland pretty much invented the sound of America in Classical music along with its extension into the movies.

I was thinking that an essay comparing the early and later scores might be entertaining, and also indicative of how well-served Steinbeck has been by the many excellent soundtracks--quietly masterful Alfred Newman for Grapes of Wrath, then Copland's two, followed in the Fifties by Alex North's Mexican-modernist music for Viva Zapata and Leonard Rosenman's somewhat-atonal, psyche-in-sound score for East of Eden, and later the piano work of Doctor John enlivening Cannery Row, plus the remakes drawing on Goldsmith and Isham. And didn't Duke Ellington write an orchestral suite based on Sweet Thursday for the Monterey Jazz Festival? Major composers and musicians all.

But that's where this vague plan has stalled, as I await (no breath held) the long-desired, long-overdue official issue of Goldsmith's music for The Red Pony. Even a release of the film on DVD would be most welcome. I mean, come on... Henry Fonda? A masterwork by score giant Jerry? Talk about a no-brainer. Why is that telefilm not available? And the collector labels Varese Sarabande or Intrada could easily create a fantastic 2CD set offering the complete scores from both versions, Aaron's and Jerry's "Ponies" running neck and neck, head to head. (It's actually been 25 years since VS issued the one and only Copland/Red Pony soundtrack--as opposed to the well-known suite he made from it.) Could it be... this year, Jerry's album?

In the meantime that round-up is a good idea that's going no further. Just like my long-promised and long-delayed Part 3 discussion of tenor saxman Bill Perkins. And an essay on Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Lotte Lenya as I conceive them. And pieces on Tom Selleck on screens big and small, and the funny, sexy TV series Bones, and reviews of live albums by Art Pepper and John Coltrane, and a look at the amazing stream of Jazz compilations and reissues coming out of Spain (thanks to looser copyright laws), and then... well, who knows?

Will any of the aforementioned ideas come to fruition? I guess you'll have to check back from time to time to see where the posts take me--and you too, maybe.

Further deponent sayeth not.