[78-L] Good post from fnarf

[Taylor Bowie]

Thanks for an excellent analysis, "fnarf"  (Sorry I don't know your name!). 
I especially like your locating the place where Crouch and Sudhalter would 
be able to find common ground.

One of my favorite mid-30s "sweet band" records is the Teddy Hill Orch. 
version of Got Me Doin' Things,  with clipped muted brass,  hotel-band tenor 
sax (by Chu Berry!?!?!),  and a wonderful "business man's bounce"  from the 
rhythm section.   And a totally wonderful "sweet band" vocal from trumpeter 
Bill Dillard...I love his singing.  A great record by any measure,  and it 
makes me wish that other black bands had gotten more of a chance to record 
this kind of pop commercial arrangement...I'm sure they played them at live 
gigs.

Not to change the subject,  but have any of you seen the episode of the old 
TV show "Barney Miller" where Bill Dillard has a role and plays his horn? 
Wonderful performance.  I guess he had something of an acting career in 
later years,  mostly on stage.


Taylor




----- Original Message ----- 
From: <fnarf at comcast.net>
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [78-L] Lost Chords vs. different genes


> From: "Taylor Bowie" <bowiebks at isomedia.com>
>
> Taking these paragraphs backwards:
>
>> And no one can deny that, after a while,  there was cross-polination if 
>> you
>> will.  Lester Young famously said that his early influences included
>> Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey,  and Ella Fitzgerald on one occasion cited
>> Connee Boswell as her first "model."  Rex Stewart has written eloquently
>> about the influence of both Armstrong and Beiderbeck on his own
>> playing...and you can sure hear it on many of Rex's records.
>
> Oh, absolutely. In the "classic" phase, it might be possible in some 
> instances to identify "black style" and "white style" (think Basie vs. 
> Miller, for instance) but these had lost their strictest definition, and 
> whites could "play black" and vice versa, and the strict segregation had 
> pretty much crumbled. In fact, jazz was in the vanguard of breaking down 
> these barriers in the wider society. Not to say that there wasn't still 
> plenty of discrimination, even in sophisticated New York; blacks couldn't 
> play the Copa for a long, long time, and couldn't sit in the audience for 
> much longer than that. But musically, while there was still separation, 
> they could and did play together, influence each other, imitate each 
> other, and so on. Ella exists in a space that is not "black" or "white" 
> but rather "American song". It's important to remember, though, that she 
> lived her entire life very much trapped in a "black world" -- segregation 
> still exists. And look where she came from -- a hom
> eless black teenager wandering Harlem sometimes without shoes.
>
>> Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that no one in jazz,  including
>> Bix, Bolden, Armstrong, etc. developed independently.  And surely the 
>> sound
>> of the European-style orchestras and instruments had a strong effect as 
>> to
>> how early black players developed their sound,  if not their style?
>
> Well, certainly. Trumpets and trombones and pianos didn't come from 
> Africa. Most people accept that blacks learned to use these instruments by 
> playing in, or seeing whites play in, Civil War military bands. The whole 
> setup of early proto-jazz bands was military in style, right down to the 
> shoulder braids. Blacks in New Orleans in particular but everywhere in 
> slave culture used to parody and imitate their white masters, and 
> musically, by the time leading up to Bolden were probably playing a 
> more-or-less straight version of Sousa-style marches, from which the 
> variations came forth. Uptown, the creoles of status, almost white, were 
> playing classical music on the piano, which is the real "folk music" of 
> most of white America (as has been recently mentioned in another thread 
> here). When that rag time started to show up, whites, creoles, and even 
> blacks with aspirations got their knuckles rapped by many a teacher for 
> "bringing that n****r music in here".
>
> Once that "n****r music" idea infiltrated or infected the minds of the 
> players, though, both white and black, there was no going back. The 
> freeing idea itself, that I can tear this up if I want to, which naturally 
> became a competitive arena, is what led to these proto-musics becoming 
> something we would recognize as "jazz".
>
> I guess the point is, where both Crouch and Sudhalter can agree, is that 
> jazz proceeds from the point of intersection. It is not African, not 
> Spanish, not Cuban, not Haitian, and not white -- it's the mix. It's where 
> a truly American idea took flight, rather than a European import (and, 
> remember, the slaves themselves were a European import).
>
>
>
>
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