I hope JazzWest readers have enjoyed the story of "My First Drum Set," as offered in three installments on this blog: a small study of the psychology of an aspiring young musician. I want to thank Editor/Publisher Wayne Saroyan for the opportunity to present these jazz-oriented sections of the memoir project I've been working on. There's more of this nature to come, but, for now, I'd like to close "My First Drum Set" with an appropriate (I hope) epilogue — or coda — and then introduce something quite different.
On April 12, 1952, when I was a junior in high school, I attended a concert at the Masonic Temple in Detroit called "Piano Parade." It featured boogie-woogie stylists Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson, Erroll Garner's trio, and my idol Art Tatum (with Slam Stewart on bass and Everett Barksdale on guitar). Tatum's plane was grounded in Chicago because of a severe snow storm, so he had to be driven over (a long haul) around Lake Michigan and across the state — which left Garner (with Shadow Wilson on drums and John Simmons on bass) to play, much to our delight, for two and a half hours.
When Tatum finally arrived (just about ‘round midnight), he played a full set. My date at the time was a young woman who, five years later, would become my wife. Betty claims she can still see, seated high in the balcony as we were, the glint, the glitter, the gleam of Tatum's emerald ring — and I can still hear the miraculous music he made. This was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my entire life!
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I would like, now, to take some time out from my "Inherited Heart" memoir, because a momentous annual event is about to take place: one close to the hearts of Bay Area jazz fans. That event is the Monterey Jazz Festival.
When the Festival turned 40 years of age, I had the good fortune to get hired to write a book commemorating that birthday, and I did so: Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years. I was privileged to interview and write about such jazz greats (the heroes of my youth!) as Max Roach, Percy Heath, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck, and Ray Brown (among others!).
I also, by way of the Festival, first heard and became familiar with someone who has become my favorite contemporary male vocalist: Kurt Elling.
Kurt has made three MJF appearances (2003, 2006, 2008) and will be present again this year. In 2006, he not only earned his keep as Artist in Residence, but performed with the Yellowjackets, with the Clayton/Hamilton Jazz Orchestra (in the commissioned piece "Red Man-Black Man"), with the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra, in Dave Brubeck's "Cannery Row Suite" (playing the role of "Doc"), with his own quartet (featuring pianist/arranger Laurence Hobgood), and participated in a "Conversation" (conducted by jazz journalist Andy Gilbert) with Hobgood, discussing their highly productive "creative collaboration."
For the next few installments on this blog, I'd like to explore my own responses to Elling's music, and develop some ideas on an aspect of his work that first attracted me to it: his interest in, and the influence of, the Beat Generation — of which, by chance (the "accident" of being in the right place at the right time), I was a part. I don't think you need to have once been a "beatnik" to appreciate the full effect of Kurt's vocal style and its content, but it doesn't hurt.
By the time he first appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2003, I had four CDs by Elling (whom one jazz writer has recently dubbed a "reedy-voiced Chicago hipster"): "Close Your Eyes" (1995), "The Messenger" (1997), "This Time It's Love" (1998), and "Flirting with Twilight" (2001). When I heard the first two, several tracks prompted an immediate shock of recognition, as if they were unique (and original!) re-enactments of themes and preoccupations I was familiar with. On "Dolores' Dream" (from the "Close Your Eyes" CD), Kurt provided lyrics to a Wayne Shorter solo that reminded me of poetry I had once absorbed: "The white electric skillet of a day threatened to sear us all away — fat frying. Spluttering, rank Chicago smeltering along. Smothered in heavy wooly sweat, the city knew a sad regret." The piece at the start was unaccompanied sung spoken word, then introduced a hip groove on the words "jump in my car, uptown to scram. Popped in a great Von Freeman jam, and the coffee hit. Bam!” — the music replete with pulsing Hobgood piano and fast on his feet (or tongue) Elling scat—the piece ending, "If there's one girl I've got to remember, it's... it's... it's [aspirated]... her."
Wow, I thought: very bright, brilliant, hip ("beat") storytelling in song — which is something, a legacy, I happen to love.
Fran Landesman's 1950s collaboration with composer Tommy Wolf, "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men," could, as sung by Kurt, be a Beat Generation early anthem: "All the news is bad again... kiss your dreams goodbye... drinking up the night, trying not to drown... choking on their youth."
"Those Clouds Are Heavy, You Dig?" combines the Brubeck/Desmond take on "Balcony Rock" with words based on the work of another familiar figure (albeit Czech-German, this time, not "beat"), Rainer Maria Rilke: a fable turned hip by Kurt, a "little cloud" searching for God (parents are only interested in "possessing things," and offer useless advice, "You'll grow out of it soon and start singing a grownup tune"); whereas "Now It Is Time That Gods Came Walking Out," a Rilke poem, is recited by Kurt, reflecting his concerns as a former divinity student: "Once again let it be your morning, gods... You alone are source."
When I first listened to "The Messenger," I recognized the inspiration of Thomas Merton (another mid-50s legacy; "The Seven Storey Mountain" and "The Sign of Jonas" influence on my life, and I seriously considered becoming a Trappist monk, until a young woman named Mary Jane McLaughlin saved me from that fate), in "The Beauty of All Things," serenely, handsomely rendered with a loving piano backdrop: "There is something within you... don't be shocked or surprised if I lift your disguise." Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy" (I remember seeing a photo spread on this first "Beatnik" in Life magazine!) is enlivened, after its Nat "King" Cole tempered start, by wild scat on Kurt's part: overt risk-taking and innovation an early hallmark of his approach.
I dug all ten minutes and seventeen seconds of "Tanya Jean," a hip, swinging vamp piece of epic extension, a track that moved from "Dig with me this chick lording every clique" (a "royal queen" who stops every clock and keeps a "flock" of men) to familiar lingo — "Dig what I'm saying" — and syntax — "unnameable surgings of lust into what must always be," "envision the vision," "inner vision crying into the vortex of night," "spilling over infinity," "Go moaning and roaming, alone-ing," "everything always is," "screaming across the open plains of nothingness" (a line from Herman Hesse, another cultural icon of my time) getting in the act along with Tanya Jean (the music itself based on an extended Dexter Gordon solo). I dug what Kurt was saying to the tune.
And finally: the great good fun of "It's Just a Thing," with its homage to Lord Buckley (of "The Naz" notoriety — "Look at all you Cats and Kittens out there! — and his predecessor, "Voutie Oroony" Slim Gaillard), Kurt telling a Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler (with perhaps a sniff of the wild raw humor of Elmore Leonard's "Tishomingo Blues"?) tale, in the vernacular again: "hip to the scene," "solid gone," "indelibly groovevatude."
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I'd like now, if I may, to do a bit with establishing my own "Beat Generation" credentials, and then get back to appreciation of Kurt's accomplishments. My wife Betty and I arrived in San Francisco in 1958. We'd been married, "Bohemian" style, in Hawaii, and spent a honeymoon summer living on the only open spot on the Wailua River in Kauai, pre-statehood (the island having retained its 19th century plantation life ambiance). Just twenty-one years of age, we lived in a shack (wooden, not grass), surrounded by mangoes, papaya, bananas, and with an abundance of crawfish in the river; but city kids by way of background, we really didn't have a clue as to what to do with it all. I'd had a touch of "Zen" in New York by way of J.D. Salinger and the appropriately small Peter Pauper Press book "Japanese Haiku," with its delicate "icons" set beside each poem by Issa, Basho and Buson, and this interest in the culture of Japan grew by way of the only movie theater in the town of Lihue (a town that seemed to begin and end with its general store), a theater that showed Japanese samurai films… without subtitles.
Arriving back on the Mainland (as it was then called), we took a third-floor apartment on Hayes Street in San Francisco for $60 a month rent (jobless, I told the landlord I was a clerk in a law office, and ended up working as an elevator operator at the White House department store). Poet and Beat Generation pater familias (although somewhat ambivalent about his role as "guru and ringleader") Kenneth Rexroth lived just around the corner, on Scott Street. In the liner notes to "Flirting with Twilight," speaking of the lyrics he wrote to Fred Simon's "While You Are Mine," Elling told Zan Stewart, "At the time I wrote the lyric, I was reading a lot of [poet] Kenneth Rexroth, so it's kind of a Rexroth homage. He was always aware of the passing of time, how much is irreplaceable when it's gone, how much of life you have to get now. Now, today, baby, make it real now, especially with romance. That makes everything so sweet and bitter-sweet, even at the moment of the most profound togetherness."
How true, with a Beat/Zen emphasis. On his first CD, "Close Your Eyes," Kurt recited, surrounded by wild improvisation provided by Hobgood, Rexroth's poem "Married Blues" ("I didn't want it, you wanted it. Now you've got it you don't like it. You can't get out of it now… too poor for the movies, too tired to love.")
Kurt "says" this poem in a deliberately squeaky, nasal, hectored, nearly hen-pecked, all too "married" voice. The liner notes to "Close Your Eyes" cite Rexroth as "one of the great American intellects of the 20th Century," playing "a pivotal role in the San Francisco literary revival" — which is true. When I first tried my hand at poetry, I was strongly influenced by the spare, straightforward strength and brittle beauty of his book "The Signature of All Things" and his splendid "One Hundred Poems from the Japanese." Yet, ironically, Rexroth's own voice does not come across as all that impressive.
I recall being enthralled by the content (and daring) of his performance at the Cellar, reading (to jazz) "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (in memory of Dylan Thomas: "You killed him/In your God damned Brooks Brothers Suit"), but I will confess that, in spite of the sublime nature of much of his poetry, his own pre-"Howl" rant against 1950s unhip bourgeois America — Timor mortis conturbat me ("the fear of death disturbs me") indeed! — strikes me, today, as comical, pretentious. Rexroth sounds a bit squeaky, nasal, hectored himself. But, again, more will be coming up regarding these initial efforts to merge, or marry, spoken word and jazz.
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In the installments that follow, I would like to offer my own reflection on the music of Kurt Elling, an interview with him in which he talks about his "Beat" roots and his affiliation with the Monterey Jazz Festival, and my own response to his performances at that event this year (and his other appearances). I'd also like to continue the connection between some of what Kurt does and my own reminiscence of the San Francisco Beat Generation scene in the late 50s. I hope you enjoy this and what will follow. Please stay tuned.
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