Articles liés à Jazz: An Illustrated History
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From Chapter Six: The Velocity of Celebration 1936-1939
The Energy It Takes
Benny Goodman’s favorite orchestra was Duke Ellington’s, he said, both because “the flavor of Duke’s music is entirely different than anything else in jazz,” and because his soloists seemed to have such a deep personal commitment to what they were playing.
For his part, Duke Ellington rarely complained about Goodman’s coronation by the press as “The King of Swing” or the enormous popularity of the new, mostly white bands that followed in his wake. After all, Ellington had written the tune that gave the new music its name–“It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”–three years before Goodman hit it big at the Palomar, and he didn’t much like the term, himself. “Jazz is music,” he said. “Swing is business.”
Ellington continued on his own independent course, refusing as always to be categorized. By doing so, Rex Stewart remembered, “he could stand above his contemporaries . . . in the manner of a god descending from Olympian heights. And why not?” Stewart continued. “He had removed himself. Let the world catch up.”
When hits for the full orchestra proved few and far between, he formed small groups within his band, just as Benny Goodman did, and wrote or arranged some 140 pieces to showcase his stars. Other bands would eventually follow suit: Tommy Dorsey’s Clambake Seven; Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats; Woody Herman’s Four Chips; Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five; Chick Webb and His Little Chicks. Ellington also tried having two basses for a time, to give his band a little extra lift; and he continued to experiment with longer forms, as well, most notably a two-part piece called “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” that took up both sides of a 78. “Like all of our compositions,” he said, these pieces “concern themselves with capturing and revealing the emotional spirit of the Race.”
Eventually, there were new popular hits, as well–Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Jeep’s Blues.” And again and again–in Dallas and Chicago and Memphis and half a dozen other towns–Ellington and his men found themselves playing theaters and ballrooms that had previously been closed to black bands. When an overly familiar interviewer asked Ellington how he felt about the fact that he could neither dine nor stay in some of the hotels in which his band played, Ellington characteristically deflected the question. “I took the energy it takes to pout,” he said, “and wrote some blues.”
Benny Goodman was not the only white bandleader to revere Ellington. No one admired him more than Charlie Barnet, and when he opened at a club on New York’s Fifty-second Street Barnet invited him down to hear his men play Ellington’s music. Ellington hesitated. The club did not normally welcome black patrons, and he asked Helen Oakley, now in Manhattan and working for Irving Mills, to scout the territory on his behalf. “Duke was terribly careful, extremely careful about what he called ‘situations,’ ” she remembered. “He never got into situations. Fifty-second Street was making all their money on black talent and keeping out black customers. But they told me that they would be very pleased if Duke Ellington would come. They’d have a table ready.” Ellington asked her, “ ‘Is it all right?’ ” she remembered, “and I told him, ‘Yes, yes it was.’ And it was all right. They received him at the door and they had a special table and Charlie was in seventh heaven.” Ellington sat quietly, sipping his drink and smiling appreciatively as Barnet and the band outdid themselves playing his music. But at one point he quietly turned to Oakley and murmured, “Hmm, they even fluff where we do.”
Cutting Butter
John Hammond, who had been partly responsible for putting together the Benny Goodman band which had ushered in the swing era, now had a new mission. He had been in Chicago in the winter of 1936, recording boogie-woogie piano players during the day and listening to the Goodman band at the Congress Hotel at night. One evening, he wrote later,
Having heard enough of Goodman’s music, . . . I went out to my car, . . .
not quite decided where to go next. It was cold as only January in Chicago can be, and I turned on the car radio. I had a twelve-tube Motorola with a large speaker . . . I spent so much time on the road that I wanted a superior instrument to keep me in touch with music around the country. It was one o’clock in the morning. . . . [T]he only music I could find was at the top of the dial, 550 kilocycles, where I picked up W9XBY, an experimental station in Kansas City. The nightly broadcast by the Count Basie band from the Reno Club was just beginning. I couldn’t believe my ears.
Hammond had heard Basie during a brief visit to New York with the Bennie Moten band several years earlier. He had been a powerful but busy pianist then, a stride player with a rumbling left hand. But now, he had developed what Hammond called “an extraordinary economy of style. With fewer notes he was saying all that Waller and Hines could say pianistically, using perfectly timed punctuation–a chord, even a single note–which could inspire a horn player to heights he had never reached before.”
Despite the cold, Hammond slipped out to his car every night that week to listen in to Count Basie and his band. One evening, he insisted that Benny Goodman join him between sets to hear them. Goodman was unimpressed. “So what’s the big deal?” he said, shivering in the car.
“I suppose I was asking too much of Benny. There I was in the parking lot of the Congress, telling him that a nine-piece group in Kansas City was the best I had ever heard, while across the street he was enjoying a triumph with one of the smash bands of the country.” Hammond was undeterred. He was now determined to bring Count Basie to New York.
William James Basie had given himself his title. “I knew about ‘King’ Oliver and . . . that Paul Whiteman was called the ‘King of Jazz,’ ” he remembered. “Duke Ellington was also . . . one of the biggest names in Harlem. . . . So I . . . had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it. ‘Count Basie,’ it said, ‘Beware the Count Is Here.’ ” It was a rare moment of immodesty. Count Basie’s career seemed to build almost in spite of himself–or so he always liked to make it seem.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904, the son of a coachman. His mother took in laundry to pay for his piano lessons. As a boy, he had dreamed of joining a circus and running away to see the world. He dropped out of school at fourteen, planning to become a drummer. Then young Sonny Greer, who would soon spark the Ellington band, came to town and outplayed him so badly he was driven back to the piano. In 1924, he had moved to Manhattan, where he learned all he could from the Harlem stride specialists–James P. Johnson, Willie the Lion Smith, and his own contemporary, Fats Waller–and paid his bills by accompanying silent films.
Then he went on the road, playing burlesque and vaudeville theaters with Katie Krippen and Her Kiddies, Liza and Her Shufflin’ Six, and a troupe called Gonzelle White’s Big Jazz Jamboree–which ran out of money when it reached Kansas City in 1927. “There we were,” Basie remembered, “with no show and no loot and no job.” He played organ in the Eblon movie theater for a while, but for the first time in his life wherever he went in Kansas City he found himself surrounded by the blues. “Eighteenth Street, at that time, was blazing,” he remembered. “I mean, everything was happening there, beautiful . . . you could hear the blues from any window or door. Right away I knew that was for me.” The blues would be at the heart of everything he did for the rest of his life, specifically the irresistible Kansas City style of stomping the blues that his friend the writer Albert Murray, quoting Duke Ellington, has called “the velocity of celebration.” “I really don’t know how you would define stomp in strict musical terms,” Basie once said. “But it was a real thing. What I would say is if you were on the first floor and the dance hall was upstairs, that was what you would hear, that steady, rump, rump, rump, rump, in that medium tempo. It was never fast.”
Basie spent several months on the road with Walter Page’s Original Blue Devils, but when they began to have trouble finding dates, he returned to Kansas City and went back to working at the Eblon, moving from club to club after it closed, listening and sitting in. At about five o’clock one morning in 1929 he saw a big crowd on Eighteenth Street. “When I asked about them, somebody said that they were the wives and sweethearts and . . . relatives and friends and followers waiting for the Bennie Moten Band that was due back in town from a long tour out in the territory. . . . It was kind of like standing around waiting for the hometown team.” Eventually, the band pulled up in two gleaming Chryslers. Bennie Moten and his brother Bus were waving from the first one. “They had a special kind of class,” Basie said, “and they also looked like they had it made in some ways, while the Blue Devils were still out there struggling from gig to gig.”
Basie wanted to sign on right away, but there was a problem. The band already had a piano player–Bennie Moten himself. It seemed hopeless, Ba...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
The Energy It Takes
Benny Goodman’s favorite orchestra was Duke Ellington’s, he said, both because “the flavor of Duke’s music is entirely different than anything else in jazz,” and because his soloists seemed to have such a deep personal commitment to what they were playing.
For his part, Duke Ellington rarely complained about Goodman’s coronation by the press as “The King of Swing” or the enormous popularity of the new, mostly white bands that followed in his wake. After all, Ellington had written the tune that gave the new music its name–“It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”–three years before Goodman hit it big at the Palomar, and he didn’t much like the term, himself. “Jazz is music,” he said. “Swing is business.”
Ellington continued on his own independent course, refusing as always to be categorized. By doing so, Rex Stewart remembered, “he could stand above his contemporaries . . . in the manner of a god descending from Olympian heights. And why not?” Stewart continued. “He had removed himself. Let the world catch up.”
When hits for the full orchestra proved few and far between, he formed small groups within his band, just as Benny Goodman did, and wrote or arranged some 140 pieces to showcase his stars. Other bands would eventually follow suit: Tommy Dorsey’s Clambake Seven; Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats; Woody Herman’s Four Chips; Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five; Chick Webb and His Little Chicks. Ellington also tried having two basses for a time, to give his band a little extra lift; and he continued to experiment with longer forms, as well, most notably a two-part piece called “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” that took up both sides of a 78. “Like all of our compositions,” he said, these pieces “concern themselves with capturing and revealing the emotional spirit of the Race.”
Eventually, there were new popular hits, as well–Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Jeep’s Blues.” And again and again–in Dallas and Chicago and Memphis and half a dozen other towns–Ellington and his men found themselves playing theaters and ballrooms that had previously been closed to black bands. When an overly familiar interviewer asked Ellington how he felt about the fact that he could neither dine nor stay in some of the hotels in which his band played, Ellington characteristically deflected the question. “I took the energy it takes to pout,” he said, “and wrote some blues.”
Benny Goodman was not the only white bandleader to revere Ellington. No one admired him more than Charlie Barnet, and when he opened at a club on New York’s Fifty-second Street Barnet invited him down to hear his men play Ellington’s music. Ellington hesitated. The club did not normally welcome black patrons, and he asked Helen Oakley, now in Manhattan and working for Irving Mills, to scout the territory on his behalf. “Duke was terribly careful, extremely careful about what he called ‘situations,’ ” she remembered. “He never got into situations. Fifty-second Street was making all their money on black talent and keeping out black customers. But they told me that they would be very pleased if Duke Ellington would come. They’d have a table ready.” Ellington asked her, “ ‘Is it all right?’ ” she remembered, “and I told him, ‘Yes, yes it was.’ And it was all right. They received him at the door and they had a special table and Charlie was in seventh heaven.” Ellington sat quietly, sipping his drink and smiling appreciatively as Barnet and the band outdid themselves playing his music. But at one point he quietly turned to Oakley and murmured, “Hmm, they even fluff where we do.”
Cutting Butter
John Hammond, who had been partly responsible for putting together the Benny Goodman band which had ushered in the swing era, now had a new mission. He had been in Chicago in the winter of 1936, recording boogie-woogie piano players during the day and listening to the Goodman band at the Congress Hotel at night. One evening, he wrote later,
Having heard enough of Goodman’s music, . . . I went out to my car, . . .
not quite decided where to go next. It was cold as only January in Chicago can be, and I turned on the car radio. I had a twelve-tube Motorola with a large speaker . . . I spent so much time on the road that I wanted a superior instrument to keep me in touch with music around the country. It was one o’clock in the morning. . . . [T]he only music I could find was at the top of the dial, 550 kilocycles, where I picked up W9XBY, an experimental station in Kansas City. The nightly broadcast by the Count Basie band from the Reno Club was just beginning. I couldn’t believe my ears.
Hammond had heard Basie during a brief visit to New York with the Bennie Moten band several years earlier. He had been a powerful but busy pianist then, a stride player with a rumbling left hand. But now, he had developed what Hammond called “an extraordinary economy of style. With fewer notes he was saying all that Waller and Hines could say pianistically, using perfectly timed punctuation–a chord, even a single note–which could inspire a horn player to heights he had never reached before.”
Despite the cold, Hammond slipped out to his car every night that week to listen in to Count Basie and his band. One evening, he insisted that Benny Goodman join him between sets to hear them. Goodman was unimpressed. “So what’s the big deal?” he said, shivering in the car.
“I suppose I was asking too much of Benny. There I was in the parking lot of the Congress, telling him that a nine-piece group in Kansas City was the best I had ever heard, while across the street he was enjoying a triumph with one of the smash bands of the country.” Hammond was undeterred. He was now determined to bring Count Basie to New York.
William James Basie had given himself his title. “I knew about ‘King’ Oliver and . . . that Paul Whiteman was called the ‘King of Jazz,’ ” he remembered. “Duke Ellington was also . . . one of the biggest names in Harlem. . . . So I . . . had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it. ‘Count Basie,’ it said, ‘Beware the Count Is Here.’ ” It was a rare moment of immodesty. Count Basie’s career seemed to build almost in spite of himself–or so he always liked to make it seem.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904, the son of a coachman. His mother took in laundry to pay for his piano lessons. As a boy, he had dreamed of joining a circus and running away to see the world. He dropped out of school at fourteen, planning to become a drummer. Then young Sonny Greer, who would soon spark the Ellington band, came to town and outplayed him so badly he was driven back to the piano. In 1924, he had moved to Manhattan, where he learned all he could from the Harlem stride specialists–James P. Johnson, Willie the Lion Smith, and his own contemporary, Fats Waller–and paid his bills by accompanying silent films.
Then he went on the road, playing burlesque and vaudeville theaters with Katie Krippen and Her Kiddies, Liza and Her Shufflin’ Six, and a troupe called Gonzelle White’s Big Jazz Jamboree–which ran out of money when it reached Kansas City in 1927. “There we were,” Basie remembered, “with no show and no loot and no job.” He played organ in the Eblon movie theater for a while, but for the first time in his life wherever he went in Kansas City he found himself surrounded by the blues. “Eighteenth Street, at that time, was blazing,” he remembered. “I mean, everything was happening there, beautiful . . . you could hear the blues from any window or door. Right away I knew that was for me.” The blues would be at the heart of everything he did for the rest of his life, specifically the irresistible Kansas City style of stomping the blues that his friend the writer Albert Murray, quoting Duke Ellington, has called “the velocity of celebration.” “I really don’t know how you would define stomp in strict musical terms,” Basie once said. “But it was a real thing. What I would say is if you were on the first floor and the dance hall was upstairs, that was what you would hear, that steady, rump, rump, rump, rump, in that medium tempo. It was never fast.”
Basie spent several months on the road with Walter Page’s Original Blue Devils, but when they began to have trouble finding dates, he returned to Kansas City and went back to working at the Eblon, moving from club to club after it closed, listening and sitting in. At about five o’clock one morning in 1929 he saw a big crowd on Eighteenth Street. “When I asked about them, somebody said that they were the wives and sweethearts and . . . relatives and friends and followers waiting for the Bennie Moten Band that was due back in town from a long tour out in the territory. . . . It was kind of like standing around waiting for the hometown team.” Eventually, the band pulled up in two gleaming Chryslers. Bennie Moten and his brother Bus were waving from the first one. “They had a special kind of class,” Basie said, “and they also looked like they had it made in some ways, while the Blue Devils were still out there struggling from gig to gig.”
Basie wanted to sign on right away, but there was a problem. The band already had a piano player–Bennie Moten himself. It seemed hopeless, Ba...
The companion volume to the ten-part PBS TV series by the team responsible for
The Civil War and Baseball.
Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns vividly bring to life the story of the quintessential American music—jazz. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best.
Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others.
But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon—and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities—New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York—and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.
Visually stunning, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration—and a celebration—of the American experiment.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Civil War and Baseball.
Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns vividly bring to life the story of the quintessential American music—jazz. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best.
Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others.
But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon—and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities—New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York—and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.
Visually stunning, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration—and a celebration—of the American experiment.
From the Hardcover edition.
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- ISBN 10 1417719249
- ISBN 13 9781417719242
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