"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again."

– Eric Dolphy

We're very fortunate, perhaps even divinely favored, that the birth and development of jazz has so nearly coincided with the arrival of recording technology, both auditory and visual. Because jazz is a music not only of great craft but also of nuances, of intuition, of sudden brilliance in the moment of execution, to have only the sheet music of the great jazz masters would be to possess the hollowest of shells. Oral tradition, to be sure, has accounted for the passing on of certain jazz secrets in an almost gnostic sense ("Like, how did you get that crazy slur there, Pops?" "Hang around, kid, and you might find out."), and musicians were influenced by hearing and seeing other musicians play. But although the lineages may have survived, the performances themselves could never have been contained and preserved in a written format that was the equivalent of sacred scripture. Jazz at its best values new acts of creation over tired reruns (although, at its worst, it has plenty of those too), and so the presence of recording technology is more significant than in the classical field of written scores and interpretations.

Whenever Louis Armstrong or Lester Young played a solo, it could never be recaptured unless it happened to be recorded in some way. The closest equivalent in classical music might be recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own compositions, or of the preternaturally speedy-fingered pianist Simon Barère executing the music of Rachmaninoff and Weber in a way never since duplicated; but they are not quite the same thing. Scholars wax orgastic at the discovery of a previously unknown composition by Mozart or Haydn that adds little to our knowledge of those composers, yet a tape of Handel at the keyboard for the premiere of The Messiah might radically alter our understanding of how music was performed in that era in a way that no mere score could do.

Such a tape may be stored somewhere in the akashic record, but it isn't scheduled for release anytime soon. We do, however, have tape on the Mozarts and Handels of jazz - or most of them. The world was not entirely fortunate in this regard. One of the sad sidelights of recording history is that the founding father of the jazz trumpet, legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden, does not exist for us because we have no recordings of his music. We do have the wonderful Jelly Roll Morton composition "Buddy Bolden's Blues," which gives oblique glimpses of Bolden the character and of New Orleans life at the time:

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shout "Open up the wndow, let the foul air out. . ."
I thought I heard Judge Fogerty say, "Give him thirty days in the market, take him away.
Give him a big broom to sweep with, take him away."
I thought I heard him say.

(At the time, misdemeanor sentences could apparently be served by sweeping out the New Orleans marketplace.) Bolden's innovations may live on in the work of Armstrong and Joe Oliver and their descendants, but without recordings, the lineage is harder to trace.

Jazz repertory companies have been formed over the years to replicate the great music of the genre, especially big band swing, which lends itself to reproduction based on written arrangements. The solos that were the very marrow of big band music were not written down, but since they were recorded, they can be transcribed and reproduced. Members of repertory companies then have the choice of replaying the original recorded solo or of creating one in the style of the era. Unfortunately, the major repertory companies I've heard tend to sound academic and tedious - reproducing the sound of the music but little of its exhilarating sense of revelation.

The best approximation of authentic big band music of the swing era I ever witnessed was created by Sun Ra's Arkestra as part of their everyday repertory. A brilliant and vastly underrated stylistic chameleon, Sun Ra began in the 1970s dedicating part of each performance to classics of the big band tradition. In the midst of recreating the original arrangements of Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, or Duke Ellington, his soloists, drenched in the spirit of the era, stood up to blow original solos that were created in the moment and in their own voice but somehow also in the dialect of a musician playing in the 1930s or '40s. And so they applied jazz principles even to the archivist's function, a triumph of essence over form. (The ever restless Arkestra would then segue out of the big band era into dreamy Latin rhythms, incendiary bursts of avant-garde wailing, or one of Sun Ra's uniquely spare show tunes from outer space.) Recording technology is ubiquitous now, but the quality of the music being captured has not necessarily improvd. In an age of chronic media overexposure, the possibility of an unsung jazz genius dwelling among the untrodden ways of some Midwestern backwater is greatly reduced. We already know perhaps more than anyone would ever care to know of Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Through countless appearances on the Tonight Show before he died, drummer Buddy Rich had become almost as familiar to American television audiences as Pete Rose or Sammy Davis. (Rich was infinitely more amusing, though. On his deathbed, a solicitous nurse asked if anything was making him uncomfortable. Rich opened his eyes briefly and said, "Country music.")

Part of the wonder of archival film footage is its very scarcity. We have, for instance, only two brief clips of Charlie Parker playing (with Dizzy Gillespie), a few precious minutes of Lester Young, an infuriatingly curtailed, if electrifying, bit of Art Tatum (a pianist of such multidimensional powers that he could count both Vladimir Horowitz and George Gershwin among his fans) gleaned from an old newsreel about nightclubs, and nothing at all of Sidney Bechet in his luminous early years. Such scarcity makes the discovery of substantial amounts of an artist of the caliber of Thelonious Monk akin to finding, in filmmaker Bruce Ricker's words, "the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz." Part of the excitement stems from the continual discovery of previously unseen or long-lost footage from jazz's long Golden Age. The recent emergenceof a piece of film containing a few minutes of Charlie Parker jamming with Coleman Hawkins caused a minor sensation in the jazz world.

In my survey of jazz videos for lingo 1, I arbitrarily distinguished three categories of presentation: documentaries (combining recent and archival performance footage, interviews, and voice-over narration); compilations (archival footage thematically linked to a particular instrument or legendary player); and performance sessions (before a live audience or in the studio). Based on the tapes I had seen at the time, I made light of the last group, many of which are hit or miss affairs that lack the structure of a good documentary or the excitement of watching vintage film clips of legendary players in their prime. But I've since unearthed a number of session tapes that possess both charm and great historical significance, whether they are carefully choreographed set-ups or just a classic band caught on a particular day at the television studio.

One thing these videos offer that recordings don't is the opportunity to watch the visual language of jazz musicians, the nonverbal cues and signals to each other to join in or lay out, the quick response to humor in a bandmate's solo, and all the details of intuitive communication that make this music such a pleasure. The sessions are also of incomparable value to students of jazz, who can observe individual fingering techniques and identify instrumental timbres - the difference between a trumpet and a trombone, say, or between clarinet and soprano sax, not always easy for the untrained ear to distinguish on record.

Naturally, one hopes for session tapes that reveal glimpses of the masters at work. But just as mystical experiences make up only a tiny fraction of everyday spiritual life, not all jazz can be as transcendental as Monk or Coltrane at their peak. And in fact it's the very quotidian nature of the jazz on a recently released series of television shows originally broadcast in 1962 that makes them so invaluable. While most of American TV was ignoring the great jazz being created here during the '60s, Jazz Scene USA, overseen by jazz buff Steve Allen, produced 26 highly original half-hour shows featuring some of the best musicians either playing in or passing through Southern California at the time. Four videos containing eight of the broadcasts are now available: Cannonball Adderley Sextet and Teddy Edwards Sextet, Frank Rosolino Quartet and Stan Kenton and his Orchestra, Shelly Manne and his Men and Shorty Rogers and his Giants, Phineas Newborn, Jr. Trio and Jimmy Smith Trio.

Part 2

lingo 5

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