Blue Notes

Profiles of Jazz Personalities

Robert P. Vande Kappelle

• Éditeur: Resource Publications
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781498271240
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: African American Studies

Music, like romance, is the language of the soul. Music allows us to express ourselves, and in so doing makes us feel alive. Jazz music, the only art form created by Americans, reminds us that the genius of America is improvisation; a good beat, a contagious rhythm, an emotional ballad, creative improvisation, jazz has it all. Jazz is the story of extraordinary human beings, black and white, male and female, children of privilege and children of despair, who were able to do what most of us only dream of doing: create art on the spot. Their stories are told in Blue Notes.Blue Notes contains profiles of 365 jazz personalities, one for each day of the year. Each vignette tells a story, some heartwarming, others tragic, but all memorable. The daily entries also provide valuable information on jazz styles, jazz history, instruments and instrumentalists, and such related topics as jazz and religion, women in jazz, drug and alcohol abuse, and racism. These topics can be referenced through an extensive set of indexes. The book's appendix includes helpful background information, a concise overview of jazz music, and even a quiz on jazz biography.While Blue Notes is written for jazz fans in general, experts will value its comprehensive nature. So whether you are curious about jazz or simply love and appreciate music, Blue Notes will provide daily moments of discovery and help you recognize what the rest of the world already has, a music so compelling that it can be said to define the human being in the twentieth century.

Chapter 1

January

January 1—Susannah McCorkle (1946–2001)

b. Berkeley, CA; d. New York, NY

Vocalist

[Vocal Jazz; Traditional Pop; Standards]

Other jazz notables born on this day: Papa Celestin (1884); Al McKibbon (1919); Milt Jackson (1923); Chris Potter (1971)

Jazz notables deceased on this day: Alexis Korner (1984)

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During her thirty-year career Susannah McCorkle seemingly had everything go her way—talent, intelligence, good looks, and a successful career. An ambitious performer, she also wrote for the New Yorker and published a number of short stories. Known as one of the top interpreters of lyrics during the 1980s and ’90s—with a clear, natural voice described as combining Billie Holiday inflections with an occasional hint of Marilyn Monroe—Susannah was at or near the top of her field when she took her life on May 19, 2001 by jumping from her New York apartment to the street below.

Her life and career reveal barely a glimmer into the circumstances that led to her tragic suicide. As the daughter of an anthropologist, she spent time during her formative years living in Mexico and Venezuela, in addition to the U.S. She studied Italian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and upon graduation she traveled to Paris. There she discovered recordings by Holiday and soon became involved in jazz. Following a short stay in Rome, she moved to London, where she worked with Keith Ingham (to whom she was briefly married), among others, and performed with visiting Americans such as Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, and Bobby Hackett (who called her “the best singer since Billie Holiday”). Throughout her career she recorded many “songbook” sets, dedicated to the music of particular composers or lyricists. The poignant titles of certain albums, including her Grammy-nominated collection, The People That You Never Get to Love (1981) and the more recent From Broken Hearts to Blue Skies (1998), hint at an inner melancholia.

The greatest irony is that this beloved singer took her life soon after compiling a collection of Most Requested Songs (2001). This final album, a parting gift to her fans, was made more wistful by reflections on the album sleeve. Perhaps, as she wrote in the liner notes for her reading of “If I Only Had a Heart,” she was including herself among those individuals who “have trouble experiencing their own emotions and yearn to feel something, anything.” Apparently, this disillusioned dreamer learned to sublimate her inner feelings, for whatever anguish she bore served as a catalyst for her artistry. Like Billie Holiday, who initially inspired her, Susannah was able to communicate a song because she lived with emotional pain. Rather than distort or alter the lyrics, she used her jazz sensibility to bring out their hidden beauty, thereby attracting devoted fans. Her personal tragedy should draw additional listeners to this lovesome flower, cut in her prime.

January 2—Kenny Clarke (1914–1985)

b. Pittsburgh, PA; d. near Paris, France

Drummer; Bandleader

[Bop]

Other jazz notables born on this day: Nick Fatool (1915)

Jazz notables deceased on this day: Erroll Garner (1977); Eddie Heywood (1989); Nat Adderley (2000)

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Unless adopted or raised in strong foster homes, children who lack parental influence during their formative years often develop unwholesome patterns later in life. Rootless, they may wander through careers, marriages, and even homelands. Kenny Clarke was such a person. Lacking a proper start in life, but resilient and flexible, he spent much of his career searching—for a name, a home, an identity, even a certain birthdate (he may have been born on January 9). Abandoned by his father and left homeless with the passing of his mother, he was placed in the Coleman Industrial Home for Negro Boys (1919–26). Like Louis Armstrong, who six years earlier had been placed in a home for waifs, young Kenny’s experience was mollified by the opportunity to learn music. After experimenting with various brass instruments, he eventually took up drums. He left school to become a musician, touring in a band that included another Pittsburgh native, trumpeter Roy Eldridge.

Up to this point he had worked as Kenny Spearman, but when he went to New York in 1935 he dropped his surname and became Kenny Clarke. Around 1940, some of the younger musicians who felt that swing had fallen into a rut began developing their own original styles. While a member of Teddy Hill’s big band, Clarke and fellow sideman Dizzy Gillespie began experimenting with new rhythmic conceptions. The novel thing that Clarke added at this time was to shift the ground beat from the bass drum to the lighter sound of the cymbals, thereby freeing the bass drum for accent and surprises—“dropping bombs,” as the practice came to be called. Listening to Clarke’s offbeat rhythms, Hill inadvertently gave Clarke his nickname, “Klook,” when he called the drummer’s style “klook-mop stuff.” Around 1941 Klook began leading the house band at Minton’s Playhouse, a bar in Harlem where young modernists gathered in a series of jam sessions that permanently altered the jazz world, creating a form of music known as bebop or “bop.” In the process, he became the jazz world’s first bop drummer.

In 1943 Clarke was drafted into the army, where misfortune struck again. While stationed in Alabama he married jazz singer Carmen McRae, but caught AWOL (absent without leave), he was shipped to the European war zone and remained in France until 1946. His marriage suffered during this period and after four years he and McRae separated. But he acquired a taste for Paris, a place to which he would return frequently. In search of a religious identity, Clarke became a Muslim after the war and briefly took the name Liaquat Ali Salaam. A decade later, after he had participated in numerous landmark events, including recording historic albums with Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool group and performing as a member of the groundbreaking Modern Jazz Quartet, Clarke finally moved to France permanently. Home at last, he co-led the influential Clarke-Boland Big Band and established himself as a major figure on the European jazz scene.

January 3—James Carter (1969–)

b. Detroit, MI

Saxophonist; Bass Clarinetist; Leader

[Contemporary Jazz; Hard Bop; Post-Bop; Avant-Garde Jazz; Soul-Jazz]

Other jazz notables born on this day:

Jazz notables deceased on this day: Kaiser Marshall (1948); Earl Swope (1968); Wilbur DeParis (1973)

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Born to a musical family in Detroit, Carter was fascinated early on by the appearance of the saxophone, and he began performing shortly after receiving his first instrument when he was eleven. He played jazz at the nearby Blue Lake Arts Camp and then toured Scandinavia with the Blue Lake Monster Ensemble in 1985. That year, while still in high school, he gigged with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. In 1988 Carter played with Lester Bowie in New York and by 1988 he was touring with Julius Hemphill. He has since recorded and performed with some of today’s top jazz artists, as well as leading his own highly versatile band.

Potentially the most exciting saxophonist to come to the fore during the 1990s, Carter caused a sensation with his recordings for the Japanese DIW label. When JC On the Set was issued in 1993, Carter’s entrance on the first selection, a unique montage of pops, squeals, and split-tones, was sensational. The album was universally acclaimed as the finest debut by a saxophonist in decades.1 On Jurassic Classics, recorded a few months later, he devised another stunning opening, this time for “Take the ‘A’ Train,” its two-note train whistle, like the screeching of wheels, kicking off a breathless ride down the tracks. His initial album with Columbia later in 1994, The Real Quiet Storm, an album of ballads, received unequivocal praise from jazz critic Gary Giddins: “if jazz is to enjoy a genuine breakthrough beyond the nonimprovisatory kitsch that saddles the charts, here is music with rhythm in its feet, light in its eyes, and brains in its back alley soul.”2

Carter is often compared to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the largely self-taught saxophonist, inventor, and one-man reed section who, like the unclassifiable Carter, was a totally original performer. Beginning on saxophone a scant three years after Kirk’s death in 1977, Carter embodies Kirk’s scholastic understanding of the instrument’s history, as well as his exuberant style and expansive spirit. The owner of sixty woodwind instruments, Carter performs skillfully on most reeds, and while the tenor sax is his main instrument, he also plays the soprano, alto, and baritone saxes, in addition to the clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe, and bass flute. His musical taste also runs the gamut, from straightahead to swing to free jazz. Carter often switches unexpectedly between styles, and the effect can be exhilarating or disorienting.

Though not everyone approves of Carter’s intrepid playing style, all agree, however, that Carter is an astounding technician with unlimited potential for development. This unconventional musician may soon be considered one of the all-time greats in jazz.

January 4—John McLaughlin (1942–)

b. Kirk Sandall, Yorkshire, England

Guitarist; Bandleader; Composer

[Post-Bop; Fusion; World Music]

Other jazz notables born on this day: Frankie Newton (1906); Joe Marsala (1907); Frank Wess (1922)

Jazz notables deceased on this day: Paul Chambers (1969); Eddie Barefield (1991); Leo Wright (1991); Les Brown (2001)

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If originality is the engine that drives improvisation, McLaughlin is the engineer. An innovative fusion guitarist in the early 1970s, he played a specially built electric guitar with two nec...