Martin Williams

[Leeway]

We can say that bad taste knows no boundaries, racial or otherwise, but I think that's a condescending attitude.

I happen to think that's a valid observation, but why is it "condescending"? In fact, it seems to me quite the opposite.

As far as smooth jazz and smooth R&B (the fulsome crooner school of emoting) goes, I've noticed the same phenomenon here in DC. Interesting that most of the African-Americans I work with, and my wife works with, in DC, have little or no use for rap either. (That might be an age thing).

My conjecture is that as more African-Americans move into the American middle and upper-middle class, they adopt more "mainstream" tastes, i.e., mass market, or middlebrow. Thus, music that is "smooth" and "soothes," has a veneer of ease and offers easy to pick up melodies, appeals more than a music that one associates with harder times, "outsider" status, etc. Same goes for their white counterparts. Same in books, films, etc. The American mainstream usually prefers homegenized cultural products. So, my sense is that this is a class thing.

[Simon Weil]

I do think "intuition" (or instinct or whatever) is a valid concept for these sorts of discussions. For me, it's linked with the creative facility. I'm not claiming to be profoundly creative, but in terms of having ideas - sometimes they will just pop into my head intuitively. I've also taken pictures and then walked off, knowing intuitively that I've "got" it. And those have been my best shots.

To me it's like a magical facility. I guess it's to do with giving your imagination free rein. But, historically, it can also be an extremely destructive one. The Nazis intuitively, instinctively "knew" that the Jews were evil....

It taps into the unconscious, one's fantasies - dreams - but also one's nighmares.

That's what the Romantics say, and I agree.

Simon Weil

[Don't know where this fits in with Martin W. - Except that he had a whole bunch of good ideas that just seem to appear.]

Edited December 27, 2004 by Simon Weil

[AllenLowe]

Per middle class taste, I did notice on a recent BET broadcast that a Kenny G performance had an audience made up primarily of appreciative African Americans -

[ghost of miles]

Wasn't Armstrong a huge fan of Lombardo & other sweet bands? And I don't think he was alone among African-American musicians of the 1930s. (Hell, Allen, I might've read that in your book--don't be surprised if you encounter your own wisdom/knowledge being parroted back to you here!)

[AllenLowe]

And per Simone Weil's comments - intuition and instinct is indeed mysterious - why does one come up with good ideas (or bad ideas)? My prime point in all of this is that it's hopeless, in this process, to try and separate the intellectual from the emotional or intuitive - as they all contribute; any separation of elements that we make might be seen as artificial, at least in my opinion -

[AllenLowe]

Armstrong did, by some accounts, admire Lombardo's sax sound (I can't take credit for this) - if, however, you want to hear an excellent Lombardo jazz performance, try St. Louis Blues, from 1930 - it actually swings!

[Christiern]

• Armstrong did admire the Lombardo band and when I asked him about that, I came away with the impression that it was the high level of musicianship he admired more than the actual charts. Musicians often listen with different ears--take for example Lester Young's admiration for Jo Stafford; I was surprised when he expressed that to me, but when I later thought about it, I concluded that it was her perfect pitch he admired. I may have been wrong, but it made sense to me. It is folly to think that jazz musicians are so into their music that they don't listen beyond it. I have been to parties at Cecil Taylor's loft (in the late 60s) where the music was all Motown, and if someone suggested Coltrane, Cecil would have none of it.
  

[Larry Kart]

That Martin Williams four-part series on the "state of affairs in jazz" I mentioned a while back -- the one that ends with a hymn of praise to the World Saxophone Quartet -- appeared under the title "How Long Has This Been Going On?" in Jazz Times (Feb.-March-April-May 1987). I'll try to scan it in some time, but I have doubts whether that will work -- I don't have the original magazines but a dark, dim, and blotchy Xerox -- and it would be a bear to type it in (maybe 6,000-8,000 words in all), My guess is, as I think I said before, that Martin was not in good health at the time (he died in 1992) -- he sounds tired and distracted, and some of what he says ignores or contradicts things that I know he knew to be the case, if only because he'd said that they were the case in pieces he'd written before.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

I have the original magazines if the need arises.

Mike

[paul secor]

Don't recall what blues Martin liked, but I do recall him pointing out in print on several occasions that the once fairly common belief that the blues was a folk music pure and simple doesn't hold up to examination -- rather, what we have is a fairly constant recycling and reshaping of popular music of many kinds and vintages and that, for example, what one might prize as deeply authentic and personal in a Blind Lemon Jefferson or a Leadbelly or a Fred McDowell or a Snooks Eaglin (different as they each may be) often turns out to have been a song that they first heard on the radio or on a record and then wrought into a shape they found pleasing. Allen Lowe is THE expert on this whole multi-faceted process.  Martin, I believe, found the whole idea of "folk music" (or rather the ideology of it) wrong-headed, even pernicious. 

It seems to me that Martin Williams' comments about blues musicians might apply to musicians in many genres of music, especially the part about "then wrought into a shape they found pleasing." (I realize that that's your rendering of what Martin Williams wrote.)

I think that Williams' comments had some validity (I'm assuming this was in the 60's), in that blues musicians were looked upon by most critics and listeners then as pure "folk" artists. There were few reissues in the 60's - the flood came in the 70's and 80's - and I think that Williams' comment was, in many cases, a true one. It's since become common knowledge that blues lyrics, tunes, and instrumental techniques were passed along through phonograph records, as well as through personal contact. That doesn't take anything away from the blues musicians who picked up things from records. They still had to make the music their own.

I could be wrong about this - I'm relying on memory - but I seem to remember that Williams didn't seem to have a high opinion of early blues musicians in general. Something about blues musicians taking songs or lyrics from records by Bessie Smith and other classic women blues singers and not being able to play them well sticks in my mind. Perhaps that's what you were referring to, Larry. If my memory is correct, that seems to be a blind spot, and quite a large one, at that. Perhaps you or someone else who has ready access to Martin Williams' writings can check this out. If my memory has failed me, I apologize to Mr. Williams.

I do wonder if the fact that Martin Williams didn't write much about non-jazz blues musicians relates to the fact that people tend to listen to the blues emotionally first, and perhaps intellectually afterwards. Perhaps he found that there was little in that music to engage his intellect. I think that he was wrong, but perhaps that was the case.

[AllenLowe]

just to add to this, though I probably disagree with Williams in the big picture, he was on to something about "pure" folk sources - Bill Malone has pointed out, in a discussion of early country music, that the sources for a great deal of early country recordings were minstrel and pop music -

[Joe]

Maybe it was even mentioned on this very thread, but I failed to find it here...

I could have sworn that Williams once wrote something to the effect that a good deal of Eastern European "folk music" contained more of a jazz feel than most blues music. Does this sound familair to any of the Williams readers here? if so, pointers to the exact passage would be most welcome.

Thanks.

[Larry Kart]

"I could have sworn that Williams once wrote something to the effect that a good deal of Eastern European "folk music" contained more of a jazz feel than most blues music."

Don't recall Martin writing that, but I do recall Barry Ulanov writing -- in his history of jazz (the title is "Jazz," followed by a colon and some other words; Garth Jowett recently mentioned it on another thread I think) -- that there is more jazz in a gypsy fiddler than there is in a corps of African drummers.

[garthsj]

Here is the quote from Barry Ulanov that Larry mentioned in the previous quote. Since this book was mentioned last week I decided to revisit it for the first time in probably thirty years, and found it to be much more historically complex, intellectually rigorous (if also wrong in lots of places), and idiosyncratic than I remembered it from my teenage years. I guess that I just know a lot more about the history of jazz than I did back then. Nonetheless, I think that this book has been unjustly neglected in any assessment of the history of jazz literature, and deserves to be evaulated in much more positive terms. Simply put, it has a lot of very interesting perspectives and basic information than most of the blander jazz histories used in universities today.

Ulanov said:

Superficially, this might appear to be consonant with descriptions of jazz and the experience of listening to it. But there is never anything in jazz, not even at its most primitive, that suggests a tune yelled by a hundred persons; whatever delicacies of pitch and liberties of intonation, there is never a chaotic cacophony such as Gide describes, in which not one of the hundred or so persons sings an exact note. In the same way, the description of beaded piano-wires suggests jazz honky-tonk piano; but the honky-tonk piano was the result of the poor equipment of brothels and barrelhouses, not of a need to confuse and drown . . . contours."

A comparative analysis of African and American music does not yield clear parallels. For one thing, jazz is a measured music, the structure of which depends upon fixed beats, occurring in rhythmic patterns as unmistakable and immediately identifiable as the pulse of a metronome. African drumming, submitted to the most painstaking of auditions, simply does not break down into a structured rhythmic music; there are shifts of time and points and counterpoints of rhythm that make accurate notation impossible. As for the melodic qualities and quantities of African music, these too are shaped by a tonal and rhythmic conception entirely outside the Western diatonic tradition. To speak of the blue notes -- the flattened third and seventh -- as they are inflected against their natural position within a fixed key, or the alterations of pitch of jazz singers or instrumentalists, or their swooping glissandos, as American developments of African music is to talk unlettered nonsense. The basic chordal and melodic and rhythmic structure of the blues and of the jazz that has developed out of the blues is firmly within the orbit of Western folk music. There is far more of the sound of jazz in Middle-European gypsy fiddling than there is in a corps of African drummers.

Barry Ulanov, HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA , New York: The Viking Press, 1955, p. 12.

P.S. I have always loved this cover, and wish that I owned the figurine depicted....

Edited January 3, 2005 by garthsj

[Joe]

Thanks Larry and Garth for the correction and the quote. Now if I can just recall where I read this recently... maybe the liner notes to Attila Zoller's GYPSY CRY?

Will let you all know.

Edited January 3, 2005 by Joe