A New History of Jazz (paperback)

[reg]

just noticed that the paperback version of Shipton's A New History of Jazz came out yesterday in the UK. i had been looking for this for a bit, on and off. now that's it's in paperback i think i'll pick it up.

(link to book on amazon)

anyone read this?

[Lazaro Vega]

Yes, and did an extensive interview with the author that was on the Jazz Institute of Chicago web page, but seems to have disappeared. I have it at work and will post sometime this week. It is a helpful book, many primary source interviews from his work with the BBC.

[blue lake]

October 22, 2001

Alyn Shipton, author of “A New History Of Jazz” (965 pages, Continuum), speaks from New York with Lazaro Vega of Blue Lake Public Radio at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in western lower Michigan.

Alyn Shipton: I just got in from London today. I don’t know what time it is. It’s two in the morning my time.

Lazaro Vega: We could start by saying one thing I find most valuable about the book is that you’re using primary source interviews, maybe things that people hadn’t seen before. I can think right off the top of my head of Ravi Coltrane, Pat Metheny, record producer Chuck Nessa, just quite a few of them. It seemed every time I went to the footnote section it turned out to be an interview you conducted. I think that addition of primary source material to the flow of information about jazz is invaluable. How did you come to do all of these interviews? Were they specific to this book or is this just part of your career that you’ve amassed all of these things?

Alyn Shipton: Well it’s a bit of both, really. I present a weekly radio program on the BBC World Service and I’ve done that for four years. So I guess that’s 50 interviews a year times four. So 200 of them goes an awful long way towards building up a collection.

But, the thing is that, also, I make documentaries for the BBC, as you know: I think you were in Chicago when I was working on a series about AACM. After I finished doing the questions that I needed to do for the radio I started asking my own questions, because, obviously, once you start researching something like that the whole thing gets bigger and bigger and you want to know, or at least I always want to know more about it.

I think the other thing, Lazaro, is that a lot of people tend to take one or two quotes that people have made for a Time magazine interview or something, and then that becomes the way that the world sees, as it were, Pat Metheny or whoever it is. It’s important to remember that everybody has a kind of dialogue with the music, verbally as well as musically. Everybody that I’ve spoken to has a lot of things to say about it, and this book is just a snapshot, really, of a lot of views that happen to fit the overall argument of the book. But, in every case I think it’s been the case that a lot of jazz writers have kind of underestimated the contribution that musician’s have themselves to understanding and illuminating the music.

Vega: There was a real valuable series of articles that Kenny Dorham wrote about jazz, and if you pick up “Jazz Masters of the ‘30’s” written by Rex Stewart I think you’ll find those instances are probably more valuable today than most everything else that was written at the time about the music.

Shipton: Well, if you look very carefully at the bibliography for this book you’ll see that I’ve had a kind of lifetime commission to bring the words of such musicians to the public. So, for example, Rex Stewart’s autobiography, “Boy Meets Horn,” which is the sequel to “Jazz Masters of the ‘30’s” is a book that I actually saw through it’s publication.

Clare Gordon, who is his editor on the Downbeat book, “Jazz Master’s of the ‘30’s” actually worked with Rex before his death on the autobiography. And when he died she put all these legal pads of his writing on top of a wardrobe and left them for about 20 years. She saw one or two of the other books I’d done with Barney Bigard and Buck Clayton and reached me out of the blue and said, “Look, I’ve got Rex Stewart’s book here, would you like to publish it?”

For twenty years I’ve been a publisher publishing books about music. So Rex’s I was delighted to be able to publish in the U.K., and the American edition was done through the University of Michigan Press. That’s part of my contribution, is being, I think, now to publish over 20 autobiographies of musicians of that importance.

Vega: How many of those are still in print?

Shipton: Quite a large number of them. In fact, as a sort of adjunct to this book from Continuum, my “New History of Jazz,” we’re actually bringing out a number of these books again in paperback. So, for example, the life of Teddy Wilson, the life of Marshall Royal the West Coast alto saxophonist, and one of my books with Danny Barker, that is kicking off the series. We very much hope to bring almost all of them back into print in paper back in what we’re calling the Bayou Jazz Lives. That might sound a bit strange, but my English Company is called Bayou Press, so that explains it.

Vega: Beautiful. We’ll look forward to those because ultimately, like “Swing To Bop,” Ira Gitler’s oral history, those seem to be corner stone works. I have Danny Barker’s “Bourbon Street Black.” I’ve had an ear to the ground for his other autobiographical monographs, which are on Oxford, I guess.

Shipton: Yes, the first one was called “A Life In Jazz” and we did that in 1986.

Well, it’s a great book. It was actually Danny who got me going on this whole thing. I met him when I went to New Orleans the first time in the mid-1970’s. He sort of encouraged me to go around and talk to people. I suppose I owe it to Danny that I started interviewing musicians, really. He’s a very inspirational character. The more recent book we’ve done, which is called “Buddy Bolden And The Last Days of Storyville,” which was the book that Danny was working on at the time he died in 1993, has a lot of stuff about how he was actually researching the story of African-American jazz from the inside. A lot of the jazz establishment didn’t necessarily realize that what Danny was doing was really a one-man documentation of the music. He sent questionnaires out. He kept, I mean in his house there were two rooms just full of boxes of documents which really documented his entire life right the way through Lucky Millender, Cab Calloway, the “This is Jazz” show with Rudi Blesh, and then back to New Orleans in the ‘60’s.

Vega: That will be a wonderful historic record to have revealed to us.

Shipton: Well, can I tell you that this book will spur anybody who has access to people who still have stories to tell to get them to get them down on paper and tell them? Because I think it was about 20 years ago there’s an English critic called Albert McCarthy who published a book called “Big Band Jazz,” and it says in there, ‘A whole generation of musicians will die before their stories come out in print unless somebody does something about it.’ It was reading that and talking to Danny that made me feel that I had to be motivated to go out and do something about it. So, in my kind of little way I’ve tried to do something to preserve a generation. Of course a lot of the swing musicians who I was working with 20 years ago, sadly, are no longer with us.

Vega: That’s true. I’d like to find your book about, you said, Buck Clayton and Barney Bigard. Let’s return to “A New History of Jazz.” There have been many histories of jazz written. I was wondering if you would elaborate on the title of your book, “A New History of Jazz”? What were your primary ideas about reassessing the history of jazz? What makes it new and different from what’s already been written?

Shipton: I guess there are two levels to this. The first is that, like everybody who’s got an interest in jazz, I’ve picked off the shelf all the other histories as times go on. I started with Rudy Blesh and “Shining Trumpets” and went on to Marshall Sterns and “The Story of Jazz.” Of course, like everybody, I learned a lot from those books. But if you stand back, and that even includes more recent things like Scott Deveaux’s book or the very lavish color illustrated book that goes with the Ken Burns series, fundamentally they’re all telling the same story. And this wasn’t quite good enough for me; I wanted to feel that somebody, somewhere aught to be challenging this story and saying, “Is what we think jazz history looks like actually as clear cut as that? Did it start in New Orleans, go up the river to Chicago and spread to New York, or are there other things that were going on that musicians have known about, that people in different areas of the country have known about which haven’t necessarily made it into print?

So what I tried to do, and of course you can’t entirely do this because the other histories are there and everybody’s referred them, but what I tried to do was to say if I was a historian of anything else I’d start with primary document sources – with newspapers, with musician’s life stories and so on – and I’d try to construct a history that didn’t refer to all the previously published ones and see if it came out the same. Of course the answer is it partly comes out the same and it partly comes out different.

Vega: It certainly does come out in your own way. You’ve mentioned Rudy Blesh a couple of times now. I noticed in part of the book you make mention of his radio series. Is that available in recorded form anywhere?

Shipton: Yes, they’ve been out various times on the Danish Storyville label, they’ve brought out a lot of the broadcasts. I think most of them were recorded. They’re a very interesting kind of summary of the end of the first stage of the New Orleans Revival. They have people like Sidney Bechet, Bob Wilbur, and Albert Nicholas working alongside of New York musicians like James P. Johnson. And, of course, working alongside the white Chicagoans like Wild Bill Davison. So they are kind of melting pot for all the traditional styles of jazz and yet they were very forward looking. Blesh, of course, took on Barry Ulanov in the late 1940’s for this idea of “Swing vs. Modernists.” There was a classic series of broadcasts, which also survive, and I think they’re out on the English Spotlight label, which have a band with Parker and Gillespie playing things like “Tiger Rag,” would you believe?

Vega: Yes, I do have those.

Shipton: Well, of course, the other band that went with that was led by Jimmy McPartland. Those sides have also been issued, but more people have the Bird and Diz sides than have the Jimmy McPartland.

Vega: You’re right; I don’t have the McPartland’s from that. But that was supposed to be some kind of contrived battle of styles, right?

Shipton: That was the idea, and of course it was all done for “Bands for Bonds,” so the fundamental idea was fundraising, and to create a kind of jousting contest on the airwaves was designed to whip up enthusiasm for spending money.

Vega: You mentioned the traditional story of jazz born in New Orleans and then going up the river to Chicago. I think if you find out really what happened you might see the music in California before it went to Chicago, right?

Shipton: That’s one of the places, certainly. There’s quite a lot in the book about California, not least because of a lot of New Orleans musicians, not necessarily all together, but at different times ended up out there and plugged into a quite discreet local movement that was going on. This was both a black and a white movement, and it wasn’t simply an African-American initiation on the West Coast. But there was certainly a lot of music that we would probably recognize as being jazz going on well before things like The Original Dixieland Band arrived in Chicago.

Vega: Or even Louis Armstrong arriving in Chicago – didn’t he go out to Ca…

Shipton: …Quite late in the game; he didn’t get there until 1922 and by then King Oliver had been out on the West Coast, Freddie Keppard and Jelly Roll Morton. Of course there’s a fantastic book that just come out from University of California Press by Phil Pastras called “Dead Man Blues” which is all about Morton’s extraordinary career in the West. It’s quite the amazing story.

When I was really getting to grips with the early history there were two things that stood out for me. The first was meeting Jesse Stone before he died. Jesse Stone was born in 1901 and he was a territory bandleader who actually recorded in 1927, but he founded his first band as a teenager in 1918. I guess, like, the Beatles started as teenagers, well, in 1918 Jesse Stone started a big band, and why not? In his first band he hired somebody called Coleman Hawkins to play the cello, and subsequently the C-melody sax, and subsequently the tenor. So there was somebody who had got a band running in Atchison, Kansas, of all places way before Hawkins went on the road with Mamie Smith, way before Fletcher Henderson.

I began thinking about, where did the musicians who played in all these big bands that suddenly appeared in New York and Chicago in the 1920’s come from? I think the answer is a very large number of them already had experience from playing in the territories: this is, like, upper Mid West right down to Texas and the South West. So there were musicians really from all over the country that caught jazz on the wing, in a way. They might have met it on the touring vaudeville circuits, they might have simply met it through other musicians coming back to where they lived after having spent time in the (Armed) Forces, because some of them were soldiers who’d been in the trenches in France with the Hell Fighters Band of James Reese Europe.

Indeed, that’s the route by which Jesse Stone learned about jazz: musicians who’d been in the services coming back to the Mid-West and bringing with them the stories of syncopated music from New York.

Vega: And of course the social mores that were changing with WWI with softer collars, dancing and all of the different changes that happened in youth culture that created a need for that kind of music, right?

Shipton: Absolutely. And Jesse was very good at trying to draw the picture of what was going on across the nation as they toured around. I mean, they were very briefly in the ‘20’s as big a thing as Bennie Moten or the later bands with Count Basie or anyone; they were the pre-eminent territory band. So he was a good man to talk to and find out about that.

The other thing that was going on at the same time is that African-American musicians were taking jazz to Europe. One of the themes of the book is that it was an international music very much earlier than people have realized.

Vega: Well, didn’t Sidney Bechet get all the way out to Russia by 1922?

Shipton: Certainly, he came to London in 1919 and he traveled all over Europe. There were other musicians, particularly an Uncle Lewis Mitchell, who was a drummer who came over with a string orchestra, in fact, to play in London during 1916-17, and then ended up in Paris. He worked with Bechet as well. He was an extraordinary character who acted as a kind of magnet for musicians coming to Paris. So Arthur Briggs, the trumpeter, and a whole gaggle of other musicians came through Paris and worked with Lewis Mitchell who became a kind of clearinghouse for bands that were going to come to Europe. And he was very much a kind of mentor for the younger musicians coming over to work in Europe. I think there were other figures in Scandinavia and in Germany who behaved very much the same.

Vega: I very much enjoyed the international aspect of your book, “A New History of Jazz,” whereas you’d be expecting to follow a narrative directly from early jazz into the Swing Era, or jumping right from swing into bop, instead there are these international asides, like news bulletins. Even when you get into Free music there are notices about Tony Oxley and Evan Parker in Britain, which have always seemed to me to be important to the music’s development and evolution. Because those cats were serious.

There was an early prejudice against the European practitioners of jazz from Leonard Feather, perhaps, and maybe some other writers in America who said the Europeans, other than Django, couldn’t swing. Benny Carter said that when he first got to some of the bands in Europe he found that their rhythm was a little bit stiff, but by the time he lived with them and worked with them they definitely changed.

Shipton: Of course there’s a big quotation from Benny Carter in the book talking about working with BBC musicians in London in the mid-‘30’s. And you’re absolutely right; he made a fantastic difference to these players. I think if you listen to things like “Maida Vale Swing” (see, “Swingin’ at Maida Vale” 1936) or some of the other things that Benny recorded in London, or indeed the sides he made in Holland with The Ramblers, they’re as good as anything he did in the States. They are great records.

It’s interesting that more of Benny Carter’s work from Europe found it’s way back to this country than Coleman Hawkins at the same time. John Chilton, who was the biographer of Hawkins, told me that something like only 16 of the records that Hawkins made found there way back to America as legitimate issues over here. It’s an extraordinary statistic that Hawkins was recording very prolifically, in fact, in Europe, but not a lot of those discs were on labels that had U.S. distribution and so they simply failed to arrive here.

Vega: I’m looking forward to delving deeper into that part of the book. “A New History of Jazz” is huge, and it’s not a casual read, and I find it’s not a linear read.

Shipton: It doesn’t have to be. I think if you were very persistent you probably could read it from page one to page 970, but you’d have to be quite dedicated, and also quite strong because it’s a very heavy book. I hope people find whether it’s a linear or patchy read that they get drawn into it.

Vega: One of the things that I’ve found to be interesting in looking at Jelly Roll Morton is that he spelled out the basic principals of what jazz could be, and in my estimation those things that Jelly Roll said hold for the entire music, all the way up to the most contemporary and avant garde forms that happened in the 1960’s and after. From solo saxophone concerts or John Coltrane’s “Ascension,” however you want to look at the music you can still go back to Jelly Roll for the basic principals. Meaning, composition and improvisation, you can take any song and make it a jazz song, there need to be certain ideas of tension and release, there need to be breaks in the music for hot solos, musical effects which create excitement such as putting parts behind the soloists to make things interesting.

It seems there’s been a tendency in American music circles for the last 20 years or so to break the history up into segments, claiming one doesn’t relate to the other. I’m wondering if you could comment about that?

Shipton: I think your observation is very astute. I think that Morton does show a kind of set of paradigms that people have been able to draw out of it what they’ve wanted to find. I said, for example in the book, that Gunther Schuller has always said The Red Hot Peppers sides from the ‘20’s are the epitome of New Orleans jazz, but actually are they? I mean Morton didn’t hear a New Orleans jazz band in his hometown after 1907. He never went back there. So his entire concept is something he heard as a small boy and then encountered on the road, or in Chicago or wherever he happened to be, ever since. I take that sort of itinerary from Jim Dapogny, from the published edition of Morton’s music, which was done by the Smithsonian. So I think I’m fairly accurate in saying that.

But you’re right. (Schuller) found that in it. I found, as you did, this extraordinary balance between composition and improvisation. And indeed there’s not a lot of difference in outlook between a lot of what Mingus did and a lot of what Morton was doing. It holds right the way through the history.

Vega: Sure, James Dapogny is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve seen his band about four or five times. There’s another band that comes around out of New Orleans and is led by a clarinet player named S. Fredrick Star who used to be the dean at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.

Shipton: He used to be at Tulane for a while.

Vega: He actually went and bought Johnny Dodds clarinet. He’s really big about -- when he presents a concert, often with slides and a lot of explanation -- how New Orleans music was a lot different then we’ve been led to believe. That it wasn’t just sextet music with the trumpet/clarinet/trombone front-line, and that Italian music, Opera and all kinds of musical strains besides ragtime and march music were part of the melting pot. He then gives demonstrations about that with, for example, “Over The Waves” and certain sentimental pop songs were favorites of dancers, etc.

Shipton: They were, and I think he’s dead right on the size of the ensemble. One of the myths I’ve tried to explode is that the Dixieland line-up was the paradigm. I’m not sure that’s true…I think that Fred Star is absolutely right that the paradigm of the Dixieland band isn’t the only thing that was going on, there were much bigger bands. We know from photographs of King Oliver, we know from all the stories of Fate Marable, that way back in New Orleans, 1917-1918, there were eight, nine, ten piece bands. Perhaps the sound of early New Orleans jazz is a lot more like Sam Morgan than it was like King Oliver. We just don’t know. But I’m sure that what got recorded was only part of the story.

Vega: He often points, as well, to A. J. Piron.

Shipton: Oh well I think the Piron band is one of the most interesting. I point out in the book there’s a record they made called “Louisiana Swing” which is almost the story of the transition from ragtime to jazz in one disc. You have three choruses, the first one with Piron taking the lead on the violin, and just a very subtle, muted trumpet and trombone behind him. In the second chorus the trumpet starts to take the lead and you can just feel a little kind of loosening up of the rhythm. By the third chorus Peter Bocage on cornet has taken over the lead and John Lindsay on trombone, who was of course later Morton’s great double bass player, is playing straight foreword tailgate trombone. You have in three choruses the story of the transition from ragtime to jazz. It’s the most extraordinary record.

Vega: See, now we’re talking about a nine hundred-page history of jazz and I know we could probably talk for an hour about this. We’ve basically barely gotten out of New Orleans, and there’s so much more to talk about.

Shipton: Let’s start at the back. This is where you began, so.

Vega: Well, you were speaking to Lewis Porter. I really loved his Coltrane book; I just loved it. He mentions in a long quote in your book the composition “Like Sonny.” He’s really hot on that, the record “Like Sonny” that John Coltrane made for Atlantic and then Roulette, apparently, and elsewhere. He points out in his book the origins of it, from a version of “My Old Flame” that Sonny Rollins recorded; it’s in a solo there with Kenny Dorham.

I just wanted to add to your dialogue in the book that there’s a recording from 1960 that John Coltrane made as a member of the Miles Davis Quintet in Sweden on Dragon Records. That also contains an intermission interview with Coltrane. It’s the Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb rhythm section. The pieces are long, anywhere from 13 to 20 minutes long, and there’s a solo “On Green Dolphin Street,” I think it is, that ‘Trane takes off on and in the middle of works in variations from “Like Sonny.”

Shipton: Well I shall rush out and find a copy of that. As you know I summarized that very succinctly in the book by talking to Lewis and trying to get him to boil it down to three very short paragraphs. But you’re right; you can get into Coltrane’s music. I’ve taken the point that “Ascension” is not the end of the story it’s the middle. You have to come to grips with the later music to understand a lot of where the early music was going.

Far too many histories sort of get to one album beyond where the writer is really happy about the music, so you feel people fall away with “Giant Steps,” or they fall away with “Love Supreme.” The number who stay the course beyond “Ascension” and start getting into and listening to “Interstellar Space” and some of the later albums, it’s a difficult course to stay but it’s immensely rewarding the once you do.

Vega: When I was reading that segment of the book I was thinking Porter is one of the strongest writers since Wynton Marsalis came along to show musically how the jazz innovations of ‘Trane’s post 1965 are tied to his early work.

It would seem that in the history of jazz what we need now, and that you give us, is a focus on the art form. How is the music of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, ‘Trane, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton and the European Free players tied to the basic principles exemplified by Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bird, Miles Davis and those cats? Later on in your book, in relation to that, there’s a quote from Ravi Coltrane that blew my mind where he ties ‘Trane’s 1959 “Giant Steps” to the post 1965 music via organizing principal of major thirds, as he says, “the idea of dominants setting up a resolve.”

Shipton: I share your need to see this story made coherent because I think it is a coherent story. I think you’re exactly right about that, and that all the people that you’ve named, from the AACM members right away through to Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton do fit the narrative. There’s no need to see them as somehow exiled from the process. I see it very centrally part of the same thing.

But it’s also important, and I think I’ve tried to bring this out in the book, that just the same way as jazz was a series of parallel regional developments in it’s early life, that’s still the case now. There are quite distinct regional differences between the way that people approach fundamentally the same problem. So I don’t think there’s a huge difference between the starting points of Muhal Richard Abrams and the starting point for Ornette Coleman. They just chose to go very different ways.

Vega: Absolutely. One of the things I found a little controversial in your discussion of John Coltrane’s music is in the period when they’re working with simple structures and complex textures. The idea, and I would like to hear you expound on this, that the complex harmonic structures of “Giant Steps” led John Coltrane to play a certain way. That is finding every scale in every chord and laying it out. Very complicated musically. Then, when he reached the modal phase, say after 1961 and he put together his great quartet, that instead of trying to have the whole band play with such complexity, he simplified the rhythm section so he could explore on top of it.

Shipton: Well he simplified the harmonic side of it. I don’t think you’d ever call Elvin’s playing simple.

Vega: That’s what I meant to bring up because when I was reading that section I wondered if I was following it just right.

Shipton: No. The point I was trying to make is where there is movement in the rhythm section it tends to be harmonically very restricted. So if you take a piece like “My Favorite Things,” which he played over and over and over again, recorded many times if you include all the live recordings of that song, fundamentally the harmony is paired right down from the commercial published version of the song. I mean, McCoy plays two modal chords behind most of it and that’s it. There’s no attempt to keep the original structure in place.

What Elvin does on the first record, which I think has Steve Davis on bass, and then in the later recordings of it with the quartet and in the live concerts, you find the harmonic movement that McCoy Tyner produces getting simpler and simpler and simpler while Trane’s playing, and Elvin’s rhythmic support to that playing get more and more complex. I find that fascinating.

The other point I was trying to make at that point was that there are some sides, and I’m going to have trouble remembering them because I haven’t got my thumb in the right place in the book to remember exactly, but I seem to remember there’s a version of “Dear Old Stockholm” and one other side what was made with Roy Haynes subbing for Elvin on drums (“Newport ‘63”). And suddenly the rhythm section in those sides goes into this kind of fuzzy texture that you hear in the late band with Alice Coltrane and Rahied Ali. It’s an extraordinary moment, because there is the original quartet but with a different feel on the drums entirely, and suddenly the band is not playing time.

Now, the only other band that had managed to sift in and out of time in the same way was the Miles Quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Where if you take a piece like – oh I don’t know, there are lots of them, even from “E.S.P.” onwards -- you have these moments where the time becomes elastic. That doesn’t happen a lot in the Coltrane Quartet because Elvin is such a metronome. Then suddenly you put Roy Haynes in there and something quite different happens. I found that was fascinating, too.

Vega: Some of those records with Roy Haynes end up turning into saxophone/drum duets.

Shipton: Yes, he talks about that, and I think I’ve quoted a small fragment of interview in the book where he said that he could feel the moment that Jimmy Garrison stopped playing because Garrison was such a powerful player that even if he couldn’t hear every note he could feel it in his chest as this powerful noise from bass that’s going on the stand next to him.

I think Roy is a classic case of the continuity we were talking about earlier. When I was talking to him, and I didn’t put this in the book, but I discovered that one of the earliest bands he played with was the Luis Russell Orchestra in which, of course, Louis Amstrong played right the way through the 1930’s and well into the ‘40’s. Luis Russell kept the band going in the late 40’s and, blow me down, Roy Haynes was one of his drummers. He took over from somebody called Big Sid Catlett.

I’m not sure if Roy recorded with the band but he certainly toured with them for awhile.

Vega: One of the things I wanted to bring up was that on page 764 you mention that Charles Mingus initial career was more as a player than a composer, but that’s subject to change now, right?, because of the Uptown release? Are you familiar with that? Charles ‘Baron’ Mingus, West Coast 1945-49 which came out, probably, right about the time you were putting this book to bed. This is the first complete look at all of the recordings he made for Dolphins of Hollywood and all the small labels out there on the West Coast.

Shipton: No, I’d only heard a couple of those and I do indeed talk about the Dolphins of Hollywood version of “Mingus Fingers” because I interviewed Buddy Collette about that. But I didn’t hear the whole as an Uptown, I heard them on a collection that came out called “Central Avenue Sounds” which is the four disc set from Rhino that came out last year to go along with the book that was produced by the U.C.L.A. oral history project.

So I was aware of some of the music, but I certainly wasn’t aware of the degree of compositions that were on the Uptown sessions that you were talking about.

Vega: This isn’t an ambush, I’m just trying to make you aware of that release.

Shipton: This is one of the big problems that if you try to be definitive about any stage in jazz, there’s always somebody who knows one more detailed thing. And that’s a classic case of something where the records haven’t really been available.

Vega: Mingus’s first sessions as a leader were some of the most obscure records in all of jazz. This Uptown release comes with, like, a 100 page booklet that illuminates the first chapters in Mingus’s musical life..

Shipton: I look forward to that. I was very unfortunate that when I went out to talk to Buddy Collette, I just missed Britt Woodman. He died about 5 days before I got there. So, someone I very much wanted to talk to but unfortuately just beyond access. Everybody else was very cut up about it. It wasn’t really the best time to go and talk to many of his people, his best friends who knew him well.

But on the other hand the fact that so many of his former colleages had got together for the funeral meant that there were a lot of stories going about. People did remember much about the bands that the Woodmans had played in with Mingus early on. Of course not everybody had copies of all those sides, so what sort of passed into the published folklore is the stuff that I mention in the book that’s very, well, Buddy Collett had copies of the ones he was on, but not , of course, the ones that he wasn’t part of. Perhaps in the second edition you’ll see something different in that particular section.

Vega: Cool. Let’s move on to Ornette Coleman. In looking at some of the changes he brought about in jazz, for instance in Chapter 17 there’s something about improvising without chord changes. It would seem some of Coleman’s music isn’t entirely without chord changes. The way Charlie Haden explained it in Ken Burns’ “Jazz,” I’m paraphrasing, they would start off with an idea of what the harmonic sequence is, but the once Ornette started soloing they listened to him for cues to the harmonic centers, and the whole band would move with him. So, it’s not that there are no chord changes, but it’s just that they’re not predetermined. The harmony is in a constant state of flux to the degree that sometimes it’s dropped all together or over powered by melody and rhythm, but may re-enter again.

You go back and forth in your explanation of Ornette’s music where you hit that on the head, and then might drift back to the “improvising without chord changes” idea. Of course it depends on what piece you’re listening to; maybe “Free Jazz” doesn’t have that much flux as some of the Quartet’s music.

Shipton: Well, ironically, I don’t think that Prime Time has it either. I think that Prime Time has a lot of simultaneous harmony going on. You can either view it as being lots of harmony running simultaneously in the same way as Bill Laswell, for example, had lots of harmony running on Herbie Hancock’s current “Future to Future” album. Or you can see it as being harmonically anarchic and that you can’t actually put your finger on anything going on.

I think the point that I made, and you’re right to say I go back and forward about it, but I go back and forward about it having quoted Ornette saying that, if you play something one way, that’s great. I found the quote, it’s on page 775, and he says, “I would prefer it if musicians would play my tunes with different changes as they take a new chorus, so there will be all the more variety in the performance.”

The point is, if you listen to early Ornette, certainly the stuff he recorded before Atlantic, the very early things that he did with members of the MJQ and one or two other people who were out on the West Coast, you hear somebody who’s playing fundamentally bebop, but occasionally varying structures, and I mean varying from chorus to chorus but not really varying the harmony very much.

And then he, at the end of that phase before the Atlantic recordings you hear some really extraordinary pieces like “The Sphinx” which he recorded both with that early group and then again with the Quartet. Suddenly structure is everything. The structure is linked to the melodic contour of the piece and not to the underlying harmony. That’s the point I was trying to make, which is that there wasn’t an absence of harmony in the sense that there was a consistent re-harmonization of what was being played. We’re probably loosing some of your listeners here because this is quite abstract discussion.

Vega: It’s true, though: if you’re going to deal with Ornette Coleman’s music you need to encounter these aspects of his music in order to see the change it made with what went before with the complexities of harmony in bebop. I mean, wow, you have to go to school to play Dizzy Gillespie’s music! You can’t get through that on a song, you have to go to school. Then when you get into Ornette Coleman, it’s almost like there was a change away from musicians going to school on the changes, something like let’s go back to the feeling of the blues. Let’s make sure that the emotions determine the song form, rather than the song forms determine our emotions. That’s fundamental, isn’t it?

Shipton: Yes. I’ve tried to grapple with the main definitial issues in Ornette’s music in the chapter. I’m not sure I’ve come out with an answer. But I’ve at least tried to raise most of the questions.

I’ve taken the idea of this being a psychological change in jazz where musicians actually went through a kind of cognizant extension of the way they thought about music. I firmly believe that. That whether you do it by going to school, or whether you do it by sitting and playing in a big band every night until you’re bored witless and you think of some other way to play the music, it’s actually about changing the way you think about how you tackle the music.

Now, the question with Ornette Coleman has always been is this, and I’m not saying this in any way a pejorative way, is Ornette a kind of Idiot Savant, or is he actually one of the most canny people you’re ever going to meet? I think he very much plays it so that we’ll never know.

In Gunther Schuller’s view, and he said this to me on-air in a BBC interview, is that he believes that Ornette is kind of musically dyslexic, and that with the intuitive grasp of language that many dyslexic’s have he’s arrived at whole lot of answers to questions that aren’t necessarily the same as our answers might be, but they’re none the less very valid.

My view, having talked at some length to Ornette, and that’s all in the book, is that Ornette is desperately sincere. He’s one of the few people that I warmed to within seconds of meeting him, and found myself absolutely drawn into his explanations. One of the reasons I’ve quoted him at some length is I think that he’s had as much problem as the rest of us trying to explain this music to an unwilling world.

Vega: It’s wonderful reading his direct quotes from you. That sincerity comes through the way you present him. Ornette’s music is so fascinating I’m glad to see it achieve a centrality in the discussion of the 1960’s. His contribution doesn’t often get rewarded like this in jazz histories. But the music was crucial.

Of course his music fits into the larger movement of musicians finding another way into jazz besides playing popular song form with a recurring cycle of chords, and I’m thinking of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra. We had all these different individuals coming to their own realizations about how that can occur.

Shipton: And if you read the Brubeck chapter you have some individuals who try to do all of them at once.

Vega: Ha! I just wanted to mention, too, that it’s just a fantastic summation of Anthony Braxton’s music. You say on page 819, “Braxton’s music may not all be about jazz, but his restless, explorartory imagination is, and his improvisatory and instrumental talents are remarkable.” You make the bigger point, which only a writer such as John Litweiler and a few others have come to, but not in a general history. I was heartened to read that. Anthony Braxton’s argueably the Beethoven of our time.

Shipton: I have an endless regard for him. I have two great memories of Braxton. One is watching him do a sound check for a concert in London; I think it was the piece that I discuss in the book, “The Wheel Of Fortune,” which if I’m right is “Composition Number 190.” But he played every instrument he plays, from double bass saxophone right the way through to sopranino and then all sorts of flutes and things, then the piano and various other things. He did it all with total seriousness, but with this wonderful beatific grin on his face. He just enjoys it so much. And he enjoys things that are really on the edge experimentally. I mean, this concert had everything going on it: it had video; it had sections that may or may not get played depending on where the wheel of fortune ended. They were all rehearsed, they were all thought through.

I found him as engaging as Ornette in his way. Because he talks at such speed and with such density it’s very hard sometimes to pull out of, well, there is no such thing as an easy conversation with him, but they’re all rewarding.

Vega: Again, that came through: you did a good job of distilling his speech down to meaningful essences. I like the idea that you come up with near the end that musicians may grow from within the jazz tradition or may choose to come at it externally. But before you made that statement you brought many players into the tradition. So, for example, if you’re going to peruse Roscoe Mitchell and The Art Ensemble’s group improvisational ideas you’re working within a jazz tradition to start with. I think that is critical to understanding where we are right now.

Shipton: Yes, I think Chicago is very interesting, and Roscoe particularly. I have dwelt quite a lot on Roscoe, and I know this is an enthusiasm of yours, too. But equally, just in the U.K. at the moment, I heard him just two nights ago, Ken Vandermark’s band is touring at the moment. There’s a band that, with it’s new album “Acoustic Machine” on Atavistic is playing at one stage absolutely inside the tradition, and at the other hand music that is more extreme noise music than Peter Brotzman, and yet somehow or another there’s a link between the whole thing. It’s a consistent, coherent vocabulary, and I think that’s part of it. But the ensemble vocabulary that pushes the boundaries often has roots way back in the tradition and whether they go back to Morton, whether they pick up somewhere later in the story, I’ve tried to show that there are lots of jumping off points where that’s possible.

Vega: Congratulations on publishing such a useful, readable history of jazz. I just love it.

Shipton: Well thank you very much, and thanks for talking to me. If you’re ever around when I’m on the BBC World Service check out the show. Right, it’s www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice. If you go into the World Service homepage, down at the bottom there’s a program box where you just can call up the names of programs, and this one’s called “Jazzmatazz,” and it’s on twice a week. It will tell you both when it streams on the web and, I think, there’s a place you can click and find where it’s being locally re-broadcast on FM.

Vega: I’m about to go on the radio and do a program on Dizzy Gillespie, so I’ll be using passages from the book on the air tonight.

Shipton: Well, my paper back of “Groovin’ High” has just come out from Oxford, so. If you want, I think the Gillespie biography is a “mere” 380 pages. It’s a minnow after this.

END

[Alexander Hawkins]

Not that it's of any real consequence, but I picked up a paperback copy of this book here in a bricks-and-mortar store in the UK about a year ago...

I wonder if it was maybe just an import?