This Bird don't soar

Bird!

After reading this review of Crouch’s book, I was excited, and reserved the book. Why? Don’t I know enough about Charlie Parker? Of course I do; I’ve been listening to Phil Schaap for decades. DO I need to know more? Of course not. But … this is Bird. So I took the book. I read to page 41, and, disappointed, and annoyed, I shut the book. And returned it. Crouch relies on metaphors, similes, cliches, and other grammatical tricks, tries to come up with a cadence that he supposes, I suppose, will make the reader feel Bird’s music … But, it don’t work.

    Example: discussing Coronado’s exploration of the territory above the Rio Grande led by Marcos de Niza. Included in the group was an African slave named Estevan. This Arab Negro, Crouch writes, died up there, Niza said, for some foolish and arrogant act; the promotion from slave to scout had yeasted his head to self-destructive proportions. You know, give them an inch. (41) What?

And: But the things his fellow band members were thinking was of no consequence to Charlie Parker. He had his mind on other matters. How does Crouch know? Conjecture? Sure, it is easy to suppose Parker wanted to score dope before playing music, but that can not be assumed, not in a biography. In fiction, sure.

Norman Granz

Hershorn, Tad. (2011). Norman Granz : the man who used jazz for justice. Berkeley : University of California Press.

 When I saw it, I had to take, even though, at the time, I had four or five other books. A couple of years ago I saw a CUNY grant available for writers of biography. Daydreaming, I wondered whom I might write about, and Granz came around: I could not fin done bio written about him. Interesting man, interesting book. After starting to write La Roja en verde, and the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, things changed. Worth going back to; stopped at p.122

Mentioned in book: Nat King Cole

Sleepy Lagoon case - connected to Zoot suit riots

 David Stone Martin - influenced by the line art of Ben Shahn;drew covers for Granz


 Joe Turner sang in Duke Ellington's Jump for Joy in LA, 1941 (34)

Marie Bryant: sang with Duke; had relationship with Granz

p.46: Prez's only recordings without drums, first in a trio 

T-Bone Walker (51)

Gjon Mili (65) - Jammin' the Blues

 

Searching for music, I found this book, and while I was not sure if I would read it, I did, and rather enjoyed it.

Kastin, David. (2011. Nica's dream: the life and legend of the jazz baroness.  New York: W. W. Norton.

Tremé

Watched last two episodes last night. Enjoyable. Not great, but certainly excellent for television.

'Tis autumn

In 1991 filmmaker Raymond De Felitta heard a singer named Jackie Paris on a Los Angeles radio station and began a search that first yielded the fact that Paris had died in 1977. In 2004 De Felitta discovered Paris was alive and making a comeback in a New York City nightclub. This film explores the life of the jazz singer along with an exploration into what it is to live the life of an artist in its least glamorous aspects. Includes interviews with jazz legends including Billy Taylor, James Moody, Anne Marie Moss, Mark Murphy, George Wein, and others.

Outsider Pictures

Paris had a distinctive voice. A tenor, it was pleasant, yet, for me, it lacked something, some quality. One person in the film said that once someone explained Paris's lack of success by saying he doesn't sound like anyone. A valid point. We are so inclined to say that a writer, a musician, a singer, resembles another, as a way of qualifying (and, often, pigeonholing) the talent, that someone who can not be so qualified can suffer thereby.

He also played guitar and tap-danced. Of the latter, there is no recording extant; there was a recording of Paris playing guitar in a trio, and singing: he reminded me a lot of Tiny Grimes (see above).

That he didn't make fame is strange. The film explored and tried to answer that. Perhaps his temper and his ego got in the way, though he would hardly be the first musician to have an outsize ego and temper. Peggy Lee tried to propel his career. Ella liked him. But, clearly, someone didn't.

Monk

Kelley, Robin D. G. (2009). Thelonious Monk: the life and times of an American original. New York: Free Press.

New book. Reviewed in the Times on 18 October.

Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his jun­ior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.

That was the original Stuyvesant, on 15th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues, on the south border of Stuyvesant Square.

The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk ­“really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”

Mary Lou Williams is brilliant.

Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.



Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.




There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello - Thelonious Monk