bud powell swings so hard it hurts

[Doctor Jeff]

Chuck Berry started recording after Elvis, but they were both important artists who bridged the black-white divide in the mid-50's. I just remembered that Ray Charles recorded country, but that wasn't until 1960 or so. (Elvis recorded That's Alright Mama in June 1954 even before Charles recorded What'd I Say.) So Elvis was really the first crossover artist.

It's important to remember that jazz artists didn't come out of the womb as jazz musicians; they grew up with the same cultural influences as everyone else, until at some point the jazz bug took hold of them.

I wouldn't expect Pat Metheny, growing up in the Midwest with his folk and country and pop influences to play exactly the same as Bud Powell, who grew up in Harlem.

[henryrobinett]

Since yesterday I woke up humming Wail. I don't know what song is posted. I haven't clicked on it but I'm a huge Bud fan.

[henryrobinett]

I'll say this though about the cross over of Elvis. I didn't know any black people who listened to, liked or admired him. So that's a drawback to his real cross over appeal.

[jazzguy100]

Powell swings like a mother but dont pretend nobody has swung since.

These cats swing hard

[mr. beaumont]

Man, that Payton video is badass.

[Doctor Jeff]

I just reminded myself that Nat King Cole would have been considered a crossover artist, and big band music certainly appealed to all audiences, although prior to the 50's again with very few exceptions the bands themselves were not integrated. They all "swung" because they were playing dance music based on older ragtime and blues rhythms.

So I wouldn't say that there was no influence from other cultural elements.

But there was this background that the players came up in--the music of Harlem (Bud Powell) and Kansas City (Charlie Parker) and New Orleans (Louis Armstrong) and East St. Louis (Miles Davis) was very different from that of the midwest (Iowa--home of Bix Beiderbecke and Glenn Miller, Missouri--home of Pat Metheny) and other genteel environments (San Francisco--Dave Brubeck).

When you grow up in one environment, you swing, when you grow up in the other you often play chamber music on jazz instruments. Not that that's bad, you just can't dance to it.

[John A.]

.(Not to digress too much, but prior to Presley and Chuck Berry music was much more strictly demarcated--RNB people didn't listen to country, and vice versa.)

That's just not the case. There was and always has been cross-pollination between black and white music. Countless artists attest to this, and scholars like Alan Lomax document the phenomenon extensively. The business was segregated, and people couldn't share stages or studios in much of the US, but airwaves and records are a totally different story.

John

[Lazz]

Up until the late 50's music record sales and radio audiences were pretty strictly segregated by race. They called RNB "race records" and C&W "hillbilly records". There was virtually no crossover. There weren't a lot of white guys in bebop-style jazz either at that point, and very, very few mixed bands. So jazz artists like Louis Armstrong and Bud Powell and Charlie Parker had one kind of experience, and Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman and Stan Getz another, much more bourgeois experience.

My point is that now a young musician gets exposed to and can choose from any genre, and can have pretty much any influence. That was not always the case.

Aah - I get the general sweep of what you're saying better now, Doc - I think.
But questions remain.

While agreeing with you that young musicians today have easier access to a broader range of content and genre than those of us who came up before the free MP3 era, the mere existence of such greater access does not mean that young musicians automatically take advantage of it. My own personal experience of the young musician today is that they still have a shamefully narrow perspective. Not only does the distribution media (channels of access and opportunity) actually serve more and more of that narrowing monocultural creep, but the old optimistic banner-waving long-tail thesis (should we say ideology?) has also been demonstrated as false. They CAN choose from any genre, sure - but DO they? I say no. The data also says no.

And while it's true also that consumer markets were constructed racially, your implication that players adhered to the same demarcations in what they payed attention to is not necessarily the case. In the earliest years of the 20th century, for example, before the race-records category had been invented, it was pretty rare for black artists to make records. Those who did – like W.C.Handy, James Europe, Tim Brymm, G.W.Johnson, and multi-instrumentalist Wilbur Sweatman – were those who reached for a mainstream audience by performing in styles akin to those of popular white bands of the day. Popular white bands of the day, meanwhile, frequently sought their inspiration in African-American musical styles.

And then minstrelsy, for instance..... what was going on with the rise and spread and huge popularity of minstrelsy? From Thomas Rice all the way to Elvis, the history of appropriation illustrates clearly that the ears of players were NOT segregated by race.

Sorry to be such a quibbler, but I am long intrigued by the differences between historical facts and the myths we are encouraged to believe instead, and have found my current blues researches rewardingly provocative in that regard.

It's important to remember that jazz artists didn't come out of the womb as jazz musicians; they grew up with the same cultural influences as everyone else, until at some point the jazz bug took hold of them.

Sometimes true. As far as it goes. I was bitten by the bug. As no doubt you were, too. On the other hand, it's also important not to overlook the centrality of family in the network of our cultural influence. For those who grow up within a musical family environment, where learning an instrument, playing together and sharing a musical language and attitude is normal and natural (I'm thinking of, for example, the Montgomerys, the Jones brothers, the Saluzzis, the Da Violas, the Garners...) the young musician will enjoy an enormous and significant amount more than just "the same cultural influences as everyone else".

[Doctor Jeff]

John I don't disagree there was cross-pollination going on re' artists, but this didn't necessarily extend over into the audiences for various types of music.

Lazz you make very good points, and I am probably being too dogmatic. I don't doubt that those factors contributed to the evolution of jazz.

However, the original issue was Bud Powell's swing, and I think his upbringing in Harlem and exposure to the clubs and bars and milieu there contributed to his style.

I think Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan and Pat Metheny and many others had a different experience that contributed to a more academic approach.

Re' Elvis, he was a transformative figure because he was so unique. He took in all the sounds around him and distilled them into his music. Clearly the culture at large was ready for this amalgam.

[henryrobinett]

That's just not the case. There was and always has been cross-pollination between black and white music. Countless artists attest to this, and scholars like Alan Lomax document the phenomenon extensively. The business was segregated, and people couldn't share stages or studios in much of the US, but airwaves and records are a totally different story.

John

Man. I don't know where you get your info from but this is simply not the case. There were rare incidents of after hour jam sessions but they were very rare.

[Lazz]

However, the original issue was Bud Powell's swing, and I think his upbringing in Harlem and exposure to the clubs and bars and milieu there contributed to his style.

Undoubtedly.
No problem.
It's an impossible challenge (I think) to extrapolate many worthwhile generalisations from such a facile truism as "we are all influenced by our environment", but it is certainly fascinating to consider how it all played out in terms of specific individuals.

Apologies for helping to push the thread off-topic.

[sgcim]

To push the thread even further off-topic, a pianist friend of mine has been obsessed with finding the missing link between Bud and Bill Evans for the last 40 years.
His ex-teacher, Andy LaVerne, posited Sonny Clark as the ML, but my friend isn't happy with that answer.

Any ideas?

[princeplanet]

To push the thread even further off-topic, a pianist friend of mine has been obsessed with finding the missing link between Bud and Bill Evans for the last 40 years.
His ex-teacher, Andy LaVerne, posited Sonny Clark as the ML, but my friend isn't happy with that answer.

Any ideas?

I think it's a futile obsession. Surely there was no one direct link, probably something more like "BE was influenced by several players (not just Jazz), who were each in turn somewhat influenced (or not) by Bud Powell."

[John A.]

Man. I don't know where you get your info from but this is simply not the case. There were rare incidents of after hour jam sessions but they were very rare.

I'm not necessarily talking about jam sessions in otherwise segregated environments, but of people being aware of each other's music via radio, recordings, other kinds of contact between them, and common folk/gospel/spiritual roots to a lot of jazz, blues and country music. One source is Alan Lomax's "The Land Where the Blues Began" which has multiple accounts of songs that were common to both white and black repertoires, and of the ways in which blues singers inverted the meanings of many country/folk/gospel songs. Another is interviews with people like Merle Travis and Doc Watson talking about how black and white musicians drew from the same wells and encountered each other in the rural south. Also, things like Jim Crow being less of a force in New Orleans than in other parts of the South, and the reality that there were white jazz musicians from very early on (e.g., Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, et. al). Yes, there was segregation, and appropriation was more whites appropriating black music than the other way around. But the idea that there were completely separate and non-interacting white and black music worlds in the US until the 50s, civil rights, and rock and roll is not correct. Musicians of different backgrounds consistently sought out each other's music throughout US history, even when there were significant barriers to doing so.

To the OP's point about Bud Powell having a musical personality and rhythmic concept rooted in his origins, and, say Bill Evans or Dave Brubek swinging differently because of their origins ... In one sense, of course. People are all products of their environments. OTOH, I'd say the salient feature of all of these people is that they were individuals with highly distinct musical personalities that are markedly different from anything that preceded them. None of these guys is an incremental change from his antecedents. Each is a revolutionary, and it's more interesting to me to contemplate how that happened. Also, most of the people we're talking about on this thread (and all the innovators in jazz) were consciously trying NOT to sound like their predecessors and trying to craft their own voices, so of course over time people sound less like the past.

John

[henryrobinett]

Ah, I thought so. You're talking about ONE SIDE. White folk COULD listen, go into black joints, buy records. But that's not a free flowing exchange of ideas. The ONLY way blacks played with white musicians or exchanged information with white musicians, was at these rare after hours, ILLEGAL jam sessions.

There is STILL an unspoken musical segregation. Its very frustrating. I've been trying to figure out a way to expose it or bring it up. But its still not good, even in jazz, from BOTH sides.

[Lazz]

Man. I don't know where you get your info from but this is simply not the case. There were rare incidents of after hour jam sessions but they were very rare.

My suspicion, Henry, is that JohnA might be getting his information on this from the same general sources as I do - i.e. the historical record - which often contradicts what we most sincerely believe to be true.

Neither of us, I imagine, would dare attempt a rosy picture of life for non-white folk - but our welcome awareness of the past's racial nastiness (and its present legacy) can however blind us to the full range of historical truths.

The great Sophie Tucker, for example (great as in "huge") took lessons in coon-shouting from Mamie Smith. Later, in 1920, Mamie Smith's first recording session was with the all-white Riga Orchestra.

Of 1927, when Duke began his residency at the Cotton club as entertainment for a strictly white-folk clientele, Sonny Greer recalled, "the last show at the Cotton Club went on at two and the club closed at three-thirty or four. Then everybody would go next door to Happy Roane's or to the breakfast dance at Smalls' Paradise, where the floor show went on at six o'clock in the morning. ... It was the complete show with 25 or 30 people, including the singing waiters and their twirling trays. Show people from all over New York, white and colored, went there … …….. Or Charlie Johnson's band there, at six or seven in the morning, with maybe twenty-five musicians from the bands all over town, white and colored, playing at one time, all the top names in the music business."
(Quoted by Stanley Dance in The World of Duke Ellington)

The great depression seems to have brought an end to a lot of activity - but to imagine the Harlem Renaissance had no impact on practising artists of every hue would be foolish, I think. In the world of popular commercial show-biz there was indeed much cross-pollination and co-mingling among the entertainers.

And then how about the later '30s, when swing was king? Newspapers in Chicago and New York contained expressions of shock and fear at the phenomenon of black and white kids dirty-dancing together. It was written about much like oldsters wrote about rock'n'roll in the '50s. It was an expression of racial fear alright, and the desire to keep us apart, but also clear evidence that even the young urban civilian public, the consumers of entertainment, were engaging across the racial-divide also.

Different stories in the South, for sure, but JohnA ain't wrong on this - and I have loads of documentary evidence to prove it.

[Lazz]

There is . Its very frustrating. I've been trying to figure out a way to expose it or bring it up. But its still not good, even in jazz, from BOTH sides.

Yeah.
You're right, Henry - the power nexus is unavoidable.
I also find it frustrating that it is so damned tough having a real conversation about race.
And I agree completely that there is STILL musical segregation.
We should be able to talk about it.

[sgcim]

There are some intense explorations of race and jazz in the following three books:

1) Notes and Tones- by the great jazz drummer Art Taylor

2) Cats of Any Color- by jazz writer Gene Lees

3) Where the Light and Dark Folks Meet- by jazz trumpet player Randall (Randy) Sandke

The last book was written a few years ago, the first two were written earlier (1970s-1990).

I'm reading Dizzy's autobiography now, which also features interviews with some of the greats he worked with, Budd Johnson, Billy Taylor, Max Roach, John Lewis, James Moody, Gil Fuller, Billy Mitchell, Dave Burns, Al McKibbon, and many others.

Diz explains that the after hours sessions back then were necessary, because the idiot musicians union would actually fine musicians for sitting in at clubs where they weren't being paid!

The musicians at Minton's refused to play clubs 'downtown', because they didn't want the ofays to steal their music.

The only white musician to play in the early sessions at Minton's was trumpet player/composer, Johnny Carisi.
Later on, JC brought musicians like Kai Winding to sit in.

[Groyniad]

I'm a fan too, but why single out Bud when there were so many other great players :
Hank Jones, Bill Evans, Oscar Petersen, Sonny Clarke, Cedar Walton, Kenny Drew, Winton Kelly, Harold Mabern, Horace Parlan....

Whereas no one really surpassed Bird, I'm not so sure the same can be said for poor old Bud....?

i've heard a live recording of round midnight with bud and bird - i used to listen to it a lot - and there's very little doubt that bud blew bird off the stand. one can hardly believe one's ears.

aren't there many stories that bird revered bud. i think so.

and lawson - i get the picture - but there's no inference from 'we've been wrong before' to 'we're wrong now'.

my case is simple: it don't mean a jazz-thing if it ain't got that swing. i really don't want to try to characterize the feel that connects ray brown and billie holiday and bill evans and sonny rollins and nat king cole and frank sinatra and louis armstrong and johnny griffin and wes. i can say this much - but it won't help. the relevant feel doesn't happen now and then in the music - it is a constant thing. it may peak or dip with certain phrases and pauses - but it pervades the performance rather than occurring at given times within it. the performance generates a kind of rhythmical tension or intensity which lasts as long as the performance - and never lets up.

the bud ballad above is a great example - but i bet there are lots of people who just don't dig it. on my view it is what makes jazz - jazz. what makes it addictive and dangerous and kind of insane. intense swing - like bud's - is not really a nice thing - it does almost hurt - its like being constantly unsettled. swing like oscar p. is almost always a nice thing - and that's great too.

there's a damn fine reason that armstrong and bird occupy a unique position in the history of jazz - and it is a very radical and implausible view to hold that metheny is in that sort of league.

[Groyniad]

re - missing link between bud powell and bill evans:

wouldn't bill evans have connected himself to bud powell out of sheer love?

bill's incredible drive is very close to bud's i think.

[princeplanet]

i've heard a live recording of round midnight with bud and bird - i used to listen to it a lot - and there's very little doubt that bud blew bird off the stand. one can hardly believe one's ears.

......

Where can I find that? Would love to hear it.

[Groyniad]

Ah, I thought so. You're talking about ONE SIDE. White folk COULD listen, go into black joints, buy records. But that's not a free flowing exchange of ideas. The ONLY way blacks played with white musicians or exchanged information with white musicians, was at these rare after hours, ILLEGAL jam sessions.

There is STILL an unspoken musical segregation. Its very frustrating. I've been trying to figure out a way to expose it or bring it up. But its still not good, even in jazz, from BOTH sides.

i'm not surprised - i just got back from nearly 10 years in Louisiana - but this depresses the hell out of me

[Groyniad]

Where can I find that? Would love to hear it.

it was a pretty bad live recording - i'll try to find it and pm you if i manage it.

[dortmundjazzguitar]

[christianm77]

Ah, I thought so. You're talking about ONE SIDE. White folk COULD listen, go into black joints, buy records. But that's not a free flowing exchange of ideas. The ONLY way blacks played with white musicians or exchanged information with white musicians, was at these rare after hours, ILLEGAL jam sessions.

There is STILL an unspoken musical segregation. Its very frustrating. I've been trying to figure out a way to expose it or bring it up. But its still not good, even in jazz, from BOTH sides.

A (black) friend was telling me about this today. I've noticed if anything, increasing segregation here in London. Certainly noticed it in the bands that book me.

Fewer black jazz musicians in general, too.

There are possibly socio-economic reasons for this in the UK. Jazz is becoming increasing upper-middle class, too. But the race thing is definitely there too, and we don't like to talk about it because in the UK, middle class white people see ourselves as post-racist. Which is bullshit, of course.

I get the impression that things may be better than in the US, but that doesn't make it OK.