Thank you! Thank you for sharing your story on how you came to Jazz. Your ‘avalanche’ of words conveyed both the enthusiasm and respect you have for the art form. I enjoyed reading post. I was at a dinner party this last weekend at my parents’ home; I happen to mention your post – as well as Chris and Potter’s – with one of the couples there. Come to find out they themselves are ‘disciples’ of Jazz: they go at least one night a week to a Jazz club here in Seattle. I mentioned a few of the pieces you, Chris, and Potter suggested I start with, e.g. “Red Top.” They of course knew all of them; they then offered to have me over for my first Jazz 101 session. It should be fun. Again, thanks for taking the time to write! I appreciate it.

“Not all jazz is swing though some swing is jazz (I am out on a limb here- please anyone correct me). I think of swing as dance music, and again some of it I believe you can call jazz.”

At the risk of simultaneously oversimplifying while displaying my imperfect comprehension of the topic: Swing had both ‘hot’ and ‘sweet’ forms, but, just as within rock’s two-decade growth from the comparative tameness of Buddy Holly to the take-no-prisoners Sex Pistols, the ‘sweet’ derived Swing isn’t nearly as interesting as the ‘hot.’ This is why I adore Lionel Hampton’s big band – even though he’s hardly the first bandleader who springs to mind when one thinks of the genre, “Big Band Swing.”

The ‘sweet’ stuff – like, say, most Bing Crosby – isn’t really jazz. But then most Bing Crosby isn’t really ‘Swing’, either. I class him as ‘Swing Era Pop’, along with The Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Guy Lombardo, and a slew of others.

The Mills Brothers, on the other hand, definitely swung, even while producing pop songs with almost no instrumentation aside from their voices and one acoustic guitar. Swing, in my imperfect understanding, was more an approach to, or sense of, tempo – a rhythm and a musical style built on that rhythm.

To wit:

“Chris did a whole show on swing back in the old Connection days.”

I googled it: http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2000/04/20000414_b_main.asp

The archive’s sound quality is somewhat watery, but it’s still listenable and massively insightful. I grinned at hearing all that Basie in my library – and while having it explained by Robert Levin! (I’ve got Levin on CD’s playing Mozart, so it was doubly special to hear him talk with Chris about Swing, Basie, and Duke.)

It reminded me that my best Basie set is this: Cutting Butter – The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1939-1942 – which I was damn lucky to find. It swings effortlessly from “The Apple Jump” onwards, and it’s the most flawless, hi-fidelity compilation of pre-stereo recordings I’ve yet heard.

Anyway, the books with which I supplement my listening either imply or downright declare that Swing is jazz’s great second generation. The first generation is the stuff that Scott Yanow calls Classic Jazz, and that Gunther Schuller analyzes in depth in Early Jazz – Schuller’s first volume of a three volume musicological history of jazz. His second volume is wholly devoted to Swing: The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945.

But, just as all the rock-era music that uses rock rhythms, chord progressions, and electric pyrotechnics isn’t necessarily rock (remember the dreadful Osmonds?), not every Swing Era musician using Swing idioms was actually performing Swing. (Like the “sweet bands” – Lombardo, Xavier Cugat, etc. – and the crooners).

Yanow mirrors Schuller, of course, in his contributions to the Third Ear Essential Listening Guide series.

“I was just playing Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges on a CD called “Side by Side” It has Harry “Sweets” Edison on trumpet and Billy Strayhorn on some piano numbers. To me it’s swing and jazz- definitely you could do a Lindy to it.”

I’m no expert, but I’m willing to be that if you can Lindy to it, it’s Swing – and therefore jazz!

But, then again, the question of “What’s jazz?” seems to answerable only ‘in the ear of the beholder’. I’ve never owned a DVD player, but am about to break down and get one because I want to own this:

Jazz: A Film By Ken Burns. And while ogling it online today, I began to read the Amazon customer reviews.

Whew! What a wild discrepancy between gushing praise and seething vitriol! ]

Praise:

“I am a jazz musician, son of a jazz musician, am conservatory trained, and this series stands toe to toe with the best lectures by the best music historians and music theory experts I have studied with. If Ken Burns chose to follow a the pillars of jazz in depth rather than give ten minutes to every musician to come along in the past hundred years, we are better for it. If you want ten minutes on each musician, read liner notes. Mr. Burns series will be remembered precisely because it does go into such depth. Bird, Duke, Pops and Dizzie do not come clear to you without much study. We should be grateful for the fact that this series is anything but shallow.”

Vitriol:

“This film is horrible. As many reviewers have pointed out already, the subject matter, which is about jazz music, is not complete. There were very key movements in jazz that were not even discussed. The documentary ends in the early 1960s when the jazz style of bebop was still being played. This is incomplete and a waste of film, because everyone who loves jazz like I do, knows that jazz didn’t end in the 60s. This film was a total waste of time and effort.”

And a voice of moderation:

“This is a great series but it is not a true history of jazz. It omits the crucial fact that jazz was driven by songs and vocalists and not by instrumentalists. An example would be the ‘canaries’ who were the singers who got big bands their audiences in the swing era.”

Soooo…what’s jazz? Apparently, it’s whatever the jazz-style partisan claims it to be!!!

But this from you is gonna stick in my mind for years, ol’ friend, “definitely you could do a Lindy to it”. I love that! Thanks!

(And thanks for mentioning that old Connection episode too – I never heard it before tonight.)

When I first moved (3 years ago) from Michigan into the KUOW broadcast range, I, like you, tended to turn the radio off after the end of Says You! I wasn’t at all interested in that brassy swanky music – that annoying, schmaltzy showy junk my parents had favored and had unfavorably compared my childhood’s 1960’s rock to. But, well, you know how it goes: you’re busy with something or other and you can’t always get that radio switched off before the swank starts up at 7PM. In my first months out here it happened a couple of times, and though I wasn’t thrilled, I found that by the third or fourth time, I wasn’t much annoyed any more. Because, little by little as the Saturdays passed and the “Golden Age Of Radio” blared on, I began to find the music both interesting and amusing. The names of the bandleaders, soloists, and singers began to stick in my memory. Presently Amanda (and no: I’m too new to this area to know her from anywhere but KUOW) played a version of a song I recalled fondly from my early childhood – The Mills Brothers’ “Jeepers Creepers” – and (to my surprise—almost like a zombie of some bizarre new musical species), I googled it. And then ordered on impulse a Mills Brothers compilation with that song on it.

I also recall quite clearly (and, in retrospect, with no small amusement) thinking while ordering, “This’ll be the ONLY money I’ll ever waste on music that isn’t rock, blues, ambient (good for fiction-writing), or (because I like ‘classical’ music too, as do you) period instrument recreations of 18th century stuff.”

Yeah, right.

Glacially, and almost imperceptibly, that Saturday night Swing kept growing on me. Enough so that one day while browsing in a brick and mortar music megastore, I wandered from the rock aisles into the little jazz section. There I found the Duke Ellington “Properbox” – 4 discs for a mere $20, and took a chance. Boy am I ever glad I did. Around the same time, the local library yielded more gems, including the Billie Holiday Properbox. So, I was experiencing growing interest and appreciation, yeah sure, but, at this stage, and despite my recent musical acquisitions, no great epiphany – yet. The music was charming – like a collection of sonic museum pieces – yet I couldn’t quite take it seriously. It didn’t (yet) have any power. Well, of course the epiphany presently came, crystallizing one Swing Years evening when Ms. Wilde played Benny Goodman & his Orchestra’s ultra-bluesy “Why Don’t You Do Right”, sung by the quietly sultry Peggy Lee. (A fabulous, nearly classical arrangement by Goodman’s pianist Mel Powell.)

That tore it all open, shining a sun’s force of light where once all had been dark, and doing me in, once and for all. From the artful alternating tutti-solo clarinet-tutti introduction through all the sassy you’re-gonna-listen-to-me-you-creepy-cheapskate lyrics (not originally Lee’s, but sung like she’d damn well made them her own) and Goodman’s patented hot clarinet solos and fills, I realized I’d reached the point of no return.

I HAD to take the music seriously. It wasn’t just “charming” anymore. Not “quaint”. Not nostalgic. It was fully alive and powerful. (Maybe I’d just needed all that time to acclimate to mono after a life of stereo and hi-fi…? Nah—I think I just needed more time to acclimate my ear to another musical universe.)

So that’s when the profligate spending began. One compilation after another. I’ve just now done a quick CD head count and, to my surprise, I own just under 300 Swing, pre-Swing (Scott Yanow calls it ‘Classic Jazz’ – the jazz of the 1920’s through roughly 1931), and post-Swing CD’s. Yeah, that’s a lot more jazz in my possession than I’d realized before tonight.

Even so, I still feel like a wholesale novice. Partly because I’ve been listening in earnest only for a couple of years now; and, even more, because despite those 300 CD’s-worth of 78rpm recordings, I know full well that my collection is dwarfed by the thousands of songs from the Swing era that I don’t (yet) own. (Not to mention the bebop I’m ever-so-slowly warming to.)

I’m not yet even halfway to anything approaching a comprehensive library of the music – and not a quarter of the way either, most likely.

So, please take the following avalanche of words and suggestions not from a self-styled ‘authority’ (I promise you I ain’t) but instead from an neophyte, untutored, barely jazz-literate enthusiast. Here’s the link: Swing 101 (as taught by a tyro).

Comments, corrections, complaints, critique, and plain old chatter are welcome from all and sundry. (That means you too, Chris.)

Bobby- I did not mean to suggest that swing- as Nick suggests- is not also a good route to go to get to jazz. Not all jazz is swing though some swing is jazz ( I am out on a limb here- please anyone correct me). I think of swing as dance music, and again some of it I believe you can call jazz. Chris did a whole show on swing back in the old Connection days.

I was just playing Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges on a CD called “Side by Side” It has Harry”Sweets” Edison on trumpet and Billy Strayhorn on some piano numbers. To me it’s swing and jazz- definitely you could do a Lindy to it.

First, I wanted to thank you for sharing that story of your sister. It’s a beautiful reminder that there are times when we don’t have to try and understand someone, but just love them.

You had also asked the question: “So to find the soul you can’t think too much; that scares the soul away. The harder you think the less you can know/feel it.”

Someone once compared the soul to a wild animal, i.e. it was essentially shy. And just as you wouldn’t go trampling through the wood to find a wild animal, the same applies to the soul; we need to sit quietly at the base of a tree and be patient; if we’re lucky, the soul may show itself, but even then there was no guarantee.

Now back to Jazz: Thanks for sharing both your story and suggestions on listening to Jazz. It sounds to me that you and Chris have both, so to speak, been privileged enough to witness the soul – whether it be Jazz’s soul, your soul, or some glimpse of your own, who knows really – pass through the woods. (I suspect Nick may have too, or is at least working on it.) Also, I’ll definitely watch Evelyn Glennie’s Touch the Sound video, if only because I grew up in Scotland as a kid – family moved there when I was five, and lived there until I was ten. I went back last month – twenty-five years later – to visit the small town – Rosehearty – I lived in, population 1200. It was surreal. Nothing had changed except for my old school. It had been torn down about seven years ago, and new one built in its place. And guess who the honorary guest at the grand opening was? Evelyn Glennie! Talk about a small, SMALL world.

“Red Top” which is on the “Concert by the Sea” album brings back a certain era in my life. I bought that vinyl after I had seen/heard/experienced Erroll Garner at a club in Manahattan during my dating days. I loved him! I listened to that album so much on my stereo, soaked it in, that it is burned into me (using water and fire for metaphor) forever. Hearing anything from that today brings back those days when New York was quite a different place/scene and my life ahead an unknown.I don’t quite know why this music appealed to me early on, perhaps it was it’s freedom and I felt I needed to liberate myself.

Now I am incapable of hearing anything on that album without those associations. It’s interesting that Chris brings that album up so much.

Very interesting Bobby that you bring up Evelyn Glennie the deaf percussionist. “Touch the Sound” ( filmed in Scotland) is a DVD short movie about her and how she hears with her whole body. You must see this. My husband came home with it as someone gave it to him at work and we watched it. Then he bought 25 copies and handed them out to people he works with. (For long years he has been producing audio demos and demo shows for a sound system manufacturer and he keeps dreaming up ways to show the value of music in our lives.) Anyway the DVD had a profound effect on me, I can’t begin to tell you all but I recommend it.

Thanks Bobby for bringing her up- she’s extraordinary.

While were on the subject of discovering music – only to becoming a lifelong fan – I was in high school when I stumbled upon classical music. I couldn’t get enough! But when it came time to start my own collection, I was lost. I asked a teacher for some ideas. “Dvorak’s Cello Concerto is essential.” “Okay,” I said, “but which one?” If only I had a picture of that pained expression that came across my teacher’s face; that “Oh sweet Jesus, tell me he didn’t say what I thought he just said?” face

Thank you. I will certainly purchase those recording; particularly if they’re able to inspire me like Uncle Emerson can! I’m reminded of a that line in Amadeus when Salieri describes hearing Mozart’s Serenade:

“On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse – bassoons and basset horns – like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.” [Emphasis mine]

I finished reading your post this morning. If only I continued reading past the first “Swing Years” I would have seen that you and I both call Puget Sound home. BTW, did you know Amanda Wilde when she was a DJ at KEXP? Most of my friends are disciples of that radio station. Anyway, I look forward to reading your list of suggested recordings. P.S. my email is moonkey1@gmail.com If you’re ever in Seattle, perhaps one day we’ll meet up – who knows, a few months from now you and Amanda might be there – like two proud parents – when I purchase my first Jazz recording. “There he goes, Nick. Why, it seems like only yesterday, you’d have to hold him down, while I’d played Coltrane into his headphones, and he’d cry, and cry…”