I was in a
university bar the other day and I saw a large, glossy
advert for ‘Lindy’ dancing classes. Below it was a list of
students who had signed up for it. About fifty had. This
was in Newcastle, but I’ve seen the splendid finished
product of such classes gyrating at Leeds Jazz Club, where
at times the youngsters turn up in droves.
It got me
thinking. What if?
What if the
long-awaited Jazz Revival had actually started? What if
these were the green shoots. Wasn’t Jazz originally
primarily a music to dance to? Are we on the point of
attaining the real new Millennium?
Why not? Why
could it not happen? We are all agreed the product is good
enough. To most of us who take this magazine, it’s more
than good enough. It’s the only product, musically
speaking. It’s the music that shakes the blues away, makes
me happy when I’m sad and sad when I’m happy – sad in the
way that only sheer pleasure can make one sad in its
impermanence, its memento of the transience and mutability
of life.
In any case, Jazz
is more than just music; it’s more a way of life. It’s the
balm and the boon of the oppressed and underprivileged.
It’s everything that’s happy and unfettered, free of the
miserable constraints of bourgeois indoctrination. Jazz
musicians don’t just follow dots on a page; they don’t
breathe when they’re supposed to. They don’t jump when a
man out front with a stick points at them. They jump when
they feel like it which is the way nature intended it.
Hey-Bob-A-Rebop!
I’d better
terminate that self-aggrandising paragraph and get back to
the thread. If Jazz is as good as we think it is, perhaps
even better than we know it to be – because very few of us
know more than one area of it, one continent in a vast world
– then one day it must return and reconquer.
Surely, the world
is waiting for such a sunrise like never before, a musical
messiah with a new vibe. This music that in its broadest
sense lasted longer than any other popular form, giving a
name – the Jazz Age - to a period that effectively spans
three decades, must surely come again. I mean there’s not
been much opposition really has there, coming from the
three-chord greasers to the headbangers and guitar-wreckers,
the otiose boy bands and gormless girl bands, Alice Coopers
and Alice bands, Boy Georges and ZZ Tops, in short the alpha
and omega of musical vacuity – lacking melody, harmony,
resonance and all the staples of music save rhythm. So much
that I hear inadvertently these days sounds like junk and
only to junkheads can sound like music.
While we’re on
the hobbyhorse, we might as well tilt at the lack of words
as well, the absolute paucity of anything that is
intelligible and poetic. What might Mitchell Parish, some
of whose lyrics, in Stardust, Deep Purple, Moonlight
Serenade and a host of other songs, stand comparison with
the very greatest of poets, or Cole Porter, or Dorothy
Fields or Jimmy (Red Sails In The Sunset, Isle of Capri,
South of the Border) Kennedy make of it all?
Someone once said
to me what wonderful lyrics the Beatles wrote and I couldn’t
help riposting: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, like ‘Norwegian Wood,
ain’t it good’, or ‘I’ll buy you diamond rings and things if
it makes you feel all right’, or the subtle way they rhymed
‘dog’ and ‘log’ in A Hard Day’s Night, or that nuanced
repetition of ‘Judie, Judie, Judie’.” Well, those who prefer
Strawberry Fields to Blueberry Hill (and I’m thinking here
more of Louis and Glenn Miller than of Fats per se )
are welcome to their preferences.
Don’t get me
started on the ‘lyrics’ of Rap!
So let’s take the
premise, then, that Jazz will inevitably return. But even
more certain is it that when it does it will not be in
exactly the same form. How could it be since there’s
nothing exact about it in the first place? Revivals of
anything always incorporate an element of revisionism,
selectivity and original creativity. Look at the new
trams. When, for example, I hear young female Jazz singers
today, I am generally aware of something alien tugging at
their voice strings, causing a voice wobble that they don’t
know they have and will never get rid of. It’s as indelibly
printed on their voice graphs as the vowel sounds and
inflections in their everyday accent. It’s what they’ve
heard in their formative years and what they’ve internalised
and it owes very much more (I’m guessing) to Britney than to
Billie.
So inevitably
when the Great Revival mark two comes (I’m now saying when
not if), there’ll be some changes made. And this got me
thinking even more. Would I be rushing headlong to embrace
the new music – or would I be finding purist reasons to
reject it. I’m reminded here of those evangelising
Christians who actually, I’m told, resent it when urban
expansion brings new faces to their church, oftcumdens (as
we say in Yorkshire), who sit in their pews and park in
their space and delight the vicar.
I think I might,
in spite of all my best intentions, actually really rather
frown on the revival. My father did!
My thoughts go
down the vista of years to a terrace house in Halifax, in
the 1950s, and the monthly meetings, in our parlour, of the
Halifax Rhythm Club, of which my father was secretary. I
was usually ushered out of the way when four or five
augustly bearded gentlemen arrived bearing their 78s before
them, in much the manner of today’s pizza deliverers.
One of them was a
war hero called Eric who had lost his legs in combat and
kept a jeweller’s shop. He was a bit better off than the
majority, had the biggest collection and, I would think, set
the tone of the meetings.
Affable soul that
he was, there was one thing that really got his goatee. It
was when I intruded and asked him if he had any of my then
hero, Chris Barber. I might as well have asked for a
dunce’s cap at an Oxford college or some other kind of cap
in the Vatican! Eric and his coterie reacted with unfeigned
rage, not to say apoplexy. (I’d very much like to know what
my father recorded in his minutes.) Barber, you see, to them
was an impudent upstart, a virile young man condemned by his
popularity and his damnable usurpation of their heroes, King
Oliver, Louis, Wingy Manone, the Savoy Havannahs, The
Rhythmic Eight et al.
Something told me
not to mention Lonnie Donegan.
Barber, to them,
was barbaric. Barber was something that got stuck on your
shoe. Barber had to be invisible and inaudible.
I can, if I’m
being honest, see myself reacting similarly if suddenly a
Wayne Butler, a Kyle Taylor, a Beckham Baker arrived on the
scene, full of the vigour and arrogance and ambition of
youth and with all its indestructibility, not to mention a
full head of hair, a great deal of technical brilliance on
the trombone and brimming over with passion for the music I
thought I had proprietorial rights over, which he was now
tweaking just a little, giving it a few subtle nods in the
direction of pop, a few new up tempo arrangements.
Would I and a
good many grey beards like me really want to acknowledge
this as a future great at the dawn of the new millennium.
What would the chaps still doing sterling work in our Trad
bands, as they have for these last forty or fifty years,
think about it? They might be dusting off an old song that
Bessie sang: “ I ain’t gonna play no second fiddle, I’m used
to playing lead!”
Maybe, for me,
the only way forwards is like one of those advances
backwards that the Italian army specialised in!