Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (1924–2005) spent his career fighting purism by synthesizing old blues, country, jazz, Cajun, and R & B styles.
Asked in an interview about his early blues-based recordings, he gave a practical answer: “I had to sound like that because I was just starting out. Seeing as how I was a newcomer, I obliged.”
“But after a while, I thought, ‘Why do I have to be one of these old cryin’ and moanin’ guitar players always talking bad about women?’ So I just stopped. That’s when I started having horns and piano in my band, and started playing arrangements more like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, rather than some old hardcore Mississippi Delta stuff.”
An examination of Bessie Smith’s first two released recordings—Down hearted blues and Gulf Coast blues—demonstrates that her interpretative originality and expressive individuality were evident from the start of her recording career in 1923.
Full transcriptions of her vocal line on each of these recordings combined with detailed descriptions and analysis of the pitch content, the main rhythmic and melodic characteristics, and the melodic-harmonic and text-music relationships reveal the micro-components of Smith’s early vocal tendencies, demonstrating how, although Smith’s phrases display some similarities with each other, they constantly vary in imaginative ways, matching her with the great jazz improvisers.
This according to “Bessie Smith: Down hearted blues and Gulf coast blues revisited by Alona Sagee (Popular music XXVI/1 [January 2007] pp. 117–127).
Today is Bessie Smith’s 120th birthday! Above, the singer in 1923, the year of the recordings; below, the recordings themselves.
Aided by her extraordinary voice, technical proficiency, and mastery at adopting multiple performing personas, Sarah Vaughan obscured conventional divisions between jazz and pop, masculinity and femininity, and blackness and whiteness. By transcending these binary oppositions, she crafted a vocal identity that was commercially viable, artistically satisfying, and which undermined racial stereotypes. In so doing, she reconfigured how American audiences understood the black female voice.
In American jazz criticism of the 1940s and 1950s, discourses on vocal timbre became a means to maintain boundaries between style, race, and gender, and anxiety was expressed by critics when a voice did not match the expectations created by the body that produced it or vice versa. Given that Vaughan’s voice was constructed as neither distinctly black nor white, and neither distinctly jazz or pop, this provides some explanation for her dramatic transformation, including plastic surgery, to create a physical appearance appropriate for her voice.
The roles of recording technology, the suburban home, and the contrasting domain of the nightclub all must be considered in terms of the politics of crossover in Vaughan’s career.
This according to To bebop or to be pop: Sarah Vaughan and the politics of crossover by Elaine M. Hayes, a dissertation accepted by the University of Pennsylvania in 2004.
Today is Vaughan’s 90th birthday! Above, the singer in 1946; below, in 1958.
Sidney J. Furie’s film is a crossover text, created to win the sympathies of both white and African American audiences. In its effort to provide for all possible viewer positions, the film negotiates racial, gender, generational, and political issues.
This according to “Strange fruit?: Lady sings the blues as a crossover film” by Gary Storhoff (Journal of popular film and television XXX/2 [summer 2002] pp. 105–113).
Today is Diana Ross’s 70th birthday! Below, her portrayal of Lady Day.
Glenn Miller and Fats Waller were born in the same year, 1904, and died on the same date, 15 December 1944 and 1943 respectively. Few pop idols survive changing fashions unscathed, but Miller and Waller seem to have done just that.
One does better to consider the overlooked similarities between Miller and Waller than to belabor their obvious differences. Too much has been made of a racial divide that turned them into emblems of black cool and white corn, but everyone danced to Miller, and more whites than blacks bought Waller records.
The era inspired similar goals: Waller encouraged people to laugh through the privations of the thirties; Miller induced them to romanticize American values during wartime. Both used jazz as a conduit to reach a larger public than jazz per se could command. Both were defined by the times; now they define those times for us.
This according to “Stride and swing: The enduring appeal of Fats Waller and Glenn Miller” by Gary Giddins (The New Yorker LXXX/14 [31 May 2004] pp. 85–87).
In 2010 Johnny Winter decided to make recordings of some of the classic blues songs that had inspired him to become a musician. The result was his 2011 album Roots.
“The whole thing was a lot of fun,” Winter said in an interview. “They were songs I loved and grew up with, that I was influenced by.”
Recalling imbibing Delta blues from the source, as a sideman for Muddy Waters, he said “Playing with Muddy meant so much to me as an artist. It was a big pleasure, a big thrill. I loved every second I spent with him.”
This according to “Living blues talks to Johnny Winter and Paul Nelson” by Steve Sharp (Living blues XLII/5:215 [October 2011] p. 41).
Today is Johnny Winter’s 70th birthday! Below, Winter and his band plays Dust my broom, a song first recorded by Robert Johnson and later covered by Muddy Waters; the video is from Winter’s tour supporting Roots.
The work draws on both long-standing symbols of African American cultural identity and more immediate historical context. It is a modernist work as well, as Roach (1924–2007) and his musicians strove to make use of African and African American legacies in new ways.
Decades after the recording, We insist! still sounds fresh, modern, and haunting, reminding us that jazz tradition has always been in dialogue with the social and cultural movements going on around it, and has often been at its most inspired when engaged in social commentary.
This according to “Revisited! The Freedom now suite” by Ingrid Monson (JazzTimes XXXI/7 [September 2001] pp. 54–59,135; available online here).
Today is Roach’s 90th birthday! Below, a recording of the work.
BONUS: Roach was the first jazz musician to receive a MacArthur Fellowship! You can read about it here.
“None of us knew we were making history” said Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903–83) in a 1981 interview. “To us, every one of those sessions was just one more recording.”
Hines was speaking of the recordings that he made with Louis Armstrong in 1928 and the following years—recordings now considered enduring jazz masterpieces, not least due to the pairing of Armstrong’s trumpet and Hines’s avowed “trumpet-style” piano playing.
“My father was a cornet player, and I wanted to play that instrument when I was growing up. But playing it hurt me behind my ears, so I learned the piano instead. And I started playing on the piano what I had wanted to play on the cornet.”
In so doing, Hines freed the piano from its limited role as a rhythm instrument, playing hornlike phrases that cut across the regular patterns that the bass and drum were playing. He enriched his style further by using his classical training to introduce rich chords and piquant dissonances.
In 1924 Hines met Armstrong over a game of pool. Soon they were working together, for, as the pianist recalled, “he was playing the same style that I wanted to play.”
This according to “Fatha Hines: Stomping and chomping on at 75” by Robert Palmer (The New York times 28 August 1981).
Today is Hines’s 110th birthday! Below, Joe “King” Oliver’s Weather bird in a masterful 1928 duet with Armstrong.
Today, on Big Joe Williams’s 110th birthday, let’s recall how he won over an audience of jaded rockers in 1965:
“Sandwiched in between the two sets, perhaps as an afterthought, was the bluesman Big Joe Williams…
“He looked terrible. He had a big bulbous aneuristic protrusion bulging out of his forehead. He was equipped with a beat up old acoustic guitar which I think had nine strings and sundry homemade attachments and a wire hanger contraption around his neck fashioned to hold a kazoo while keeping his hands free to play the guitar. Needless to say, he was a big letdown after the folk rockers. My date and I exchanged pained looks in empathy for what was being done [to] this Delta blues man who was ruefully out of place.”
“After three or four songs the unseen announcer came on the p.a. system and said ‘Lets have a big hand for Big Joe Williams, ladies and gentlemen; thank you, Big Joe.’ But Big Joe wasn’t finished. He hadn’t given up on the audience, and he ignored the announcer. He continued his set and after each song the announcer came over the p.a. and tried to politely but firmly get Big Joe off the stage.”
“Big Joe was having none of it, and he continued his set with his nine-string acoustic and his kazoo. Long about the sixth or seventh song he got into his groove and started to wail with raggedy slide guitar riffs, powerful voice, as well as intense percussion on the guitar and its various accoutrements. By the end of the set he had that audience of jaded ‘60s rockers on their feet cheering and applauding vociferously. Our initial pity for him was replaced by wondrous respect. He knew he had it in him to move that audience, and he knew that thousands of watts and hundreds of decibels do not change one iota the basic power of a song.”
This according to “Big Joe Blues” by Marc Miller (Blues for peace, 2005). Above, Williams in Hamburg in 1972; below, a close-up performance with his celebrated nine-string guitar.
“I recently—well, three years ago or somethlng—played in Billings, Montana for the installation of the Shriners’ Grand Potentate. And the Shriners were all out there sitting at round tables; it was all black tie and tuxedo and gowns, and I’m up on the stage playing. Well, there’s this one table of Shriners that must have stopped somewhere else on their way to the dinner, because they were a little bit out of control; they were laughing and joking and slapping each other on the back…and I’m playing the piano, and these guys are a distraction. “
“So…I could see the Grand Potentate sitting there, and he was obviously concerned with these guys, so I decided, well…. See, something in the piano business is that, whenever someone like this appears on the scene, all the customers want…they want to see someone handle the situation. They don’t want to themselves; they’re too timid. So I realized a long time ago, it’s the job of the piano player—deal with it! So I have never been afraid to deal with these people on any level. “
“So what I did was, I was up on a stage, and they were over there, and I had a cordless mic. So, I stood up after playing this tune, and they’re all over here, ‘Wah-ha-ha, Ha haw haw…’ going on like this; they’re standing up.”
“So I took the mike, and I said ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next tune that I’m going to play for you is the St. Louis Rag. It was written by Tom Turpin, who owned the Rosebud Bar in St. Louis; from 1900 to 1908, Scott Joplin hung out in the bar.’”
“And as I was saying this, I was walking over to this corner of the stage—there are little stairs going down—and I said, ‘The Rosebud Bar was an Institution in St. Louis, because people would come up the rivers, down the rivers…people would all go to the Rosebud’—and by now I was standing next to these guys—and I said [getting louder on each word until he is shouting] ‘They would go to the Rosebud, where they would all SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND LISTEN TO RAGTIME!’”
“They sat down and shut up. The Potentate almost fell over backward in his chair laughing, and I just went back up on the stage and continued. But to me, that’s just business as normal!”
This according to “‘Sit down, shut up, and listen to ragtime’: Bob Milne and the occupational folklore of the traveling piano player” by Jennifer Cutting and Stephen Winick (Folklife Center news XXIX/1–2 [winter–spring 2007] pp. 15–17). Above and below, Mr. Milne plies his trade.
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For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
