Nat Hentoff, Lewis Porter At the Jazz Band Ball, Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene (2010)

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.Every night, musicians who didn t have a gig elsewhere were linedup, two or three at the bar.Coming home, early one morning, I wrote in my day book: I never was inChicago when Louis Armstrong played with his Hot Five, but it must have beencomparable to this.Monk and Coltrane were exhilarating because you neverknew what was going to happen next.You did know that whatever that would bewould never happen again.And you might well remember how those momentsfelt for the rest of your life.I keep having these regenerating feelings.Around when I reached eighty stillwriting on my day job as a reporter I was way low one of those days, meetingdeadlines on the genocide in Darfur and about those parts of the Constitutionhere in the United States being on life support.That night, I went to the Blue Noteclub near where I live in New York s Greenwich Village for a tribute to my friendClark Terry.A mentor to Miles Davis and Quincy Jones when both were barely knownoutside their neighborhoods, Clark born in 1920 has survived a number offormidable ailments.That evening, having been helped out of his wheelchair, hewas making it up to the bandstand as someone in the audience shouted, How arethe golden years, Clark?Terry, trumpet in hand, turned toward the voice and said, They suck! andbeat off the first number of the set.He played as if he were in his twenties.Thegloom and the feeling of futility about what I d been doing during the day whollylifted.I was almost skipping on the way home.Jazz again had refilled me with life.I don t know a single jazz musician who has ever retired because he or she was218 Epilogueconvinced they had no more to say in their music.Many years ago, I saw DukeEllington on one of his few days off.For years, he had been on the road for 200 ormore one-nighters a year, with such jumps as between Toronto and Dallas.That afternoon, he looked worn out, and I said, You don t have to keep on liv-ing this way.You can retire on the standards you ve composed on your ASCAPincome. He looked at me as if I had become a stranger. Retire? he almost shouted. To what?As time goes on, there is no quotation I repeat more often.A tenor saxophonist and composer I recorded for the Contemporary labelmany years ago, Benny Golson (born in 1929), brought a new group in the sum-mer of 2008 into a New York club, Smoke, just before going into a recordingstudio with it and his new compositions and arrangements. Creativity never retires, he told the monthly All About Jazz New York. Anybody who s worth their salt never says, I ve done this and I ve done that,now I m finished. Music is open-ended; there is no end to it.Hank Jones put itthis way: The horizon is always ahead. That s right.It s perpetual.You want togo on, you don t want to stop.Will jazz ever stop? At seventy-six, Phil Woods was performing for the BBC inEngland in 2009, the year in which I wrote this.He had recently been designateda Jazz Master by America s National Endowment for the Arts and was working onnew commissions, with more playing gigs to come during the year.Between concerts and broadcasts in England, Phil told John Watson of JazzJournal: I ve had pulmonary ailments, and soprano sax and clarinet are now alittle difficult to play, but alto sax is still my friend. And as I ve heard him playrecently, a resoundingly joyous friend.Asked about the future of the music that keeps him thriving, Phil said: Theyoung musicians keep coming, and I m very optimistic because the music is sostrong, and so many good men died for it; and so many people love it, and it ssuch a strong, vital social force, so I have hopes.I do have hopes.The term social force reminds me of my favorite story about Dizzy Gillespie.In one of his jazz ambassador tours for the State Department, Dizzy and theband were in Ankara, Turkey, ready to play at a lawn party at the Americanembassy. While I was signing autographs, Dizzy recalled, I happened to look at thefence surrounding the grounds.A lot of street kids were pressed against the fence.They wanted to come in and hear the music.One of them actually climbed overthe fence, and a guard threw him right back over it. I asked what was going on.Why did they do that? Some official said, Thisparty is for select people.Local dignitaries and important Americans in thecity. I said, Select people! We re not over here for no select people! We re over here My Life Lessons 219to show these people that Americans are all kinds of people. I had a girl in thatband, and almost as many whites as blacks.We had a good mix. The ambassador comes over and asks, Are you going to play? I say, No! I sawthat guard throw a little kid over the fence.Those are the people we re trying toget close to the people outside the fence. So the ambassador said, Let them in, let them all in. I was very privileged to have known, and learned from, Dizzy and all the othermusicians in this book.For two years, 1960 and 1961, I did more than write aboutthem.Archie Bleyer, who owned a then successful popular music label, Cadence,decided, as he put it, to do something for jazz. Asking me to start a new label,Candid, he promised me free reign, and he kept his word.I told him up front thatthe releases would not measurably add to his income for a long time.He mightnot even have heard of some of the leaders of the sessions.Having been at recording sessions where the producer actively and insistentlytried to shape the music, once I had chosen the leaders, I gave them free reign.Most of what I did was to write down the time of each take, send out for sand-wiches, and make sure that the leader was at the final editing session.It was hisor her byline, not mine.On rare occasions, when the players got stuck in dense arrangements, I didleave the control room and suggest that they just move into a blues and theywere liberated again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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