Forty Images Along the Way: Jazz

Many of the pictures I’ve chosen for this Lenten practice of mine, choosing photos from my collection and writing a few paragraphs inspired by the images, are comparatively recent. But this one goes back to my college days. Thus it is a print from fifty years ago.

Just before I took this photo of jazz pianist George Shearing, I had done my very first radio interview with him. Imagine that. My first ever interview was with Shearing. I carried a small cassette tape recorder into an intimate practice room in the school’s Conservatory of Music, and bungled my way through a conversation with the man who wrote “The Lullaby of Birdland.” No prep on my part. No idea how to proceed. So, the photo I took from backstage during the George Shearing Quartet concert turned out far better than the interview.

That said, Mr. Shearing was more than tolerant of my inept questioning during our time together. He projected grace, a generous spirit, and good humor, and I can still hear it in his voice over the hiss of the fragile tape these five decades later.

Obviously, this image sings jazz to me. Piano, bass, drums, and vibes. When I started this blog many years ago, the title “Peace, Grace, and Jazz” came to me, almost something I could use as benedictory words. Peace…of course, as in “peace be with you.” Grace…as in that gift freely received and generously offered to others. And jazz? Just to be clever? No. Because I do wish you jazz.

Here’s what appeals to me about that genre of American music, now so internationally appreciated. Jazz is creative, rhythmic, and improvisational. I think a form of it was the first music I heard. At least, the first records played on the Kellam phonograph were 78 rpm big band era tunes from my parents’ WW2 days. That era was a couple of generations removed from the birth of the “jazz age,” and the musicians bowed to the public’s desire for danceable tunes and more tame lyrics, but some trumpets still wailed, basses got slammed, and drums kept syncopation alive, even if the “Blues in the Night” lyrics were not exactly  as achingly painful when sung by Dinah Shore.

Besides my own history, that is, growing up in the fading echoes of those jazz bands, I personally love the inventiveness of the music, especially when musicians leave the printed notes behind and let the spirit of jazz inform their improvisation, freely springing (or swinging) into wherever their souls want to fly.

I’m with those who remember that the roots of jazz are in the fields, where call and response and spirituals were the musical seeds of the blues. In thinking about the connection of jazz and church, I came across this un-attributed quotation from Stephen Longstreet’s The Real Jazz Old and New:

When the slave came to talk to God with a banjo he played what he heard by ear, or liked by ear. And when he got a piano he played it sinful or godlike. He played his music in clapboard churches, or for the purpose of the open-air evangelist, or he became the professor in a Storyville whorehouse, with ragtime or barrelhouse, in saloons or wherever music was wanted for a burial or a parade or a fish-fry.

Lament, Longstreet wrote, reached a high level of folk art. But I suppose, so did praise! I have written of “jazz vespers” in previous posts in this Peace, Grace, and Jazz journal, so I need not plagiarize myself here. And my friend Bill Carter and I produced a DVD called “Jazz Belongs in Church,” where our shared credo is expressed musically and theoretically. (www.presbybop.com is where you can find that resource.) It’s enough to add here that even Lent lends itself to jazz expression (or does jazz lend itself to Lent?).

Lent is blues, minor key or not. The tenor sax sings the psalm, the piano plays repentance and forgiveness, the drums and sticks and brushes and cymbals join the bass in the pulse beat of wandering in wilderness and lingering in garden and hanging on crosses.

The vibes of Lent? Like bells calling us to church.

 

Generational Rhythm

There was an odd piece of furniture in my childhood home. Well, it wasn’t really furniture, but it was a substantial slab of wood (to a 6 year-old) and hammered onto that wood was a hard rubber pad, about 1/4 of an inch thick. The wood measured maybe 6″ square, and a couple of inches high. It made its way through various rooms of the house where I grew up: on the kitchen table, the living room floor, or a dining room chair — wherever Dad left it after practicing. Here’s a hint: drumsticks were never far from the object. Dad called it a drum pad.

And he could drum! Mom and Dad both played in their high school marching band, Mom with her saxophone, Dad with snare drums. I never saw or heard Mom play, and never heard what might have become of her sax. But I remember Dad’s drum exercises! He didn’t have an actual drum, but that pad was a fixture in the house for many years. Besides the high school band, Dad had also played in “The Union-Endicott Colonial Fife and Drum Corps,” a group that became almost legendary in our hometown. [It continues to this day, some 70 years later, now using the name “The Continental Ancient Fife and Drum Corps.”] As a young father now, Dad drummed the corps’ rhythms, sticks on rubber, at lightning speed, holding on to his youth even as his own kids grew toward the age for music lessons.

It was inevitable that I would adopt the drum as my first attempt at “playing an instrument,” in second grade. After all these years, the memories of those days are few, but imaginary snapshots remain. I recall my lessons taught on the stage of the school auditorium. I stood at the drum and practiced the most elementary of rhythms: the drum roll. I can hear the teacher’s hint at how the roll was to work: “Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy…” And I translated that into a very slow tap-tap with the right hand, tap-tap with the left. It didn’t sound at all to me like Dad’s pad.

Another snapshot: carrying a full-sized snare drum home, strapped to a second-grader’s body, drum bouncing against me with every step, and words of warning to any classmate who had the idea that it would be fun to slam a hand or stone on the drum head as I walked the four blocks home. No mere pad for me! I got to borrow a real drum for my practice sessions, a few minutes each day (supposedly), relegated to the cellar of the house where the noise of Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy wouldn’t drive the rest of the family crazy.

Last snapshot from the album: I was in the basement with the drum when the music teacher called my Mom. He was surrendering. I remember her telling me after their brief conversation (was she standing at the top of the cellar stairs?) that my teacher had said, rather bluntly, that I had no sense of rhythm, and that perhaps in a few years, I might develop one. In the meantime, I should take the drum back to school, and think about another instrument.

This probably came as no shock to Dad. He had tried to mentor me through flams and para-diddles and flam-para-diddles. But it was hopeless. (I learned later that perhaps the drum roll might have moved beyond Mama/Daddy if I had let the stick hit on Ma and bounce on -ma, hit on Dad and bounce on -dy, and stopped trying to play like a mechanical monkey. Too late.]

Dad’s sense of rhythm skipped one generation (me), and my own kids never considered taking up the sticks/pad thing. Later in life, my wife Joan and I saw a drum for sale at Colonial Williamsburg, and we thought it would be a great present for my Dad; probably the first “real” drum in his possession since high school. I suspect it turned out to be not quite as real as we thought. He never owned up to this, not wanting to hurt our feelings, but I’ll bet he tried playing it, and punctured the drum head (since the thing was more decorative than “real,”). When we last saw the drum many years back, it was upside down, decorating the front hallway of their home.

All this comes back to me now that my 12 year-old grandson is taking drum lessons, and has played in his middle school band. Apparently he does have a sense of rhythm, does practice, and has some of my Dad’s musical genes. I told Ryan that I wish my Dad were around to see this happen. He’d beam at the thought of a great-grandson doing the flam-para-diddle thing. A new generation.

This essay has taken so long to write that while I typed, it occurred to me that my grandson’s drumming comes from another source, much closer gene-wise. My son-in-law was a drummer! That explains a lot. Genes from both sides of the family.

All that’s left now is practice, practice, practice. Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy. Etc. Etc. Etc.