The Sandke Affair 1: Can White Cats Play Jazz?
Randall Sandke, a good musician, could have written at least two books far better than last year’s Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz.
a) He could have lovingly documented a talented and discursive group of musicians who currently chronologically stretch from grandmaster Dick Hyman to rising star Anat Cohen. (Cohen recently brought Howard Alden -- a guitarist at the epicenter of this community -- into the Village Vanguard to play Sidney Bechet, which was probably a first.) In an admittedly reductionist way I think of this crew as “The cats on the soundtracks to Woody Allen movies, invited to George Wein jam sessions, and featured at relatively conservative jazz parties and cruises. Their great advocates were Whitney Balliett and a certain era of Concord Records, both gone now.” Since Sandke has played with most of this community, he would be perfect to write their history: Why were they important? What were their best records? How did they feel about race? How did they react to Wynton Marsalis playing transcriptions of early jazz like “Cornet Chop Suey” to corporate and/or government funded acclaim after they had done the same shit 30 years earlier?
b) He could have anthologized -- or co-anthologized, this really needs to be by done by a mixed-race committee -- a Jazz and Race Reader along the lines of the Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis Readers. It is high time to collect all the most provocative race-related statements made by musicians and critics in print. Sandke has dug up some quotes I didn’t know before, but there are a lot more. And whatever is there needs to be reprinted in full.
He does neither. Instead, Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet is a grumpy collection of divisive opinions, driven by dislike of Wynton Marsalis and Jazz and Lincoln Center, and riddled with out-of-context quotes that obscure the intent of the original author(s).
Sandke's thesis is presented on page 9:
Following are two alternative histories of jazz. The first is a standard politically correct version as taught in many colleges across the land:
Blacks were the most lowly and despised class in New Orleans. Discrimination shut them out of the wider world and they had to devise their own cultural practices. When Jim Crow laws swept through the South after Reconstruction, the proud French-speaking Creoles were consigned to the same lowest rung of society inhabited by blacks. The melding of a sophisticated Creole tradition with the crude but heartfelt music of darker-skinned descendants of slaves produced jazz.
Jazz initially received little attention from whites, with the exception of a few white musicians who produced a pale imitation of it. But the white public came to embrace jazz once it had been watered down to suit their tastes. As these young white musicians sought fame and fortune, the real authentic black jazz players were making much less money playing for their own people. Following the Great Migration, black areas in the North were just as shut in by racism and discrimination as the neighborhoods where jazz grew up in New Orleans.
Jazz finally reached the masses in the 1930s, but only when white swing bands appropriated the styles of black bands playing in Harlem and Kansas City. Black musicians became so frustrated with this turn of events that they developed a new music they hoped white musicians couldn’t steal: bebop.
White musicians responded by devising “cool jazz,” yet another watered-down pseudo style, and its popularity forced black musicians to create funky hard bop. Eventually, this was whitened too as funk turned into fusion, making even more white players rich. Black musicians also created avant-garde jazz, which sometimes went by the name “New Black Music.” Finally, Wynton Marsalis arrived on the scene to take jazz back to its roots and celebrate its past traditions.
Now let’s consider another encapsulated history that I believe is much truer to the historical record:
The white public developed a taste for the music of African-Americans as far back as colonial times. Meanwhile, blacks were increasingly acculturated to European-derived musical styles. The broad acceptance found by minstrel companies (both white and black), gospel choirs (such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers), and later, ragtime, attests to a widespread, cross-cultural interest in African-American music. Though African-American music has maintained many distinctive qualities, it has always absorbed many hybrid elements.
When syncopated dances swept the country in the 1890s black bands were preferred across the land, especially by the white upper class. In New Orleans all bands played roughly the same repertoire, though in differing ways. Many white musicians took to these new styles, which could be heard throughout the city. These musicians had to adapt to remain competitive. Soon many played jazz exclusively, as indicated by the abundance of non-reading professional white musicians in turn-of-the-century New Orleans.
When black and white bands from New Orleans took to the road and spread jazz up north, many observers pointed to the interracial character of the music. But Prohibition would segregate jazz musicians almost as much as the Jim Crow laws of the South. Prohibition was rarely enforced in the emerging black belts, so organized crime moved in and established a new form of nightclub that took the country by storm: the black-and-tan. Black-and-tans were not limited to a few upscale establishments, such as the famed Cotton Club, but were a vast nationwide phenomenon. African-Americans were hired to “jazz it up” for whites eager to trade their disposable cash for sin, at least as far as imbibing illegal alcohol. The power and excitement of the “wild” and hot music they performed became a major attraction in itself. The stereotype of blacks as jazz players would both help and hinder black musicians, but the image became fixed in the public mind.
Then...but that’s the subject of this book, and what follows will fill in many of the gaps of this storyline and refute much of the conventional wisdom found in standard jazz texts. The point is that one view of history paints jazz as restricted, limited, conditioned by the evils of segregation -- a cultural expression so ingrained that whites can barely fathom its true meaning. The other view, the one presented in this book, places jazz squarely within the mainstream of American culture, even though it was created and in large part creatively driven by blacks. As a living art form, jazz is open to anyone with something personal and unique to contribute. The jazz ethos is again free to live and flourish.
What “conventional wisdom” and “standard jazz texts,” exactly? I don’t recognize the first “exclusionary” version, supposedly “a standard politically correct version as taught in many colleges across the land.” In lieu of specific citations, I’m left suspecting that what Sandke is really referencing is not a plethora of “standard textbooks” at all. Pg. 5:
The exclusionary agenda may have reached its apotheosis in the ten-part, six-million dollar television series Jazz, produced for PBS by Ken Burns and aired in 2001.
I guess I have to see that damn thing sometime. I’ve never wanted to because I am a professional. What professional was ever pleased by how their pet topic was treated by a mass-market PBS special?
I haven’t seen Jazz, but I have seen plenty of backlash, on the internet (here is a convincing example) and in the real world. Who hasn’t? There used to be a poster hanging at Michiko rehearsal studios that viciously parodied it. (I think it suggested that Louis Armstrong was the silent partner of the Coltrane quartet because Armstrong taught McCoy Tyner quartal harmony note by note at the keyboard. It was actually a pretty amusing poster.) Keith Jarrett not only wrote a stinging letter to the New York Times but took a potshot at the series in the liner notes to Inside Out. “People who don't 'understand' free playing (like Wynton Marsalis, Ken Burns, etc.) are not free to see it as an amazingly important part of the true jazz history.” Wow! One of our greatest musicians has made career choices based on not liking a PBS special.
Back to Sandke: I guess it is possible that in “many of our colleges across the land,” bored music teachers wheel out the DVD series of Jazz and go to sleep. But honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine that any talented teachers would show Jazz without letting the students know that the series was intensely controversial. It would be interesting to find out for sure. Sandke should have done a poll of college music teachers instead of offering up generalities.
However, Jazz hasn’t been all bad for Sandke. On page 3 Sandke quotes: “The African-American cultural critic Gerald Early wrote recently of the ‘frustration of being a white jazz musician in such a starkly racialized field, in some ways more repulsively racialized than in the 1920s and 1930s...Even in this age of diversity we still seemed to be bedeviled with the question of whether whites can play jazz, whether blacks are more gifted jazz players, whether whites have ever done anything truly innovative in jazz.'” It’s nice for Sandke to have this quote. It’s the only quote like this in the book from a black man. As I read it, I scratched my head, because I didn’t remember reading it when going through all of Early’s music writings in advance of our interview. Checking the attribution in Sandke’s footnotes, I see it comes from the companion volume to the Ken Burns special.
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Of course, it’s hardly just Jazz that gets Sandke’s goat. His climatic chapter “Radical Ideas and Retro Music” is a takedown of Wynton Marsalis and JALC.
In the following, my commentary is in brackets. Page 130:
It also troubles me that while Marsalis has reached out to children, the black community, and the rest of the world, he has never reached out to fellow musicians in his adopted home of New York city. [Hundreds, if not thousands, of New York musicians work at JALC every year.] He is the artistic director of the largest jazz institution the world has ever seen, yet he seems blithely unaware of what other musicians are doing right next door. [Could we have an example, please? For whatever it is worth, my own impression is that the man knows exactly what else is going on, and doesn’t like it.] Negative comments concerning Jazz at Lincoln Center are typically met with accusations of racism, casting white critics as meddlers attempting to mold the program in an image more to their liking. [Show me the examples, please.] I am well aware that any jazz program, especially the one with the highest public profile, can’t please everybody. And Jazz at Lincoln Center has shown signs of enlarging its artistic vision by including concerts of Ornette Coleman and even Benny Goodman. Nevertheless, to the vast majority of working jazz musicians, Jazz at Lincoln Center remains an unwelcoming and tightly closed shop. [Who, exactly, is being shut out? The cats on the soundtracks of Woody Allen movies? Perhaps they are, I don’t really doubt this as a possibility. But Dick Hyman did gig there within the last year or so...A few concrete examples must be given. Did Sandke himself ever approach JALC only to be turned away? It’s important to hear that if it’s true, although Sandke’s own bio on his website includes the credit: “He has written arrangements for Sting, Elton John, the King of Thailand, and transcriptions for Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.” !!!]
Instead of all this undocumented blather, Sandke should have written a history of JALC reception. It is extraordinary that the names Whitney Balliett, Gene Lees, and Terry Teachout do not appear in the index of Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet. Either Sandke wants to pretend that he doesn’t have forebears, distance himself from their groundbreaking work, or protect his friends, I’m honestly not sure. Sandke calls Ken Burns a “stale rehash” but the same can be said of much of Sandke’s book. I’m more energized reading the first wave of JALC criticism by Balliet, Lees, and Teachout rather than anything JALC-related in Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet.
Balliett was the first. In his extensive review of August 1991 “Classical Jazz Festival” sponsored by Lincoln Center and held in Alice Tully Hall (published in the October 14, 1991 issue of the New Yorker), Balliett is both cheered and worried:
Ten years ago, most young black musicians had never heard King Oliver and Louis Armstrong; their sense of the history of jazz began with the Miles Davis of the early sixties. But Marsalis, solidly grounded in the past by his father, the pianist Ellis Marsalis, is attempting to teach a new generation of black musicians where they came from.
He’s doing it in a disquieting way, though. It appears that he is reviving not only the older music but also the reverse racism popular among black musicians in the fifties and sixties. Just six of the fifty-four performers used this week at Lincoln Center were white. Blacks invented jazz, but nobody owns it.
In the July 31, 1995 issue, Balliett is less even-handed in “This Thing Called Swing: Three generations of musicians are still making that elegant and succinct sound,” an article that name-checks Randy Sandke as an important trumpeter in the style.
Jazz has become institutionalized in New York, and the front office, currently at Lincoln Center, is run by the Oz-like triumvirate of Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray. Marsalis, the nominal C.E.O., leads the teeming neo-hard-boppers, who, their recording contracts in their hatbands, have taken over much of the New York jazz scene.
Later, after discussing Bob Wilber and Dick Hyman, Balliett adds:
It is curious that almost all the members of this generation of swing musicians are white, and that it is they who have refurbished the music of the great early black jazz musicians. It is also curious that Wilber and Hyman have never been consulted by the producers of the revival programs at Lincoln Center; in fact, this omission has been one of the grounds for the persistent grumbling about the reverse racism which has been directed towards those programs.
Gene Lees cited the first Balliett article in the longish concluding chapter of Cats of Any Color. “Jazz, Black and White” is rather hysterical in tone but probably has some good points. You can learn what the heart of anti-JALC sentiment was in 1994, and why there was reason for the furor. There are interesting cameos by Bill Kirchner and Willard Jenkins.
Although Lees worked to battle Jim Crow in the 50’s, it seems like he never got over the rise of Black Nationalism in the 60’s. I imagine some angry black man in a dashiki shouting in Lees face, “You know nothing at all, Whitey!” and Lees being forever broken.
He’s the only author I’ve seen that has the temerity to attack Art Taylor’s Notes and Tones. “He [Taylor] evidently was not interested in what white jazz musicians think, perhaps does not even consider them jazz musicians.” Lees goes on to compile lines in Notes and Tones from Randy Weston, Johnny Griffin, and Miles Davis that are slightly Black Nationalist or separatist in shading. It’s an embarrassingly provincial attitude: Taylor was a great drummer who frequently recorded with great white musicians, and his book is just about the only place where his generation talks to each other without a white critic in the room.
I must say it: Notes in Tones is vastly more important than Cats of Any Color. Period. Still, for those curious about the history of JALC reception, this chapter is essential.
Teachout cites Balliett (not on the JALC, but on Albert Murray) and Lees in 1995’s “The Color of Jazz,” originally in Commentary and anthologized in The Terry Teachout Reader. Because he isn't out for blood the way Lees is, Teachout's criticism is more compelling.
More recently, in Pops, a book that reclaims Louis Armstrong as an American popular musician, Teachout mentions Wynton Marsalis, JALC and Ken Burns’ Jazz in a positive manner. An alert insider might notice that there’s rather too little on Marsalis and conclude that Teachout has reservations. (Stanley Crouch isn’t even name-checked, which is a questionable choice, given the importance of Crouch’s 1985 essay "Papa Dip," and Terry could have worked harder to include more black critical voices overall.) But Terry shows that he is shrewd and flexible, and future readers of Pops won’t feel the need to battle JALC and Burns yet again.
While the omission of Balliett, Lees, and Teachout from When the Light and the Dark Folks Meet is surprising, I am astonished that Sandke does not reference Richard Sudhalter other than one line about the Ted Brown orchestra and a few other quotes cited in the footnotes. I suspect that Sandke loves Lost Chords: White Musicians in Jazz, 1915-1945, but that’s just an educated guess, Sandke doesn’t say so outright. Both books do begin with a quote by Stravinsky.
Overall, Sudhalter’s book is not to my taste -- at some point I get nauseated by how little there is about racism against blacks from the same era -- but I respect him. Some obsessives collect stamps, some run model trains, and some learn everything they can about white jazz musicians before bebop. In my opinion that is not the most sublime vintage of wine to consume, but fine: it was Sudhalter’s life's work and his collection is valuable. Lost Chords also has a lot of accurate transcriptions and occasional outbursts of joyous passion -- passion that can threaten to become overbearingly portentous and therefore hilarious. It’s hard to imagine what Tram would make of the chapter title, “Frank Trumbauer: The Divided Self.”
Sandke is more satisfying than Sudhalter when writing about racism against blacks, and much better about celebrating black music overall. But I’m getting off-track: I’m trying to address JALC reception, and JALC is not in Lost Chords. It’s just that Sudhalter is the elephant in the room -- I gotta stick him in somewhere. Sandke naturally has little enthusiasm for Stanley Crouch’s books. But if he put away ideologies for a minute Sandke really could have learned something from Crouch. In the front of any Crouch collection, Stanley puts a long essay that gives his personal history and contextualizes everything that follows. “I was young and dumb when I met this man, but his influence was positive until we had a fight...” and so forth. Where the Light and the Dark Folks Meet would be a little more acceptable if Sandke weren’t so coy about his influences and his alliances.
Back to JALC reception! One thing that Balliett, Lees, and Teachout don’t address is a history of certain black bands always having all black-personnel. I have no problem with that history; in fact, I think it is kind of cool. Indeed, if, say, Mulgrew Miller someday turns up with whites in his trio I will feel a pang of sadness -- an era will be gone.
Mulgrew Miller is not racist, I hasten to add. I once heard him on the radio talking excitedly about Keith Jarrett’s solo on “Rainbow” with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, not to mention the fact that Miller has recorded as a sideman with all sorts of white musicians. But when it comes time for his career choices as a leader, I suspect that Miller wants to present the music in a certain kind of way, as classical black music. McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter seem to want the same thing. The MJQ had to have four black musicians to make they money they did, are you kidding me?
All-black bands make good commercial sense. It’s a clear image that can be sold, and most jazz musicians need all the help they can get in hawking their wares. Perhaps it’s helpful to think of the Harlem Globetrotters: of course there have been great white basketball players, but how the hell were you going to sell that particular product with a mixed-race team? I was amused to learn recently that “Sweet Georgia Brown” was co-written by one of the few black composers of the Great American Standard, Maceo Pinkard. It’s obvious to me now but I never thought about it before. The Globetrotters got that detail right, too.
So when Balliett wrote in 1991, “It appears that he is reviving not only the older music but also the reverse racism popular among black musicians in the fifties and sixties. Just six of the fifty-four performers used this week at Lincoln Center were white,” my first thought is, “Sheesh! Lucky we got six in there.” But, true enough, JALC is not a private organization like the Globetrotters. I agree that white musicians need to be represented. Which they are these days, I think at least partly in response to criticism by Balliett, Lees, and Teachout. Sandke is writing like there haven’t been almost 20 years of growing pains at JALC, but there certainly have been, including two quite different executive directors, Rob Gibson and Adrian Ellis.
It remains our job to scrutinize JALC and make demands. They are the top dog, the representation of our music at a corporate and governmental level. They get money from everywhere and spend it promoting jazz.
The only time The Bad Plus fired off an angry letter to a jazz magazine it was JALC-related, in response to Tad Hendrickson’s 2005 assessment in Jazz Times.
When discussing a Joe Lovano gig at Dizzy’s, Hendrickson reported,
...There were a lot of complaints about the band, mostly directed at drummer Paul Motian's unique approach to timekeeping.
"A lot of the regulars, including staff members, were off-put by him," Barkan says of Motian. "They didn't get him. 'Why did you get this guy? He doesn't swing.'”
Ooh. Want to get TBP’s goat? Insist that Paul Motian doesn’t swing. I can’t find our letter, but it contained something along the lines of, “Motian can sit back and relax, knowing that his deeply swinging yet modernist style can still upset squares, even though he has been playing exactly the same way for at least 40 years!”
In response to my DTM interviews with Wynton and Stanley Crouch, the heads of JALC invited me to a meeting last year. I immediately demanded that JALC give avant-garde masters more gigs, arguing that they are under an ethical responsibility to present and document the music at its best, even if it wasn’t going to fill seats or be popular with staff. And plenty of older avant-garde masters need the gigs! Crouch loves Bobby Bradford: why the hell hasn’t Bradford been celebrated at JALC?
My demands haven’t been met yet, but these things take a while. After they read this blog entry maybe I’ll get another phone call. (UPDATE: Adrian Ellis emailed to say, "We are working on it, honest!" I'm sure they are, and (as I should have said in the first place) when we initially met last yeat they were already working on it. When experimental music is regularly programmed at JALC -- as it inevitably will be -- I will have been a just another voice in the choir, not the instigator.)
I’m not trying to dissuade Sandke or anyone else from holding JALC’s feet to the fire. Their operating budget was reported in the New York Times in 2006 as $35 million! They can afford to listen to criticism and demands. (And I’m sure they do, daily.) But our criticism must make sense. The Sandke paragraph above is simply unfounded: looking at the JALC website today, I’m thinking it would be easier to make a list of local “working jazz players” that have gigged or will be gigging at JALC than than those that haven’t or won’t. To be fair, his book was published last fall, so the last time Sandke assessed JALC was probably 2009. The Dick Hyman/Fats Waller performance probably happened after When the Dark and the Light Folks Meet went to press.
(NYC musicians: Don't assume that because your music is outside the box that you can't sniff around JALC and see if you can't pick up a gig or some other kind of music work.)
While I’m on the soapbox about JALC and JALC-related items: Do they use Ken Burns’ Jazz as a teaching tool? If so, I’m not sure that is acceptable. It’s fine if they sell it in the gift shop but those that instruct there should use other sources. They must teach a complex history, not an easily digestible mytharc. And while I praise Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues below, the current edition is slightly compromised by having an introduction by Rob Gibson. Next time it would be better off with commentary by someone unconnected to the corporation.
Moving on, the very next Sandke paragraph is just as mysterious, again page 130:
There is yet another way in which jazz musicians, both black and white, have suffered from the Marsalis phenomenon. The relentless promotion of Marsalis and the “Young Lions” who followed in his wake has led to a cultural backlash in Europe. Every American jazz musician I’ve talked to, regardless of the particular genre they specialize in, says their work in Europe has seriously declined over the past ten years. This trend can be partially be attributed to weakened economies, high airline prices, and the imposition of tariffs on foreign artists. But U.S. jazz musicians are also facing considerable rejection on aesthetic and ideological grounds for the first time in the music’s history. As the English writer Stuart Nicholson writes in his book Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address), “We are at a key moment in jazz history. The music is being reshaped and reimagined beyond the borders of the United States through the process of glocalization [sic] and transculturation with increasing authority by voices asserting their own cultural identity on the music.” He notes the irony of how, from the beginning of the twentieth century, jazz helped liberate Europeans from the aesthetic dead ends of their own perhaps overly-refined musical tradition. “Now,” Nicholson states, “The jazz tradition is stifling America.”
As with Terry Teachout, I know Stuart Nicholson personally and like him besides. (His book on Duke Ellington is valuable.) And at least one of the points of Is Jazz Dead? is interesting and important: some European jazz bands figured out how to play for young people in dance clubs again. But Nicholson’s attack on American jazz is rather sensationalist. "Current Perceptions" is my essay on the topic. The gist is: if we all meet at a jam session and count off some medium-up rhythm changes, who are you going to want to hear, the trace-dance-electronic beat crowd profiled in Nicholson’s book or the cats in Wynton’s big band?
Sandke must agree with me about that one! In a footnote, Sandke admits he thinks Nicholson “overstates his case.” I’m not surprised! The members of the Bugge Wesseltoft group wouldn’t know a Bix Beiderbecke LP if you broke one over their heads. I actually like some Wesseltoft’s music and don’t think he or his community need to know anything about Beiderbecke or anybody else. But surely Wesseltoft and his ilk must be considered in the traditions of Vince Guaraldi, Ramsey Lewis, and Bob James (melodic pop jazz) or 70s Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead (funky vamp and jam), hardly the topics of Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet.
In another twisty Sandke-ism, Nicholson is quoted on page 128 (three pages earlier) without his name attached in the body of the text:
In 1997 a writer for the New York Times asserted, “Over the past decade, in large part because of Wynton Marsalis’s efforts, jazz has been widely celebrated as an essential element of the African-American cultural heritage and white practitioners have been increasingly seen as interlopers.”
Of course, here Sandke wants to avoid Nicholson’s name (found only in the footnote) because just “a writer for the New York Times” suggests it is a standard establishment American personality, not an Englishman whose only article for the paper was a short form of Is Jazz Dead? Sandke is trying to get two for the price of one!
George Colligan recently reprinted the Nicholson Times article along with Colligan’s heated response. I agree with a lot of what George says. However, Nicholson does have certain indisputable facts on his side. At a French festival, I saw E.S.T. destroy a boring straight-ahead “Dizzy Gillespie tribute” with Steve Turre and Ronnie Mathews. The tribute band unquestionably could play better rhythm changes, but E.S.T. gave the audience a more fulfilling experience.
Back to the top of the quoted Sandke paragraph: As usual, Sandke offers no facts to back up his assertion that Wynton Marsalis has made us suffer in Europe. My own take on the problem? Europe has been playing jazz long enough for there to be lots of excellent homegrown players. These homegrown players also have strong local followings. The promoters have needed less and less Americans at their festivals to ensure good programming.
There may also be a political reason too. Most jazz fans and promoters are liberals. The first time George W. Bush was elected, it was bad enough. But when he got in a second time, the whole world was deeply shocked. We were on tour in Europe right then, and I felt that the populace was more suspicious of Americans and American culture immediately. This is a little Sandke-ish of me, I don’t have facts and figures to back it up, it’s just a feeling. On a more positive note, I do think Obama has been good for American jazz music in Europe, especially in France. “America is cool again!” one jazz promoter told me in Paris.
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In addition to Wynton and JALC, Sandke has plenty of problems with the other members of Balliett’s “Oz-like triumvirate,” Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray.
Murray either committed a spectacular tactical error or got away with an astonishingly successful case of playing the dozens in 1976’s Stomping the Blues when he wrote in a footnote:
In recent years, certain self-styled liberal jazz critics have made a special point of registering their disapproval of the use of the term "race records" as an advertising category for blues music in the catalogs of such companies as Columbia, Victor, Decca, Okeh, etc. But since these same writers not only forever intrude the name of Bix Beiderbecke into discussions about such seminal blues-idiom trumpet players as Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, but also make no outcry whatsoever about the numberless articles that describe Benny Goodman as the King of Swing or the polls which rate Woody Herman and Stan Kenton over Duke Ellington and Count Basie, their motives are open to some question. Are they truly concerned about the symbolic segregation expressed by the term "race records," or are they aiming at a redefinition of blues music that will legitimatize the idiomatic authenticity of certain white musicians, whose very accents indicate that they are not native to the idiom but who nonetheless enjoy reputations (and earnings) as great performers?
Beiderbecke is one of Sandke’s greatest heroes. I like Bix myself -- he's undoubtedly a "seminal blues-idiom trumpet player" -- but even if I didn’t, I would absolutely respect Sandke’s pure love. In the arts, love is what makes the world go around. I will defend anyone’s open-hearted love of any (non-corrupt) musician, absolutely.
It’s frustrating that Murray got racist in a footnote and put down Beiderbecke. It was an act that became far more than a footnote for those eager to have an example of Murray’s racism. Sandke is the latest in a long line to trot out this example with something akin to glee: What a relief to have hard evidence that occasionally a black man has been skeptical of white jazz musicians! In other news, the earth goes around the sun.
If Murray was momentarily racist, does that mean we should dismiss his book? Of course not. If we banned all the books by authors who were momentarily racist, what would we read?
Critics of Murray dwell on his conflation of jazz and blues as historically inaccurate. There may be some truth to that. But still I defend Stomping the Blues. It’s an inspired poem about music. While it is not academic (nor ever claimed to be), it feels authentic. And it’s the only work of its kind.
I considered calling Albert Murray in order to ask him about Bix Beiderbecke. But he’s 95, so it doesn’t seem appropriate. If he were younger I would, though. It’s been 35 years since Stomping the Blues came out: one of his critics should have gone after him and gotten a bit more context for the Beiderbecke footnote. Maybe Murray would say that he’s reconsidered. Or that he likes Beiderbecke less than ever. Or maybe he would laugh and say, “I got you on that one! You boys were so worried! Of course Beiderbecke can play, who doesn’t know that? To stay in the game, you need to be a little more confident!”
I've owned Randy Sandke’s first album New York Stories since it came out. The music is pretty good (especially the Metatonal duo "Brownstones" with my former teacher Jim McNeely) but I like the little stories about each tune even better. I also used to think the picture and accompanying caption was hilarious.
With the publication of Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet, that picture now feels awkward. I guess Sandke has really has spent a lot of time worrying about the question, “Can white cats play jazz?”
Of course white cats can play jazz!
Nothing can change that indomitable fact! It doesn’t matter what Murray wrote, or what Wynton programs, or what Ken Burns films. They are actually a relatively lightweight trio: A dozen of the greatest black jazz musicians from Armstrong to Coltrane could rise from the dead, make a power circle, and intone, “No white musician has ever contributed to this music” for a week straight but that wouldn’t make it true. On pg. 101, Sandke says that Bix Beiderbecke’s reputation has “suffered during this age of political correctness.” I cannot agree! Music outlives critical fads. As of today, “Singing the Blues” has 213,414 views on YouTube, with an accompanying 200 comments praising the man as the greatest ever. As long as we listen to jazz, we will listen to Beiderbecke. There’s no reason to be worried that anyone of any race has the ability to take him away from us.
The Bad Plus has occasionally been treated as “White guys who can’t play within the tradition.” I’d use his name but I just can’t remember it: a black jazz writer in Cleveland (I think?) came out to one of our gigs in the early years and complained to us at length about our music, our audience, our presentation, our repertoire, and how our recording of "My Funny Valentine" doesn't swing or use changes. It was refreshing to be told that to our faces so directly, and all three of us thanked him.
We weren’t kidding that it was refreshing. Indeed, I think it is a welcome rite of passage. If you are in this music and you are white, and if a black person looks you in the eye and and initiates a conversation with racial overtones -- particularly if you are getting the bad end of the deal -- well, that may feel awful for a minute. But at least you now share something with all the great white jazz musicians who got raked over the coals by some black person.
On page 11, Sandke declares that he is an integrationist. “If that makes me an old fashioned fuddy-duddy, or even a racist in the jaundiced eyes of some, so be it. Deep in my heart of hearts I am secure in knowledge I am not.”
Who cares? Does it help the music to go around asking who is racist or not?
[Go on to Part 2, "Break Out the Books."]
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BONUS TRACK: I spent too much time thinking and writing about 80's and 90's jazz based on Sandke's assertions. In the end it derailed the thrust of my argument. I suspect that many DTM fans would like to read it, and I had fun working on it. It's more of a fantasia than a serious essay, though.
Sandke, page 132, with my commentary in italics:
Through the eighties and nineties the major labels, all subsets of major corporations, dominated the entire business of jazz. [There was a big money grab for a few years, this is true. It was probably the only time in jazz history when quite as much money was being made on new acoustic small-group music. Something that gets left out, though, is that it was also the same time that the new technology of the CD was just arriving. The whole music business was booming like never before. A lot of my favorite records from that era were on smaller labels, who were also benefitting from the boom.] Signing young players was widely believed to be the best way to court the youth market. “I thought if I went after young artists at least it would pique the interest to kids,” said George Butler of CBS. Publicity departments of the majors felt they could create overnight jazz stars much as they had done for pop music. Musicians were selected as much for projecting an approved “image” as for their ability to play. [Again, I wish that Sandke offered up some hard data. I’d love to see a list of all the jazz artists signed to majors in the 80’s and 90’s. There were a lot of Young Lions but not only Lions: off the top of my head I think of Tim Berne (Columbia) and Steve Coleman (RCA) and Henry Threadgill (Both Novus and Columbia) and Michel Petrucianni (Blue Note).] The Black Music department at Columbia, which handled Wynton Marsalis--and, for a time, his brother Branford, as well as Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison--was also promoting Michael Jackson, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, and other pop acts. Though Steve Backer of RCA denied that jazz departments of the majors were operating “in lockstep,” one industry observer, Richard Cook, noted, “At a time when a world of diverse music was becoming more available to consumers then ever before, a dreadful homogeny was beginning to sweep through dealings of the major record companies.” [Many jazz listeners and critics prefer to support independents. “I liked them before they signed to a major label” is a familiar fan trope in both indie-rock in jazz. The late and mostly groovy Richard Cook, quoted here on “dreadful homogeny,” was a fan of the Bad Plus -- before we were signed to a major label! In his and Brian Morton’s guides to jazz on record, he often -- irritatingly and in our opinion inaccurately -- said our debut effort on Fresh Sound was better than our Columbia discs.]
A much smaller number of white musicians, such as pianist Benny Green and organist Joey DeFrancesco, were approached by the majors. (Green was dropped by Blue Note because, as Lundvall explained, “His records were selling OK, but not enough to justify the escalating expenses.”) [OK, how can you not mention Christopher Hollyday? He got a push way bigger than Green or DeFrancesco.] Older white musicians, Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas being the prime examples, attracted major label support only after years of apprenticeship. Lovano was signed to Blue Note in 1991 at the age of thirty-eight, Douglas to RCA at thirty-seven. Both of their careers really took off after receiving the kind of support only a major label could provide. [The couple of records Dave made on RCA fit comfortably in a maverick career that has always had the John Zornish credo of “independent” at its base. Lovano could have easily been a leader earlier, but waited, biding his time in Paul Motian and John Scofield bands, until he was ready. Something Sandke could have looked at: Did anyone signed to a major label have to change their music to fall into line with Cook’s “dreadful homogeny? ” Lovano’s double CD Quartets at the Vanguard for Blue Note has one set with Young Lions (1995) and the other with mavericks (1994). I much prefer the maverick set, but can’t really believe Lovano didn’t want to play with the Lions, too -- although the question certainly could be asked. Another scenario that has a whiff of impurity was the surprising appearance of the Marsalis rhythm section of Robert Hurst and Jeff Watts and star Lion Kenny Garrett on Geri Allen’s first Blue Note, The Nurturer (1991). I hope these choices were not industry-dictated.] Strong evidence of the record labels’ intent to focus on African-American jazz artists can be found by looking at the winners of the annual Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, the most prestigious talent contest in the jazz world. Winners are selected by a panel of noted jazz professionals on the basis of artistic merit, yet those offered recording contracts have nearly always been black. Jacky Terrasson, Marcus Roberts, and Joshua Redman all signed major label contracts, whereas Ted Rosenthal, Jon Gordon, and Bill Cunliffe did not. Of the young white first-place winners, only trumpeter Ryan Kisor was awarded a deal (by Columbia), but he was dropped after only two recordings. [Haven’t all the Monk competitions shown that it is not automatically relevant to a career? Why can’t Sandke list all the winners, anyway? There’s been so many more than seven contests. Oh: after looking on the internet I see he just means the years 1987-91. So often, Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet feels like it was written twenty years ago. BTW, Ryan Kisor’s main gig since 1994 has been with the JALC orchestra.]
A terrible side-effect of the “big money for young musicians on major labels” era was how it ruined some huge talents, who were encouraged to go too far too fast. Sandke agrees, and chooses Roy Hargrove to be his example. But Hargrove still has a functioning career. Several others just out of their teens made only one or two records, were dropped, and got a major case of the blues because of the bait and switch. The artistry of these naturally-born musicians then stagnated, in some cases seemingly for good. (I’m pulling a Sandke by not naming names but just don’t have the heart.)
Sandke continues:
Older African-Americans also suffered as a result of the new youth orientation of the major labels. Such renowned veterans as pianists Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones were ignored by the majors during this period, as were saxophonists Frank Wess and Jimmy Heath. Middle-aged trumpeter Jon Faddis had no record deal even though at one time two of his students did. The venerable saxophonist and composer Benny Carter, with seven Grammy nominations and two wins under his belt, was similarly passed over.
Hank Jones recorded three albums for Emarcy in 1989, 1992, 1993, and a few different projects for Verve starting in 1994. Flanagan’s first album for Blue Note in 1997 was sadly his last trio record. But this is quibbling over the wrong topic: being “signed to a major label” is misleading. You cannot tell me that anyone Sandke lists here made less money in the ‘90s than in the ‘80s or ‘70s. There was new commercial juice for all the straight-ahead older masters, in part due to Wynton et al. Didn’t Jon Faddis get a Carnegie Hall big band at least partially in response to JALC?
And what about Frank Morgan? Benny Carter vs. Frank Morgan: that’s an interesting, specific topic. No question that Carter is the greater artist (although I like Morgan too), so why did Morgan get the brass ring? I would guess that Morgan had a “story” (drugs, prison, etc.) in a way that Carter didn’t. Or, what about Joe Henderson? In this case, I wish that Joe hadn’t been picked up by a major and agreed to make so many concept albums. Low-budget live trio sets with Al Foster and any good bassist would have been even better. Wynton Marsalis appears on Morgan and Henderson major label dates: Mood Indigo (1989) works, but I’ve never really appreciated Lush Life (1991). It was an extensively-lauded bestseller, but I worry that it sat unlistened on the shelves of many middle-of-the-road Americans, proving to them that you need only to respect this music, not love it.
As far as Strayhorn tributes go, the best one I know of the era was by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, Sempre Amore (1986). As with Henderson, I prefer Lacy and Waldron’s work on small labels like Soul Note to their only major label effort, Hot House, (1990) a concept album with less emotional punch. That was when Lacy was on Novus for a few records; Dave King and I both both obediently bought The Door (1988) when it was heavily promoted, and both of us only ever really liked the Ellington/Strayhorn track with Sam Woodyard, “Virgin Jungle.” In this case, I wish the major had made Lacy make an entire album of Ellington "jungle" music.
Lacy got his shot, Threadgill and Berne got theirs, but not all the avant-garde cats did. Indeed, my interpretation is that the more experimental and challenging musicians, especially the black ones -- not Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan for God’s sake! -- lost the most real estate when the Lions ascended. Someone on the outskirts of the AACM (they wish to remain anonymous) once told me that “Wynton and Stanley took food off the table,” an image that remains vivid.
As far as comparatively straight-ahead musicians go, weren’t the truly overlooked more in mid-career than Jones, Flanagan, Wess, and Heath? Musicians more distinctive than Jon Faddis, musicians instantly recognizable in a blindfold test, musicians who always showed that they could play the classical language of modern jazz without belaboring a historical point. Stanley Cowell, Charles Tolliver, Dave Liebman, and Richie Beirach all come to mind -- I think (I don’t know for sure!) that ’85 -’95 was a bit drier for them then it should have been.
Someone like Ed Blackwell certainly had a modicum of respect but it’s too bad that the last decade of that incomparable master (he died at 62 in fall 1992) wasn’t an indomitable procession of ever-more brightly lit celebrations and higher-paid gigs. God bless Lovano for doing the most for Blackwell in the last years.
I wish some of the Young Lions had searched out the mavericks like Blackwell. What if, say, Harrison/Blanchard had gotten Blackwell for an ‘80s Columbia record date? That would have been amazing, and I bet it would have sold, too. [UPDATE: Whoops. They did record with Blackwell on a redo of the Dolphy/Little Five Spot, and don't think it sold well at all -- but it wasn't promoted on Columbia, either. Still, a gaffe!] Don Cherry made a couple of duo records with Blackwell -- with all his talk of New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis should have made one as well!
The jazz records that survive and sound better every year are often comprised of disjunct voices. I don’t dispute Richard Cook if he is saying that the 90’s-era Young Lion records (not the industry as a whole) needed more variety. In my own essay on the genre I shy away from definitively concluding that the best Young Lion records were pretty much from the 80’s, before the less-distinctive ‘90s took over, but I suspect that my implied judgment is mostly true.
I’m rather surprised that Sandke doesn’t mention how CBS tried hard to get Woody Shaw off the ground before Wynton sort of took his place. That’s admittedly hard to swallow, for Shaw was an innovative genius in a different tier of accomplishment than Marsalis. Yet, I find the early run of Wynton Columbias to be more successful records than anything on the Mosaic CBS Shaw set. Wynton had the right band, the right recorded tones, and some sort of death-defying charisma. The CBS Shaw records didn’t. I may be in a minority opinion about this, especially when in a room of jazz players who came of age before Wynton hit it big! But to this day, if I had to give a novice Stepping Stones or Black Codes, there’s absolutely no hesitation in my mind. Black Codes has something that reaches out to grab you, whereas Stepping Stones can only be appreciated by an indoctrinated professional or fan. I know this to be true because Black Codes is part of the culture of my own youth -- and I’m hardly the only jazz musician about my age who feels that way. So many of us loved that record.
Wynton’s own music has changed since. The best of it remains compelling, and none of it is below a professional level...but the small groups can be awfully “Type A” sometimes. On The Magic Hour, the rhythm section is so on top of the beat and tight it seems almost “ricky-tick.” And I don’t think the fine musicians on that record automatically wanted to play that way. I believe the direction of “feel” comes from Marsalis, who, despite serious experience playing with Art Blakey, Tony Williams, and Elvin Jones, apparently demands that his bands never drag the beat and play everything on a readily decodable grid at all times. The “decodable” approach worked for Jeff Watts, Robert Hurst, and Marcus Roberts -- they were all post-fusion naturals -- but many times since the Live at Blues Alley years I have wished Wynton’s bands would occasionally grease it up and color outside the lines. (I will say that the bass and drums team on The Magic Hour, Carlos Henriquez and Ali Jackson, sound really good on the more recent Congo Square, the album I studied in detail when I interviewed Wynton. And at that aforementioned Anat Cohen gig she had Henriquez and Herlin Riley, the drummer who replaced Tain. There was nothing to say: Henriquez and Riley played the medium-up swing of "Limehouse Blues" as well as it could be done.)
Sandke unfortunately only has a quote from the late bassist Charles Fambrough to discuss the same topic. According to Fambrough (as quoted by Sandke), when he played with Wynton, it “Didn’t have the freedom of Art Blakey’s band. It was all about what Wynton thought the music should sound like. He didn’t give any real consideration to the individual musicians. The band I was in was actually lucky. You can hear the cats playing the way they wanted to. But he was standing behind them, saying, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’...That was the beginning of a problem Wynton was going to have in the future.”
Probably Fambrough isn’t wrong, but he may not be the most reliable witness. More than anybody else, Wynton Marsalis encouraged abandoning the worst element of 70’s and 80’s conventional jazz recording technique, the wildly over-amped bass sound. Marsalis also rarely allows bass solos. Every record I’ve heard with Fambrough has a reasonably unnatural bass sound (especially in the Blakey years) and plenty of bass solos. I’m not at all surprised he didn’t stay in Wynton’s band.
There are two Sandke albums in my collection, New York Stories from 1985 and Outside In from 2001. New York Stories is one of thousands of badly engineered jazz records from the early ‘80s, with an artificially massive bass and tiny drums. Outside In has a nice natural bass sound and dynamic drums. An argument could be made that Wynton really helped out Sandke here! “Radical Ideas and Retro Music”: perhaps, but it’s worth remembering that sometimes that “retro” concepts can just be “good” concepts.
[Go on to Part 2, "Break Out the Books."]
