Bebe Bebe Do It Again Bebop

Nov xx, 1966

Jazzmen's Quartet

By JOHN S. WILSON

Four Lives in the Bebop Business organisation By A.B. Spellman

wenty years agone, when the jazz globe split into two violently opposed camps of "moldy figs" and "beboppers," the schism appeared to be just some other in the series of intramural spats that had occurred from fourth dimension to time in jazz. It could be presumed that, like earlier splinterings, this 1 would eventually heal over every bit both factions were absorbed past the mainstream of jazz. To a degree, this did happen--but the battle between the figs and the boppers has taken on a special significance because it coincided with what has proved to be a crucial dividing point in jazz history. Before that fourth dimension, jazz was entertainment. Since and then, most musicians take been trying to present jazz every bit a serious art class, despite the fact that they have had to do it in a milieu that is however geared to entertainment.

This "peculiar cantankerous-pollination of show business organization and serious modern jazz" is what A.B. Spellman refers to as "the bebop business concern." To explore the problems that the mixture raises for gimmicky musicians--specifically, for the blackness American musician--Spellman has examined the careers of four unusually talented jazzmen who take tried to cope with these circumstances with varying degrees of success: Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, 2 of the most controversial jazz musicians of the past decade (and, in Spellman'southward view, 2 of the three most important new musicians off the decade--John Coltrane is the 3rd); Herbie Nichols, a pianist whose potential was unfulfilled when he died in 1963; and Jackie McLean, a teen-anile prodigy of the bebop era, who has survived to find a prominent identify in present day jazz.

Survival, often under the direst circumstances, is one of the recurring notes in all four stories. Coleman has actually been beaten up, had his saxophone smashed, by people who did not similar the way he played. Taylor is a pianist who has to limited himself on, at all-time, one-half an musical instrument. He showed Spellman his ain pianoforte.

"Not more than half of information technology works," he said. "In a mode, this piano is me: It half works. I get to piece of work about half the twelvemonth. Everything that'southward wrong with it, I did to information technology. I knocked those keys out. I can wait at that piano and come across my piece of work from the terminal few years. But you know, a cat playing classical music who had come this far would be getting free pianos, because information technology is good for the industry. Not me, infant. The pianos I get to play on are never more sixty per cent, take most of the ivory off the keys, and they are never in tune. Now what is that going to do for my music?"

Taylor, Coleman and Nichols take encountered relentless antagonism, not only from night club operators who were reluctant to hire them and from audiences that wanted familiar sounds, simply from young man musicians who refused "to play with them. McLean was never an outsider in this sense. But he started downwardly a path that destroyed many young musicians of the bop menstruum, one that included narcotics addiction.

Spellman steers clear of the misty romanticism that oftentimes colors writing about the struggles of jazz musicians. He views these men with a perceptive and understanding middle, earthworks through the protective surfaces and telling much of their stories in skillfully edited direct quotations that have the ring and seize with teeth of reality.

His place on Taylor is a particularly provocative portrait of a thorny, adamant and penetrating private with a delightfully mordant wit. It sums upwardly much of the essence of the book. Information technology is Taylor who provides Spellman with a microcosm of the countless, Job-like adversities that can follow an innovator through the contemporary jazz world. And information technology is Taylor's thoughtful analysis of the relation of European music to the cultural aspirations of the white American and the blackness American that clarifies not only for justification for "serious jazz" equally opposed to jazz as entertainment but too the underlying reasons why he and other likeminded musicians persist in the face of alienation and frustration that are their steady lot.

Mr. Wilson is the author of "Collector's Jazz: Modern," and "Collector's Jazz: Traditional and Swing."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/home/jazz-bebop.html

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