On jazz, fusion, Body and Soul, and Johnny Green

The other day I was listening, and re-listening, to the 1938 Chu Berry-Roy Eldridge recording of the 1930 song Body and Soul. This irreplaceable side isn't a case of jazz musicians making something out of nothing, as Louis Armstrong did with a weak song like Sweethearts on Parade. With Body and Soul there's much to inspire the improviser. The tune, in Ruby Braff's words, has a lot of meat on it.

That's because of composer Johnny Green.

From his family and European tutors Johnny Green inherited the musical language of the classics. The music in the air in New York when he was young was a medley of ragtime syncopation, Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan, Sigmund Romberg, Americanized versions of Strauss and Lehár, tunes influenced by Victorian salon songs, English music hall, and minstrel shows, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Caruso and John McCormack records. This and more helped shape the idiom of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters.

When I listen to Body and Soul, I hear a melody line and harmonies in the opening eight bars that could -- in different context, rhythm, and instrumentation -- be redolent of operetta. The same can be said of Green's Out of Nowhere and so many other early pop hits. As the musicologist Legrand Sidney Doggett has rightly pointed out, "Irving Berlin's What'll I Do? is pure Vienna." The modulations in the Body and Soul bridge, so ripe with challenge for a good improviser, reveal the composer's technical training in the European classical tradition. Like Bix Beiderbecke and other intellectually curious musicians of the time, young Johnny Green would also have been eagerly soaking up the new French impressionism of Ravel and Debussy. Echoes can be heard in the chromaticism at the end of the bridge, bringing us back to the home key. Add to all this the skills snd sensibilities of musicians like Berry and Eldridge, and you have a heady musical mixture.

Critics and musicians these days seem ever-eager to "fuse" jazz with other musics. Jazz should always be open to new influences, but I laugh when people talk about fusion as if it's something new. Fusion has already happened, in a huge way. It happened organically and spontaneously. It's called the Great American Songbook. It's called jazz.

2,856 ways, tricks, steps, tips, rules, must-haves, and secrets

Navigating one's way through modern life is dauntingly complex. I'd never fully appreciated the magnitude of the challenge until I saw the March issue of Cosmo. The sheer quantity of information to be absorbed is staggering. The numbers tell the story. Add 'em up:

10 (ways to let a guy know you’re interested)

4 (ways to get the curls-gone-wild look)

101 (things about men)

3 (ways to rock your flared bottoms; meaning the bottoms of jeans, I think)

4 (ways to get a guy to listen)

25 (fun ways to go nude without freezing your butt off)

2 (rules for layering like a pro)

5 (secrets to superlush lashes)

5 (flirty finds that set the mood)

8 (easy steps to tighten up your triceps)

7 (sexy must-haves)

6 (ways to tell sexy from skanky)

5 (shameless money-saving tricks)

4 (steps to a half-moon manicure)

23 (great places to meet men)

12 (ways to crank up the cuddle hormone -- their wording, folks)

5 (secrets his top TV show reveals)

9 (ways to squeeze more time out of your day; one of which might be to stop reading this magazine)

By my calculations, this adds up to 238. We could easily exceed 250, but the hygienic ways, tricks, and steps near the back of the magazine are a little too personal for comfort, so I'll settle for 238. This is just one month of the year. Multiply by 12 and you get a total of 2,856 things to learn yearly. It's like going to law school.

I’m keeping my copy of Cosmo. Several of the articles cry out for further analysis, especially the one about fun ways to go nude without freezing your butt off. I live in a climate where that's important. You’ll be able to do your research with your own copy, coming soon to a waiting-room near you.

Rest easy: the foul-mouthed gross-out is alive and well

First thing every morning I check the New York Times, our "newspaper of record."

This morning I awoke to the news that rocker/activist Bob Geldof is unhappy. According to music critic Jon Pareles, in a "grumpy" keynote speech at the 25th annual South by Southwest Music Festival, Geldof "bemoaned music’s loss of relevance. Although there was no shortage of 'cool bands,' he said, music didn’t have the kind of broader social impact that it did with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, punk and grunge. He argued that music was no longer channeling rebelliousness and discontent."

Not to worry. Pareles has glad tidings:

"[Geldof] might have changed his mind had he seen Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, the teenage Los Angeles hip-hop collective..... Rapping about drugs, rape, murder, getting pulled over by the police and wanting a father’s respect, over blotchy low-fi tracks, members of Odd Future climbed stage scaffolding and dove into eager crowds. Audiences responded with mosh-pit surges and hearty chants of 'Wolf Gang!'"

What a relief! Thanks to what Pareles calls Odd Future’s "foul-mouthed gross-outs," Geldof's vision of Satori -- a permanent state of adolescent angst, rebellion, and self-destructiveness -- is intact.

As usual, Pareles, the music critic, goes on at great length without ever telling us whether he actually liked the music. You can always rely on the New York Times.

A cautionary clip

This clip illustrates two lessons that should have been learned but weren't:

(1) never get into a scat-singing contest with Roy Eldridge;

(2) never raise your horn before Coleman Hawkins is ready to let you in.

The difference between Dodger fans and Giant fans

I'm talking about Brooklyn Dodger fans and New York Giant fans.

On January 22, 2011, under the headline “S.F. Giants Return for Fans They Left Behind,” the New York Times reported that a group of San Francisco Giants players and executives returned with their World Series trophy to New York, where they were greeted warmly by many old-time Giant fans. So warmly that Bill Neukom, Giants’ managing general partner and chief executive, was moved to say, “It’s really heartwarming. There’s a sense of a community of Giants fans. You have to be impressed by the devotion.”

Brooklyn fans are different. We don’t forget so easily. I still haven’t forgiven Leo Durocher and Sal Maglie for throwing at Carl Furillo. Nor have I forgiven Charlie Dressen for bringing in Ralph Branca to face Bobby Thomson that day in '51, when Thomson had been lighting up Branca all season. Don't get me started on Charlie Dressen.

With Brooklyn fans the intensity of feeling never seems to go away. A recent Associated Press article quoted two old-time Dodger fans. One says, “Dodger fans hated the Giants. To the core we hated them. The rivalry was unbelievable." Another says, "We hated their uniforms, we hated their ballpark, we hated their announcer and we hated Channel 11 for televising their games." You can tell these guys are still fuming.

Recently a friend reported to me that the Los Angeles Dodgers will be holding some kind of “retro day” this season when they’ll wear the old Brooklyn uniforms with the Brooklyn “B” on their caps. My (cleaned-up) response: “Screw ‘em.”

Wild Bill meets Rag Mop

In late 1949 or early '50 when I was 10, the Ames Brothers' record of Rag Mop exploded; came out of nowhere to the number-one spot on Martin Block's WNEW Saturday morning countdown of the top records. I read somewhere that Rag Mop was intended as the B side; the flip side, Sentimental Me, was supposed to be the hit.

I remember watching Eddie Condon's Floor Show on TV. Rag Mop had just begun its ascent, and was already in my record collection. I wasn't yet a jazz fan but I enjoyed Condon's TV show. I liked the gruff, wisecracking trumpet player who seemed to play out of the side of his mouth.

In one segment Condon would ask the studio audience for requests. Usually it was a standard like It Had to Be You. In the early days of live television, the studio audience for a show like this was anyone they could drag in off the street. So Condon went into the audience to ask for requests and some teenager yelled out, "Rag Mop!" It was obvious Condon had never heard of it. The guys in the band thought the title was hilarious, and the trumpet player said something like, "Naah, there's no song like that." That sealed it; Condon went on to another request.

For a while Rag Mop was everywhere, then it flamed out. I saw the Treniers do it on TV a couple of years later. I think it's the Colgate Comedy Hour with Martin and Lewis, 1951 or '52. Be warned: jive ahead.

It was prophetic that Rag Mop, and not Sentimental Me, became the Ames Brothers' super-hit. (Sentimental Me eventually rose pretty high on the charts, too.) In late '49-early '50, the hits I remember Martin Block playing were Mule Train by Frankie Laine, Ghost Riders in the Sky by Vaughn Monroe, I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts by Freddy Martin (and Merv Griffin), Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think) by Guy Lombardo, A Dreamer's Holiday by Buddy Clark, who had just been killed in a plane crash (I still like both the song and the singer), It Isn't Fair by Don Cornell, With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming by Patti Paige, the Third Man Theme played on the zither by Anton Karas, I Can Dream, Can't I by Patty Andrews. You get the drift. By the end of the 1940s the Top Twenty had become a swing-free zone. Heat-seeking youngsters were craving more excitement from their pop music. The Treniers' Rag Mop on Martin and Lewis in '51-'52 was a glimpse of things to come.

In 1953 I'd be listening to a disc jockey on a Cleveland station I could pick up on my bedside radio, unless there were thunderstorms anywhere between Brooklyn and Cleveland. He called himself the Moondog, and he was playing rhythm and blues. I heard Joe Turner and Ray Charles for the first time on his show from Cleveland. In a year or so, Alan Freed moved to WINS in New York and soon all my friends were listening to him. Big changes were coming.

I still think it's too bad Wild Bill and the Condonites didn't know Rag Mop was just a blues. They could have played the hell out of it.

Musical tip of the day

Want to hear a relaxed, joyful set of some of the best jazz being played these days? Go here:


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