My introduction to Johnny Griffin came through the fearless live albums that he recorded with Thelonious Monk–Thelonious in Action and Misterioso. Although Griffin’s 1950s triple-tenor-threat A Blowin’ Session, which paired him with John Coltrane and Hank Mobley, is one of the most-frequently cited albums in articles about the Chicago saxophonist, listeners would be well-advised to check out (in addition to the Monk titles) some of his late-1950s and early-1960s Riversides as well, albums like Way Out! and Johnny Griffin Sextet, that capture the urgency and drive of Griffin’s South Side soul. You can also hear some of Johnny Griffin in these previous Night Lights shows: Art Blakey’s Class of ‘57, East Meets West: Ahmed Abdul-Malik and World Jazz, and For Lady: Early Tribute LPs to Billie Holiday.

Watch Griffin run down the bebop classic “Night in Tunisia” with trumpeter Woody Shaw:

Jazz critic Larry Kart, in his marvelous book Jazz In Search of Itself, cites Andre Breton’s statement “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all” in relation to Griffin’s playing, and goes on to write:

The sound Griffin gets–so rich in overtones that it can seem internally dissonant–the splintered logic of his lines, the jagged rhythmic thrusts in the midst of gentle ballads, the blatant tonal distortions all proclaim that beauty can no longer be met in isolation, that instead it can arise only when the artist confronts the radical discontinuities of the modern world. Indeed, if a representative Griffin solo were to be transformed into a visual work of art, one envisions a structure shaped from various pieces of cultural-physical debris–a cracked jukebox, a smoking truck tire, and some buzzing neon tubing fused to a 1953 Buick Skylark grille and bumper… Griffin came up with a music in which romantic emotions were present but constantly beleagured, a way of playing that had to test each tender impulse by running it through an acid bath. So even though the notes that finally emerge from Griffin’s horn may not be beautiful in any ordinary sense, they are a kind of beauty that urban America permits and inspires.

One of my favorite passages from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man states, “Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.” These are difficult times for those who love jazz of the 1945-1990 era and the artists who performed it. We lose musicians nearly every week, it seems; since I began this blog component of the Night Lights program, Max Roach, Oscar Peterson, and Frank Morgan are just several of the players who have passed on. When we lose them, we lose our living connections to the places and times from which they came. Griffin’s fire was forged in the cauldron of the bebop and hardbop eras, the mid-20th-century world of Chicago blues and African-American community, and a host of other circumstances that have begun to disintegrate, for better and for worse, into the slow compost of history. Players today have to find their own fire; they’ve grown up in different times and have different things to rebel against, different things to celebrate. Sometimes in jazz the Saroyan edict gets turned on its head–those who learn too much from the past are doomed to repeat it. Johnny Griffin came up in a time of great innovation, and yet a time when dangerously obliterating influences could take hold, whether they were drugs or the drug-like spell of certain players. In spite of this he found his own fierce way. We won’t forget his convulsive beauty, even as we wonder how beauty may manifest itself now in a new century of jazz.

Share This

Share This

Terry Teachout has offered up some apt reflections, and Bill Reed has posted a tribute as well that includes a link to an interview he did with Stafford. So far, the only newspaper obits I’ve seen come from the Washington Post and the London Telegraph; undoubtedly the New York Times and some other large newspapers will follow suit.

You can hear some selections from Jo Stafford’s 1959 Ballad of the Blues concept album on the Night Lights program Even White Girls Get the Blues.

UPDATE: NPR’s Jo Stafford segment and the New York Times’ obituary.

I also came across a good passage about Stafford from Will Friedwald’s book, Jazz Singing:

Jo Stafford exemplifies the postwar era more than any other songbird….Stafford’s singing speaks, you should forgive the expression, for the whole era: intonation that approaches Fitzgerald and Torme but doesn’t strive toward their ideal of improvisation and recomposition; a middle-range low soprano suggestive of a female (Dick) Haymes, however, never trying to achieve his warmth or his involvement. Stafford provides a respite from other styles by providing so little of her own…the lack of style is in itself a style, and Stafford’s cool melo-tones are infinitely preferable to the flocks of mike-moths who dub themselves “song stylists” to excuse their complete lack of voice.

Listen to Jo Stafford sing “Long Ago and Far Away”:

Watch Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney perform a pair of autumn standards:

Share This

Algren, who had enjoyed such success several years prior with The Man With the Golden Arm, had just published a followup novel, A Walk On the Wild Side. It was not, however, the novel he had wanted to write, and he was at the beginning of a long and unhappy period in his career. Holiday had just published her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (largely authored by William Duffy). Though her story was being marketed as a “comeback,” her health was declining, her personal life was still in turmoil, and death was only three years away. Studs Terkel writes:

I had gone to see her at the Budland. It was a short-lived jazz club in a South Side Chicago cellar. I was in the process of working on a children’s jazz book. “Sure, baby. Come on,” she said at the other end of the phone. Nelson Algren accompanied me. He was, at the time, wearing glasses.

…After her performance, Algren and I shambled into her dressing room. Dressing room, did I say? It was a storeroom: whiskey cases stacked against the walls, cartons of paper napkins, piles of plastic utensils spread about, this, that, and the other. It didn’t matter. She was there, with the gardenia in her hair. Lady, in the gracious manner of a lady, bade us be seated. Algren slouched into a chair against the far wall, in the semidarkness. He appeared a character out of one of his works: Bruno or Frankie or Sparrow or Dove.

…And when the conversation ended, as casually as it had begun, and the waiter had brought her a tumbler of gin–”Lemon peel, baby”–she indicated the man in the shadows, Nelson Algren. She had been aware of his presence from the beginning; there had been mumbled introductions. Now she murmured inquiringly, “Who’s that man?” Algren explained that she and he had the same publisher. The Man With the Golden Arm and Lady Sings the Blues had both been put out by Doubleday.

“Your glasses.” She was persistent, too.

(From Studs Terkel’s Talking to Myself: a Memoir of My Times, and also adapted for the 50th anniversary critical edition of Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm.)

Watch Billie Holiday perform “I Love You, Porgy”:

Photo of Nelson Algren by Art Shay

Share This

Here are some excerpts from our interview with Steven Isoardi that didn’t make it into the show:

Relying on memories
Leaving Lionel Hampton
Impact of Watts riots
Tapscott & the FBI
Fear of the LAPD
West African culture & UGMA
Other arts
1980s a hard time for the Arkestra
Tapscott/UGMA archives
On music from the book’s CD
Horace as a person

A new movie, Leimert Park: the Story of a Village in South-Central L.A., covers the story of a cultural resurrection following the Los Angeles riots of 1992. There are interviews with and performances by Tapscott, Billy Higgins, and others. The film, which has drawn rave reviews from the Los Angeles media, is produced and directed by Jeannette Lindsay. It is now available on DVD.

Watch the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, under the direction of Michael Sessions, perform:

Air date: July 19, 2008
Original broadcast date: February 24, 2007

Share This

*More on the Rene Marie national anthem controversy:

NPR story (includes an interview with Marie)

Marie’s website statement.

*Jazzwax master blogger Marc Myers has struck again–check out the beginning of his interview with legendary drummer Roy Haynes.

*The Bop and Beyond blog has posted a two-part interview with Mosaic Records producer Scott Wenzel, in which he gives some background detail on the research and other labor that goes into a Mosaic set (and also intimates that the label might consider returning to doing vinyl sets as well at some point).

*The Wall Street Journal looks at Indiana native Claude Thornhill and cool jazz.

*Volkher Hofmann has written a detailed, interesting remembrance and profile of drummer Ed Thigpen (best known for his stay in the Oscar Peterson trio) over at his Living With Music blog.

And finally, a happy centenary to Mr. Louis Jordan.

Share This

Watch a clip from Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, with music from Miles Davis’ score (”Nuit sur les champs-elyseees”):

Watch a big band led by Tubby Hayes perform Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare”:

Air date: July 12, 2008

Share This

That show, Let Freedom Ring is now archived for online listening. It consists of jazz tributes to freedom with a civil-rights slant, including Charles Mingus’ “Freedom,” Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” Miles Davis’ “Freedom Jazz Dance,” and (shades of this week’s Rene Marie controversy) Charles Lloyd’s recording of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Listening back to the program now, I’m pained by my delivery (I like to think I have more snap and verve now, and a little less of the druggy late-night jazz-dude tone) and the meandering introduction of the program’s musical theme…but the set-list holds up pretty well and hopefully still makes for good July 4th jazz listening. I’m still grateful to WFIU for the opportunity to do this show, and I’m very grateful to the listeners from all over the world who’ve tuned in, e-mailed, contributed, and supported the program and the website in many different ways. A happy long holiday weekend to all…and good listening for the week ahead.

Share This

Marie has done such mash-ups before, interpolating the anti-lynching classic “Strange Fruit” and the southern anthem “Dixie.” (Full disclosure: I’m a Marie fan, having featured her on Afterglow, and when she’s on her game I think she’s one of the most authentic, soulful, and interesting modern jazz singers around.) Jazz at its best was (and is) a music that thrives on an element of risk–not to mention freedom. The “jazz=democracy” analogy is facile and overused, but that’s because there’s some crude truth to the idea that it has something in common with certain ideals of American life. What Rene Marie did was risky and interesting, and perhaps not appropriate. (The critical piling-on that’s followed, on the other hand, is predictable and emblematic of politicians rushing to prove their patriotic bona fides.) It provokes questions of race, art, history, civil ceremony, and, yes, what it means to be American and what it means to love–and how one loves–this country. Some may be offended; some may be grateful that we are a living, breathing society that can still celebrate our freedoms even as we argue passionately about what those freedoms mean.

Watch Rene Marie’s interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”:

Share This

Share This