Environmental or archaeological insights into jazz history

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I was listening to Jimmy Ponder’s album “Live at the other end” (Explore), which I bought a few months ago, yesterday morning and, for the first time, looked at the sleeve notes, by Ted Panken. Here’s the first part.

Still going strong at 147 Bleeker Street towards the southern border of Greenwich Village, The Other End, where guitarist Jimmy Ponder performed this superb 1982 solo recital, has a history.

It opened as The Bitter End in 1962, one of a congeries of coffee houses, Italian restaurants, and saloons occupying the tenements of Bleeker, MacDougal and West Third Streets. They serviced a mix of college students, bridge-and-tunnel kids and tourists looking for kicks, art-oriented Villagers, Italian-American tough guys, Washington Square Park strollers, and the alcoholics, drug addicts and other lost souls who populated the Mills Hotel, an imposing 1,400-unit Stanford White-designed flophouse that occupied an entire Bleeker Street block and housed on the ground floor the Village Gate.

The Bitter End’s original incarnation, a coffee house called Take Three, booked a mix of hardcore folk singers, radical jazzfolk, and beat poets. Towards the end of 1961, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, which made two pathbreaking recordings for Verve earlier that year, accepted an engagement. “We played several weeks for the door,” Swallow recalled. “On one particular night we made less than a dollar each… and we decided to better bag it, that it wasn’t working. The music was glorious, but it seemed futile to continue.”

Foreshadowing the British invasion, the Bleeker Street soundtrack was rapidly shifting from Beat to Pop. “One singular event perfectly encapsulates the very swift change that blew through,” says Swallow, referring to a jazz-and-poetry gig at the Bitter End, with a straight-looking poet named Hugh Romney, who subsequently changed his name to Wavy Gravy and became the symbol of 1960s commune culture with the Hog Farm. “One night the management told us that there was another act, two guys with a guitar and a girl. After we finished our set, we encountered them in the kitchen before they were about to go on. The two guys were arguing about the third of the four chords in the piece they were about to play, and they had a repertoire of five or six tunes. We were utterly contemptuous. A little concerned, too. Something did seem to be in the air. Within a couple of weeks, we were gone, and they were carrying on. They were Peter, Paul and Mary.”

Over the ensuing two decades, Peter, Paul and Mary, Randy Newman, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, The Isley Brothers and many more would make location recordings there. And Bob Dylan made the room his headquarters during a fecund period in 1975.

Still tenement-lined and not yet theme-parked in 1982, Bleeker Street was gentrifying. In 1974, the Mills Hotel closed, and reopened two years later as an upscale condominium. The one-time low-life hotel on the other side of Thompson was down, replaced by a modern building that housed Lush Life, a jazz club where international acts performed. Once saloons where down-and-outers drank, the Red Lion and the Village Corner booked top shelf jazz pianists on a regular basis. Art Blakey was living at Bleeker and Broadway and hiring young lions, and alumnus Wynton Marsalis was a nascent megastar. Jazz was becoming chic.

So it wasn’t a huge stretch – and it couldn’t have cost much – for the pop-oriented Other End to book Jimmy Ponder.

The first thing that struck me was that the conclusion that jazz was becoming chic was a very fair assessment following that brief survey of the locality. And also a most telling one; if there’s one thing that jazz had never been before (well, a possible exception might have been in Paris in the fifties), it’s chic. And perhaps that does explain some of what happened to jazz thereafter.

My next immediate thoughts went to Jack Travis and his book, “The autobiography of black jazz”. Travis, being an estate agent, focussed a lot on the buildings in Chicago where jazz was played. But, from memory, I don’t think he drew any conclusions about the way in which the physical developments might tell us anything about the way jazz developed there. It seemed to me he simply presented the various facts about the buildings because he knew them; not because they actually illuminated what happened.

But another piece of history, that was illuminated by a sense of place, occurred to me. Early last year, I bought a couple of albums recorded in the mid-seventies by Ntemi Pilosi, a South African jazzman. The sleeve notes surprised me greatly by devoting some space to the antagonism that erupted between Abdullah Ibrahim, when he returned to South Africa in the mid-seventies, and the South African musicians who’d stayed at home. Apparently he was criticising SA jazz musicians left, right and centre. The notes quote Lulu Masilela, a saxophonist and organist.

Ibrahim and his wife both played classical and jazz and this and that, and then he announced, "this is what is called music, unlike [your] African music, for instance like Mbaqanga. That is just mnyana phambile ["running in the dark"]. That's not music!"

I was so angry! I said we are here to listen to him play. Now here it is he criticises what we are doing and what we are living on! To my thinking, he was trying to insult us musicians that cannot read and write music. Yes, that was definitely how I looked at it.

And then a month later here comes this popular song ['Mannenburg' by] Dollar Brand! This same guy that once said this and this and this about our cultural music and to my ears this sounds like one of Bra Zacks' songs, and it is! I said to myself, how about re-recording this tune and play it the way it is [and] instead I will give the credit to Bra Zacks because this is Zacks Nkosi's song.

Apparently Masilela's band The Movers did record Mannenburg for Teal records and had the satisfaction of seeing the Mover's recording outsell Ibrahim's "original".

We blew it to pieces! We stopped it from selling!

Clearly, one is supposed to sympathise with Lulu and his confreres. And indeed, I do. But it isn’t as simple as Lulu made out.

Some light on the factors underlying this animosity was thrown, for me, a short while later, when I got the local library to get me an academic book called “Africa’s urban past”. It included a paper on the land use planning aspects of the clearance of District 6 of Cape Town.

Cape Town’s District 6, where Ibrahim and many of his band came up, was an old part of the town, near the centre (which meant possible real estate benefits) and near the docks. Like many docks areas all over the world, it was home to a wide variety of people from here, there and everywhere. And to middle classes (usually living above their shops), working classes, a fishing community and layabouts. And, crucially, to blacks, whites, coloureds and Asians – in the terminology of the apartheid government – all living cheek by jowl, shopping in the same shops, and going to the same cinemas, the same theatres, dance halls, bars and clubs; I think there was a concert hall in the area as well, also open to all. An intolerable situation to the government, but one that had existed for a long time. A crucial point the writer made was how cosmopolitan and varied the population was; both ethnically and in outlook.

This was contrasted with the situation in which the evicted population were placed in townships on the periphery of the town. Township policy for the displaced population was not merely to get “the blex” out of the way but to separate them into their “tribes”, as in other South African cities, on the grounds that if they were all put together, they’d fight each other.

So the situation in which Ntemi Pilosi, Lulu Masilela and Zacks Nkosi came up (mostly Alexandra Township in Jo’burg) was one that was organised so that much more limited horizons would be available to the population, than the one in which Ibrahim developed. But, of course, the musicians created as they could under the circumstances.

It seemed to me that this approach, of looking closely at certain locations which were in the position of a nexus of some kind of development, might yield fruitful results for the understanding of some of the things that happened in the music.

Discuss.

MG

[Hot Ptah]

There have been books written about Kansas City in the 1930s, if I understand the point that you are raising.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

That sounds interesting. Any titles/authors you can mention?

MG

[Hot Ptah]

I know of "Kansas City Jazz, From Ragtime to Bebop--A History", by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subj...i=9780195307122

[Chuck Nessa]

The author of An Autobiography of Black Jazz was Dempsey Travis.

For this kind of look at music development, you might check out Point From Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists' Group of St. Louis by Ben Looker and A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George Lewis. Both deal with local music collectives in the '60s.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Thanks to both of you. I'll take these titles to the library tomorrow and see if they can get any.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

The author of An Autobiography of Black Jazz was Dempsey Travis.

Thanks for reminding me. I had it in my head that, when he led his band in the mid-thirties, he used the name Jack Travis. Nat Jones, who was with James Brown in the early sixties, was in that band, I believe.

MG

[Hot Ptah]

For the Kansas City book, Haddix did a great deal of research on the precise geography of the clubs and how it had an impact on the music. He also did a lot of research on Charlie Parker's childhood, where he lived within the Kansas City area and how it shaped his development.

[Chuck Nessa]

The author of An Autobiography of Black Jazz was Dempsey Travis.

Thanks for reminding me. I had it in my head that, when he led his band in the mid-thirties, he used the name Jack Travis. Nat Jones, who was with James Brown in the early sixties, was in that band, I believe.

MG

Knew him a bit in the late '70s / early '80s. Nice enough fellow but sometimes unbearably full of himself.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

The author of An Autobiography of Black Jazz was Dempsey Travis.

Thanks for reminding me. I had it in my head that, when he led his band in the mid-thirties, he used the name Jack Travis. Nat Jones, who was with James Brown in the early sixties, was in that band, I believe.

MG

Knew him a bit in the late '70s / early '80s. Nice enough fellow but sometimes unbearably full of himself.

Estate agent - say no more.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

The author of An Autobiography of Black Jazz was Dempsey Travis.

Thanks for reminding me. I had it in my head that, when he led his band in the mid-thirties, he used the name Jack Travis. Nat Jones, who was with James Brown in the early sixties, was in that band, I believe.

MG

Knew him a bit in the late '70s / early '80s. Nice enough fellow but sometimes unbearably full of himself.

Estate agent - say no more.

MG