Revivalists - the Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

go BEYOND Jimmy or Lonnie Smith circa 1967.

....you can take it to a different place maybe...but you can never go beyond.

Sure. But taking it to a different place is the thing, isn't it? It's a different world from 1967. Stuff - all kinds - needs to be taken to different places (or at least can be and sometimes is). Now, is that revivalism? It seems to be what Larry's talking about.

The "old way", when the world changed, brought about a new music. Now we don't seem to have much new music, just some people with new ways of looking at old music, which is interesting. And I'm not sure that it matters which way a musician does it, if the end result is music that relates to now.

But I'm not sure DBOT or Kankawa, no matter how much I like what they do, are playing music that relates to now, in the way the musics of Concha Buika, Louie Vega or Castro Destroyer and other HipLife artists I've heard recently do.

And I think that means that I still think those guys are revivalists.

MG

[Larry Kart]

Larry Kart, So that I can understand the distinctions you are making, would Don Byron's "Bug Music" album qualify as revivalist as you are using the term?

Not really. Byron was trying IIRC (heard the record back then but don't own it) to do an eccentric, more or less post-modern take on a chunk of the musical past that was already felt to be rather eccentric at the time of its initial flowering. Indeed, Raymond Scott's music was heavily fueled by that sense of eccentricity, both in terms of Scott's creative impulses and how that music was received by the public back then. As for Byron himself, already drawn to the clever-weird wedge of the cultural spectrum (he'd already done Mickey Katz, right?), the move to Scott was pretty logical. In particular, if we take Byron at face value, he wasn't involved here in moving back and away from the present to a supposedly Edenic past but was instead kind putting his name (and, he had reason to hope, a price tag) on a collage made up of weird photos from 1938.

[Soul Stream]

Somtimes somethings seem so old, they're new. Is it revivalism...revisitism...progression through regression....? Amy Winehouse uses a 60's style soul band (the Dap Kings) to back her up on one or two cuts on an album and they become huge hits. That stuff's so old that young people think it sounds new.

I say this as a lifelong complete revivalist. I live in a world of my own making that stopped in 1971 basically. Not only do I see nothing wrong with it, I've bet my life upon it.

Edited February 26, 2008 by Soul Stream

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Somtimes somethings seem so old, they're new. Is it revivalism...revisitism...progression through regression....? Amy Winehouse uses a 60's style soul band (the Dap Kings) to back her up on one or two cuts on an album and they become huge hits. That stuff's so old that young people think it sounds new.

I say this as a lifelong complete revivalist. I live in a world of my own making that stopped in 1971 basically. Not only do I see nothing wrong with it, I've bet my life upon it.

A lot of that stuff has been that old for a long time I think it was the mid-eighties when Booker T & the MGs "Green onions" became a big hit over here (for the first time), because some firm had used it as a TV advert. All my daughter's friends were shocked, (my dear, SHOCKED!) when she told them that her dad had a copy from twenty-odd years before.

MG

[seeline]

Larry Kart, So that I can understand the distinctions you are making, would Don Byron's "Bug Music" album qualify as revivalist as you are using the term?

Not really. Byron was trying IIRC (heard the record back then but don't own it) to do an eccentric, more or less post-modern take on a chunk of the musical past that was already felt to be rather eccentric at the time of its initial flowering. Indeed, Raymond Scott's music was heavily fueled by that sense of eccentricity, both in terms of Scott's creative impulses and how that music was received by the public back then. As for Byron himself, already drawn to the clever-weird wedge of the cultural spectrum (he'd already done Mickey Katz, right?), the move to Scott was pretty logical. In particular, if we take Byron at face value, he wasn't involved here in moving back and away from the present to a supposedly Edenic past but was instead kind putting his name (and, he had reason to hope, a price tag) on a collage made up of weird photos from 1938.

\

Bug Music has more Ellington tracks (I believe) than Scott - along with material from John Kirby's book. I *really* like the Ellington and Kirby material on that album.

Somtimes somethings seem so old, they're new. Is it revivalism...revisitism...progression through regression....? Amy Winehouse uses a 60's style soul band (the Dap Kings) to back her up on one or two cuts on an album and they become huge hits. That stuff's so old that young people think it sounds new.

I say this as a lifelong complete revivalist. I live in a world of my own making that stopped in 1971 basically. Not only do I see nothing wrong with it, I've bet my life upon it.

A lot of that stuff has been that old for a long time I think it was the mid-eighties when Booker T & the MGs "Green onions" became a big hit over here (for the first time), because some firm had used it as a TV advert. All my daughter's friends were shocked, (my dear, SHOCKED!) when she told them that her dad had a copy from twenty-odd years before.

MG

An acquaintance of mine describes this phenomenon as (more or less) discovering that your grandparents were pretty hip after all...

Edited February 26, 2008 by seeline

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

A lot of that stuff has been that old for a long time I think it was the mid-eighties when Booker T & the MGs "Green onions" became a big hit over here (for the first time), because some firm had used it as a TV advert. All my daughter's friends were shocked, (my dear, SHOCKED!) when she told them that her dad had a copy from twenty-odd years before.

MG

An acquaintance of mine describes this phenomenon as (more or less) discovering that your grandparents were pretty hip after all...

No, it wasn't about me - it was that those kids had no idea that this was a classic record from a mere two decades before.

MG

[seeline]

I understand that, but the point of my friend's remark is that there really is a phenomenon of this kind - in pop music at large, as well as in "niche" genres. Said friend has encountered it a lot in "Latin" music, and I do think it's applicable to people like Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché as well. It took *me* a long time to start being able to appreciate a lot of jazz from the 30s and 40s (and I'm in their age bracket), so - I found out that a lot of the music my parents grew up on was pretty good after all.

if you start checking around in the music blog world, you'll see a *lot* of very young people who are hooked on all kinds of things (from R&B to psychedelic rock) that either their parents or grandparents (or both) were fond of. You could, I think, see a lot of the current "psych folk" trend as coming from that same impulse/source.

I can't remember who wrote the song "Everything Old is New Again," but the title makes sense in this context.

Edited February 26, 2008 by seeline

[Soul Stream]

The idea of being "current", just seems like a pretty hollow argument to me. Sure, revivalist movements become real old, real quick. Mostly due to everyone hopping on the bandwagon of what initially was probably brought about by real enthusiasts. The millionth time you see something like a Big Daddy Booty and the Oak Street Rub Board Spankers...and that sort of thing at your local arts festival and you can get the idea. Good music never gets dated and is always sought out enthusiastically every generation or two by die-hards that make it fresh again.

[johnlitweiler]

I'll try to add a bit more. Off the top of my head, genuine jazz revivalism in my view must involve a literal or figurative distance from contemporary phenomena and/or a desire to distance oneself from contemporary phenomena. For example, the very first jazz revivalists, the Lu Watters Yerba Buena crowd in San Francisco, was driven in part by a professed loathing for the supposedly corrupting commericialism of the slick Swing bands (yes, they meant Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, et al., and they felt this music corrupted both musicians and the public) as well as by their belief that jazz had a relatively neglected/forgotten, artistically pure Edenic past, which they could return to and revive. Also, I hate to mention this, but for some of these folks there was a good deal of CPUSA parlor Marxism mixed in. e.g. pioneering primal black geniuses being ripped-off by the machinery of mass-market capitalism. The CPUSA's whole "folk music" binge coincides with this. Of course, Watters et al. also genuinely dug King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, etc., but for my tastes, they seldom were up to the challenge musically (though people whose opinions I respect disagree). Also, and this brings up another key point, though the SF revivalists didn't see it that way, they were perhaps too close -- in time and physical/social distance -- to their models. Here there was the interesting fact that Condonites, whose music was as close by as could be, had never ceased to play their version of the music they themselves had played in the '20s. Don't have chapter and verse on this, but my guess was that the SF revivalists regarded the Condonites as no less corrupt than the Goodman and Shaw bands, et al. I should add that the one great key virtue of the SF revivalists is that they regarded the pieces of the '20s that they were drawn to as worthwhile in themselves, as vehicles for ensemble performance, not merely as frameworks for solos. They themselves IMO were not able to bring this off as well as was desireable, but this was a genius insight in terms of what would come to pass elsewhere. (Footnote: Given the template I'm building here, I think that Wynton definitely is a revivalist, though of a newish, corrupt sort -- because the goals of his movement were so deeply oriented toward acquiring cultural power, under the guise of moral-aesthetic righteousness.)

"Revivalist" is a far-too-kind word for the mean way Wynton distorts some old pieces like King Oliver's "Snake Rag" into 2-beat novelties, as if to say "look how quaint those old, unsophisticated guys were." His Morton album, which is rearrangements of JRM pieces with bop-era styled solos, is better and doesn't pretend to be a revival.

I'm quite fond of most 1946-48 Lu Watters. It was certainly an ensemble style, the solos were brief, it tried to apply Oliver's 1923 Chicago-band style to a somewhat wider repertoire -- let's say up to Armstrong's 1927 Hot 5 and 7. The brassy sound of that band was unique, sure no other 2-trumpet revival band played w/so much energy. A lot of energy seemed to come directly from Watters himself and from the hyper clarinetist Bob Helm; also, by that time these players (who, according to Martin Williams, began as record collectors) were now simply better musicians than on their collapsible 1941-2 records. There's an ensemble fire, maybe even passion, about pieces like the later "Yerba Buena Strut" and "South" and "Richard M. Jones Blues" that transcends "hot" dixieland/trad playing; at slower tempos Helm could be a good, touching, lyric soloist. Re imitation vs. originality, back then the San Franciscans could seek out some New Orleans musicians and learn from them, which most Australians and latter-day French (and '50s Dutch and British, etc.) couldn't (but didn't the very young Alain Marquet and Jacques Gauthe study under Sidney Bechet?). It's interesting that Lu Watters quit playing about the time U.S. trad jazz became so stylized. The striking features of his 1-CD comeback in 1962(?) are (1) his style is now a slightly later, more ecstatic Armstrong and (2) he tries to push the band by himself. Maybe their fans, for ex. some of the Jazzmen and Record Changer writers, professed loathing for swing, thought it was a perversion of real, true, folk jazz, but Watters etc. started as a swing band (however, w/a weird 2-beat rhythm) and they were more tolerant of post-Armstrong developments. Who knows, maybe they even absorbed some later ideas, like George Lewis copped BG phrases. Watters booked Condon into his nightclub and somewhere on the web is Condon's approving interview (though surely it was his ghostwriter's interview) with Turk Murphy. Larry, was there a direct CPUSA connection to the Watters band?

Re Mr. Morel, on the Le Petit recording he plays the really lovely verse to "Old Fashioned Love" at just the right sub-medium tempo; neither James P. Johnson nor anybody else ever recorded that verse. Bless Morel for reviving Tiny Parham's pieces, too. But I do think the playing of Marquet and the perfect tenor player Michel Bescont is most of what survives from some of Le Petit's more obscure pieces.

20+ years ago I wrote a Chicago Reader review of David Dallwitz's "Ern Malley Jazz Suite" and I wish that amazing album were on CD. Is Swaggie still releasing through GHB in the US? Can we get up a crowd to lobby GHB and Swaggie to reissue "Ern Malley Jazz Suite" on CD? In fact, let's ask for all of Dallwitz's 1970s Swaggies.

Finally, re revivalism, does anyone have thoughts re Evan Christopher? He was impressive when I heard him playing clarinet with Irwin Mayfield's big band in New Orleans last spring, but he was playing swing, not trad that time.

[Larry Kart]

Will reply, John, but maybe not for a while. Today looks very busy.

[Larry Kart]

Larry, was there a direct CPUSA connection to the Watters band?

I was talking much too loosely and kind of backwards when I wrote this: "Also, I hate to mention this, but for some of these folks there was a good deal of CPUSA parlor Marxism mixed in. e.g. pioneering primal black geniuses being ripped-off by the machinery of mass-market capitalism. The CPUSA's whole 'folk music' binge coincides with this."

The last sentence is true, and while such thinking was in large part cooked up by the CPSU (see the book "Great Day in the Morning" by R. Serge Denisoff, among others) -- in part as a solution to the problem of how the primarily foreign-born CPSU of the '20s could be "Americanized" or be presented as such, in part because it as felt that the avant-garde tendencies of many of the better-known CPUSA-associated composers did not speak directly to the "people" -- that thinking then became of the "Popular Front" mainstream on the '30s and had an effect on all sorts of thoughtful or would-be thoughtful people, whether or not they had any direct connection with the CPUSA. As for the second sentence, one of the passages I must have had in the back of my mind was this from poet-painter-novelist-jazz fan (and amatuer jazz pianist in the SF circle) Weldon Kees:

"Popular Culture is completely at the mercy of the laws hastening corruption and decay. No other road is open. Unlike High Art, it cannot fall back on attitudes of recalcitrance for survival.... If the laws of which I have spoken could themselves speak ... their proudest boast would be reserved for the debasement of popular music. Here is total capitulation. The period from the end of the the First World War to about 1936 was one of enormous productivity of first-rate tunes.... A handful of men wrote most of them: Gershwin, Spencer Williams, Fats Waller, Youmans, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart. Most of these men are dead; there have been no successors. (Out of an earlier jazz period that stretched back into the twenties came such impressive and enduring hot classics as [a long list follows]. Almost everything written by Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Scott Joplin, Clarence Williams -- most of them musicians and bandleaders of a very high order --remains fresh and robust. Men of their quality belong to a time as enclosed and without continuance as that of the Ephrata Cloisters, Vorticism, or Lord Timothy Dexter).... The nervous, gay, compulsive music of the twenties gave way to a tastelessness streamlined beyond belief.... Even the best jazz today [Kees is writing in 1948] lacks the fresh originating intelligence at work in the late twenties.... There is an immense concern with mere preservation. The unearthing several years ago of Bunk Johnson ... was a welcome act of antiquarian recovery.

"It has been the practice of some later musicians to work intensively at the inventive, though feeling has often been buried in displaying of virtuosity. Performers such as Tony Parenti, Don Ewell, Paul Lingle, Bob Helm, Wally Rose, Burt Bales, and Turk Murphy, among others, continue to resist corruption; but their ranks are systematically being thinned out by desertions for cushier swing bands, by sudden collapses of talent, and the normal high death rate among jazz musicians....

"While jazz continues to persist on records and occasionally elsewhere, the best of it increasingly feels nostalgic, depending more and more on a cultist rather than a popular base; it is almost drowned out by the racket of the large swing and popular bands. These have nothing to do with jazz, although they often contain remnants of rather gratuitous jazz in solo work....

My emphases. Kees does go on to speak of bop, of which he has some understanding but, as you might expect, little sympathy. I'd add that the views of Kees in this piece almost certainly were firmly in place in his mind in the late '30s, and that he was was far from the only person who held them.

Finally, though, I know of no direct CPUSA link to SF revivalists; in fact, Kees himself IIRC mocked CPUSA group-think, if only because he was a classic "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member" type.

[EKE BBB]

Grant Stewart

Sure!

Other current players who can play some good stride:

Bernd Lhotzky

Louis Mazetier

Chris Hopkins

Rossano Sportiello

Tom Roberts

Neville Dickie

Paul Asaro

John Sheridan

Oliver Lancelot

Jeff Barnhart

and, of course, old master Dick Hyman!!!