The Cult of Jazz: Gone, Not Forgotten

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by Ralph De Toledano

No one seems to know that the third millennium really begins in 2001, so the nostalgia, or the thank-God-the-20th-century-is-over moaning shouldn't have begun this Jan. 1. But putting aside the general bellyaching, those of us who are getting cheated on our Social Security, still pounding typewriters (uh, computers) and doddering to the National Press Club where the young fry don't give us no respect, that past and beat-up century did give us some goodies -- at least after 1939 when the swing era began. Oh, the real and righteous jazz had been there all along, ever since 1902, when the great Jelly Roll Morton claimed later that he had invented it, but no one had told us that if you listened carefully to Paul Whiteman's "hot section," Bix Beiderbecke and associates would give you the message.

As a matter of fact, few of us, the youth of the mid-thirties, were listening to Whiteman or really remembered that his 1920s Aeolian Hall concert had produced George Gershwin at the piano and the "Rhapsody in Blue." Benny Goodman is given credit for the outbreak of jazz where we had known only Guy Lombardo, but he really was the creature of a wave -- and you could go to the Apollo, on New York's 125th Street, and hear all the black bands that had been popularizing what Goodman capitalized on. But it was not only there, for all over the country small bands were playing that New Orleans music, transmuted to Chicago Style and Dixieland, transmuted to Harlem mainstream.

All over the country -- New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, but mainly New York -- the small bands with their great soloists sprang up. I was editing everything on the Columbia campus and struggling to stay one step ahead of the dean, but every night that we could afford it we were down at Nick's or Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, where Eddie Condon, more impresario than guitar man, had brought together the great Chicagoans. Or we were suffering what probably was the worst booze in the city at a little tavern named George's, where Clarence Profit played some sterling piano. And afternoons we would congregate at the Commodore Music Shop, and sometimes Oona O'Neill, lovely and 16, old Charlie Chaplin's bride-to-be, would cross over from 21 to chat with us and to the jazzmen who came in for a free listen to the new hot records. We used to wonder what she saw in that old lefty, but they say he had it to the very end.

It's forgotten now, but the jazz aficionados of my generation probably spent more afternoons listening to the big bands at the Apollo or downtown at the Paramount or rummaging for old Bessie Smiths or other forgotten old records, a cent apiece at Salvation Army depots and secondhand Harlem shops. And some of us made a cult out of jazz -- Tom Merton, who later would become a Trappist monk and was my art editor on the Columbia Jester; Gene Williams, with whom Ralph Gleason (in rime the jazz critic on the San Francisco Chronicle) and I started Jazz Information, the first serious publication in America devoted to le jazz hot; Robert Paul Smith, who after graduation became advance man for Goodman's band and in time wrote that best-seller, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.

But the music we loved was not to continue thus. In one of those listening sessions at the Commodore, Dizzy Gillespie discovered Stravinsky. I was there when he emerged from the booth exclaiming, "Man, listen to that crazy music!" -- and bebop was born. The war came along and the draft scattered us around the globe. And when we were liberated from our uniforms, bebop was king and, in time, rock 'n' roll took over. What had been the jitterbugs went for rock, hard and soft, and the Beatles and all the rest. Those of us who had gone into military service had listened to the fine V-Discs that the Army produced, but the jazz aficionados among us were, like Queen Victoria, not amused. And when rap came in -- telling us to kill the fuzz, beat our women and beebledy-babbledy excrete on our culture, we impolitely withdrew.

Well, there has been some return of "mainstream jazz" -- and here and there, as in Chicago, you can hear some of the very good ones like Max Hook beating it out on the old Eighty-Eight. But then you've got Wynton Marsalis, the jazz commissar at the Lincoln Center, dripping of Juilliard and preaching that jazz belongs only to blacks so you ofays get lost! Come Y2K, the real and the righteous jazz will have a very hard time, and it certainly won't be what it once was. But thank God, we can lock the doors and play our LPs and CDs, white and black, where Wynton won't hear us.