Читать книгу Roots - Craig Horne - Страница 7

Chapter 2

The Roots of Jazz

American black music is self-evidently deeply political in the important sense of having clear and perceived connections with the oppressed position of black people in American society … to some extent the blues negotiate the tensions between opposition to the status quo, accommodation to it, and transcendence of it through the joy of sensual release …1

Blues and roots are words that have an elemental quality, words you can build something with, words that, for many, have a personal resonance that make nerves quiver like piano wires.

The Encyclopedia Britannica2 says blues originated in America’s South in the early twentieth century and developed from nineteenth century field hollers and funeral processions. From there it evolved into music played by itinerate singers, guitarists and piano players. It contains elements of jazz, ragtime and church music and, according to the BBC News Magazine,3 was initially made broadly popular by W.C. Handy in 1912 when he published his song ‘Memphis Blues’. Its roots go way back to Africa, the drums, the rhythm, the ju ju.

Essentially, though, blues is a lyrical vocal form and at its core is emotion: think Bessie Smith, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy, Etta. Sure there’s slide guitars, bottles and paper bags full of twelve bar forms, but at its heart, at its elemental base, is a blues feeling, a dark weapon that can cut your heart in two.

Roots music incorporates elements of the blues; it also incorporates folk music, country, rhythm and rock. But on a deeper level there’s the howl and whisper of working men and women heard in its ballads. Originally it was music made by white rural workers in the Deep South of America, but then it grew to incorporate the hopes and sorrows and convictions of everyday people’s lives. It’s sung and played on porches, in churches, in the fields, in bars and concert halls. It incorporates Cajun, zydeco, gospel. It’s a form that can tell us about the history of a whole people in the face of changing social conditions. It’s a music drawn from the lived experience of ordinary people, it’s a music that gives dignity to identity and celebrates being alive.

All these forms of music are organic. After World War Two, rural black workers moved north to Chicago, Detroit and the West Coast in search of a better life, and the blues adapted to the social and economic conditions it found in each location. Suddenly urban themes bled into lyrics, electricity and amplification were added, the blues got loud, they were infused with groove, they became sophisticated. The West Coast blues were championed by T-Bone Walker; John Lee Hooker came from Motor City, but it was Chicago that produced the electric Muddy and Wolf and Elmore James, Little Walter, Koko Taylor. And so in America in the ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s, blues became the language of the urban black industrial working class.

Roots music drifted to the city. Woody Guthrie, the Reverend Gary Davis, Peggy Seeger, Josh White, Joan Baez — they ended up at The Gaslight and Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, New York City. As did this little frostbitten Jewish fella from Hibbing, Wyoming, a boy in search of destiny in the heart of Modern Gomorrah. John Hammond, the AR mastermind of Columbia Records, the man who discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman and Count Basie said that when he first heard Bob Dylan he felt he incorporated the tradition of blues and jazz and folk.4 So, if you want to know how roots music has adapted and changed over time, listen to Bob.

So to summarise, the blues isn’t just one thing. Son House said that: ‘The blues ain’t nothin’ but a low down achin’ chill.’5 Sure, that’s one thing it is. But the blues can be a good time too, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy gave us a good time at the Melbourne Town Hall back in ’72 but they also gave us that low down achin’ chill. Roots can do that too; that’s the thing about folk culture, it comes in many forms, from historic Irish ballads, to bluegrass, jazz to reggae, R&B, Cajun … Dylan. At their essence blues and roots music gives voice to the disenfranchised and repressed; it’s the sound of the lived experience of people, and in Australia — and Melbourne in particular — we lapped up both genres.

Melbourne has always been a kind of magnet that has attracted all things American to our shores, be it Fords, fashion, language, movies, and of course music, be it jazz, country, folk and blues. Yeah, Melbourne loves American music, but we’re not American. Our blues and our roots didn’t come from ‘walking behind a mule back in slavery time …’ like it did for American blues singer Booker White6 our blues was coloured by the songs first heard on convict ships.

What we did was take the form and feeling of blues and roots music and adapt them to our cultural, social and political circumstances, and in the process we created something uniquely our own.

Jazz Roots — Dixie Blows into Melbourne

Jazz too was a musical form that came straight out of the United States. Like country music, jazz was made popular in Australia via the introduction of a radio in the early twentieth century. What we heard on our radiograms we adapted to our lived experience here in Australia, especially in Melbourne, and there is no better illustration of this process than the career of Graeme Bell, a career we will examine in detail in the following chapter — but first, some historical context.

Nineteenth-century Marvellous Melbourne was booming like a thunderstorm; we were the Chicago of the south, that’s what they said, a city that grew from nothing like Lodz or Odessa. It was gold that made Melbourne boom and bloom, gold that made it rich. Buildings rose from the grey clay, marvellous buildings like Parliament House, the State Library, the Exhibition Buildings, Treasury, the Courts, the Town Hall and Post Office. Melbourne was brash, boastful, and modern. Train lines snaked over empty fields, and newfangled cable trams ran down wide Victorian boulevards lined with Italianate terraces dripping with ornate, wrought-iron balconies. At that time many Melburnians were on the make; some were speculators, others gamblers, squatters, sportsmen. They searched for glory like that dumb copper Burke and the lost navigator Wills. Art, theatre, and culture were secondary to avarice in Melbourne in the nineteenth century, though of course there were those with pretensions.

As Andrea Baker points out, music entrepreneur George Coppin had arrived in Melbourne from Liverpool and gained control of the Theatre Royal. He staged operas, some of which, it is said, rivalled concerts staged at London’s Covent Garden. ‘Gold rush optimism sparked the golden age of Melbourne’s classical music and opera scene. Between 1850 and 1890, thirteen music venues were built along the Hoddle grid in the CBD.’7 Her Majesty’s and the Princess Theatre are just two examples of theatres built during the Victorian era in the Renaissance Revival style.8 But it was the Melbourne Town Hall and the Athenaeum on Collins Street that would mainly host performances by Melbourne’s first musical superstar, Dame Nellie Melba. Melba was Australia’s first diva and she ruled the world stage, appearing everywhere from St Petersburg to Vienna, London to New Zealand and even America. Her career spanned from 1880 until her death in Sydney in 1931.

Melbourne may have been marvellous and its streets lined with gold, but in some ways they were also filled with empty pleasantries. The boom couldn’t last. Land prices were out of control; rapacious land speculators had moved in, bought up vast tracts of dirt and sold them on at wildly inflated prices. London banks lent freely to buyers who were then hocked up to the eyeballs. It was a land boom and inevitably the bubble exploded, which led to debt, a financial crisis and a deep economic depression. Property values in central Melbourne plummeted and did not return to their 1880s levels until the late ’50s.

But Melbourne in the 1890s wasn’t just a time of economic crisis, there was a cultural shift going on, courtesy of a couple of touring outfits from faraway America. The companies brought with them African-American syncopated dancers, spiritual choirs and ragtime piano players. Suddenly amidst the economic gloom some excitement was injected into Melbourne’s nightlife and its vaudevillian theatres filled with people eager to experience the exotica of those African-American entertainers. Ragtime music was a new kind of entertainment for Melbourne and seemed to complement the seedy side of life found in the barbershops, gin joints and opium dens hidden in laneways off Little Lonsdale Street.

The origins of this new music were mysterious. That it was of African-American origin was not in doubt: it came from the blues, from hunting songs and the chain-gangs. Some argue that way back in the first half of the nineteenth century this wild syncopated music was born when black slaves — some from Africa, some from the Caribbean, some from the interior of the American South — gathered on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square to play music and cross-pollinate their traditions. The music evolved overtime from its hard-luck, down-home origins, to become what we now know as jazz.

Christian Blauvett9 argued that New Orleans Creoles were the principal founders of an emerging jazz genre. Creoles were the mixed-race descendants of black and white ancestors and typically identified more with European culture, rather than African culture. After the Jim Crow laws of 1890 classified the city’s mixed-race Creoles as ‘black’, they were only allowed to play with other black musicians. This brought a greater musical fluency and technical skill to black music, as many Creoles were trained in classical music. This new Creole musical mix, soon to be known as jazz, incorporated the African tradition of rhythm and improvisation with a schooled European approach that emphasised harmony and different forms of instrumentation (saxophones, trumpets and pianos).10

Jazz was initially played in the sporting houses of Storyville by pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton who, its rumored, peeked in at those rockin’ and rollin’ couples doin’ what they do and played in time to the rise and fall of those shakin’ money-makers. In fact, the word ‘jazz’ may have come from the slang ‘jass’ which had an association with New Orleans bordellos, jasmine perfume being the favored scent of the city’s prostitutes. Others argue that jass referred to a woman’s rolling derriere,11 which, since time immemorial, has got a lot of mojo workin’.

A few cool Melburnians in the ’20s sure got their mojo working when jazz — labelled dangerous in ’10s New York Times because of its brothel origins — came to town.

‘As the ’20s got underway, the new styles of jazz swept away the elegant dancing of the Edwardian ballroom; jazz was not only a new style, it was a new sound. Instruments that had been excluded from serious music, banjos, saxophones and drum kits reinforced the rhythmic drive of the music.’12

In respectable, suburban, ’20s Melbourne, gardenesque housing estates spread along newly-electrified tram routes. Streets were filled with conservative, male-dominated households that looked to Empire for guidance, excluded liquor, and frowned on the modern, Americanised spectacles of the cinema, the dance hall, and commercial music. These vulgar entertainments had polluted middle class Melbourne via the recent availability of the gramophone, radio, and of course the movie theatre. It was through these mediums that jazz, and its symbol of lasciviousness and moral collapse, the flapper, appeared in the dance halls and supper clubs of Melbourne.

‘The flapper was a girl who ‘jazzed’ her appearance, she bobbed her hair, painted butterflies on her knees, put on her Charleston dress, her ‘art silk’ stockings and her swinging beads and danced the night away.’13 The flapper even swung those long beads in time to arguably Melbourne and possibly Australia’s first all-girl jazz dance band, The Thelma Ready Orchestra.

The line-up for Thelma’s orchestra was: Thelma on banjo, Kath McCall, piano, Lena Sturrock, violin, Alice Organ, saxophone, clarinet and cornet and Lillian Stender, vocals and drums. And they played everywhere. They held down long residencies at the Mayfair Café in St Kilda, the smart and very modern Venetian Room at the Hotel Australia, not to mention the Menzies and Oriental Hotels. They also played two or three nights a week at society weddings and feature events at Melbourne’s premier reception venue; Nine Darling Street, South Yarra. If that wasn’t enough, the orchestra had a regular gig at radio 3DB as well as two mornings a week at the King’s Theatre on behalf of the Herald newspaper.

Jazz, or a form of it, seemed to have infected every female musician in Melbourne. Suddenly all-female dance bands, like those led by Eve Rees, Marion and Dora Lightfoot, Val Summerhayes, Agnes Smyth, Alic Dolphi, Grace Funston and the aforementioned Thelma Ready, were playing regularly at dance halls, balls, receptions and on the vaudeville stage.

Thelma Ready understood that her all-ladies band was something of a novelty: ‘a drawcard with the gentlemen’, as she put it. Their drummer Lillian Stender was a particular attraction, with her ‘natural voice and lovely personality’.

‘She had IT. All the men fell for her. I had a job to control her. A few fights went on. Although Lillian had learned the drums, she was never a good drummer. Lily got by on her personality, her looks and her voice…’14

By the ’30s Melbourne was jumping, and all-female jazz/dance bands were a huge attraction. Eve Rees and her Merrymakers, with its piano, saxophone, trumpet and drums line-up, played every night of the week. Eve told Kay Dreyfus, ‘What a tremendous amount of work we got! … Mayoral balls, CWA dances, cafés lodges, clubs, weddings, parties…receptions of all kinds …’15

Jazz was changing Melbourne. Some opinion leaders at the time said it was destroying the minds and morals of the young, that it was a dangerous and demoralising fad at counterpoint to the morally-correct, white Anglo Saxon, suburban sensibility of middle-class Melbourne. But jazz had resonated with the young ramblers and gamblers of the inner-city; it had infected the city like the Spanish flu. St Kilda and Fitzroy, for example, were wide open to all things American: jazz, flappers, Hollywood movies, cool-cat language and gangsters like Squizzy Taylor. Emulating his hero, Chicago’s Al Capone, Taylor filled the streets of Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond with bullet-holed bodies, debris and sadness.

If you believed the newspapers, inner Melbourne was awash with jazz, crime and sex. The Truth newspaper was full of articles about sly grog sloshing out the back of lolly shops, cafés, hairdressers and grocers, mostly in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Port Melbourne, and mainly sold by destitute women trying to turn a quid. When the law cracked down on the trade, many sly groggers turned their attention to the sale of the then legal-cocaine. You could buy a packet of snow on Little Lonsdale Street for two bob, making coke the drug of choice for many denisens of the inner city. Others had more creative uses for the wonder drug: a trainer and stablehand were arrested by police when their horse, Valdoid, won the 1923 Moonee Valley Yaroke Handicap by half the straight and at long odds; turns out the horse was doped up to its bridle with coke!

Inner Melbourne sure was roaring in the ’20s, but then things went a little too bit too far for our god-fearing, racially pure authorities. In 1928, when African-American Sonny Clay and his band came to town, all hell broke loose. As Jeff Sparrow explained in A Short History of Communist Jazz:

‘When Sonny Clay toured with his band The Colored Idea, the Commonwealth Investigative Branch — the forerunners to ASIO — devoted themselves to monitoring the musicians, determined to prevent them “consorting with white women”.16 Eventually, the uniformed police raided an after-concert party. The Truth explained what they found: “Empty glasses, half-dressed girls, and an atmosphere poisonous with cigarette smoke and fumes from liquor — and, lounging about the flat, six negroes”.’17

In their inimitable journalistic style, the Truth newspaper’s headline screamed:

‘Blackout for Sonny Clay’s Noisome Niggers … Australia wants not another coon …’

Following a sustained media campaign from Truth, which respectable papers like The Age joined; a parliamentarian raised the matter in the House of Representatives in Canberra.

‘After reading out headlines like “Nude girls in Melbourne flat orgy” and “Raid discloses wild scene of abandon; flappers, wine, cocaine and revels”, he asked, “Does the Minister not think that in the interests of a White Australia and moral decency, permits to such persons should be refused?”’

The Minister agreed — and six band members were deported. It would not be until 1954 that another band led by an African-American musician would be permitted to tour our sunburnt shores, a huge cultural and musical lost opportunity, for the whole country, but especially for Melbourne.18

Melbourne’s reception towards African-American jazz musicians contrasted to that offered by European cities such as Paris, where jazz was introduced to the French by segregated black soldiers stationed in France during World War One. African-American soldiers — led by Lt James Reese, a well-respected New York bandleader — marched their music through two thousand miles of tiny farm villages and concert halls across France. Everywhere Reese led his 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment band, they created an exciting musical revolution. The French went crazy for jazz and the African-American musicians who played it.

After the war, many African-American musicians, dancers and entertainers returned to France. Many settled in, and delighted cabarets and club audiences of Paris’ Lower Montmartre, which became known as Black Montmartre. Club owners and club-goers from all over the world couldn’t get enough of the syncopated rhythms. In the early ’30s Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins — and later Ella Fitzgerald — were treated like royalty by Parisians and so these musicians toured often, up to and after World War II.

Not in sunny white Australia however where politicians and the conservative press had dismissed jazz music and musicians as decadent, degenerate and a direct threat to our racial purity. Such disapproval from community elders, however, spurred many young people to explore the hidden pleasures of this new and exciting music.

Initially jazz was hidden in the popular songs of America’s Tin Pan Alley inspiring Melbourne’s more curious and adventurous musicians to delve further. This study led to jazz appreciation societies emerging across town, and saw both amateur and professional musicians emulate what they heard on records from Chicago and New York. Suddenly jazz bands were the cat’s pyjamas and jazz musicians were cool — especially hot stylists like Melbourne’s own multi-instrumentalist Benny Featherstone and the trombonist-bandleader Frank Coughlan. These bands played a mixture of jazz and popular swing for eager dancers to do the Lindy Hop and Charleston. They played to packed crowds at venues like the Palais in St Kilda or the exotic Green Mill with its state-of-the-art rubber sprung floor, atmospheric lighting, and convenient location across the river from the Flinders Street Railway Station. Frank Coughlan also played informal group sessions at venues like the Fawkner Park Kiosk, as well as gigs at The Melbourne Town Hall.

You can still hear what those ‘cool cats were puttin’ down’ through the wonders of wire recording. In 1925 American band leader Ray Tellier had an eighty-two week run at the Palais with his outfit the San Francisco Orchestra, during which time the band recorded ‘Yes Sir That’s My Baby’. This song, along with Bert Ralton’s Havana Band’s ‘I Want to be Happy’ were the first Victorian jazz age recordings.

Then the roaring twenties gave way to the depressive thirties. Suddenly the capitalist world was being blown apart and chaos was driving its fist into the faces of the poor. The ’30s saw a third of the working population unemployed; the poorer suburbs were hardest hit, as were those aged 20-29 and over forty. Even those who managed to keep their jobs had their wages cut and their taxes increased. Homelessness was rife, children starved, families were torn apart. Those of the working class were reduced to rubble, but the affluent middle class mainly survived. But what’s that I hear? A new sound had crept into the financial ruins of Melbourne, and that new sound was Dixieland jazz — but only those living in a working household, those with food in the icebox, cream-coloured drapes and an HMV radiogram, took any notice.