Backwards Psychology

Published: Fri, 06/10/22

No one really wanted the classical music shift at my college radio station, so if you wanted to get your hours in without working overnight from one to three or three to five pm, that was the first place to go. For my money, it wasn't playing classical music that was a drag. It was how long the pieces were – in a two hour shift, you only got to get on the mike maybe a half dozen times, and it will come as no surprise to my, ah, constituency, I'm sure, that talking to people, about music, no less, was, for me, the main attraction to working in radio.

Fortunately, the jazz slots weren't all that popular either, so that's where I moved next. After my first show, the program director called me in for a little meeting. "Listen," he said, "I've been looking over your playlist. You gotta play some more of the new releases. Actually, any of the new releases. If we don't play new the new records, they won't send us any more new records. That's how it works." I failed, as any self-respecting jazz fan would put it, to dig. "But," I said, thinking back through my choices, "you know, I was going in chronological order!" I'd started out the first hour with some Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli, and then crawled through the next decade or two as best I could.

In retrospect, probably not the hippest way to organize a show for the general listener, but it had made sense at the time. I got in similar hot water when I tried to take piano lessons my sophomore year. Knowing just enough about jazz to get myself in trouble, I went to my advisor after a few lessons and said "look, this guy's trying to teach me bebop chord voicings and I can barely play. Why isn't he teaching me about swing first?" Wow. Definitely the wrong thing to say. "Do you have any idea," intoned my advisor, a more-or-less avant garde/free jazz child of the sixties, "what Fred had to go through just to stand and watch Bud Powell's left hand?"

Clearly, I did not, having almost no idea at that point who Bud Powell was, much less how significant it was to have the opportunity to watch him at work. I spent the rest of the semester sucking at piano, and despite other subsequent attempts to acquire some basic facility, continue to suck at piano to this day, although I do have a much greater appreciation at this point of what it must have taken to hang out around Bud Powell and why any serious aspiring jazz pianist would have undertaken to do regardless of the risks involved.

I was attempting to learn jazz in an academic environment in the 1980s, which means two ironically opposing forces were hard at work. One, just about everyone I studied with had cut their teeth as performers in the 1960s, and so had built their musical values around the post-bop of the second classic Miles Davis quintet, the consuming rigor of quartet-era John Coltrane, and/or the Albert Ayler-esque fallout from the onset of Ornette Coleman. And two, Wynton Marsalis' retro revolution was just getting under way in real life, but hadn't had time to hit the academy yet. So my interest in swing was far too archaic for the Herbie Ron 'n Tony crowd, and likewise if not more so for the Trane & Ayler folks. And even if the Wyntonesque re-evaluation of the entire jazz lineage from the 1920s on had already been in play, the fact that I was more immediately interested in people like Charlie Christian and Herb Ellis than Buck Clayton and Lester Young would have been problematic anyway.

So – and I can feel the irony dripping off me as I write this – I did what any self-respecting misunderstood journeyman would: I went off and learned about what I wanted to learn about anyway, and screw the academy. I transcribed all the solos on Genius of the Electric Guitar, I wrote a big band chart to see if I could do it, I rummaged around used record stores for Duke Ellington LPs. I read about Horace Silver, took some lessons with Emily Remler, listened to the Modern Jazz Quartet and Charles Mingus. And then, after one more stab at formal learning, a semester of grad school in jazz composition, I bagged any further pursuit of jazz as either an academic or performing pursuit, and spent the next couple decades learning, playing, recording and thinking about roots music instead.

And once I no longer had to get good at jazz, I rediscovered how much I liked listening to it. Freed of the pressure to dig Miles, Coltrane and Ornette, I resumed my slow chronological crawl through the 20th century. As a result, I finally (finally!) made it into the 1950s, and the harnessing of bebop's rhythmic and harmonic developments to blues, gospel and Latin grooves that came to be labeled hard bop. None of that would have made much sense, however, without having learned to hear all those swing precedents. And it's been all that hard bop that has ultimately made it possible to come full circle and start hearing why 1960s jazz happened. Just like understanding swing made it possible to hear bebop's reaction to it, so understanding hard bop has made it possible to hear Miles, Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, to understand what they were reacting to and have a context for those various and varied reactions.

All of which I have taken the time to talk about so I could talk about this: Last weekend, Ms. Fretboard and I went to a friend's 50th birthday party. It was a lovely and amazing evening in many ways, and just as things were getting under way, the band began setting up on the back deck. Now, this can be an awesome thing or a dreadful thing at a party, but I should have had more faith in our friends and their great taste in music, because it wound up being a four piece swing band. This could still have been disastrous, because – well, I lived through the 1990s. Need I say more?

But of course – the band was fantastic. And my friend Jonathan, who was throwing the party for his wife, said "hey, so, you should totally sit in!" And I said, "no, come on. These folks are great, they have their thing, which is great, and besides, I'm having a fabulous time listening to them. It's cool." But on the break, we went up together to chat with them, because I wanted to gush about how much I was enjoying it. And the guitar player invited me to sit in. So...ok. That's different. Jonathan went and rummaged up a visiting cousin's guitar and amp, we got everything set up, and the band kicked off a far more uptempo "After You've Gone" than I was expecting, and in a key I haven't played it in before.

Honestly, though I muddled through, it would have been totally within the band's rights at that point to turn to me and say "hey, that was...uh...great, thanks so much, glad you could come up and play one with us." Silent emphasis on the "one." But they just looked over and called the next tune. And that's how it went, for the next forty-odd minutes. Most of the time, if they mentioned a key ahead of time, I didn't manage to catch it, but after that first tune, the tempos settled down, my relaxation went up and it was so fun to be in the midst of such great playing that I was able to remember that it's just music, and music is something you play.

And here's the other thing. Every tune they called, I either knew, more or less, from having heard it again and again over years of listening, or it operated like you'd expect it to, being part and parcel of a specific period and genre. So while I've never actually played "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" on a gig or anywhere else, it does what one of those tunes does, so within a chorus or two I was squared away enough to play it like I had.

Nonetheless, I woke up the next day thinking, "I bet I could have played those tunes better." So my first step was to poke around for an uptempo version of "After You're Gone," which led me to trumpter Roy Eldridge's version. Now, here's a guy I've heard about forever, and even have at least one dusty Pablo LP of somewhere, but have never really listened to. And I'm aware of him as the swing predecessor to Dizzy Gillespie. But holy crow. The whole time I was listening to swing the first time around, I thought of it as a less frenetic, less baroque kind of improvising than bebop, with simpler chord progressions and more relaxed tempos. Um...now I see why Eldridge is the stepping-off point for Dizzy.

And likewise, I see how the very things I learned in my efforts to navigate the blues changes like a jazz musician –- the things I combed through hard boppers like Stanley Turrentine, Tommy Flanagan, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley and the like for, are the very things needed to play swing at those hotter tempos. I mean, for cryin' out loud – bebop was, of course, built on the bones of the swing repertoire, as an extension and elaboration of swing improvisation. So it's not ridiculous there would be so close a kinship between bebop and swing soloing, even when you're working backwards.

So now, I have this opportunity to go back and hear all there is to hear about Roy Eldridge, which will no doubt lead to all sorts of other roots and branches, and with any luck will ultimately help untangle how previously elusive mainstays like Lester Young and Louis Armstrong fit into the picture. Or maybe it'll just be all Roy Eldridge, all the time. Who knows? In the meantime, I've posted a playlist of some of my swing essentials, records that got me started and records I'm checking out now. You can find it on the Playlists page of my web site, or just use the direct link below:

Swing!
 
More soon,

David

P.S. Should you be part of the small minority of readers living within spitting distance of Austin, Texas, I have a CD release show coming up on Saturday, June 18th at the New World Deli in Hyde Park. No plans as of yet to record or stream it, but I'll certainly post info on that as well if anything changes.
 
For organized, ongoing weekly lessons that help you learn tunes, turn them into complete songs, and start improvising, register for the Fingerstyle Five membership at www.fretboardconfidential.com