Note: This is far too long for a conventional post. I am happy to edit it down to an appropriate size, or readers can just skim or scan the document or stop reading now if they have little interest.-Ron Price, Australia
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JAZZ: A commemorative compendium of prose and poetry in memory of Dizzy Gillespie
Preamble:
I put together the following compendium of prose and poetry in memory of Dizzy Gillespie who died 22 years ago this month. John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie(1917-1993) was an American jazz composer, trumpeter, bandleader, and occasional singer. Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge. But he added layers of harmonic complexity previously unheard in jazz.
I met Gillespie in his hotel-room in Perth Western Australia circa 1990 several years before he died, and gave him a prose-poem I had written. I was just at the beginning of my own creative and literary life, a literary life in which improvisation has been a central factor in my work. The following package of poems was also inspired by watching the 9th episode of Ken Burns' documentary, Jazz. In particular it was the emphasis placed in that episode on improvisation in the history of jazz from the mid-to-late 1950s to the early 1960s when I, myself, had become seriously interested in the Baha'i Faith.
Phrasing is a very important part of jazz players' set of improvisational skills. Instead of just playing a collection of notes that would work based on the chords, and harmony, among other features of musical expression, the player builds an idea, often creating solos that superbly demonstrate musical phrasing, and lead the listener to a logical and memorable conclusion. Great examples of this are found in classical music. In Beethoven's fifth symphony the first idea is played and then again with a slight variation.
Dizzy Gillespie, a Bahá'í since about 1970, was one of the most famous adherents of the Bahá'í Faith. This Faith helped him make sense of his position, his fame, and his life-narrative in a succession of trumpeters; it also helped him turn his life from a knife-carrying roughneck to a global citizen, and from alcohol to "soul force". These are the words of author Nat Hentoff who knew Gillespie for forty years.
Gillespie's conversion was most affected by Bill Sear's book Thief in the Night. Gillespie spoke about the Bahá'í Faith frequently on his trips abroad. He is honored with weekly jazz sessions at the New York Bahá'í Center in the memorial auditorium. This Faith also helped me make sense of my life, my life's narrative, and the tests and difficulties in my path. It has also been at the basis of a certain solemn consciousness in my thought and manner, a consciousness which is itself the wellspring of the most exquisite celebratory joy.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1A letter from the Universal House of Justice to all National Assemblies, 3 April 1991.
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Part 1:
Jazz was a 2000 documentary miniseries, directed by Ken Burns. "If one considers the 10 DVD-set a story of jazz until the 1960s, Ken Burns has delivered a valuable introduction. With 75 interviews, over 500 pieces of music, 2400 film stills and over 2000 archive film clips, the 19-hour epic is not that bad," wrote one reviewer. It was released in 2001 with chronological and thematic episodes providing a history of jazz. That history emphasized innovative composers and musicians, and American history. Swing musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn"; several episodes discussed the later contributions of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to bebop, and of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane to free and cool jazz. Nine episodes surveyed forty-five years (1917–1961), leaving the final episode to cover forty years (1961–2001). The documentary examines the impacts of racial segregation and drugs on jazz.
During the dozen years, 2004 to 2015, I watched all ten episodes. Last night I watched the ninth episode1 covering the years 1955 to 1961. I knew nothing of jazz in 1956 when I was only 11 and at the start of my 8 years adolescent baseball and hockey careers. Those eight years, though, were eventful ones in my young life. They were years when the core of my value-system took its first shaping, when I joined the Baha'i Faith, and settled-in to the start of my long and complex academic life.
Part 2:
This episode began with John Coltrane's composition Giant Steps. West Coast Cool and young musicians who wanted to go beyond Bebop are presented and, in 1955, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman started the period of soul music. Then came Elvis Presley and jazz was never again at the center of popular music. Sonny Rollins, Duke again, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, a clean musician who tragically died in a car accident, Sarah Vaughan, Satchmo once more, Art Blakey and Horace Silver with their Hard Bop Jazz Messengers are presented.
The highlight of this segment comes from the CBS live program "The Sound of Jazz" with Billie Holiday performing Fine and Mellow, accompanied by Lester Young and Ben Webster. Cannonball Adderly and Bill Evans are other stars presented. Last but not least comes Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, the best selling jazz album of all time. The treatment of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and his free jazz adventure is very basic.-Ron Price with thanks to 1"The Adventure", NITV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 24/1/'15.
You give your life for
what you are doing in
that new jazz world of
improvisation with the
Ornette Coleman Quartet
and opening 40 years of a
kind of jazz that would be
the background for my life,
my working life '59 to '99,
little did I know in those
four decades of my life
from the age of 15 to 55,
& an early retirement, a
sea-change, during which
I could watch that history
of jazz with its biographical
focus,1 and continue with my
many literary improvisations.
1 Ken Burns is a talented biographer, and his films are most effective when he is able to present an overarching narrative in terms of the biographical detail of that narrative's participants.-Charles Paul Freund, "Epic Jazz", Reason magazine online, January 8, 2001
Ron Price
25/1/'15.
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WRITING IS JAZZ
Writing is jazz....words roll and spin and jive.....a collection of letters and spaces, commas and periods, semi-colons and colons. -From Writing is Jazz, An Internet Blog: John M. Flores, 11 April 2007.
Jazz improvizing and poetizing
share much in the game of life.
They are both fun and help their
practitioners get to the purpose
of life. To be in the moment---
drawing on the past, anticipating
the future when time seems right.
Often the process is effortless as
if I am some sort of instrument:
semi-analytical, semi-emotional,
semi-performance, semi-trailer:
carrying the baggage of life down
the road in the darkness of night
with headlights showing the way
into meaning—at least for me if
not for others on the road of night.
Yes, there is joy and tranquillity,
the preparation has been my whole
life: the payment and reward has
nothing to do with money, simply
can not be bought or sold or chosen;
it comes because of who you are and
what you want as you go about finding
your way in this slough of despond.(1)
(1) This prose-poem was written after listening to an interview with Sascha Feinstein on ABC Radio National, 15 October 2008 at 10:05 a.m.
Ron Price
1/11/' 08 to 25/1/'15.
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SWING
...one view of the history of jazz
Part 1:
Ken Burns' doco was broadcast on PBS in 2001 just after I had retired from a 50 year student-and-employment life, 1949 to 1999. The chronological and thematic episodes of the series provided an interpretation of the history of jazz rooted in biography. I have seen the series twice during the years 2004 to 2015 on television in Tasmania Australia. Jazz has always been on the periphery of my musical experience since the earliest days of my life in the 1940s. This series brought jazz closer to the centre of my life, although I would never be a jazz aficianado, connoisseur or expert.
Part 2:
Like all histories of all subjects, there are many ways of writing the story. Ken Burns and his crew gave viewers one of these ways of dealing with a century of jazz. Many enthusiasts were waiting for Burns' take on jazz knowing, as many did, that Burns is one of the best doco producers. The swing era, also frequently referred to as the "big band era", was the period of time from about 1935 to 1946. This was the period of WW2, and when my parents met and married, and I was born.
During this period big band swing music was the most popular music in the United States. Though this was its most popular period, the music had actually been around since the late 1920s and early 1930s, being played by black bands led by such artists as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, Cab Calloway, and Fletcher Henderson. There were also the white bands from the 1920s led by the likes of Russ Morgan and Isham Jones.
The era's beginning is sometimes dated from Benny Goodman's performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on 21 August 1935 bringing the music, as it did, to the rest of the country.2 By the last half of 1935, millions waited for the next war only four years away.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, and 2Scott Yanow and Paul Du Noyer, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, first edition, Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2003, p.128.
Part 3:
I could not help but see
the remarkable tie-in, a
synchronization, betwix
the origins, development
of the Baha'i teaching &
administration programs
with the history of jazz
going right back to 1917!1
This was especially true
of Benny Goodman in a
performance at Palomar
in Los Angeles, the same
time as the Baha'is of the
USA and Canada planned
their first systematic Plan
to implement those Tablets
after a hiatus of twenty years,
in the year 1937 and the Plan
went to '44 with two years of
waiting to begin the next Plan.
Those last 40 years to 2001,
the beginning of a new 21st
century, and the opening of
those Terraces on Mt Carmel
just topped that amazing and
wondrous synchronization
beginning in 1917 with the
revelation of those Tablets.1
1 Abdul-Baha completed His writing of the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1917. Those Tablets were the foundation document for the Baha'i teaching program organized within and by Baha'i Administration. It is a program I have now been associated with for more than 60 years.
Ron Price
30/5/'14 and 25/1/'15.
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A DANCE TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
Clockwork Orange in a Personal Context
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By the mid-to-late 1930s jazz had become the defining music of the generation, the generation that was then coming into its teens. Jazz seemed to unleash forces and energies like rock 'n roll did twenty years later. Like rock 'n roll, too, jazz possessed a definite physicality; it released pent-up emotions; it was pure pleasure; it was a form of escape and it was entertainment. As jazz emerged so, too, did Baha'i Administration. In 1937 Baha'i Administration had developed from a small number of groups to possess and enjoy a national consciousness. This development led to a systematic teaching program entitled the Seven Year Plan.
Between Benny Goodman becoming that generation's icon of popular music by playing at Times Square to a packed house of teenagers in the Paramount Theatre in March of 1937 and his band's contest with Chick Webb's band at the Savoy Ballroom in May of 1937, this Seven Year Plan began. -Ron Price with thanks to "Episode Five: Jazz: Pure Pleasure," ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 27/10/2001.
It exploded, completely unknown,
overnight, or so it seemed to the
generation who began that Plan in
'37. In reality, it had been slowly
developing in theory and form for
nearly a century.....if you go back
to that magic year of 1844 when
the first message went across that
telegraph wire with" What hath God
wrought?"...and He had wrought....
Jazz was becoming popular in
the way we would have liked
to be popular, but our Plan
was a slow-release model,
an experimental disposition,
a dance to a different drummer,
with the light, lyrical, exquisite
touch of an Eddy Wilson, often
sad, slow pace of a Billy Holliday
or a Glen Miller popular romantic-
swing, yes, those were swing times.
Men and women working together,
composing on-the-spot, everyone
in harmony, moving toward elegance
and joy: that was one way of defining
what our aim was too in those early
Baha'i Groups and Assemblies at the
start, beginning in those first-days-of-
form, those days of an Administrative
vision when we started our dreaming,
dream-time, our dreaming, yes, yes.(1)
(1) When Duke Ellington was asked what he was doing when he was playing jazz on the piano, he said "I'm dreaming."
Ron Price
3/12/’10 to 24/1 /'15
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MY SOUND
By 9:30 in the evening it is time for me to move away from writing and reading, after what has usually been a 6 to 8 hour day of intellectual and literary work. I sit in front of the box from 9:30 to no later than 11 p.m., and let the soporific effects of my medications and the television move my brain-waves onto alpha and help induce a sleepy effect.
After making some toast and a hot drink I sat down and watched “A Journey Through American Music: Free Jazz to Future Jazz.”1 I won’t go into the many details of this short musical history, but will refer in this short prose-poem to a Wayne Shorter, a saxophone player who came to the jazz group known as Weather Report in the 1970s. Shorter had a reputation and a dominant role as an instrumentalist due to his solo work and his contributions to Miles Davis’ "second great quintet" during the 1960s. His choice not to follow the same approach with Weather Report led to some criticism of the group.
During his time with Weather Report, Shorter was noted for generally playing saxophone with an economical, "listening" style. Rather than continually taking the lead, he would generally add subtle harmonic, melodic and/or rhythmic complexity by responding to other member's improvisations. Playing both tenor and soprano saxophones, Shorter continued to develop the role of the latter instrument in jazz, taking his cue from previous work by Coltrane, among others.
It is not the biography of Shorter which I could go into in much more detail, though, that has given rise to this prose-poem, nor is it his technical virtuosity. It is, rather, his ability to play his instrument as if the sound of the saxophone was the sound of himself. The capacity to integrate his personality, new sounds he heard as well as new forms, textures and moods into his highly individual sound, into his complete self, to make his everyday self more complete in the process---this was what one could call ‘the sound of himself.’--Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2 TV, 11:45-12:35 a.m., 25/6/’10-26/6/’10.
While you were making your name….
as one of the most important American
jazz musicians of your generation, while
you were becoming a household name…
amongst jazz fans around the world, and
winning honours & recognition, and now
considered jazz's greatest living composer…
....while this was happening......
I got going with my life as a student-teacher
and a member of the Baha’i Faith,1…...Then
with Weather Report, 1971 to 1985,2…...the
first years of my Australian life we were both
beginning to record our own voice, at last, after
some grinding 1960s years. We both had some
grinding to come, eh, Wayne……as we enjoyed
the sound of our voice with you in Soka Gakkai
and me in the Baha’i Faith. Good luck old man!
1In 1959 Shorter joined Art Blakey. He stayed with Blakey for five years, and eventually became musical director for the group. Dizzy Gillespie joined the Baha’i Faith in 1968 when I was living on Baffin Island among the Inuit. Shorter is, himself, a Nichiren Buddhist and a member of Soka Gakkai since the 1970s.
Ron Price
26/6/'10 to 25/1/'15.
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A LONG ROAD
In September 1962 I began my travelling life as a pioneer within the Baha’i community. That same month Playboy magazine printed its first interview.1 The interview was with jazz musician Miles Davis. I was too busy at the time starting out in my year of matriculation studies with nine subjects. I was also adjusting to a new town. It was also the last year of the ninth stage of history drawing on a Baha’i historical paradigm. I knew nothing of Miles Davis and no one I knew had any knowledge of that ninth stage of history. I kissed the second girl I’d ever kissed in my life that year, but I’m not sure anyone knew about that either. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 3rd, 2006 and 1Playboy.com.
We saved the LSA that month,
those two old people, parents,
so long ago when I was only 18.
Miles was talking about being
able to do only one thing, blow
his trumpet and that’s about all
I could do too, studying those 9
subjects was enough to keep any
normal man busy as a Canadian
beaver, nose to that grindstone.
You had your problems with
people, too, eh Miles? Enough
to drive you to the edge like my
mother back about the same time
they elected that first Universal
House of Justice in April of '63.
You were always curious about
different kinds of music just like
my mother was curious about the
different religions: that was where
it all started Miles. Curiosity killed
the cat: that’s what they say: eh, eh?
You were telling it strait Miles
about the Negroes back then,
about the hard work you did,
feeling empty, pleasing yourself,
the individuality of musicians:
all in Playboy magazine for the
first time. And the Baha’is were
starting to come out, too, with that
congress in Albert Hall in London.
It was a different kind of work that
the Baha’is did. But you--and they--
had to learn to please yourself......or
you’d go under because everyone
was different and you often felt just
as empty. It would be a long road for
the Negroes and the Baha’is: for sure!
Ron Price
3/4/'06 to 25/1/'15.
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THE CLAY OF MAN
It was Saturday morning on the edge of the Baha'i hospitality and gift-giving period known as Ayyam-i-Ha. I woke late, around ten, after going to bed about 2 a.m. I went into the kitchen for a late breakfast just before noon, and heard the faint sounds of a radio interview on The Music Show.1 The interviewee was a jazz saxophonist I had not heard of, Greg Osby. I had then, as I have now, only a smattering of knowledge of jazz: its history and contemporary expression.
Osby was saying things about his work, his playing, that sounded much like my own literary-poetic work. Bringing together influences from many sources and integrating them into some coherent whole was part of Osby’s goal, purpose, aim—and mine. The following poem is a summation of some of the points of commonality between Osby’s work and mine. -Ron Price with thanks to “The Music Show,” ABC Radio National, 10:05-12 noon, 25/2/'06 to 25/1/'15.
Our own value system
has to be seen, discussed
and understood if people
are to be nourished within
the parameters of our work.
We both hermit ourselves
from the public microscope,
work on our craft with minute
introspection and exploration
and then return, propelled,
renewed to the public place
from unknown, uncharted,
improvised, unfamiliar,
territory where we please
ourselves, grateful for the
few fans who enjoy our work,
not too swayed by opinion.
People often just do not
get what we are on about,
don’t connect to our proud
moments as we saturate and
crank out the poor, the quality—
a song, a poem a day1—
improvised, transitory, always
seeking to create a new, personal
part of the very clay of man.
1 Fred Jung, “A Fireside Chat With Greg Osby,” All About Jazz.com, November 29th 2003.
Ron Price
25/2/'06 to 25/1/'15.
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BOOGIE-WOOGIE
Popular jazz history usually places boogie-woogie in the 1930s just at the time when the Baha’i administrative apparatus had developed to the point when the teaching program enunciated in some detail in the Tablets of the Divine Plan could finally in 1936-1937 be put in action. The origins of boogie-woogie are as obscure as those of any basic jazz form,1 but this is not the case with the origins of Baha’i administration. The processes which animated the early forms of Baha’i administration could be said to be often “complex and elusive.” Its central concerns sometimes “cannot be easily identified;” the sources for a future account are still largely untapped and described in detail.
Baha’i Administration was, in the years 1887 to 1937, only slowly crystallizing in the eyes of the world, its implications and significance only imperfectly understood.2 The preliminary steps aimed at “the disclosure of the scope and working of this Administrative Order” had first been taken more than fifty years before3 but, with ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s western tour in 1912 it began to take on more definite form.
So, too, did boogie-woogie acquire more definite form when it reached Chicago in the years of WW1 just after the visit of ‘Abdu’l-Baha and before the formal revelation of the Tablets. –Ron Price with thanks to: 1Nat Hentoff and Albert J.McCarthy, Jazz, Cassell, London, 1959, pp.107-109; 2Peter Smith, “The American Baha’i Community: 1894-1917,” Studies in Babi and Baha’i History,Vol.1, ed. Moojan Momen, Kalimat Press, 1982, p.85 and 3 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957(1944), p.329.
Both were products of a definite,
a limited set of circumstances
and had, therefore, a range of
expression that was not wide.
Yet they both derived their strength
from their confinement, like a river
that flows quickly in a channel that
is narrow but deep. They drew their
power from being closely related to the
life of their audience,1 the participants
in this new form, style and pattern.
And so the first stirrings of this new
Order, the mighty processes set in
motion half a century before, were
irresistibly unobtrusively unfolding;
then, as boogie-woogie was at its
height in 1937 a new Plan was at
last conceived and gradually that
most wonderful, thrilling motion
appeared: the Kingdom of God
had indeed, began for the world.2
1 See Max Harrison, “Boogie-Woogie,” in Jazz, N. Hentoff, Cassell, London, 1959, p. 109.
2 1953 in Chicago.
Ron Price
21/8/'05 to 25/1/'15.
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TIN PAN ALLEY
Although jazz is musically distinct from ragtime, traditionalist discourses opposing the spread of popular music made little or no distinction between them in the years from the passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892 to the unveiling of the revelation that were the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1919. To most people “jazz” was simply a new label applied around the end of the First World War to the ragtime menace they had been combating for a generation. An analysis of opposition to popular music early in the twentieth century does not commence in 1917 when the abrupt explosion of jazz into the national consciousness occurred.
Opposition to ragtime and early jazz should be seen as constituting an unbroken discursive continuum stretching back into the final few years of the nineteenth century, perhaps back to 1896 which is often acknowledged as the beginning of the ragtime era or 1892 when Tin Pan Alley’s life began.-Ron Price with thanks to Matthew Mooney, “An ‘Invasion of Vulgarity’: American Popular Music and Modernity in Print Media Discourse, 1900-1925,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Spring 2004, Volume 3, Issue 1.
The literal and metaphoric centre of the modern popular song industry, beginning in the last seven years of Baha’u’llah’s life(1885-1892) and continuing through to the middle of the twentieth-century, was an area originally located on New York City’s West 28th Street known as Tin Pan Alley.-idem.
He energized our western world
in ways we could hardly imagine
at Tin Pan Alley, can you imagine?
No longer beclouded1 by a human temple
that radiant soul must have had a grand
time in that emergent “culture industry,”
manufacturing and distributing a popular
music and a cornucopia of stuff--coming
to fruition as it did just after His passing,
after the dissolution of His tabernacle
where His soul had temporarily abided.
Increasingly challenging the past,
traditionalist values, right into my
own time of rap and rock ‘n’ roll
leaving Simpson and Seinfeld in
charge and winning the day.
Turning away as they did by
droves and droves from any
uplifting didacticism, toward
uncomplicated pleasures, and
a triumph of people’s energy
over elitist, exclusivist tradition
and now in the national memory
as benign, inoffensive artefacts
worthy of cultural veneration.
For there was no real assault
of aesthetic sensibilities, no
real moral degeneracy, no real
abandonment of moral restraint,
frenetic madness, no harbinger
of cultural decline, with rock and
roll’s, rap’s, progenitors seemingly
inciting a promiscuous life: was
there? did it? is it? will it??????
Opposition to this new force
seemed antiquated, irrelevant,
then and now, again and again.
This expression of breathless
energy and activity with its
confused messages of all sorts:
underwear, chewing gum, parts
of automobiles, breasts, curves,
rhythmic sound, the smell of OH,
alcohol and an assortment of mind
benders, bending, bended, blended.
1 See Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, USA, 1957, p.244.
Ron Price
8/4/'05 to 25/1/'15.
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