Memories of music and music makers (by G.E. Powell)

Reading Ed's personal history, I am surprised to learn that my own earliest memories of music resemble his. In my case, the instrument observed was not a sitar but a curved soprano saxophone, battered and long unplayed, that had belonged to my grandfather, who had played it and his other saxophones in marching bands in turn-of-the-century San Diego. The only survivor of those old days was this ancient sax, outlasting both my grandfather and his other instruments. When, as an adult, I tried to track down this old soprano, I found that it too had disappeared. When I followed in my grandfather's footsteps and turned to music in my teens, it was the clarinet and eventually the tenor sax that I learned to play. I played in concert bands and in dance bands during my teens, but my real musical life began only when I turned from would-be performer to full time listener, and it was my experience of listening to Jazz over the last fifty-six years that has provided me with the background music for everything that I have done.

The listening phase of my musical life began before the playing phase had ended. My mother, to her lasting regret, gave me an album by the Benny Goodman sextet for Christmas, 1944. I was hooked. I quickly went from listening to Benny Goodman small groups to the big bands of the 30's and 40's, and especially those led by clarinetists, Goodman himself, Artie Shaw, Woodie Herman, Jerry Wald. In 1945 I discovered a crucial difference between the way these bands played in person and what I had been hearing on the records. In that year, I and a few of my raggle-taggle friends went to an immense arena in Washington D.C. that usually hosted hockey games and wrestling matches to hear the Tommy Dorsey band. For the first time I experienced the excitement of seeing in the flesh famous musicians who already seemed to me legendary figures: Dorsey himself, the clarinetist, Buddy de Franco, the trumpet player, Charlie Shavers. When the band played "Marie," I waited for the famous Bunny Berigan solo, not knowing that Bunny had died in 1942. The solo I heard was played by Charlie Shavers and in its bravura display of technique could not have been more different from Berigan's beautifully constructed but much simpler creation. I learned then what I already knew in a sense, that Jazz was an improvised art and that recordings were a poor, but often necessary, substitute for the real thing. This discovery led to a long pilgrimage of discovery that continued through many countries and through the many decades that have passed since 1945. Here are a few of the highpoints along the way, as filtered through the memories of a lifetime.

From just after Pearl Harbor until most of the way through the McCarthy hearings, I lived first in Washington, D.C., then near Boston, and then back in Washington. When I think of Washington in the mid-forties, I think of the final days of the big bands, slightly overlapping with the sudden explosion of a new music (or what seemed a new music at the time), Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell. Oddly enough, the high point of this period for me was not seeing the glamorous name bands playing between the movies at Loew's Paramount Theatre (which I also did), but hearing a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in the Uline Ice Arena. My most poignant memory from this concert was that of listening to Illinois Jacquet: not Jacquet as he is unfortunately now remembered, the honker and crowd pleaser, but Jacquet, the interpreter of lyric poetry--"I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance," eloquent and unforgettable. There was a lesson to be learned from this experience, although I could not learn it until years later when I compared the history of Jazz as remembered by the critics and the scholars of the art with the music itself as actually played on one particular night or another. Many of the greatest players have either been forgotten or have been remembered for the wrong reason.

In Boston, I spent my Sunday afternoons at the Savoy Cafe or the Hi Hat. I listened to Edmund Hall, Ruby Braff, and Vic Dickenson at the former, and to Lester Young, Serge Chaloff, Howard McGee, and Georgie Auld at the latter. I remember hearing Charlie Parker with Miles Davis and John Lewis at Symphony Hall and Lennie Tristano with Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and Billy Bauer in the John Hancock Hall. This latter event included the first public performance of what was, some ten or twelve years later, to be called Free Jazz, although the free jazz of the intellectual, abstract, and passionate Lennie Tristano was a different music from the free jazz of the primitive, self-invented, and also passionate Ornette Coleman.

Back in Washington in the early 50's, I was now old enough to get into jazz clubs at night, and for me this sometimes meant all night. I often went to concerts at the Howard Theatre that began at midnight and ended when they happened to end, and I heard, among many others, Lee Konitz, Buddy de Franco, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Miles Davis, Lester Young.

And so it has continued: the late fifties in San Francisco, the sixties in London and in Stockholm. I discovered a number of great musicians by happening to be walking along the right street and of suddenly hearing a voice that I recognized coming from a tenor sax or a trumpet. The first and most astonishing instance occurred in that dullest of respectable towns, Palo Alto, California. Walking along the street, I half-heard the sound of a dance band coming from an upper floor above street-level shops and suddenly realized that the tenor saxophonist whose sound and style I recognized could not possibly be the person whom I knew I was hearing. I payed the price, went in, and discovered a second-rate small group that was producing music a good bit better than second-rate because of the presence of the legendary Brew Moore, whom I then remembered, was living in those days, in San Francisco. And there he was, blond crew cut, blue eyes, looking impossibly young, holding his horn angled away from his body like Lester Young, and playing with a passion that had nothing to do with the sterility of Palo Alto or with this casual dance gig.

I spent a few weeks in London in the sixties. In those days, London was filled with music, but there was not much Jazz. Nevertheless, I recall a marvelous evening in Ronnie Scott's listening to and for a time speaking with England's greatest jazz musician and one of the world's finest tenor saxophonists, the late Tubby Hayes.

I was in Stockholm in the mid-sixties during a period of intense musical activity. I heard most of the major Jazz players during the time I was there, since I lived only four or five city blocks from Gyllene Cyrkeln (The Golden Circle). I found Art Farmer and on another occasion Dexter Gordon, simply as a result of recognizing their instrumental voices while walking along Sveav„gen and quite literally following my ears. In both cases, I found, as I had earlier in Palo Alto, a merely competent rhythm section brought to life by the presence of a genius. Once, while I was listening to Sonny Stitt at Gyllene Cirkeln, the man himself walked off the stand at the end of a set, came directly to my table, sat down in front of me, and demanded, "What do you play?" He seemed both disappointed and disapproving when I said that I no longer played at all in any systematic way. He then said, "Well, man, you sure know how to listen." he then said, "How could you give it up?" And I replied that, given the difference between his talent and mine, it was much easier for me than it would have been for him. We talked for awhile and I think that he eventually forgave me.

My most memorable experience during those days was that of hearing the famous two-week-long Ornette Coleman engagement at Gyllene Cirkeln in the autumn of 1965. Immediately before the beginning of the Golden Circle engagement, Ornette played at the Stockholm Jazz Festival, held in Isstadion (another ice rink), and I was there. The music seemed formless to me. Fortunately, a rebroadcast of the festival performance was played on Swedish Radio and I taped it. I listened to the tape a number of times and eventually understood and felt the logic of the form (even Free Jazz has form). It was lucky that, having done my homework, I was then treated to two weeks of a new music. Live!

One of the curious psychological effects of listening to Jazz over a number of years is that the music finally stays in one's mind like a kind of terminate-and-stay-resident program on a computer, ghostlike in the background. Since the music is an improvised art, the mind very quickly leaves behind the actual recorded performances, and only the changes are left, playing their own endless and original variations. The familiar experience of a song getting lodged in one's mind and refusing to leave becomes the experience of chord changes, modal patterns, and other formal bases for improvisation becoming lodged in one's mind and generating realizations of the formal patterns. This spontaneous, effortless, and often unwilled mental activity produces its own music, or more accurately a music of one's own. A gift of music, whether you like it or not.

Once, walking down the main street of Lule†, a small Swedish town near the Arctic Circle, I noticed that an endless and effortless series of spontaneous choruses was flowing through my mind. The changes were familiar, but I couldn't identify them. I wondered where they had come from, only to discover, when I retraced my steps, a Savoy Cafe, previously unnoticed. Stomping at the Savoy! Thus, music impacted on my life, even when it wasn't there.

--Grove Powell

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