07.26.07
This stuff was coming out at the same time as The Beatles and The Supremes
One of the great delights of the Aebersold workshop is the bookstore. Tables groaning with fake books and instruction books, but mostly those seemingly endless bins of classic Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside albums from the 50s and 60s on CD, all for a steal compared to what you’d part with at Borders. I always blow a small fortune. This year I came home with such gems as Toccata Trompeta by Kenny Dorham, Empyrean Isles by Herbie Hancock, Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, A Night at Birdland Volume 2 by Art Blakey (with Horace Silver, Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson), The Eminent J.J. Johnson Volume 1, among others.
Discovering this storehouse of treasures at my age, in the early twenty-first century, is a little weird for me, especially since I am, in my academic life, a cultural historian, and since I have had my ear glued to the radio since age four. I was paying rapt attention to popular culture when these records came out. Why were they not in the bins at my local LP outlets? (To be fair, maybe I wasn’t looking, fixated as I was on rock at the time. That said, part of the reason for that is surely that the rock was what was prominently displayed.)
I think about the music that did come across my radar screen at the time these great records were coming out. Certainly there was the rock and R&B that was front and center for my generation, but one also had to note the prominence of the Broadway scores of the day (Hello, Dolly, Bye Bye Birdie, Oliver), the country (Buck Owens, Jim Reeves, Eddie Arnold, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn), and the symphonic offerings. There was even some jazz that got peoples’ attention, but the names associated with that were the likes of Ramsey Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Herbie Mann and Stan Getz. Good players all, but now I can see that they represented an attempt by the music industry to grapple with some kind of accessibility issue.
So now, along with just straightforward current enjoyment of the bounty I bring home each summer, I have to run my head back through my experience of the past five decades, and assimilate this music into the context of the world of my youth.
Who did listen to Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Kenny Dorham and McCoy Tyner in 1965?
Some time back I had a conversation with Pat Harbison (a professor of trumpet at the IU School of Music) and he posited that the reason jazz moved from the club to the classroom was that soul music, and particularly Motown, encroached upon that region of black America’s imagination that had been occupied by jazz.
It seems to have started earlier. Speaking of Motown, in Berry Gordy, Jr.’s autobiography, he speaks of the period in his life when he first came home to Detroit from his Army service in Korea (1953) and started a record store in his old neighborhood. He predominantly stocked the kinds of jazz records mentioned here and quickly went belly-up. His customers were clamoring for The Drifters and John Lee Hooker and Big Maybelle.
Did the marginalization of jazz begin at the dusk of the swing era, when jazz ceased to be primarily a dance music? That seems to be a pretty plausible view.
Still, as one listens to the astounding musicianship and the unbridled zest for life, and the same soul that comes through the music given that name, one wonders how American culture might have developed differently if there had been some way to reach young music-hungry citizens like myself when this stuff was current.
