BEARING little relation to the music heard on radio and discs, TV’s version of pops and jazz is Operetta, either full-scaled agony like Hans Brinker, or a one-song picture story: the balladeer adrift in an eerie vault spotted with display furniture and flying chorus boys. The various movements that pass through juke boxes appear only as shadows on TV’s screen, usually in hammering satires such as Dick Shawn’s athletic take-off on Elvis Presley, Bob Hope’s wonderful beatnik skit, Sid Caesar’s zooter blowing tenor sax. Dodging the more frightening areas of Tin-Pan culture, TV serves a production-wise thing, filled with decorous types, lethargic pace, and tasteless jazz propaganda starring “Looie” Armstrong as the end, Man!, in triteness.
Hit records and dance bands comprise an eccentric province, photogenically uncouth and troublesomely alive with corners, brashness, wild dishonesty. TV’s facile approximation of this wild-woolly universe is the Hank Mancini score for Peter Gunn, a private-eye funhouse that provides the correct photographic clatter while keeping camera off the relaxed ensemble work of a slick group that includes Shelly Manne. Much closer to the heartbeat of jazz were the extraordinary swinging duets between Stuff Smith’s middle register fiddling and Maxine Sullivan’s muffled gamin voice on the now defunct Art Ford show. But generally, there is less agility or inspiration in TV’s song shows than occurs in the fine syncopation of Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid ad.
Since the product is dismal, the baffling question is: why so many song specialists in front of costly evening shows? When a high-pressure show is in its normal stride, the costly apparatus is being carried by a fairly vacant personage slipping self-consciously through a fine oldie (“Goodie, Goodie”), backed by the most typical of all TV sounds, ten or twelve horns playing the same note with a rhythmic deficiency that recalls Muzak. The impossible relationship between mild baritone and huge band brassiness hardly matters in a setup where the singer, like the medium itself, is congenitally a con-artist: genial, unhurried, ready to please. Even in the hands of a shrewd pseudo-jazz singer (Pat Suzuki) the music idles, simpers, waiting for the insertion of self-salesmanship out of the cute Doris Day drawer.
“Don’t be a stick in the mud,” “It doesn’t hurt to smile” are the pep songs that lie buried in the back of TV musicianship. While TV sophisticana likes to imply that Liberace or Lawrence Welk are the ultimate in musical clichés, it is only a-won-anna-two steps from Como (the end result of the “make a good impression bit”) to Welk’s show, where endless soloists doing one-fingered melody and wearing a gripped-by-nausea concern take dead aim at TV’s older audience.
Somewhere in the era of Frank Sinatra’s rise and Bing Crosby’s fall the coolness that fogs televised music came into being under the aegis of some specialists in exaggerated suaveness. Shouting his “talent” for phrasing with flagrantly bent notes, Sinatra helped invent the idea that show-biz superiority can be branded on American entertainment through a consistent, deadpan performance of “extra” effects. King Cole (adding several Oxfordian syllables to every song word on a raydeehoh) and Lena Horne (great at implying sex with throat chords and gums) gave the cool revolution impetus. Thanks to these and such early TV “actors” as Billy Williams, there is a fine web of hokum in TV music that disappears only under the onslaught of a giant (Ella Fitzgerald), or a newcomer with a flair for invention (Ruth Olay, the new George Burns).
TV addicts have to find their kicks in the grace notes that evolve from building a “personality act.” For instance, Diahann Carrol (on Jack Paar’s show) does a snide, lattice-y dramatization with nostrils and eyes that makes the average face seem a wasted organ. On the Timex jazz show, Dizzy Gillespie’s great power and authority somehow disappeared as the documentary cameraman examined his phenomenal cheek expansion, and the curious bend in the horn of his trumpet. Probably the funniest grace note occurred on a recent Bell Telephone broadcast, with Woody Herman reaching an impossibly corny stance, while working on the inspirational symbol “Saints Go Marching In.”
Television could use some of the innocence that pervaded vaudeville in the days of big-band swing. The joy of catching Louis Prima, Lionel Hampton or Ella Fitzgerald came partly from the rampant giving that poured into each performance, partly from the fact that the audience, having grown up in the neighborhood of popular music, was considered tough and knowledgeable. This fever of jamboree and hard work that made the Paramount an all-hours delight is a long mile from Fred Astaire pointing his professionalese finger at Jonah Jones’ tight, mechanical trumpeting saying something idolatrous like “That’s it, boy. I mean, that’s it.”
February 23, 1959