8
So what about instruments?
People playing instruments. Tooting, parping, farting. Tweeting like birds. Roaring like lions. Making the saxophone sound like an old bear or like Billie Holiday singing. Do the instruments count as voices too? Or do we have to think of them differently, as another kind of agency for a different kind of message?
So yes, what about jazz?
Tricky. It’s not that I don’t like jazz singing—I do: I have boundless admiration for the voices of a few jazz singers. Admiration and feeling, too. But there are only a few to whom I connect properly, and I do wonder about this habit of non-connection, as if there is a blockage in me, a snag. Yes, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Eddie Jefferson, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter . . . These are all great voices, one way or another, and they have all said great things in great ways. But I don’t often want to listen to them and, indeed, don’t find that the voices linger within me for long afterward when I do. They don’t stick. It’s as if they are coated in some oily physic that makes them slip out the same way they came in, even though, as voices, they are as musical and distinctive as any great voice in any field of vocal enterprise in all music history. I like jazz singing well enough, but it doesn’t seem to have the capacity to stick with me. Or rather, I don’t possess the will to stick with it.
Yes, Ella Fitzgerald can make a song sound as if it has never been sung so transparently before—when Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter, you really hear Cole Porter. And no one will ever cut into the tissue of existential pain with as keen a blade as Billie Holiday. For that matter, no one has ever swung so deftly and so expansively as Louis Armstrong, even if there is something ingratiating about him. Armstrong is arguably as great a singer as he is a trumpeter, which is to say really great. But even so. Even so. It is a fact that whenever I hear a fine jazz voice, I always find myself wondering how much deeper I might be taken into the moment and its emotion without the encumbrance of language, without having to decipher the experience the words describe and the ideas it depends upon. It’s as if the words actually get in the way of what really needs to be said. However much I might enjoy that moment, I can’t help but want the voice to pipe down so that I can hear what the horns have to say . . .
* * *
I make no bones about the fact that I made myself listen to jazz when I was a teenager in the 1970s because I wanted to be hip. At least, I wanted to be the kind of person who listens to jazz. I was not at that stage, in the excitable early days of the punk moment, an aspiring jazz hat: I preferred torn drainpipes and brothel-creepers. (The beret arrived a little later on, in the early stages of the following decade, along with a real 1940s demob “zoot” suit and a trench coat.) Nor was I particularly keen to mark myself in such self-consciously incendiary times as a pipe-and-slippers man, a contender for the Big Armchair. But in 1976/7, at the age of sixteen, on the uneventful edge of my dreary East Anglian fen, I did think that I ought to be at least au fait with the brothers and what they’d been saying all these decades on the swingin’ side of the pond, with their heroin and their funny glasses and their suits and hats and the grainy low-lit monochrome austerity which held their look together in a wash of steely tone and texture.
The photography counted for quite a lot. I dug the modern-jazz look, as I observed it in books and magazines and record racks. Indeed it was much easier then to see the pictures than it was to hear the music. So, long before I had a clear idea of what modern jazz had to say, I had a pretty clear idea of how Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk looked. Dizzy Gillespie too—even if I hadn’t been very touched by his recent appearances on British TV, bullfrogging his busted cheek muscles for the benefit of Michael Parkinson. But still, in 1976 the old stuff, the 1940s and ’50s stuff, looked good to me.
So I bought a secondhand copy of Miles Davis’s Porgy and Bess.
I was slightly familiar with the opera already, from my exposure to the classical canon and its attachments. Porgy and Bess was a properly composed work by a proper composer, George Gershwin, who was American, admittedly, but could still be relied upon for seriousness with a blue twist.
The blue twist was important. It seemed inevitable and wholly necessary to me that formal composition in America should sound as if it had America in it. And so jazzy-bluesy-gospelly classical opera by a proper composer in a suit added up. In fact it sounded to me like the future of accessible, not-quite-so-modernist classical composition. Apart from anything else, I liked the idea of jazz leaving marks on the hulking body of the classical leviathan as it continued its slow dive to oblivion. So I plonked this wordless, jazz-orchestrated, concerto-like Porgy and Bess on to the turntable of my two-bit stereo and waited for a new kind of seriousness to enslave me.
This it did, but not in the way I expected.
One of the primary features of the Western classical tradition is the way it doesn’t tolerate mistakes. Or at least what it calls mistakes. Mistakes in classical music are just wrong, and you may not play classical music wrong and expect to be taken seriously, whether the errors arise from technical deficiency or from bad judgment or lapses in taste. Mistakes are an insult not only to the music but to the composer himself (it’s usually a he), because the composer is the primum mobile in the classical way of thinking. The godhead. The author. You might as soon rewrite Shakespeare for easy comprehension as not follow a scored instrumental part in precise, devoted detail, paying full attention to the composer’s marks and responding to them with musicianly taste. As for technical errors . . . Fluffs, tonal inconsistencies, phraseological hiccups, goofed articulation, audible indecision, wrong notes—the list of solecisms can be as long and as rude as you like.
Yet the first thing that struck me, when I listened to Miles Davis’s Porgy and Bess in my bedroom, was the incidence of technical imperfections in it. Fluffs. Hesitancies. Inaccuracies. Mis-valvings. Split notes, smeared notes, late notes, notes which seemed to issue sidelong from some place other than the Bank of Absolute Musical Rectitude. And that was just Davis. Sometimes I thought I could even hear what sounded like mistakes in the orchestral accompaniment too, for heaven’s sake—mistakes made by the professional guys sitting down in the studio with the music in front of them on music stands. These did not occur often or obviously, but they were there all right, I was sure, contributing to the general atmosphere of instability. In fact it sometimes seemed that whole passages were being skated through as if the composition were river ice: there was an inherent dicey-ness in the music, a sort of built-in wobble and slither, as if perfect balance were not a given and at any moment the whole shooting match might go down in a heap. The ice might even crack. It was really quite startling for a sixteen-year-old music prig to encounter such inefficiency in an admired orchestral work and I struggled at first to see what they’d been driving at, those writers I’d read who’d asserted that Porgy and Bess was a timeless classic of the jazz-concerto art—a match in every conceivable artistic way for the edgy small-group recordings for which Miles Davis was apparently most famous.
But then P&B was also beautiful. Stunningly beautiful. Beautiful in its instability as well as in its carefully sifted layers of stridency and delicacy. I loved Gil Evans’s stringless orchestral arrangements for their stately heft and for their paradoxical drift, like formations of heavy, cold cloud—so different from most things I’d heard before; as abstract as any fin-de-siècle tone poem but somehow less a product of purely aesthetic thinking. Less arty; more soulful—whatever that might mean . . .
Hmm.
The slippiness perceptible in the music might, I supposed, be ascribed to a jazzy desire to sound spontaneous, as if the music were being made up on the spot, when in fact it couldn’t possibly be and quite clearly wasn’t. Furthermore, the fluffs, splits, and smears might not be mistakes at all but, rather, the marks of a deep, searching authenticity. They might actually be an intrinsic part of the music—there to be taken as seriously as the notes that don’t split or smear. This Porgy was not, after all, the buffed product of a conservatoire, but of a tough urban milieu in which funny hats and narcotics are currency and communication is judged not by its refinement but by its realness. These blemishes were not mistakes, then, but the necessary by-product of real communication, as poetic in their accidental nature as the meant stuff. “This is how people talk in the real world,” I thought, still priggish but a little humbled. “With gaps and collisions, ums and ahs. Even the noises of breathing.”
I played one track in particular, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” over and over again. It seemed so like life itself and not like an aesthetic description of it. I loved the elasticity of the walking bass and the discreet little ensemble juttings and chorusings, which supported Davis’s flugelhorn as it floated in its own space. Loved the delicate rimshots dropped by the drummer like tiny pebbles into deep water. Plip! Simply adored the way Davis seemed, quite audibly, to pass something of his being through the conical bore of his flugelhorn: soft, thoughtful, vital, elusive, even feminine. Not modest—by no means modest—but entirely without showiness or imperiousness. It seemed to me that I was listening not to a musician demonstrating his fidelity to a composer’s intent or exhibiting the fineness of his technical ability—not actually exhibiting anything at all, in fact—but one exploring the sound of his own voice in its relationship with a predetermined pattern of notes in the context of a larger chorus of voices. His voice, their voices: the call-and-response ritual that the average social anthropologist would be only too happy to finger backward in historical time for you, as if it were a thread. Voices calling, voices answering.
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” begins with high-wheeling birds but ends in the perfunctory sound of breath pushed through an instrument without forming a note, just a top-of-the-lung gust of air amplified and hardened by its passage through a couple of feet of brass tubing into the transducers of a studio microphone. A bubble bursting. A pfff with an undertone of dribble—Davis insouciantly clearing his spit-valve, perhaps, before the piece has reached its final cadence. Or perhaps he’s punctuating his final sentence: full stops sound no note, after all. Or perhaps he’s fluffing again. You can hear in the pfff the barest traces of two harmonics, one high and one low—perhaps he just missed the note altogether . . .
But the truth is, it doesn’t really matter what was meant. What matters is what you hear, and what you hear is the sound of a voice reduced to its raw componentry: thought, feeling, muscular action, exhalation. Breath, but no utterance. The sound of air.
* * *
A few years later, in 1983, I had assumed the full jazz-hipster condition, as it was then configured.
At the subcultural level at least, real interest was beginning to be shown once more in the subject of modern jazz, following the fragmentation and then displacement of the punk and post-punk accounts of British life. And although much of that interest concerned sartorial issues and the way both jazz and its look expressed political attitudes and a certain kind of social sophistication—a fantasy of antediluvian purity in style—that was quite all right with me. Anything was better than identifying oneself with the pretensions and superficialities of mainstream pop.
I had officially—almost ceremonially—renounced all interest in pop and rock the previous year and was now working in a hip record shop in Portobello Road in London called Honest Jon’s, and DJ-ing for the local pirate radio station, Dread Broadcasting Corporation. I considered myself to be au fait at last. Well, getting there. I wore a beret and a dangly earring. I read Nat Hentoff and Norman Mailer. I cultivated an amiable jazz-hipster vibe and hoped that my middle-class provincial origins weren’t too screamingly conspicuous.
Most importantly, I had done my homework and I now knew one end of the modern jazz spectrum from the other, roughly speaking. I knew that “West Coast” was no mere geographical designation. I dug hats. I understood that the socioeconomic climate that gave rise to hard-bop might belong to a postwar, pre-civil rights context, but that modern jazz also spoke deep and universal truths to my own time, provided you made the effort to acclimatize yourself to the language—which was not easy, but was as rewarding when it clicked as any cultural commitment I’d ever undertaken. I certainly enjoyed a deeper connection with The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady than I ever had with Peter and the Wolf, or indeed with Echo and the Bunnymen. I also had the beginnings of a new sense of taste. Real taste. Not any old casual infatuation for the sake of one’s self-image—the sort you go in for because of its potential to reflect yourself back to yourself in ways that seem attractive. No way. My new taste arose from a deep-churning sense of identification with certain voices, their choices, their context, and what they had to say about everything to do with being alive. This seemed like the very least one could do, were one a university-educated English white boy in his early twenties living under Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist Tories in the decay of post-imperial London.
I liked Jackie McLean, Dexter Gordon, Booker Ervin, Clifford Brown, Art Pepper, Harold Land, Horace Silver, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Elvin Jones, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Sonny Clark, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, Donald Byrd, Tony Williams, Lee Morgan, Jimmy Smith, Stanley Turrentine, Jimmy Knepper, Bill Evans, Tina Brooks, Hampton Hawes, McCoy Tyner, Cannonball Adderley, even Hank Mobley, who didn’t always connect with me because of his inbuilt conservatism and held-back tone. But I could tell he was an all-right guy.
No, actually, I didn’t just like them.
I heard what they were saying.
The list of people I wasn’t so keen on was much shorter: Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Art Taylor, Dave Brubeck . . . Greats, all of them, in their respective ways. But I had my reasons to doubt and I wasn’t afraid to articulate them. This showed, at least, my capacity for discernment. All in all, I was quite the Young Jazz Turk.
And it was great fun working in the record shop, dispensing wisdom and hipness like Bopping Billy Bountiful in a black beret, occasionally rubbing my sensibilities up against those of actual jazz musicians, actual drug dealers and actual nutters, and otherwise listening, listening, listening to tricky music all day long. It was, to use an expression beloved of old-school hipsters everywhere, an education.
Then a young guy walked into the shop—a younger guy than even I—and presented himself at the counter much as fighters present themselves in the ring, not flexing his muscles so much as making a muscular gesture out of his entire being.
“All right,” he said, pressing his sense of self over the counter like a bag of spanners. “All right. I got a question for you.”
His voice was surprisingly light, given the depth of his chest. He must have been eighteen or nineteen but was built like a box. He obviously worked out. He wore a flecked American jacket and pegs and had his hair styled in the then-fashionable American flattop, beloved of those who wished they lived in the 1950s.
“I want a record,” he said, “by the best saxophonist ever. Not the second best. Not the third best. But the best. It has to be the best. You get me?”
“Yes, I think I get you,” I replied. “But there’s a problem . . .”
“A problem?” he asked reasonably coolly. “Is this a record shop? Do you sell jazz records?”
Yip. Nod.
“Do you sell jazz records by saxophone players?” (Nod.) “In that case, I want the best one. Don’t care what it costs . . .”
“Well, it all depends on what kind of jazz you like, and what kind of saxophone player. It might even depend on what kind of saxophone . . .”
“Look,” he said, “I’ll make it easy for you. Just sell me the record that has the best saxophone playing on it that you like. There must be something that you think is the best saxophone record you can buy . . . Well, that’s the one I want. I can see you know what is and isn’t good in saxophone playing, so just sell me the faaaarckin’ record, all right?” This appeared to be an attempt at good humor.
Crikey.
“Tell you what,” I said, pretending that it wasn’t anxiety I was now feeling. “Tell you what. The record I like best at the moment is by a guy called John Coltrane. Lots of people think he’s the greatest tenor saxophone player ever, and I don’t think I disagree with them. He’s amazing. Really exciting. Got this rock-hard tone. Goes through harmonic changes like an adding machine. Absolutely pulverizes everything and anything that stands in his way—he’s a sort of dreadnought among saxophonists. The heavyweight champion.”
The fighting talk was obviously hitting the mark. My customer appeared to be impressed.
“Now, the album that is usually cited as the one, the one where he reaches a kind of peak of heightened expressiveness and where everything else in jazz history suddenly seems to change up a gear, is called A Love Supreme, from 1964. It’s an amazing record. A really challenging record. It’s . . . it’s . . .”—second thoughts were now piling in—“. . . Perhaps not the best place to start. No. Um. Tell you what, if it were me . . .”
“Just tell me what your favorite one is now, right now . . .”
“ . . . Er, probably the one I’m listening to most at the moment is called Impressions. It’s a live album, just been reissued, and Trane plays a lot of soprano on it and it’s quite . . . impressionistic. It’s not as pulverizing as A Love Supreme. Tell you what: why don’t I play it for you?”
“No, mate, no need for that. I’m in a hurry. If you think that’s the one, then that’s good enough for me. It’s the one. Now shove it in a bag and I’ll leave you in peace.”
So I shoved it in a bag, and he left me in peace.
And then about an hour and a half later he reappeared in the shop, sheened with sweat.
“I trusted you,” he said, brokenly, and then hardened himself. “And you’ve just taken the piss. I said I wanted the best sax there is and you sold me this . . . this . . . shit.”
“Look, I’m really sorry—I wasn’t doing anything of the . . .”
“Save it, mate, save it. I know when I’ve been a mug. I should’ve let you play it for me. It’s partly my own fault. But it’s also partly your fault—you sold me shit pretending that you thought it was great. And this . . . this is faaaarckin’ shit.”
He sort of half laughed and rolled his shoulders in his boxy jacket.
“Are you going to give me my money back?”
I didn’t hesitate. I gave him his money back and was glad to do so. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t have stood another minute of him talking to me in his dad’s voice.
But then, surprise of all surprises, a couple of days later he reappeared in the shop, looking rather less belligerent but still pretty muscle-bound. This time he was wearing a porkpie hat.
“Listen, mate,” he said, extending a hefty fist across the counter. “I think I owe you an apology. That record you sold me . . . you know, the shit one. Well, it was shit, but it was my mistake. I shouldn’t have asked you for it like that. Perhaps you just like shit.” This was another of his jokes. “Can’t be helped. But when I came in the shop I’d just been to see the Chevalier Brothers the night before and they were great—you know what I mean? Faaarckin’ great—and I should’ve asked you for “the best saxophone player who’s like the one in the Chevalier Brothers” or something like that. That would have been a lot better. I just didn’t realize there was so many different kinds of jazz, ranging from shit to the Chevalier Brothers. It was really my fault. So sorry, mate.”
He stuck out his hand again. Fixed me in the eye.
“Are we square?”
“We are. We are totally square. Now, perhaps I can interest you in Earl Bostic . . . ?”
* * *
It’s always hard to know what is “meant” by instrumental jazz. I certainly struggled with the issue in 1976, and still do, if literal meanings are what’s required. How does it generate meaning, a voice, when it makes no use of the language you speak yourself? What is being said?
Where do you start?
Well, learn the language, is one answer. It’s a time-consuming activity, but worth the effort. But if you really can’t be bothered with that, you can always start with what’s not being said. The standard observation to make about Miles Davis’s trumpet voice is that, whatever it is he’s saying, he’s saying it laconically, as if the absence of utterance is as important as the utterance: the gaps, the space not played in—this has become the platform on which everything else to be said about him stands. Miles Davis is the lyric poet of Laconic.
But of course he was by no means always laconic; you only have to listen to his mid-sixties recordings to know that: his playing then was full of roiling, yelling, sometimes confrontational articulacy, as full of language as the average argument. So the first thing we have to consider when wondering what is being conveyed, precisely, by all that language is that the uttering of it is always a choice, someone’s choice: to speak or not to speak—and then how much to speak. No one makes a jazz instrumentalist say whatever it is he or she has to say, whatever the volume, amplitude, frequency, and tone. They say what they say because that’s all that they can say in that particular seized moment of time; it is the sum, in that seizure, of what may be said by that individual and it is not predicated on anything other than that individual’s capacity to make an utterance in the moment (that’s the reason jazzers practice their chops so much: so they can never be caught out with nothing to say). Perhaps the most important point to be made about any jazz articulation, whether experienced live or via some recorded medium, is that the utterance is indivisible from the moment.
So that is what you listen to.
The moment.
But sometimes the moment is all too much. I still have vivid recall of trying to make sense of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, when I dutifully bought it a year or so after my first tentative engagement with Miles Davis in the seventies.
A Love Supreme has, since the 1960s, been considered one of the cornerstone works of the modern-jazz canon, along with Davis’s much easier-on-the-ear Kind of Blue, with the result that anyone with any desire to acquire hip credentials over the past fifty or so years has been obliged to get their head round it, as well as inside it.
Just listen to the thing now, fifty years on from its first release. It still comes at you. It is still a truly extraordinary outburst: a four-part suite but a single gout of energy—hortatory, profuse, intimidating; one of those occasions when “the moment” is just so full of stuff that there seems barely any room in it for melody or breathing, let alone the tender sensibilities of the listener.
It’s always risky using such language, but I can think of no better comparative noun for A Love Supreme than “torrent.” The notes come at you unstoppably, like a fast-moving wall of liquid, a flood of rhythm, tone, and syntax smashing down the course of a long valley, as if suddenly released by the catastrophic failure of a dam upstream. It is torrential both in sound and in feeling. And at first, all it seems to consist of is that fierce press of rhythm, syntax, and iron tone. Nothing else. No content. Not as such. When it first crashed through my teenage bedroom, I thought, “What is this shit?” and I shut my mouth and covered my ears.
It seemed to me that, compared to the disciplined laconicism of 1950s Miles Davis, A Love Supreme represented a failure of muscular control. Much as my burly friend in the record shop did, I at first thought in excremental terms. Here was an expulsion of something noxious and hot, something rushing—something incompatible with a sense of well-being. Certainly something affronting one’s sense of good emotional hygiene.
And so I backed off and A Love Supreme remained an outlier in my listening landscape throughout the punk years and the first couple of years after that, like a building on the edge of my psychic estate I was too frightened to visit for reasons that were compelling but obscure. The building was dark, it was mysterious, it was full of hazard—that was all I knew. To me, the album somehow integrated Pandora’s box with the chapel perilous. It was as if A Love Supreme were a container enclosing dangerous secrets and it was imperative that the lid should stay firmly on it, for fear that the contents might escape and contaminate not only me but the world.
They are dramatic years, your late teens and early twenties.
But in due course the lid came off, inch by inch, nudge by shove, helped no doubt by an intensifying desire on my part to consider myself hip and by increasing courage with regard to religion, which I had been despising stroppily since my defection from the church choir in 1973 following the breaking of my singing voice.
The point being that A Love Supreme is quite overtly a religious work. It says so on the cover. It is the saxophonist’s thank-you note to God, for . . . well, for everything. Coltrane “believed in all religions” and, increasingly, as the 1960s gathered momentum, he worshipped as he played—which is perhaps another reason why he felt obliged to go to such inordinate lengths to “get it all in,” as he famously explained to Davis when admonished by his leader for going on for too long. That was Trane’s inner compulsion and drive: the act of getting it all in, or at least getting as much in as he could. He needed to exhaust the possibilities of the available harmonic and modal language before he could countenance the possibility that he had said enough: and you can never say enough when the point of language is to be ecumenical. Not really. There is always one more prayer to be said in a different, perhaps more prayerful way, for different ears . . . (Which is perhaps why Coltrane’s is such infernally difficult music to describe. Miles Davis, with his keen determination never to say more than is necessary, has boundaries which can be limned: you can see to the edge of Miles; whereas Coltrane implies that there are no boundaries capable of containing the truly seeking voice. He sees infinite possibilities and unending permutations, so no matter how keen your description, it always falls short of using the right terms. Infinity knows no limits, by definition.)
So what does it consist of, the album, formally speaking? Well, the four thematic elements that constitute A Love Supreme add up to a little more than half an hour’s music and are unambiguously entitled “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” It is not a worldly work. It is solemn, ritualistic, profuse, and, finally, throughout the length of “Psalm”—and somewhat counter to first impressions—peaceful. It is deep and motionless as a lake, once you penetrate its busy surface. And what you discover in due course, as you find the confidence to immerse yourself fully, is that the music is actually incredibly communicative. It does have tunes in it: seething, scouring, rawly hewn tunes for sure, but tunes nonetheless, for all that they appear on first contact to be nothing more than pointillist (and pointless) acreages of notes. They are there all right. You just have to ride them as they come, like waves.
But it is as exhausting and exhaustive a work as exists in the Western music canon, by which I mean that it is not only an exhausting experience for the listener, but also exhaustive of possibility. By the end of its half-hour-plus duration, you are only too ready for the worship to stop, not just because you’re pooped but also because you feel the language used is pooped. Wrung out.
Coltrane died less than three years after recording A Love Supreme. And after it, jazz has never sounded quite the same to me, despite its continued and sometimes really quite vigorous evolution into a variety of forms, some of them noble, some less so, from 1965 right up to the present day. I still love jazz. I still follow its developments, up to a point. But I have never been able to escape the conviction that everything jazzy that follows A Love Supreme only counts really as an afterthought or further meditation; is akin to gloss or exploration for the sake of exploration or, in period jazz parlance, the rigging of “new conceptions” for the sake of modernist and postmodernist strategy. It seldom sounds to me like a voice saying what it has to say, and then shutting up.
Which is not to say that I am now in a position to offer precise translations of what the voices of Miles Davis and John Coltrane were saying when they said what they said so definitively. Nothing like. Who would be so foolishly presumptuous? But I am more grateful than I can say that they said it, whatever it was, and I surely experienced some of the truth of what they were saying in those moments, in my heart and in my mind and in my bones, fat, and muscle.
I cannot answer the question “How does it feel to be alive?,” so forgive me if I dodge the much harder one: “Yes, but what does John Coltrane mean?”
* * *
What of Hank Mobley, though? What of the moderate, reasoning, warmly articulate, relatively conservative tenor-saxophone voice that never suffered from logorrhoea and was seldom laconic in temper, but usually something in between—always available, ready to play and equipped with something attractive to say but never particularly fussed about the grander implications of the moment, or what the moment might mean for the gleam of his reputation, or indeed for the gleam of history. What of Hank, the man with no big picture?
Mobley absolutely belonged to Davis and Coltrane’s era, dying nineteen years after one and half a decade before the other, in 1986. Indeed he played with both men, most notably in 1961 when Davis was searching for Coltrane’s replacement in the Miles Davis Quintet—perhaps the most prestigious and pressurized jazz job of its day. What an audition that was.
By way of a tryout, Mobley was invited to contribute to one studio album, Someday My Prince Will Come (Columbia), and then had the privilege of being cut to pieces on it by the man he was supposed to be replacing in the group. Coltrane was meant to have gone on to higher things by then—higher and further things—and one can only presume that he didn’t just happen by the studio that day on the off-chance that Miles would give him his old job back. But he was there on one day at least and he was utterly, cruelly magnificent on that record: “Teo” in particular but also “Someday My Prince” itself are both overwhelming examples of big-picture playing: fast and fluent yet colossal, as if the saxophonist is engaged in an altogether different scale of enterprise to everyone else. Giant steps indeed. And poor old Mobley sounds intimidated; barely gets going at all when it’s his turn. It is almost as if he cowers in his predecessor’s shadow, even though they only play together on one piece, the title track. Who among us wouldn’t have cowered?
He sounds rather less choked on the live album with Davis, In Person . . . at the Blackhawk, recorded at a club residency following Trane’s final final departure that same year. But it is plainly not a great fit. The inference is clear: old Hank was not the questing, dramatic, inspirational, ground-churning sideman of Davis’s dreams, neither authorial nor sonically imposing enough to cut out a big space for himself in the creative swarm of this most self-searching of modern-jazz groups, and evidently not bothered one way or another about the status that might accrue from committing his all to the advancement of the Miles Davis oeuvre. Davis and Coltrane were interested in their places in history. Mobley knew his place on the stand.
Instead, we have to go elsewhere to find le vrai Mobley, perhaps to any one of a number of records he made as leader and sideman for the Blue Note label between 1957 and the mid-sixties, but most compellingly to his own album Soul Station, in 1960 (a year after Kind of Blue, four before A Love Supreme), a quartet session featuring Mobley as the sole horn voice.
Here is the Mobley of his own dreams: a warm, ample, melodic, subtle, supple, swinging, lucid, articulate, even playful voice. Here, away from the competitive cut and thrust of the Davis Quintet and no longer obliged to fight for ear-time in the zoo format of a standard bop quin-, sex- or septet, he is neither magisterial nor imperious, and he is very far from majestic. But he is himself, and with great authority. This is the sound of a man making his utterances without inhibition while digging his toes contentedly into ground he knows.
On Soul Station there is no strain. Mobley’s tone is grainy, reedy, occasionally nasal, sometimes even plummy like a clarinet, his articulation feather-light when required, masculinely assertive on other occasions, pushing his way through his choruses with an even, imperturbable certainty, as if reading out loud to beloved children. So perhaps it is right to say that he is magisterial, in a warmly intimate way: teacherly without being authoritarian. In detail, Mobley’s tenor is a lovely, diversely expressive sound, never robust but always convinced and clear and generous. There is suction in his phrasing as well as blowing, for it is as necessary in life to draw breath as it is to exhale, and Mobley phrases as he breathes. Sometimes it is possible to hear a little shake in the notes at the end of those phrases, as if he is referencing the way the grand old swingers of earlier decades liked to punctuate; and then he’ll sink into the ursine woofliness of Ben Webster—because, in that moment, woofliness is what makes the bear.
Soul Station is what we mean when we talk about a voice “having authenticity.” It is full of a real truthfulness that belongs in that moment to that speaker and to no other—and could never belong to another in any other moment. And it is very easy to see why, when you listen to music like this, Hank Mobley has such a devoted following among a small cross section of humankind. He may not have a big picture, but Mobley has his own cult.
* * *
There was a taxi driver who used to come into Honest Jon’s back in the early 1980s. And who knows, he might still go in there, although he’d be an ancient taxi driver now. He used to come in several times a week, wearing his shirt open to his middle to reveal the string vest he wore beneath, and he always wore a string vest, winter, spring, and summer. We used to call him Ank Mobley because that was all he ever wanted: Hank Mobley.
“Got any more ’Ank Mobley?” he’d say on Thursday afternoons, having already asked the question on Monday morning. “Anything new in by ’Ank?” And we’d always say, “Don’t think so, mate. But have a look in the Hank Mobley section,” because it would be as pointless as it would be rude to say to him, “Hank Mobley is old and infirm and off the radar and hasn’t made a record in donkey’s decades and is probably not going to make another one anytime soon—and everything that’s currently available is in stock in the racks anyway, plus a handful of secondhand albums which you’ve already got—just as this was also the case three days ago on Monday morning.” How impolite would that be?
Ank needed to ask the question though, so that he would have the warrant he needed to go through the Mobley section on the off chance that we’d overlooked something and might be shown—ha!—to have been derelict in our duty. He wanted to catch us out. He was not actually hostile, but he certainly suspected us of not loving Hank Mobley enough. And it was always a viable possibility in Ank’s mind that either Mobley had made a new record that we hadn’t noticed, or there was a new reissue we’d overlooked, or, most desirably, a rare secondhand mono copy of something from the outer reaches of the Hank oeuvre had somehow sneaked into the racks unobserved by us. Ank was, you see, a one-saxophonist man, a man of loyalty and devotion, and he needed always to be one step ahead in the Mobley game.
Another thing he liked to do was buy repeat copies of Mobley records he already owned for presentation to fellow cabbies in the taxi drivers’ café down the road in W11: cabbies he considered ripe for conversion. He was a Mobley evangelist. He wanted everyone to benefit from the good news. Behind Honest Jon’s counter during idle hours, we used to speculate about the taxi drivers of west London living in fear of Ank and his record bag.
“No, mate, no,” the cabbies would bluster over their breakfasts as he approached. “Stay back. Stay back or the bacon sandwich gets it! How many times do I have to tell you, mate: Mobley’s not my thing. I like Connie Francis and Hawkwind.”
And then a very strange day dawned. I cannot give the day a date, though it feels as if I ought to be able to. It was the day, a couple of years into my time at Honest Jon’s, when Ank came into the shop, shambled up to the counter with his shirt open and said, “Got any Stan Getz?”
We didn’t know where to put ourselves. We were struck dumb. We looked at one another, my colleague and I, and we both gestured in the direction of the Stan Getz section and smiled feebly, as children do when told by their father that all is not as it seems in the family.
“I like Stan Getz,” said Ank amiably. “Do you like him? He’s good, isn’t he? Do you like him?”
We both nodded but remained stupefied. What could this possibly mean for us all?
I quit the shop a year or so later, to do other things (though I was never as happy in work again). During that year, Ank dutifully came into the shop twice a week, sometimes three times, and on every occasion he would approach the counter cagily, like an overweight, world-weary, bungling assassin, and would ask the question: “Got any Getz in?”
And Hank Mobley was never mentioned again.
GRACE NOTES
JACKIE MCLEAN: “BLUESNIK”
Blue Note Records, 1961
It goes “Nyyyah-na-nah na-nah / nyyyah-na-nah na-naaah.” Which is then repeated several times over for thirty seconds, with a four-bar bridge passage dropped in halfway through, as if to buy time. And that’s it: a smear, a splotch of notes. Perfunctory. Undecorated. A tossed-off melodic figure rather than a tune, metered like a playground taunt, curt enough to be humiliating. More than once I have heard the melody of Jackie McLean’s “Bluesnik” not as a descending sequence of unison notes on trumpet and alto sax, blatted out over a pulsating bop rhythm, but as “Get lost / go on / fuck off.”
But I don’t usually get lost, because I know what’s coming next.
What comes next is McLean’s solo, which starts parenthetically, as if returning to the middle of a sentence left some moments before—“as I was saying”—and then squirts on for four whole minutes in a style which expresses everything you might ever want to know about hard-bop, plus a whole lot of stuff you possibly didn’t. The solo is one long wrangle, a sort of stick-fight between the clichés of Jackie’s own personal post-Charlie Parker blues-bop idiom—McLean goes in for percussive, short, angular, flaring phrases executed with eye-wateringly sharp intonation—and the saxophonist’s abiding modern-jazzy determination to make everything sound like it has never been expressed quite as spontaneously as this before. Or as candidly. Or as modernly. It’s a fight between idiom and spontaneity. Lots of people can’t stand the way McLean plays.
I love it, though. This is partly down to my wiring. I can’t help but hear in that lemony intonation a sort of agitated, even neurotic, straining beauty, ugly though it appears to some. And something in my body revels in McLean’s percussiveness—it feels deeply human to me to hammer like that against the passage of time. Listening to McLean always results in the switching on of my entire nervous system.
And for that same reason I also like his haltedness—his intrinsic lack of fluency. His hobble. Pegleg McLean is an unfluent mover, reluctant to resort to ready-made turns of phrase but occasionally prepared to use them to paint his way out of a corner. The solo on “Bluesnik” is full of such ready-mades but they are deployed with such cranky conviction that you can only listen and digest, as if, really, no one has ever said this before in quite those terms.
In fact, taken as whole, the solo is like a rebuttal of an unheard accusation, in which the speaker (the saxophonist) has a multitude of things to say in his defense, and is quite prepared to be aggressive about it, but isn’t always possessed of the command and the fluency to get those things out smoothly, elegantly, or even necessarily in the order that reflects most felicitously on his communication skills. Yet he is always idiomatic. He is always deeply in the pocket: his pocket. Jackie is profoundly authentic, psychologically speaking. He may well resort to his own clichés occasionally (and they are his clichés)—but the case he makes with them wins you over with the sheer force of his will and the atmospheric credibility of what is being said. He sounds wonky but he is nearly always true. Here’s the point: even when Jackie McLean isn’t playing like a god, he’s communicating like a human.
This, I suspect, was an issue he wrestled with himself, as a card-carrying student of the Charlie Parker bop school. As the 1950s turn into the 1960s and his contracts with the Prestige record label give way to better ones with Blue Note, you can hear it bothering him more and more: How do I move on? How do I make new? How do I get free—but stay true?
A year after the rigorously bluesy Bluesnik, he recorded Let Freedom Ring, also on Blue Note, a quartet set without a second horn on it—just Jackie, piano, bass, and drums—affording the saxophonist much more room in which to express his brand-new vision without having to make accommodations.
Let Freedom Ring represents, as it ought to with a title like that, the clangor of a voice released from the shackles of standard harmony into the freer space of quasi-modalism. It includes tunes that would strike the ear as discordant were there any real chordal underpinnings to support them. But there are none. Well, there are and there aren’t. That’s the thing about quasi-modalism: It has one foot in conventional harmony and one foot out. It’s ambiguous. It is, by definition, unsettled.
None of which stops Let Freedom Ring from being a peal of a record. The musical scheme provides a festival setting for McLean’s tone and angularity, its open, propulsive, unclogged rhythms allowing him to lay out his oblique strategies with greater latitude than ever before. Zig, zag, and zog.
But it doesn’t change what he has to say, not one iota. Whatever that is. He never stops saying it, and I always find it beautiful. But as I say, lots of people just hear a grumpy guy playing a saxophone out of tune.
BOOKER ERVIN: “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS”
Prestige Records, 1966
A convinced Freudian and jazz expert once told me that the tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin “makes the sound of a man who can’t make up his mind whether he wants to kill his mother or fuck her.”
Well, it’s a hypothesis. But this declaration did seed an idea which took hold in my mind and has not yet relinquished its grasp: the idea that an accomplished instrumentalist cannot help but show himself up in the involuntary detail of his musical articulations. The more accomplished a musician he is, the more he can’t help himself.
Poor old Booker.
But then good old Booker. Here was a man who, whatever the truth about his deepest, most hurt feelings, was certainly incapable of putting a saxophone to his mouth without revealing that he at least had wounds. In the particular case of this mournful ballad, I would suspect that it isn’t the “you” of the song’s title who doesn’t know what love is, but Booker himself. For this is the human voice expressing itself as bleakly as it ever did through the medium of brass and reed—a harrowing, hopeless despairing yowl of an utterance, in which tenderness is assayed and somehow, you feel, rejected as a bad lot, given what Booker knows of reality.
It is all too possible to hear in Ervin’s endless, needling pain the crying of a tiny unwanted baby. It is certainly hard to listen to with your heart.
JOHN SURMAN: “SALTASH BELLS”
ECM Records, 2012
Saltash is a modest town on the westerly bank of the Tamar River that divides Cornwall from Devon. The town faces Plymouth. The river is spanned by both a suspension bridge, which carries road traffic, and Brunel’s Royal Albert railway bridge, which was constructed in 1859. The town’s name means “The ash tree by the salt mill.” I have never been there. I certainly wouldn’t know what to say about it.
But John Surman has plenty to say, and he takes nearly eleven minutes to do it on the album of the same title, by deploying what sounds like a contrabass clarinet in a dew of twinkly electronic condensation. It’s a piece of gaping contrasts. Throughout its long, uneventful length, the voice of the Really Big Boy of the clarinet world is modified with brief interventions of multitracking, repeat-echo, and conventional reverb, as a dub record might be modified at the mixing desk. The digital dew persists throughout but, if anything, gets wetter as it goes on and the whole thing comes off as a sort of sleepscape of gurgles, grunts, snorts, and rumbling sighs, as if a giant is dreaming pleasantly in a morning belfry. It is not clear whether the giant is woken when the real bells of Saltash ring at the end, but the clarinets dissipate like birds into cloud. The scene is entirely tranquil.
The music could not be anything other than English. Surman is a marvelous technician and all that, but it is his search for an idiom hived off within an idiom that makes him. He does not sound to me like a man who wishes he was in Chicago or down at Minton’s on West 118th Street in New York City—this is a voice that has lost whatever traces it once possessed of a relationship with America. In fact, it seems beholden to nothing much at all apart from its environment, its locale. It has no swing, that’s for sure. Tone, texture, shape, intensity, yes—but nothing of America. It exists in its own Devonian space.
But then English music has always turned to its environment in the end, as if that were the only way to confirm to itself, finally, that it is English music. It is as if England can only be reached through its landscapes and its social arrangements rather than through the articulation of the experience of selfhood; as if our sense of self were something perhaps to be embarrassed about in our kind of society. Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Elgar—they might have something to say about this, were they still around. But whether this is a good thing or not, I cannot begin to judge.
However, I like to think I now know a little of how Saltash feels.