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THE ACTUAL ORIGIN of JAZZ
I often get people accosting me in the street with the question: Where and when did Jazz actually begin? The plantation - late 1700’s? New Orleans - late 1800’s? Chicago - early 20th century? My bedroom?
No, in fact recent archeological evidence has settled the matter once and for all: Jazz began with a guy called Al and his one mad creative outburst in Nebuchadnezzar’s Orchestra in the 6th Century B.C. (Before Coltrane)
O.K., his name was actually Aristoxenus, but his friends called him Al because, let’s face it, ‘Aristoxenus’ is quite a mouthful! Anyway, Al played an instrument called the quarna in a band so famous it was mentioned in the Bible, which at that time was not so much a holy scripture but more like an Aramaic version of Time Out; entertainment and gossip for the greater Babylon area.
Nebuchadnezzar formed an enormous band, mostly because it helped him get girls. That’s why his place was called the “Hanging Gardens”; girls would ‘hang’ out there to hear the music and dance around their zorstashs (Aramaic for handbag). The Book of Daniel says the band consisted of “horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music”.
Well, not exactly every kind. One day, (apparently a Sunday afternoon gig), Al was complaning to a friend in the masroquita (pipe) section that it was boring playing those “same tired-ass Nebuchadnezzar charts” day after day, girls or no girls! His friend Bubba said, “We play ‘every kind of music’! We’re even advertised that way in the Bible! What else is there?” By this time, Al had drunk one too many glasses of soss (a kind of fermented prune drink) and he stood up (none too steadily by all accounts) and yelled, “I’ll show you: Hit it, Ashurbanipal!” (Ashurbanipal was the main percussionist of the zmara or ‘rhythm section’).
Accompanied by the driving beat, Al blew his way into history with an improvisation which drove the crowd wild. They really dug his use of Mesopotamian scales and the Euphrates Chromatic System. But his hitherto unheard of use of syncopation led to his solo being transcribed and called ‘Sync Street’. Over the years this became ‘Sink Street’, and in later mis-translations, ‘Basin Street’.
Some may doubt my veracity, but I assure you I am not a lyre.
BUDDHA (POWELL)
There are three points of view from which to regard the Buddha and his teachings: the first is objective, analytic, historical; the second is subjective, directly accepting Gotama as ‘the Awakened One’; but the third and most enlightening is to understand the cat as a jazz player.
Born Siddartha Powell around 563 B.C. near the Lumbini Gardens, (the hottest café on the southern edge of Nepal), his first cries were music to his mother Maya’s ears. Born at a time when animism, polytheism, dualism (and even advanced monism) competed for attention, little Sid was surrounded by monks. But the only Monk he wanted to hear was Thelonius.
Having spent his first 29 years in the lap of luxury (Mr. & Mrs. Powell were loaded) he kept asking himself the same question :
“I live in a palace, I’ve got threads, and juice, and a groovy wife and son, but it’s still not swingin’!”
So, one night he cut out to find the meaning of life - and a way to solo convincingly over non-diatonic chord changes.
He studied with the hippest guys, Alara Kalama and Uddalu. He later commented, “They were cool, and, like ‘nuff respect, but you know, they were mainly into a ‘lick’ thing... same old modal tunes...”
Finally, he went off on his own to sit in at a club called The Bodhi Tree. (Sonny Rollins copped the same riff when he later dropped out for some serious ‘woodshedding’ from 1959-1961.) After six years of deep thought, at the age of 35, on the night of the Full Moon Of May, he broke into The Song Of Victory. Hitherto just known as “that bum in the corner”, the audience went wild and the cat had definitely arrived!
His first serious gig (billing himself as “The Buddha”, presciently honoring Bud Powell) was at the Deerpark of Sarnath (near Benares, a great South Indian restaurant). In between songs he shared his new-found enlightenment with the audience.
His first album, The Four Noble Truths featured only four long tracks: Suffering (not getting paid), The Origin of Suffering (cheap or criminal clubowners), The Destruction of Suffering (getting paid), and The Destruction of Sorrow (getting paid regularly).
He soon gave mankind his masterwork, The Noble Eightfold Path: The eight tracks included Right Clubs, Right Fees, Right Tunes, Right Chords, Right Scales, Right Tempos, Right Bass Player and Right Drummer. (This last, he admonished, was “a tricky one!”)
Julius Caesar’s Riff
We’ve all seen the play, (at least the movie version with Brando and James Mason), but, come on! What was the real deal on Julius Caesar; and why didn’t people dig his playing ?
New evidence shows he had a Trio with Pompey and Crassus around 60 B.C.C. (Before Cab Calloway). Now we all know Caesar as a soldier, but he was also a mean player of the lituus, a bronze conical pipe ending in an animal horn. Pompey played an early kind of Roman organ, the stallone, and Crassus was reputedly a funky psantrin (harp) player. They did a successful series of gigs in Gaul and Britain, and really slaughtered the Germans.
He went to Egypt for a much needed holiday, and made it with the infamous Cleopatra, a chick-singer of whom the joke was told: What’s the difference between a chariot and Cleopatra ? ... Not many musicians have been in a chariot!
Crassus quit the band at a festival in Spain, and later Caesar had trouble with Pompey who never could control his organ. They were playing for a musical-comedy at the Rubicon theatre, and Pompey was playing a lot of wrong chords making it impossible for the singers. The audience started booing and Caesar yelled, “The cast is dying!”. (This was later misquoted as ‘The die is cast’, but what the hell does THAT mean?) Caesar finally blew Pompey off the stage at their last show in Pharsalus.
From then on, life seemed sweet for Julie’s solo career. He had won his beautiful wife Caldonia in a battle with King Louis on the Jordan River. After a sell-out tour of Asia Minor, he uttered the oft quoted, “I came, I blew, I conquered”.
Unfortunately, a couple of critics, Brutus and Cassius, were jealous of his success and panned his later Roman gigs. On 15 March 44, Caesar read a particularly cutting review and said, “This is the unkindest cut of all! And you, Brutus ? What have YOU ever played ? Those who can’t DO, teach ! And those who can’t teach, criticise !”
Being a journalist, Brutus got twelve other guys to sneak up behind Caesar in the Senate and stab him to death. They then gave him a lot of bad reviews.
Mark Antony later gave a speech at Ceasar’s funeral where he countered the bad press. “The clams that cats play sometimes end up on their first CD. The hip shit they play on gigs never gets recorded!”
Antony himself took a particularly bad gig in Egypt and his rep never recovered.
Alexander The Great (356 - 323 B.C.C.) (before Chick Corea) may well have been King of Macedonia and conquered the enormous Persian Empire. But they called him ‘The Great’ because he was a great bandleader.
Everyone knows that Al studied with Aristotle who taught him logic, metaphysics and arranging for a military line-up. He explained to his young student that if he wanted to control Egypt, India and Asia Minor, he would first have to get to grips with controlling his voicings, chord substitutions and melodic line-writing. From Aristotle he learned that was all very well to be fearless in battle, but you also have to know which tunes to call on wedding gigs. He admitted that Alexander was a brilliant strategist, but could he modulate smoothly from E flat to A major ? Alexander knew how to take a bridge, but did he know how to keep the singer from destroying it?
At the age of 20, Alexander took over from his murdered father King Philip, and within 5 years he had driven the Persians into retreat at Arbela on the Tigris. Alexander had 47,000 men, the biggest band ever assembled, before or since. The victory was decisive. The music swung so hard that the opposing forces couldn’t keep their toes from tapping in time to the music. Their dancing became so frenzied that King Darius and the Persians (not a bad act in their day) lost their balance and fell on top of each other, at which time Alexander’s men attacked. The trombones (as usual) did the most damage. The shahnai wailed, the setar moaned, the drummers sped up and the trumpets popped out for a beer. It was all over before the tag ending.
As any leader knows, the big problem was to keep the band together when they were travelling. Rope being scarce in those days, Al would tie each man to the next with bits of old cloth and make sure they marched to a very precise beat laid down by the ‘zarb’. As a result, they became known around the world as ‘Alexander’s Rag Time-Band’. Their theme song was later adapted (stolen, actually) by Irving Berlin in 1911.
SHAKESPEARE WAS A PLAYER
The true identity of the writer of the plays and sonnets attributed to ‘William Shakespeare’ has been hotly contested in academic circles since the publication of the ‘First Folio’, largely because you could fit the scant hard historical evidence about the man from Stratford on a Post-it note. Many (including myself) believe the best candidate to be Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Whoever wrote the plays, a recent ‘find’ has proved beyond doubt that ‘Shakespeare’ was a Jazz musician, probably a tenor player. Many have raised the objection that the tenor saxophone had not been invented in the 16th century, but they ignore the fact that, as Shakespeare himself wrote, “There are more tunes on heaven and earth than are jammed on in your studio.”
A scrap of paper signed “Willie The Shake” found under the rubble of a building site in Hackney contains an unrevised early sketch of Hamlet’s speech to the players (Act 3, Scene 2):
“Hamlet: Play the lick, I pray you, like I phrased it, with trippy tounging; if you drag it like Kenneth G, forget it ! Nor do not wave the horn around, feigning soulfulness, for in the very torrent, tempest and, like, whirlwind of your passion, cool it, so the riff is smooth. Man, it burns me to see some overdressed, no-playn’ freak dancin’ around, coppin’ acres of foldin’ green for a noisy dumb-ass show, when solid cats are starvin’ !
1st Player: Yeah, man.
Hamlet: Now don’t be too tame neither, but let discretion be your tutor. Suit the phrasing to the lick, the lick to the phrasing; be natural, ‘cause the whole purpose of playing is, as ‘twere, to hold a mirror up to nature; to personify hipness and show other cats what’s happenin’. Now, you overdo it and you blow it and it messes up your embouchure an' your tone sucks ! Sure, some empty-suits will dig it, but who cares what they think ?
Oh, there be jive-ass players I’ve seen play - and heard others praise, and that highly - that don’t know standards and can’t play funk; all they think about is money !
1st Player: I hope we don’t do too much of that!
Hamlet: Don’t do any of it! And don’t let none of you clowns take too many choruses! You’ll be the only ones digging it while the audience falls asleep and forgets what tune you were playing in the first place!
Now where’s that Ophelia chick singer? We’ got some ‘rehearsing’ to do!”
