1
EDITORIAL
"Now the Billy Taylor Trio, with Charlie Mingus on bass, Marquis Foster on drums, and,on piano, a man who has a mastery of metre and metaphor equivalent, in another field,to, let’s say, Marianne Moore. Anyway, here's a problem in emotionally-applied semantics - 'What is this thing Called Love'?"
Recently, I happened to be listening to a recording of Billy Taylor's Trio, performing at Storyville in 1951, in which Nat Henthoff makes the precedingannouncement. Notice anything unusual about it? Does the comparison of a jazzmusician with a renowned poet stand out at all?I’m sure that some people’s first reactions will be to scoff at Henthoff’s pretentiousness, to assume that he has somehow gone too far, has overreached in hisclaims for the music – that he has given jazz the sort of status which it should not claim.Yes, they’ll grant you Kerouac – he was openly influenced by jazz, and there does seemto have been some sort of equivalence between a jazz solo and the improvisational flowof his writing. He did coin the term ‘spontaneous
bop
prosody’, after all. But, beyond that50s Beat milieu, you’d better stay in your boxes – if jazz is art, it’s not art with a capitalA. It’s as if there’s a worry that jazz will somehow become tainted by ‘high art’ and loseits earthiness, its popular appeal (although anyone with the faintest grasp on realityshould realize that the days when jazz was a popular music are long gone). What a lot of musicians and critics seem afraid of above all is pretentiousness –
pretending
to a statuswhich it isn’t theirs to claim.I won’t deny that there
are
problems with Henthoff’s lofty comparison: for instance, the use of the word ‘metaphor’- how can that work musically? In relation to aform so fundamentally abstract, it seems a little odd to describe one (abstract) thing interms of another (abstract) thing – although that’s not to deny that sounds haveresonances beyond their immediately heard qualities (the inflection of content by form, asin M.L. Gasparov’s concept of the ‘semantic halo’ that surrounds particular poetic forms,imbuing the words they contain with meanings beyond those of the words themselves).There’s also a slightly uncomfortable mixture of the ‘high’ - the trio's performance isdescribed as “musical anacrostics”, Taylor as “the prolific composer, expert on ragtime,mambo, Bach fugues and James Joyce” - with the ‘low’, and the hipsterish slang of suchformulations as “this is a story about a chick called 'Laura'.”Still, whatever the nuances Henthoff overlooked when making Billy Taylor the jazz equivalent of Marianne Moore, I can think of few people who would dare to makesuch comparisons today, unless in very generalized terms, where any poet, fromShakespeare to Eliot, would do. (An exception would be someone like Brian Morton, asattested by his piece in a recent edition of Bill Shoemaker's wonderful online journalPoint of Departure, in which he talks about the kinship between Steve Lacy and RobertCreeley.)Of course, there
is
jazz/poetry crossover, but it tends to occur more in avant-garderealms – Steve Dalachinsky, who's worked with Matthew Shipp and John Tchicai – or, inthe world of free improv –Derek Bailey’s reading out of excerpts from Peter Riley’s poetry while playing guitar on ‘Takes Fakes and Dead She Dances’. Furthermore, such
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