Looking for a great vacation where you can dig a lot of jazz?
How about New York, New Orleans, Chicago…or Boston.
Boston?
Yes, Boston.
A thriving local scene with deep historical roots, amazing schools (Berklee and New England Conservatory of Music), plus the “Boston-New York Pipeline.” Richard Vacca takes us by the hand and explains all.
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Music credit: The Jazz on the Tube podcast theme song is “Mambo Inferno” performed by The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra conducted by Bobby Sanabria from the CD ¡Que Viva Harlem!
Jazz on the Tube is declaring 2021 the “Year of Eddie Durham.”
If you don’t know Eddie Durham (1906-1987), buckle your seat belts. He’s one of the secret sources of the music we call jazz.
Take Eddie out of the equation and a whole lot of things that made jazz jazz would never have happened.
He’s easily one of the most important musicians in the history of jazz and therefore one of the most important musicians in the history of American music.
Whose careers were nourished by Eddie Durham’s genius?
How about these for starters?
The Oklahoma City Blue Devils, Benny Moten, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Lester Young, Glenn Miller – and this is just the short list!
1. Moten’s Swing (1933) – (00:00)
2. Hittin’ the Bottle (1935) – (03:24)
3. Topsy (1937) – (06:24)
4. Good Morning Blues (1937) – (09:38)
5. Swinging the Blues (1938) – (12:26)
6. Countless Blues (1938) – (15:10)
7. Way Down Yonder in New Orleans (1938 – two takes) – (18:07)
8. Jumpin’ at the Woodside (1939) – (24:09)
9. In the Mood (1939) – (27:18)
Documentary about Eddie Durham by the Center for Texas Music History
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Music credit: The Jazz on the Tube podcast theme song is “Mambo Inferno” performed by The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra conducted by Bobby Sanabria from the CD ¡Que Viva Harlem!
Some essential gems of jazz history hidden in an obscure book I came across about about jazz in Kansas City
The book is built around dozens of great musicians who lived through its Golden Age telling the story…in their own words.
Some of the diamonds I uncovered:
* The essential differences between New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City-style jazz
* The very real trouble Lester Young had holding down a job and how Eddie Durham wrote arrangements specifically to make him and his unique tone employable
* What young Count Basie was like and why the extent of his genius is not fully appreciated
* A vivid picture of what a musical paradise Kansas City was in its prime and why it might have been THE most musician-friendly city in all of human history!
* The seldom-mentioned musical influences that produced a generation of master musicians in America’s Southwest – Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri – that fed Kansas City’s musical scene.
* A finely detailed description of exactly how Charlie Parker worked out his harmonic concept and two little-known musicians who coached him through the process.
* The extraordinary musical life of Mary Lou Williams from her teenage years on the road, to thriving in Kansas City, to mentoring young musicians like Thelonious Mon, Bud Powell and others and helping them work out their some of their classic compositions.
* A cogent argument for the case that Kansas City was where MODERN jazz was born.
Within months of picking up the saxophone, Ornette was a working musicians in some of the scariest dives in Fort Worth, bringing home much needed money for his family whose father, a baseball player and singer, died when Ornette was seven.
We talk about this and other topics and read from A.B. Spellman’s classic: “Four Lives in the Bebop Business”
Erratum: Spellman refers to Melvin Lastie as “Melvin Lassister, a clarinetist.” It’s possible Melvin also played the clarinet, but he was most known for his trumpet playing.
The Lastie clan is one of the great New Orleans musical families and includes Herman Riley and the Andrews clan (James, Troy and Glenn) in their extended family. Frank Lastie introduced gospel drums to the Spiritual Church. and played with Louis Armstrong in the Waif’s Home Band. The family was very important in the Spiritual Church.
Others episodes from “Ornette: Deep from the Heart of Texas” here:
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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We go even further down this fascinating rabbit hole.
When Ornette was 19 (1949), he had an extended gig in Amarillo, Texas where he regularly jammed “after hours” with a legendary avant-garde hillbilly steel guitar player.
The history of American music is richer and more surprising than we can imagine!
NOTE: There were THREE Billy Briggs in Texas: a fiddle player, a saxophonist, and the artist in question.
Note: It was a performance of this tune by a visiting jazz band performing in the auditorium of I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth that Ornette says inspired him with the idea of playing the saxophone (c. 1943)
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Avant-garde genius or one of many Master Musicians who sprung from the earth of one of the most fertile musical cradles the world has ever seen?
Of course, Ornette is both.
In this unique podcast we focus on what others have ignored: How Ornette comes straight from the big open musical heart of Texas.
Move over Brazil, Cuba, New Orleans…Texas is in the house.
Errata
Three misspeaks
1. “Captain Dyett”
2. “When Ornette worked Silas Green”
3. Eddie Durham wore his hair long and braided in a Native American style as a child, but probably cut it long before becoming an adult. (In addition to being of Afro-American, Mexican and Irish ancestry, Durham’s mother was of Cherokee descent and his father of Mohawk. His first language as a child was Spanish.)
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
