Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport '56 Review

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Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport '56 ReviewThe following review appeared in issue 315 of Jazz & Blues Report (April 2009). My star rating is being conservative or stingy.
The last few years have seen a spate of books centered around a record album, telling the story about the artists and how the specific album came about and its impact. For example, Ashley Kahn has provided wonderful volumes devoted to "Kind of Blue" and "A Love Supreme." John Fass Morton's new book, "Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport 56" is on one level the story of the classic live recording by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, but it goes even deeper into social history to examine not simply how the recording happened, but also discuss the impact of the Festival performance.
The performance at Newport is recognized as helping revive Ellington's prominence in the American music scene and Morton provides a valuable and concise sketch of Ellington's career, including his emergence in New York during the twenties; the prominent part he played in the Swing era; how he was affected by the decline of the big bands and the shift in the direction of popular music; and the recording career including Ellington's aspirations which related to the writing and performance/recording of longer compositions. Yet no longer enjoying the financial success allowing him to maintain the same level of a band, by 1955 Ellington had to accept a six week stint at the Aquacades in Flushing Meadows, the site of the 1939 World's Fair, which also led to him having to replace several band members lacking a local union card.
At this time Ellington was also frustrated with the record companies. While Columbia, which was popularizing the new LP form, enabled Ellington to record extended works including the now highly regarded "Masterpieces" and "Ellington Uptown," they were not commercial successes. And frustrated with the two major labels, Victor and Columbia, he signed with Capital but again met little success. Ellington was an emcee at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, foreshadowing his performance the next year and by then had resigned with Columbia where he was reunited with George Avakian who had produced "Masterpieces" and had also produced successful recordings by Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, and was behind the recording of Ellington and others at the 1956 Festival.
Morton weaves together Avakian's biography along with that of the members of the 1956 Ellington Band, the most interesting of which was tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves (of Cape Verdean descent), the birth and early history of the Newport Jazz Festivals and the story of Elaine Anderson, the blonde lady whose dance during Paul Gonsalves' tenor solo was part of the musical magic generated that July 1956 evening. It is fascinating to read how Elaine Lorillard, wife of an heir of a tobacco fortune, helped establish the festival in this most unlikely setting, a high society community. Then she helped sustain the festival against local opposition towards the earliest Newport Festivals. This is where George Wein first started producing festivals, and there were a number of interesting tidbits including the fact that Wein created the Photographer's Pit for the first Newport Jazz Festival, something many working press at festivals take for granted.
We get to the magic evening and the performance of Ellington and others on the bill that night. Ellington's long-extended original work, Newport Jazz Festival Suite, had received lukewarm applause, and recognizing this he launched into Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with an interval where he would play piano before calling forth Gonsalves who launched into one of the most celebrated tenor saxophone blues solos of all time with the band spurred on as Jo Jones whacked a roll newspaper into his hand. As the audience reaction got more enthusiastic, Elaine Anderson started dancing in the aisle near the stage while Gonsalves kept preaching the blues. Her dance was captured by the photographers in the Photo Pit and were included in coverage of the event as well as on the back cover of "Ellington at Newport 56." At the time her identity was not known, but Morton was able to uncover her story of a one-time Hollywood hopeful starlet who had settled into the somewhat frustrating live of a wife and mother. And while this is going on, we learn how Avakian and others are dealing with the fact Gonsalves is not playing directly into the mike being used to record his performance, but fortunately into a microphone used by Voice of America for foreign broadcast and the recording of which years later would be used in some reissues of the album in the digital age. Morton then discusses the aftermath of that night including the release of the recording, the impact of the album and press coverage of Ellington's performance on the revitalization of his big band, and what happened to the participants subsequently.

There is so much in this rich and varied story for Morton to tell us. Given the rich historical tapestry, there are places one might feel one is bogged down in detail, but not only would one be hard-pressed to find anything extraneous, but at a certain point the story told here takes over and you settle in for the ride. Washington post book critic Jonathan Yardley authored the book's introduction and he notes that "I have been blessed in many ways, probably more than I deserve, with a richly rewarding private life and a small but gratifying public one, but that night in Newport stands alone and apart." It is to Morton's credit that he is able to convey some sense of the magic that made that night so unique and memorable. This book will make those having the album listen to it a new, and for others hopefully lead them to discover that one magical evening in Newport, Rhode Island.
Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport '56 OverviewIt may be that the song most baby boomers identify from July 1956 is a simple twelve-bar blues, hyped on national television by a twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley and his handlers. But it is a very different song, with its elongated fourteen-bar choruses of rhythm and dissonance, played on the night of July 7, 1956, by a fifty-seven-year-old Duke Ellington and his big band that got everybody on their feet and moving as one. More than fifty years later, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," recorded at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, still makes a profound statement about postwar America - how we got there and where it all went."Backstory in Blue" is a behind-the-scenes look at this epic moment in American cultural history. It is the story of who and what made Ellington's composition so compelling and how one piece of music reflected the feelings and shaped the sensibilities of the postwar generation. As John Fass Morton explains, it was music expressed as much by those who performed offstage as by those who performed on.Written from the point of view of the audience, this unique account draws on interviews with fans and music professionals of all kinds who were there and whose lives were touched, and in some cases changed, by the experience. Included are profiles of George Avakian, who recorded and produced Ellington at Newport 1956; Paul Gonsalves, the tenor sax player responsible for the legendary twenty-seven choruses that enabled the rebirth of Ellington's career; and the "Bedford Blonde," Elaine Anderson, whose dance ignited both the band and the crowd.Duke Ellington once remarked, "I was born at Newport." Here we learn that Newport was much more than the turning point for Ellington's career. It was the tipping point for a generation and a musical genre.

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Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Refiguring American Music) Review

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Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Refiguring American Music) ReviewMexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935 - 1968
By Anthony Macías
Anthony Macías' Mexican American Mojo is a highly readable, informative, and neatly-crafted examination of the indispensable roles played by various Mexican Americans in the middle of the 20th century in Los Angeles in the popular musical culture of the time. Macías self-consciously moves beyond mere presentation of the well-known figures of Mexican Angelino music (193), such as Ritchie Valens (184 - 191), and presents us with a variety of sketches of names, faces, styles, and relationships which flourished in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the period. Not strictly limiting himself to a discussion of musical style and musical figures, Macías evokes full-bodied portraits of Mexican American cultural groups: squares and pachucos, immigrants and high-school kids, jazz legends and G.I.'s.
In particular, Macías' (Chapter 2) examination of the role of fashion as assimilation and resistance opens the book artfully and reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. While he does not address the role of formal fashion, driven by European and East-coast interests, he is constantly mindful of the larger historical context in which Mexican American fashion in music and clothes develops. His work constantly references the popular African American styles, such as those which formed the foundation of Zoot suit fashion (70 - 71), and the distinct tensions which arise between sub-groups (such as Zoot suiters) and other Mexican Americans. He refreshes his readers with brief narrations of key historical moments in Mexican Angelino history such as the Sleepy Lagoon Trial, Zoot Suit Riots, and the deportation of the Japanese (24), then places the responses of various Mexican American groups in context.
Macías further demonstrates a sensitivity to regional variety and geography. He notes the impact of relocated southerners (with their varied attitudes towards `race') in WWII (68), the impact of public transportation on accessibility to communities and venues (65), and the white-flight impact of Jewish relocation from the inner city to wealthier suburbs on the demographic composition of various Los Angeles neighborhoods (122).
Although music remains his focus, the author is also not afraid to connect the various sub-groups he examines to controversial issues such as gang-affiliation (75) and marijuana use (129 - 130), the latter providing fertile ground for musical exploration and creativity. Likewise he does not hesitate to show how the dynamics of race prejudice extend from the Mexican American community towards others. In one fine example he shows how the Mexican-Filipino musician, Richard Barrientos, takes an overheard criticism of Asian musicians ("los orientales no saben nada sobre nuestra musica") and turns it into his own affirmative musical anthem: "Los orientales saben los ritmos cubanos" (255 - 256). He shows the way in which Mexican Americans both submitted to and subverted popular stereotypes by portraying sombrero-wearing, serape-draped musical comics as a means of gaining cross-racial popularity (203 - 204).
One of the most fascinating and consistent themes developed in Macías' book is that of race mixing and race switching. He shows how African Americans such as Babs Brown take on Mexican American identities to avoid the anti-black racism of many American institutions such as hospitals (69). Equally fascinating, he notes the ways in which racist attacks can be turned against the dominant group by the dominant group, noting cases in which individuals claim Mexicanness to avoid being hassled as white (162), on in which white kids are targeted in mixed-race neighborhoods by police as a means of preventing miscegenation (155). He further develops themes of neo-culturation and trans-culturation in his discussion of pachucos (92) and Anglo pachucos (114), demonstrating the vast variety of ways in which individuals and groups craft racial and ethnic identities for themselves.
Alongside the theme of race switching, Macías presents his readers with a kaleidoscopic vision of race in America: one in which all the colors are broken and reassembled into new configurations and forms. All under the umbrella of "Mexican/Latin Americans" he presents us with cases as diverse as those of Chinese Cubans (256), Rene Bloch, a "Jewish convert" to Latin Jazz (249), Richard Barrientos, the Filipino-Mexican mentioned above (246), Victor Brac, a "Mexican Americanized Anglo" (208), Johnny Otis "black by persuasion" (184), Little Juilan Herrera -a Hungarian Jew (183), "African American cholos" (172), the Sicilian-Mexican, Gil Bernal (160), and Kay Nomura, a "second generation Japanese American who walked and talked like his black neighbors" (159). Macías provides many more intriguing examples of these varied components of racial identity.
Ironically, my biggest formal criticism of this book is a back-handed criticism: it's so great to read about all these pieces of music, and so awful not to be able to hear them, that I must criticize Macías for not putting out an accompanying CD with this book. Less potent a criticism, I would have appreciated a few printed musical notational examples to better understand a few of the things he described, such as his description of the rhythmic division of claves (235).
Macías excels in his use of interviews and primary ethnography, but is at times weak in his use of secondary sources. The sources he chooses are often excellent (such as the work of Ted Gioia), but he frequently lapses into reliance on citations of citations. He is particularly weak when it comes to citations of major periodicals.At times his citations do not reference the primary topic he is referencing. On page he 105 makes a reasonable assertion about segregation public facilities which discriminates against Mexican Americans, but his subsequent citations do not support the assertion. On page 145 cites Kiyo Umeda about discrimination against suspected gang members and pachucos, but gives only the unrelated Music Bureau pamphlet citation. More awkwardly when he discusses the deliberate segregation of Catholic churches, he provides a quote within a quote within a quote (137), leaving picky readers to suspect his source.
On a more methodological level, my strongest criticism of Macías work is that cause and effect are dealt with anecdotally rather than synthetically. He often raises excellent questions about the changes within the community, but does not interrogate them methodologically, and only ménages to provide individual accounts, which, though valuable, do not provide a more satisfying (to me) level of analysis. His discussion of the decline of mambo (279) and the decline of jazz styles as being squeezed in the middle between black and white jazz traditions (200), or on the means in which cholos inherited a cultural (but not stylistic) mantle from pachucos (169) - in each of these cases he provides some valuable first-person accounts and views, but is thin on explanatory hypotheses.
While I believe Macías tries his best to be sensitive to the roles of gender, his material in a sense tends to force him to ignore the role of women. The strongly male-gendered creation of jazz and pachuco styles leaves him with little material with which to address the role of women in creating the jazz culture of Los Angeles, aside from his (generally good) analysis of pachuca clothing and hair fashion. In this latter aspect, however, he does a nice job of discussing the androgynous character of pachuco fashion (81, 107), though, aside from a quoted epithet, makes no reference to sexual orientation (212). At one point, though, he seems to have to rely on other authors to make his gender analyses. The following example shows a weak way in which he addresses the role of women's fashion acquisition, though a decontextualized argument made by another author: "As Espinoza argues, just because young Mexican American women consumed youth culture fashions did not necessarily mean they were `buying into' white culture and the Anglo value system." (211) I am not sure of what Espinoza's point is, but it is clear that these women are quite literally `buying into' in white culture in the most commercial (and capitalist) way imaginable.
Finally, Macías work retains a weak ambiguity in dealing with "Anglos". This is not inherent to Macías, but rather to American culture and English-language (as well as to the very notion of racialization). Who are "Anglos"? In one sentence, Macías seems to distinguish them from other Euro-Americans: "Anglos and white ethnic European Americans" (139), in others he seems to impute entire sexual characteristics to them as a group, others having "a non-Anglo sexuality and sensibility" (278).
Despite these nit-pickly criticisms, I heartily endorse Macias' book for any readers interested in either the history of jazz, the history of Los Angeles, or the history of Mexican Americans in the 20th century.Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Refiguring American Music) OverviewStretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility, Anthony Macías shows how by participating in jazz, the zoot suit phenomenon, car culture, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Latin music, Mexican Americans not only rejected second-class citizenship and demeaning stereotypes, but also transformed Los Angeles.
Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots "multicultural urban civility" that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians' union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.

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A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album Review

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A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album ReviewI loved this book. In fact I was just ordering a few extra copies to give as gifts to serious jazz connoisseurs when I came across this drivel from Rich Fontana in the customer reviews section. I felt that as a fan of both the album and the book, I am compelled to reply to his assiduously prepared critique.
In taking the author to task for being a fan, he misses the point of the book entirely: it is intended as a passionate celebration as much as carefully researched study. The author admits it unabashedly, Coltrane himself stated that an "emotional reaction" to music was paramount (in a '64 interview with Leonard Feather) and how else can one measure the effect and influence of a spiritual album without engaging the emotional?
As stated clearly by the author, and Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner - A Love Supreme was indeed a culmination of the quartet's three years together, not a culmination of Coltrane's career. Yes, Crescent was important and the author states that, even proposing it as an effective blueprint for the four-part suite that ALS is. Mr. Fontana's argument that his own perspective on Crescent is significantly different from the author's goes so far into the realm of picayune that - if it were deemed important enough to be published -- the vast majority of readers would end up scratching their heads and closing the book. (And while on the subject of hair-splitting, Crescent was recorded and released in 1964 - not 1963 - as Mr. Fontana maintains, an important matter in the hyper-charged Trane timeline.)
As to Kahn's use (another small matter apparently missed by someone who relishes detail: the author's name is K-A-H-N) of rock n' rollers (and minimalists, and world musicians) in gauging the reach and influence of ALS. One of the primary intentions of the book is OBVIOUSLY to show how Coltrane managed to transcend stylistic and categorical boundaries - and still does. In the same way the old Blindfold interviews in Down Beat - in which say, Coltrane would praise Lester Young, leading certain fans to ferret out and enjoy old Count Basie recordings - today's far-flung media allows a Carlos Santana oreven the dreaded Bono to help point their fans to the music of Coltrane
In the end, Mr. Fontana comes across as one who requires his music writing the same way: dry, analytical, single-minded. Jazz - and music in general - is NOT rocket science and should not be left to the cold, hard interpretation of one person (such as Mr. Fontana's own, opinion-as-fact portrayal of Coltrane's musical path.) In the virtual round-table Kahn has produced in this book, there is life and passion (and a helluva lot of great photographic images), powered by his own perceptions but mostly by the input of others: jazz musicians, jazz fans, even regular (G-d forbid -- non-jazz) listeners. He trusts his reader to figure it all out for him or herself, that somewhere among all those voices sits the general truth of music, Coltrane and A Love Supreme.
I applaud Ashley Kahn for making a very readable, authoritative book that exudes love and respect for its subject. This kind of writing will do more to breathe life into the jazz continuum than the boring tomes that more often pass for jazz writing. I can't wait to see what Kahn comes up with next.A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album Overview

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