First off, Tony Campise is still a guest of the medical establishment, at a rehab place in Austin. He was moved by turns from the ICU to the regular wards at the hospital in Corpus, to a rehab place in Austin at St. Davids, where my cardiologist practices his craft, to an outside rehab place to Brackenridge Hospital to treat a staph infection, and back to an outside rehab place, where he is now.
We did a benefit for him in December, the day after we returned from the Sapphire Princess, and it was at that gig that three gals–Marilyn Rucker, Diana Bray and Lisa Clark–stepped forward and performed three zany Christmas songs on their own with the big band behind them. Their delivery was so engaging that they brought down the house.
Somehow a switch was tripped inside me which said, “You know, if you’re having difficulty booking your eleven-piece band, why not add three girl singers and give it a go?” Such are the ways of the arranger’s brain.
I remembered that we I had done arrangements of a couple Andrews Sisters tunes, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Say Sĺ Sĺ” and I thought they’d have a blast singing Jimmy Rowles’ “Ballad of Thelonious Monk.” Then there was “I Wan’na Be Like You,” originally sung by Louis Prima in the Disney movie of Kipling’s Jungle Book.
So off I went to write.
That was 5 weeks ago. We were all busy on New Years, and soon afterward Marilyn had a surgery, so we still haven’t had a rehearsal, but that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming up a name (Mineshaft Canaries) and a dramatic concept which the whole lot can be dropped into.
I’ve taken leave of the small band for the first six months of this year so I can concentrate on this project. In addition, I’ll be trying to put together a 5-piece band doing Brazilian music. I’m trying to justify all the money I have invested in flutes, and I’m on the verge of selling off some Craigslist acquisitions to get an alto flute. As usual, there’s no cash for this purpose, just a room full of stuff I don’t use that ought to generate interest on Craigslist.
And another thing . . .
I picked up a copy of a 1955 Down Beat magazine (which changed its name in the seventies to down beat—ay carumba) with an interesting column by Leonard Feather, or, as we used to call him when he was writing jazz criticism in the Los Angeles Times back in the seventies, Learned Father.
Here it is:
Ruth Cage raised a provocative question in her April 6 column in which she suggested that the recent campaign against suggestive rhythm and blues lyrics was inspired by ASCAP’s battle against BMI.
There may be something to her theory but my own feeling is that larger issues are involved in any discussion of the current status of r&b music. One can dismiss the complaints leveled against r&b lyrics by pointing out that Trixie Smith recorded He Likes It Slow in 1926, that Bessie Smith’s famous Empty Bed Blues was cut in 1928, and that you can trace smut all the way back to Shakespeare and beyond.
There may have been no other reason for raising the issue, at this particular moment, than the time-honored tradition among periodicals of drawing attention to themselves by deliberately stirring up controversies.
What concerns me much more deeply about the r&b state of the nation is not simply the lyrical content but the overall musical level of this phase of the arts, which Miss Cage herself has mentioned from time to time.
Until a few years ago, when a very sensible campaign for a change of name was started by Billboard, r&b records were known as race records. Now I would ask you kindly to compare the sort of records that were being sold successfully in that field years ago with those that are making the grade on r&b best-seller lists today.
Back in the 1920s and ’30s the biggest sellers included such singers as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, and scores of others in the same general class.
Instrumentally, there were Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, even Duke Ellington, and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Jimmie Lunceford, Fats Waller, Don Redman. All these and dozens more, at least in their earlier years, sold exclusively to the r&b buyers (this was before jukeboxes, of course, but the audience was exactly compatible with today’s r&b market).
All these artists, you need hardly be told, became music immortals; their records are being reissued to this day. There was no real borderline between jazz and r&b music.
All right, now let’s look at the r&b picture today.
Can you picture an LP reissue, 25 years from today, of immortal classics by the Hearts, the Charms, the Penguins, the Moonglows or the Crows?
Do you think such early r&b hits as Downhearted Blues, Loveless Love, and West End Blues will be superseded by such currnt masterworks as Oop-Shoop, Tweedle Dee and Bazoom, I Need Your Lovin’?
Can you see a jazz fan in a record shop, after buying the latest experimental works of Charlie Mingus, turning around to ask the clerk, “What’s new by Willis Jackson?”
With rare exceptions such as Joe Turner and Ruth Brown (Atlantic is to be commended for the high level of its offerings), the entire r&b market today is dominated by three factors:
- Vocal groups that seem to have issued to one another a challenge boasting: “We can sing out-of-tuner than you can.”
- Tortured, tortuous ballad singers who would lose all their appeal if they were fitted with spines.
- Instrumentalists who made names for themselves on personal appearances by playing a solo and simultaneously removing their jacket. pants, shirt, and teeth while suspended from a chandelier.
- Love songs whose lyrics literally (and I mean literally) could have been written by any reasonably bright third-grader in grammar school.
- Novelty jump tunes written by the younger brothers of those who wrote the love songs.
I’m sorry, but the fact that somebody is raising a ruckus about naughty lyrics seems mighty unimportant when you stop to consider a much more shocking fact—that music, as a creative art, and the average r&b performance, by today’s standards, are about as close together as Eisenhower and Bulganin—and a meeting between the two seems equally distant and improbable in both cases.
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I was just four when this issue of DB hit the streets, so I can hardly comment on his direct charges. But bringing the argument 25 years forward presents interesting possibilities.
Leonard had a habit of stirring things up (I believe he coined the phrase “moldy figs” to describe the musicians still playing “traditional jazz”), yet so much of this resonates with my theory that (forgive me, Les Paul for you know not what you did) the ability to have technology in the form of overdubbing, pitch correction, and countless other gimmicks which were not available to musicians in most of the twentieth century have given rise to technology-based art, which is, ultimately, technology.
What do you think?
