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The Boys in the Bands |
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Happen sometime you can put some whining in the blowing of your instrument. There are a whole lot of different sounds you can shove in—such as crying—everywhere you get the chance. But you gotta do that with a certain measurement and not opposed to the harmony. Dont play Mice you're at no funeral/'
Keep a lively tempo but "shove in crying wherever you get the chance." Then your listeners can dance and feel the tears behind. This is the master formula of jazz—mulatto know-ingness ripened by black sorrow. Perhaps Nelson began this "whining" through instruments. At any rate the singing through the reeds and brasses—the instrumental imitation of the marvelous techniques of Afro-American folksong—this is a principal innovation of New Orleans jazzmen, responsible for a new array of orchestral sounds that has traveled everywhere with jazz, opening broad new musical horizons.
"That ain't all there is to it," said Louis. "No, that ain't all." He seemed to have run out of words. He plucked nervously at the covers, pulling them up to the neck of his heavy winter underwear. At last he said, not looking at me, "You've got to play with the heart. Picou, he come before me, he's a good enough musician, but they"—referring to the note-musicians who had taught him and to all the Uptown folks— 'They don't play with the heart. . . ."
He looked sick and old. Alone and sick. Yet the heart of this man had warmed ten thousand, thousand nights for all the world. "Do you know Sidney?" he suddenly asked, with a smile that had become really warm, as anyone who has ever heard Sidney Bechet blow sunshine out of his hom would have smiled. "Sidney," said Louis, as if this explained everything. "He wouldn't learn notes, but he was my best scholar. The son-of-a-gun was gifted. Man, he ran away with that thing, playing from his heart. . . ."
Mulatto to black, black to mulatto-mulatto Tio to Nelson, Nelson (a black by inspiration) to mulatto Bechet: this was the, chain reaction that at last exploded into jazz. A new gen- |
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