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- John Penney  [ 3/16/2006 - 11:44 ]   #

 The New Masses Presents
      AN EVENING OF AMERICAN NEGRO MUSIC
          “From Spirituals to Swing”
          (DEDICATED TO BESSIE SMITH)
      FRIDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 23, 1938
         Carnegie Hall

John Hammond conceived of this concert as a political statement set to music:  “...the Negro people have produced some of the most amazing musicians the world has ever known,” and they deserved better than the oppression and discrimination they were subjected to.

Hammond was born on December 15, 1910 in an eight-story mansion on New York’s upper east side, an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune. As a child he discovered a Columbia Grafanola in the servant’s quarters, and by the age of 12 was collecting recordings of “early Negro and country artists.” His grandmother had a player piano and he also began collecting jazz rolls. At the age of 17 he snuck up to Harlem to hear Bessie Smith, telling his parents he had to go out to play string quartets. For the rest of his high school days he inhabited the Harlem clubs, frequently the only white face in the room.

While a student at Yale Hammond returned to New York on weekends and spent his nights in Harlem. During his sophomore year a recurrence of jaundice forced him to drop out, but by then Hammond had determined that he wanted a career in the music business.

His father sent him to “The Millionaire’s Club” in Georgia to recuperate. As Hammond says in his autobiography, “I returned to New York physically recovered and emotionally enraged. The habit of discrimination was so encrusted by centuries of acceptance that both black and white knew no other way to act. I had walked through my first southern Nigger town, the son of the president of a private club for millionaires, many of them Southern, all of them white and Protestant. To know better was no longer enough. I had to do something.”

For Hammond doing something meant promoting the artists and music he loved. As an independently wealthy man he was able to pursue his passion as he saw fit. As a young man he wrote about jazz for music magazines, invested in concerts, produced his first records, and hosted the first ever radio program devoted to jazz. He traveled the country by car, seeking out new talent.

At the center of his vision was a concert that would “bring together for the first time, before a musically sophisticated audience, Negro music from its raw beginnings to the latest jazz,” but it took years to find a sponsor that would underwrite the talent search and Carnegie Hall production. In early 1938, the Marxist publication, “New Masses,” agreed to sign on.

Hammond contacted a talent scout in North Carolina and set out to find his performers. Robert Johnson was at the top of Hammond’s list but had been killed by his girlfriend earlier in the year. “Big Bill” Broonzy was signed instead. Hammond also signed many of the performers he had discovered in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City.

In the printed program for the event Hammond laid out the show, not in the order of performances, but in the order by which the music evolved. There were eight parts:

Introduction During which recordings made by the H. E. Tracy expedition to the Africa were played.

I. Spirituals and Holy Roller Hymns
Mitchell’s Christian Singers were a group of laborers from North Carolina that sang a cappella on Sundays. Hammond went to their home, a back country shack without water or electricity, to sign them up.Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a forerunner to Mahalia Jackson, a singer and guitarist who played a “Holy Roller” style of hymns that straddled gospel and the blues. She played mostly in churches but had done one night at The Cotton Club, which brought her to Hammond’s attention.

II. Soft Swing 
The Kansas City Six featured Lester Young (cl. tsax.), Buck Clayton (tr.), Eddie Durham (electric g.), Freddie Greene (g.), Walter Page (b.), and Joe Jones (dr.) Their music straddled swing and dixieland styles of jazz.
 
III. Harmonica Playing
Hammond went to North Carolina to sign Blind Boy Fuller, but Fuller was in jail. Living next door was blind harmonica player Sanford (Sonny) Terry, and upon hearing him Hammond signed him on the spot.

IV. Blues
It had been Hammond’s dream to feature Bessie Smith, but she had passed on by the time the concert was in production, so he signed Ruby Smith – no relation to Bessie – accompanied by James P. Johnson, one of the originators of the “stride” style of piano that straddled the transition from ragtime to jazz.Hammond discovered blues shouter Joe Turner and his colleague boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson in Kansas City, and first brought them to New York to perform at The Famous Door in 1936. In 1938 he brought them back for a guest appearance on Benny Goodman’s “Camel Caravan,” and they stayed to perform in Carnegie Hall. Bill Broonzy had moved from Arkansas to Chicago in 1924, where he had become a major figure in the blues scene. The Carnegie Hall performance marked the first time he had played for a white audience. Jimmy Rushing was the vocalist in Count Basie’s band, and Helen Humes was a volcalist Hammond had discovered in Louisville, Kentucky and recommended to Basie. They both performed with small groups at Carnegie Hall before performing with the orchestra.

V. Boogie-Woogie Piano Playing
Pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis had shared a rooming house with Pinetop Smith in Chicago from 1927 to 1930. Smith had a hit with the recording of “Boogie Woogie” in 1928. After he passed away in 1929, Ammons and Lewis continued to develop the form. At Carnegie Hall they played solo, duo, and six-handed with Pete Johnson. The Spirituals to Swing concert began the boogie-woogie craze in this country. Ammons and Lewis were recorded together at the very first session for Blue Note Records in January of 1939.

VI. Early New Orleans Jazz
 Sidney Bechet (cl. ssax.), Tommy Ladnier(tr.), James P. Johnson (p.), Dan Minor (trb.), Jo Jones (dr.)

VII. Swing
 Count Basie and His Orchestra

The concert was oversold to the extent that chairs for an additional 400 people had to be put on stage, and a second “From Spirituals to Swing” concert was staged on Christmas Day, 1939.

- John Penney  [ 2/21/2006 - 13:44 ]   #

Fat Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. In French, "Fat Tuesday" is Mardi Gras," the raucous pre-Lenten celebration associated primarily with New Orleans that today is in not-quite full swing in the storm ravaged city.

A decade or so ago I decided that, as I had always enjoyed the music of New Orleans, I would do a Mardi Gras special on my radio program the weekend before Fat Tuesday. I thought I should do a little research. I quickly discovered that there is no such thing as "a little research" when it comes to New Orleans.

What began as a simple excuse to play music I liked one Sunday afternoon evolved into an annual event fueled by an ongoing fascination with the city, its history, and its culture. The roots of blues, rhythm & blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll are all in New Orleans, and the evolution of the music is inseperable from the evolution of the city.

"Gumbo" is the most common metaphor for New Orleans, and it most apt. A good homemade gumbo can take days to make - mine generally take three or four. The first thing you make is the roux, flour cooked in fat that provides the smoky foundation for the dish. Next you add stock, and finally you add the stuff - crawdads, shrimp, chicken, sausage, greens, whatever.

The gumbo that is New Orleans took centuries to make, and the roux was made in the earliest days of the original settlement.

The eminent New Orleans scholar Pierce Lewis has described it as, "an inevitable city on an impossible site." Inevitable because it is at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and impossible because there really isn't a "mouth." Rather, for 200 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, there is nothing but swampland.

The site of the original French city, commissioned in 1718, has been described as, "wretched." It is too hot, too humid, prone to flooding and hurricanes, and the swamps bred untold numbers of disease-laden mosquitos. Respectable Europeans who had a choice did not choose to live in New Orleans. The original settlers were mostly hustlers, thieves, and opportunists.

The first slaves arrived directly from Africa in the early 1720's. But the French Catholic attitude towards slavery was quite different from that of the English Protestant colonials, and it resulted in a relatively large population of "free people of color" from the earliest days of the colony.

In the first place, slaves were allowed to earn money. City masters often loaned their slaves to others as wage laborers, and slaves were given the weekends off, when again they could work for wages. They used the money to buy their freedom.

Additionally, the French were quite open about secual liasons with slaves. Their mixed race offspring were frequently raised as free men or given their freedom when the father died. Many received an education, some going back to France for it.

These original settlers are the Creoles of New Orleans. They are French speaking Eurpoeans and Africans and, most importantly, everybody in between. In 18th century New Orleans there was no stark distinction between black and white, as there was in the English colonies. Africans and Europeans shared both genes and cultures, and the mixing of many rich shades of brown, both physically and culturally, was essential to the roux.

Another crucial ingredient was the infusion of Native American culture. Africans and Native Americans had much in common. They were both oppressed by the white man. They shared similar beliefs about nature and man's place in it. And they shared a love of music and dance. They were natural friends and allies.

Native Americans orchestrated the first documented escape of African slaves from the colony in 1725. The first account of Africans dressing as Native Americans - a sign of respect among neighboring tribes - comes from the Mardi Gras celebration of 1746.

Rampart Street in New Orleans demarked the inland boundary of the original city. Just outside the rampart was an open field. There are many conflicting stories, but it is apparent that it was a gathering place for Native Americans.

Creoles and Africans began to gather there too. There are stories about Creoles and Native Americans playing lacrosse together on the field. Over time, it evolved into a marketplace.

In 1744 this field was legitimized as the "Place de Negroes," where on weekends free people of color could gather openly to do business, trade news and gossip, and just hang out together. Slaves were allowed to join the congregation, and on Sunday afternoons they would come with traditional African drums and instruments. They would play music and sing, and dance.

Within a few years their numbers grew to hundreds, and Europeans, Creoles, African Americans, and Native Americans would all gather on this field for the weekly musical celebration.

The translation is not exact, but Place des Negroes became Congo Plain, and then Congo Square.

France ceded Louisiana to the Spanish after the Seven Years War in 1763, bought it back in 1800, and within three years sold it to the Americans. French Canadian refugees, the Acadians that came to be known as Cajuns, began arriving in 1764. And a few decades later black, white, and mixed race refugees from the slave revolts in Haiti began to arrive in large numbers. Sailors and settlers from all over the world would come, and some would stay.

Through all of this the Sunday afternoon gatherings continued in Congo Square, with more or less legitimacy. The Americans outlawed them in 1811, but the congregations simply reemerged elsewhere. So in 1817, in the interest of keeping them under watchful eyes, the city reestablished Congo Square as a place where, on Sunday afternoons, slaves could celebrate their heritage. As the city grew and flourished over the next century, this celebration of song and dance became renown throughout the world.

Congo Square is the cauldron in which the musical gumbo of New Orleans was cooked, and musicologists and historians point to all the stuff and stock added during the heyday of the 19th century as the source of most American musical genres.

But the roux was made much earlier, and without it the gumbo would not have been possible.

- John Penney  [ 11/18/2005 - 09:10 ]   #

When people ask what I’m up to these days I can tell them, “I’m the Director of The American Music Research Foundation,” and that sounds exceedingly cool.

The tough question is the follow up: What exactly does it mean to be “Director” of “The American Music Research Foundation?”

I thought I knew what a Director does. I envisioned it as analogous to what a Conductor does: Interpret the text and, proceeding from a keen understanding of strengths and weaknesses of the organization, orchestrate it; and then convey the resultant vision to the players in such a way that we make beautiful music together.  If you want to know what it means to be “team players,” look no further than the members of a successful Symphony Orchestra.

But the AMRF feels more like jazz to me. In Classical Music the state of the art is defined by the text. In jazz it is defined by spontaneous interpretation of text, and in fact often entails throwing the text away entirely and making it up as you go along.

I got a call once from an irate listener to my radio show, complaining about how Betty Carter was butchering a beautiful melody. I tried to explain to him that the name of the CD was, “It’s Not About The Melody,” but he would have none of it.  Charles Mingus insisted that his gigs be promoted as “jazz workshops” so that, if a patron complained that the live performance wasn’t like the record, hey: It wasn’t a concert, only a workshop, and there were no grounds for a complaint.

That’s jazz, and for a brilliant description of the creative process read pianist Bill Evans’ liner notes for Miles Davis’, “Kind Of Blue,” an essay entitled, “Improvisation In Jazz.”
 
Between the extremes of spontaneous interplay in a small jazz ensemble and the team discipline of a symphony orchestra there is the dynamic of the Big Band, which features scripted ensemble playing and improvised passages.  But even within this relatively limited genre, different leaders have different styles.

Duke Ellington explicitly recruited brilliant but difficult soloists for his band, and a significant element of his genius was the ability to get all of his superstars to play nice together. Many of his compositions were written specifically to highlight the talents of one of his irascible, self-centered stars. 

Tommy Dorsey was reputed to be a martinet who would brook no deviation from the script. His band was nothing if not “tight,” and if it swung it had nothing to do with the loose sense of, “swinging.” Rather, it derived from relentless adherence to the text Tommy proscribed.

The legendary drummer Gene Krupa toured with Dorsey, but I doubt that he ever got from Dorsey the space Benny Goodman gave him at Carnegie Hall during Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing Sing.”  Krupa’s solo has been called, “bombastic,” and even, “vulgar,” and Tommy would have had Krupa’s head had he played like that on his watch.  But the heights Krupa drove the band to – that Goodman encouraged him to take the band to – resulted in one of the most exciting and popular live recordings of the big band era.

So as an aspiring Director I have a lot of role models to choose from. But given the facts on the ground, I don’t think Tommy is in the mix. I’m coming into an organization that has been around for a few years, and the players have been working together for some time. To say that they know what they’re doing does not begin to describe the expertise and sheer talent that they bring to the bandstand.

Still, my job is to help interpret the text, coax the best out of our brilliant group of players, and make incredible music.

Our “text” at The American Music Research Foundation starts with the Mission Statement: “To collect, film, record, archive, restore, produce, master, edit and distribute material relating to American music; particularly the blues, ragtime, boogie woogie, jazz and rhythm and blues.”  It reads like a lawyer’s laundry list. It is in fact a lawyer’s laundry list, and it doesn’t swing. So one of the first things we did was to reinterpret it and come up with a one-liner that more or less sums up what we are about:

“The American Music Research Foundation is dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and documentation of American music and the artists who create it.”

What gives it particular resonance for me is the last bit about the artists. It comes straight out of the mind of our Founder and President, my good friend, and the guy who talked me into this gig, Ron Harwood. (Ron is actually the bandleader for the AMRF. I’m more like the Music Director – Freddie Green to his Count Basie.)

As Ron and I spent the past year talking about music and the possibility of my joining him at the Foundation, I heard one thread running through everything he does and wants to do with the AMRF. It is that he truly, deeply cares for the artists who make the music.

Music is, after all, something created by artists, and artists are people who are products of their time and place and experience. And while it may seem a no-brainer that without artists there would be no music, today music is often perceived as nothing more than digital files in cyberspace that should be available for free. What animates all of our activities at the AMRF is making the connection between artists and the music they make.

Making the connection begins of course by letting audiences see the artists performing. That’s what the Motor City Blues and Boogie Woogie Festival is all about. We don’t put on shows to make money. We set ticket prices just high enough to pay for the care, feeding and transport of the artists. Our goals are to get as many people out to see the performances as we can, and to document them for the historical record. 

The actual concerts are only the beginning. We video record them, and also record extensive interviews with the performers. These tapes reside in our archives and are available for students, scholars, and film makers in the future. The interviews in particular provide a link between the people and the music they made, insights about where the music came from.

We produced a 90-minute program from the 2003 festival documents for Detroit Public Television WTVS in 2004. On the strength of that production, and the endorsement of some 70-odd PTV stations across the US, we have entered into an agreement with the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) to distributute it nationally. The first satellite feed was last Sunday, and initial indications for broadcast around the country are overwhelming.   

We have three more television programs to produce and distribute by the end of 2006.  And we are turning our TV programs into DVDs containing “bonus footage." This will require additional production, and we will need to create packaging.  And since we would like to sell our DVDs nationally and even internationally, we need to build production and distribution pipelines. The DVD projects need to be completed before the related television programs air, because the broadcasts are what will spur sales. 

We have a lot of work to do. And there are other projects on our radar too.

One of the more urgent ones is to get the aging masters of American music on video, telling their stories in their own words, before we lose them. We are fortunate to have recorded such artists as Jay McShann, Johnnie Johnson, and Harold McKinney before they passed. But to date, we have only recorded interviews of performers at our festivals. We have therefore talked about going to the artists, wherever they are and regardless of whether they play for us (or still play at all), in order to get their stories documented. I could rattle off the names of a dozen here in Detroit alone whose stories should be told.

We started talking about recording and producing future programs for HDTV a long time ago, and we would like to be in on the ground floor. But so would everyone else, and there are less than a dozen “portable” HD capable production facilities on wheels available for hire. Which is to say that given supply and demand, let alone the technology, HD production doesn't come cheap. 

All of these projects require resources and money, both of which are in short supply. Money from DVD sales most likely will not even cover production costs, and since our mantra is, "Musicians have to eat too," any profits will go to the artists.

As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, we are primarily dependant upon gifts and grants, both major and minor, and it would be an understatement to say the demands on charitable giving right now are very high, particularly in Michigan.

My primary mandate is to find the resources and money we need, not just to sustain our activities, but to grow them. Which brings me to the final element of the directorial equation: The reaction of an audience and the way the band responds to it on stage.

When it comes to role models this is an easy one: Ruth Brown. She was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a winner of W. C. Handy, Grammy, and Tony awards, and she is a brilliant interpreter of audiences. She constantly interacts with them, reads them, and changes up her program and her patter on the basis of what she feels from them. When Ruth came off the stage one time and I asked how she felt about the performance, she didn’t say that the band played well or poorly. Rather, her first words were, “The audience was very responsive.”

An artist like Ruth Brown draws energy from an audience to enhance its performance. The AMRF depends on the energy of the audience to actually help make the music. You are our audience, and it is from you that we receive the resources and money we need to pursue our mission of keeping the music alive and paying proper tribute to the artists who make it.

First, we need your feedback. What do you like or dislike about our live shows and our TV programs? What about our website? What do you think we should be doing or not doing to further our mission? The first step in this process is to register on the website, which will give you the opportunity to participate in discussions about the issues, the music, and the musicians.

Second, if you believe in our mission, spread the word. Pass our newsletters on to friends.

Third, if you have resources that might help us – skills, knowledge, archival material or time for example – contact us at boogie@amrf.net .

Last but certainly not least, become a member. Currently you can join the AMRF for an annual fee of $15, which entitles you to discounts on tickets to our shows and on our merchandise, including the forthcoming DVDs. Additionally we offer sponsorships for our shows and television programs starting at $500. Details are available on sponsorship are available on our website, www.amrf.net.

We look forward to hearing from you, and you will be hearing from us.