January 2011

A-bomb Scholarship A-bomb Scholarship Movie History Movie History My Brush With the Feds One of Ours

Ornamental ironwork is an unobtrusive art; many of us go through life without being aware of it at all. But there is something so impressive about the way a rod of solid iron can be heated and hammered and worked into delicate tendrils and spirals, each slightly different from its neighbor, that once you’re introduced to the craft, you stay aware of it. You might even begin to search it out. An exhibition on view at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., through the end of October salutes America’s acknowledged genius in the field, Samuel Yellin. The exhibit was mounted with the help of his granddaughter, Clare Yellin, who carries on the family business in Philadelphia.

In the late summer and autumn of 1864 two brothers, Norman and George Carr, aged twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, left their upstate New York home of Union Springs to join the United States Navy. The motives that sent them may have been complex. Their father, who operated sail- and steamboats on Lake Cayuga, had previously kept them out of military service by paying for substitutes. But now, George wanted, his mother reported in a letter to Norman, to make a man of himself, to repay his father for the substitute (by going himself as a substitute for another man), and to get away from “bad influences.” If the family accepted George’s decision based on these reasons, they were nonetheless troubled by Norman’s earlier and utterly unexpected departure. “It seems,” Mrs. Carr fretted in the timeless voice of parenthood, “that children ought to council parents about these things.” Even George later complained to Norman that they should have enlisted together.

Charlie Parker in flight: “I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes,” he remembered of the moment when he liked to say the style that became bebop was born, ”… and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. [Then] I was working over ‘Cherokee,’ and … I found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I had been hearing.” The things Parker heard and played would make him the most revolutionary musician since Armstrong, and, like Armstrong, he influenced how every instrument, not just his own, was played. But even his music was an extension of the work of earlier innovators and rooted in the blues tradition.

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five: The leader looms over banjoist Johnny St. Cyr, clarinetist Johnny Dodds, trombonist Kid Ory, and pianist Lil Hardin, Armstrong’s second wife. A novelty tune called “Heebie Jeebies” was an early hit under Armstrong’s own name. While recording it, in November 1926, he is supposed to have dropped the sheet of paper on which the lyrics were written out, improvised nonsense syllables, and thereby revolutionized jazz singing just as he was transforming jazz playing.

Duke Ellington, the essayist Albert Murray has written, may well be America’s most representative composer: “Not unlike Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner in literature, he has converted more of the actual texture and vitality of American life into firstrate universally appealing music than anybody else.” A major figure for more than half a century, he wrote nearly two thousand pieces of music and, as S‚bat’s drawing suggests, made fuller use of the composer’s palette than any of his contemporaries. But he was also a deeply superstitious man and this rendering contains one uncharacteristic anomaly: No Ellington palette would ever have included the color green, because, he said, it reminded him of the grass growing on his mother’s grave.

Pops: It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the impact upon younger musicians of hearing Louis Armstrong (bottom center) for the first time. “I never heard a man blow like that in my life!” trumpeter Sweets Edison remembered. “He hit two hundred high Cs, and they counted them as he went around the stage, and he ended on a high F!” Here, eight other trumpet players, each an important musician in his own right, absorb lessons from the source: clockwise from top left, Muggsy Spanier and one-handed Wingy Manone; Duke Ellington stars Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart; Hot Lips Page; Wild Bill Davison and Bobby Hackett; and the fiercely competitive Roy Eldridge, who admitted that after hearing Armstrong for the first time in 1930 he became “so indoctrinated with Louis that for a while I was going around trying to talk like him.”

Legally blind and largely self-taught, Art Tatum played the piano with such overwhelming virtuosity, his long-time guitarist Everett Barksdale remembered, that “the only time I ever heard him goof was when the piano was at fault—a mechanical flaw.” Once, from the bandstand, Tatum’s own mentor, the great Fats Waller, spotted him making his careful way into the dark club where he was playing: “I play piano,” Waller told the crowd, “but God is in the house tonight.”

Count Basie (at the piano) once gave a writer his recipe for swinging—something his orchestra managed to do better than any other for almost five decades: “I think a band can really swing when it swings easy , when it just can play along like you are cutting butter.” Sabat includes here five of the men who helped him make it at least look easy: bassist Walter Page and guitarist Freddie Green, who, with Basic himself and the drummer Jo Jones (not shown), formed the all-important rhythm section; lead trumpeter Buck Clayton; and two great tenor saxophonists, Herschel Evans (left) and Lester Young, the former’s big swaggering sound contrasted with the artfully tentative solos of the latter.