Cortege
I have been charmed by the emancipatory possibilities of music, as a player and a listener, for most of my life. Those possibilities were presented to me at a very early age by my fathers 78 R.P.M. records of boogie-woogie piano players Meade Lux Lewis, Fats Waller, Freddie Slack and others. The rollicking syncopation of this music was an irresistible invitation to climb aboard a juggernaut pulsing with abandon I could barely comprehend, bound for good times. I wanted to play these sounds. My uncle bought our family a very used upright piano and I took lessons from age 10 to 14, where I found out that it was really tough to execute somebody else's music let alone conceive and execute my own. My hopes of easy fulfillment dwindled and my search for the sounds I knew existed and could probably never play led me to Modern Jazz. My high school library subscribed to Down Beat magazine, and I devoured every line, review and article in an eucharistic frenzy. This music was lurking dangerous fare for most of my classmates, and my familiarity with it, however slight, gave me a shred of credibility in a landscape that otherwise rendered me ludicrous at every turn.
My friend and I (he was old enough to drive!) ventured into the state capitol 15 miles away from our small university town, to a liquor store that sold jazz, blues and gospel records in an African-American neighborhood near the fair grounds. Two well scrubbed pink weenies from the sticks who were knocked out by how far out you had to be to produce these sounds. Sounds sanctified by the will power of mostly black musicians leading lives of depth, breadth, and urgency, unlike our own. I identified with that music as if it were my own, and with the musicians as extensions of myself. I was transfixed by up-tempo blues tunes by Horace Silvers quintet, by Charles Mingus' volatile impressionism, and by Thelonius Monk, a cryptic savant whose ponderous lumpy pirouettes sprung urgent jagged beauty from his piano. I dug Monk because of his grave mystery and convoluted harmonies that seemed to turn themselves continually inside out, presented in an elephantine soft-shoe that lurched between aching eloquence and broad pratfall. Monk gave me hope that awkwardness could be a guise of genius. And then there was the Modern Jazz Quartet. We pink cognoscenti referred to them with familiarity as the "MJQ," a talismanic acronym of solemn import. The name itself was revealing. Almost all the Jazz groups bore the name of a leader, relegating others to the role of "sidemen." The name of this group established what they did rather than who was there.
The range and cohesiveness of expression present in these virtuosos, and their ability to remain astride the prancing steed of their mutual creation with an unshakable sense of decorum, "cool" we experts called it, were attributes I could only dream of attaining. The MJQ embodied the hope that disparate individuals could join in a collective mind that comprised the anchorage from which worlds could be moved. All for one and one for all! There was John Lewis, the pianist and composer of the quartet. Understated eloquence and sly syncopation, European structure and African-American swinging intuition. Vibraphonist Milt Jackson seemed like a chameleon, pensive and melodic, acrobatic and vigorous, back and forth amongst these attributes in a heartbeat or alighting to expound somewhere in between, a harlequin, a trickster with a heart that seemed darkened by tragedy and tempered by mirth. Percy Heath, the bassist, provided the megalith platform from which these expositions were launched and sustained, and Connie Kay, the drummer, the most opaque and unreadable of the group, guided by refracted nuance and melodic precision, alluding to a beat that was irresistibly present by seductive implication. The musical persona of these four different talents became cerebral polyphony and visceral pulse in a perfect synthesis, clear and compelling.
My next-door neighbor, Earl Baird, crew-cut good 'ole boy from Alabama, quit his job driving a bread delivery truck to become the manager of the auditorium at the University that differentiated our town from the surrounding farming burgs. It was an Agricultural school, but its connection with the state university system made it a salient of culture on a plain dominated by tomatoes and sugar beets. The university connection also made it a stop for touring luminaries that played the more urban branches of the university system, bringing Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Andres Segovia, Ravi Shankar, and, blessed visitation, the Modern Jazz Quartet! I convinced Earl that he should let me bring my ancient Webcor tape recorder to his lair in the projection booth high in the back of the auditorium, to plug into the sound system and record my heroes, the MJQ.
Most of the particulars of that concert are forgotten now, and the tape is long lost. The musicians that evening seemed very far away from me, up in the perch of a projection booth, and while the sound was terrific, there was a strange lack of connection because I had to watch the stage through a small opening meant for projectionists to keep track of films when they were shown. My face filled that tiny window. A painfully accurate schematic, body in the tiny high room, face in an adjacent chasm, circumstances allowing me knowledge of, but not access to a world and a life I craved.
The final selection of the evening was Cortege, a beautiful elegiac composition from a film score, No Sun in Venice that John Lewis had written for Roger Vadim in the late 50's. It was an elegantly simple and plaintive melody in a minor key, stated first by the vibraphone and bass, a two part invention, sparsely punctuated by light percussion. The next chorus added some blues inflected gravity, followed by a more lilting bridge, and midway through the following chorus a faint ringing from Connie Kay's triangle steadily ascended in volume with flawless uniformity to a crescendo at the end of the chorus where the ringing suddenly stopped and the piece modulated to a middle section, the full ensemble playing for the first time, in the relative major key in double-time, producing a respite that evoked vivacious recollection, an anecdotal interplay between vibes and piano for several choruses, and then back to the minor key and the theme, cut time, a piano solo for several choruses like a widow stoically sorting events consolidated by loss, and , at the beginning of the grand final chorus, I recalled the final scene of The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Charles Laughton sits high among the gargoyles wishing he was made of stone like them, and the triangle began its far-off ring and I could see from my high tiny window Connie Kay caressing that triangle with his drumstick, coaxing a nagging whisper from the triangle that became steadily more insistent as the stoic majesty of the Cortege swelled towards resolution. I watched from above as the ringing steadily filled the world, became the bells of Notre Dame, became all the phone calls that weren't for me, became the alarm clock that dashes dreams and the refuge of sleep, and suddenly, Earl Bairds' Alabama drawl: "AIN'T HE EVER GONNA LET UP ON THAT GODDAMN BELL?" No, Earl, He's not.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
My friend and I (he was old enough to drive!) ventured into the state capitol 15 miles away from our small university town, to a liquor store that sold jazz, blues and gospel records in an African-American neighborhood near the fair grounds. Two well scrubbed pink weenies from the sticks who were knocked out by how far out you had to be to produce these sounds. Sounds sanctified by the will power of mostly black musicians leading lives of depth, breadth, and urgency, unlike our own. I identified with that music as if it were my own, and with the musicians as extensions of myself. I was transfixed by up-tempo blues tunes by Horace Silvers quintet, by Charles Mingus' volatile impressionism, and by Thelonius Monk, a cryptic savant whose ponderous lumpy pirouettes sprung urgent jagged beauty from his piano. I dug Monk because of his grave mystery and convoluted harmonies that seemed to turn themselves continually inside out, presented in an elephantine soft-shoe that lurched between aching eloquence and broad pratfall. Monk gave me hope that awkwardness could be a guise of genius. And then there was the Modern Jazz Quartet. We pink cognoscenti referred to them with familiarity as the "MJQ," a talismanic acronym of solemn import. The name itself was revealing. Almost all the Jazz groups bore the name of a leader, relegating others to the role of "sidemen." The name of this group established what they did rather than who was there.
The range and cohesiveness of expression present in these virtuosos, and their ability to remain astride the prancing steed of their mutual creation with an unshakable sense of decorum, "cool" we experts called it, were attributes I could only dream of attaining. The MJQ embodied the hope that disparate individuals could join in a collective mind that comprised the anchorage from which worlds could be moved. All for one and one for all! There was John Lewis, the pianist and composer of the quartet. Understated eloquence and sly syncopation, European structure and African-American swinging intuition. Vibraphonist Milt Jackson seemed like a chameleon, pensive and melodic, acrobatic and vigorous, back and forth amongst these attributes in a heartbeat or alighting to expound somewhere in between, a harlequin, a trickster with a heart that seemed darkened by tragedy and tempered by mirth. Percy Heath, the bassist, provided the megalith platform from which these expositions were launched and sustained, and Connie Kay, the drummer, the most opaque and unreadable of the group, guided by refracted nuance and melodic precision, alluding to a beat that was irresistibly present by seductive implication. The musical persona of these four different talents became cerebral polyphony and visceral pulse in a perfect synthesis, clear and compelling.
My next-door neighbor, Earl Baird, crew-cut good 'ole boy from Alabama, quit his job driving a bread delivery truck to become the manager of the auditorium at the University that differentiated our town from the surrounding farming burgs. It was an Agricultural school, but its connection with the state university system made it a salient of culture on a plain dominated by tomatoes and sugar beets. The university connection also made it a stop for touring luminaries that played the more urban branches of the university system, bringing Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Andres Segovia, Ravi Shankar, and, blessed visitation, the Modern Jazz Quartet! I convinced Earl that he should let me bring my ancient Webcor tape recorder to his lair in the projection booth high in the back of the auditorium, to plug into the sound system and record my heroes, the MJQ.
Most of the particulars of that concert are forgotten now, and the tape is long lost. The musicians that evening seemed very far away from me, up in the perch of a projection booth, and while the sound was terrific, there was a strange lack of connection because I had to watch the stage through a small opening meant for projectionists to keep track of films when they were shown. My face filled that tiny window. A painfully accurate schematic, body in the tiny high room, face in an adjacent chasm, circumstances allowing me knowledge of, but not access to a world and a life I craved.
The final selection of the evening was Cortege, a beautiful elegiac composition from a film score, No Sun in Venice that John Lewis had written for Roger Vadim in the late 50's. It was an elegantly simple and plaintive melody in a minor key, stated first by the vibraphone and bass, a two part invention, sparsely punctuated by light percussion. The next chorus added some blues inflected gravity, followed by a more lilting bridge, and midway through the following chorus a faint ringing from Connie Kay's triangle steadily ascended in volume with flawless uniformity to a crescendo at the end of the chorus where the ringing suddenly stopped and the piece modulated to a middle section, the full ensemble playing for the first time, in the relative major key in double-time, producing a respite that evoked vivacious recollection, an anecdotal interplay between vibes and piano for several choruses, and then back to the minor key and the theme, cut time, a piano solo for several choruses like a widow stoically sorting events consolidated by loss, and , at the beginning of the grand final chorus, I recalled the final scene of The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Charles Laughton sits high among the gargoyles wishing he was made of stone like them, and the triangle began its far-off ring and I could see from my high tiny window Connie Kay caressing that triangle with his drumstick, coaxing a nagging whisper from the triangle that became steadily more insistent as the stoic majesty of the Cortege swelled towards resolution. I watched from above as the ringing steadily filled the world, became the bells of Notre Dame, became all the phone calls that weren't for me, became the alarm clock that dashes dreams and the refuge of sleep, and suddenly, Earl Bairds' Alabama drawl: "AIN'T HE EVER GONNA LET UP ON THAT GODDAMN BELL?" No, Earl, He's not.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.