Word: jazzmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anything, instead of deteriorating over the years, Pepper's style has expanded and deepened. He has always something, an original; but in the late 1940s and early '50s, when his recordings with Stan Kenton, Shorty Rogers and other West Coast jazzmen first brought him to prominence, his sound combined traces of Lester Young's cool obliqueness with Charlie Parker's harmonic and rhythmic complexities. Later he took on a darker, sometimes harsher quality as he came under the influence of John Coltrane's stabbing, honking outcries and modal sheets of sound. Last week...
...jazzmen are able to get by consistently on their musical earnings. During lean years, Sam Rivers set lyrics to music for a mail-order house; Anthony Braxton used to hustle chess in Washington Square. A few fortunate musicians have found niches in education-- Ran Blake and Ken McIntyre head departments at the New England Conservatory and at SUNY Old Westbury. Alternative education centers offer a tenuous existence to some, like Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio in Woodstock and River's Soho performance loft, both of which depend on a precarious assortment of grants and private donations for support. Life...
...music" to keep the customers fired-up and spending. So it's not surprising that jazz musicians have always been obsessed with "paying dues," the tradition of enduring hardships and degrading work conditions in order to polish and purify their art. Much has been written about the handful of jazzmen who "came up through the tradition" to achieve international celebrity and artistic and financial success: Louis Armstong and Duke Ellington occupy a warm corner in our popular mythology. But jazz, financially speaking, is a marginal music, and America's margins can be narrow indeed. Ken McIntyre's frustrating experience...
...Last of the Blue Devils, first-time director Bruce Ricker's movie about Kansas City jazzmen, gets around these limitations of jazz cinematography better than any film I have seen. Jazz purists may balk at the liberties Ricker has taken--solos are cropped from longer performances, music is cut up and excerpted, "vintage" Kansas City clips are few and far between--but they can't argue with his results. The entire film rushes along to Kansas City 4/4 time; a spare 91 minutes long, The Last of the Blue Devils is one sweet breath of Kansas City air, heady enough...
...similar reunion of old jazz dancers, but Blue Devils has little of the sadness and sentimentality that are at the heart of Taps. As Ricker is quick to point out, the golden years of Kansas City were good, happy times for jazz musicians, and the surviving Kansas City jazzmen have learned how to deal with the disappointments of the intervening years; when they get together, they share joy, humor, and open affection. Jazz fans already know about the tragedies of Kansas City--how Charlie Parker died an addict, destitute and disillusioned at 35, how a disastrous gig with...