Word: jazzmen
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...French enthusiasts. Though some expatriate jazzmen never had a career worth saving at home, some have abandoned highly successful lives in America in favor of life abroad. Among the 20 or so excellent jazz musicians in Europe today are three of the best anywhere. They are the most missed of all the expatriates, and their lives away from home are as different as their reasons for leaving: > TRUMPETER CHET BAKER, 33, Says: "I left America because I had a medical problem-drugs. Europeans treat drug addicts as sick persons, not criminals, and I'm not going back home until...
Whatever happened to Chopsticks'? In Tokyo, Japanese jazzmen fell in line to jam with Vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, 49, packing them in on a five-week barnstorm tour of Japan. His regular cats augmented with local talent-including a belting new gal vocalist, Mayumi Kuroda, 21-Hamp gave the customers "integrated music" stomped out by an "Asiatic Harlem" band. "The more I travel," says he, "the more I'm convinced that jazz isn't native to the States. These boys can read the flyspecks off wallpaper...
...Freedom. However much the classicists have tried, the collision of jazz idiom and classical technique has been mainly the work of jazzmen. Dave Brubeck has been an ardent explorer of quiet waters, but the classic case of the Juilliard blues afflicts John Lewis, whose fascination with the baroque and the commedia dell' arte has led his Modern Jazz Quartet into music of great cerebration and even greater anemia. Lewis' music often seems too fragile even to be called jazz; but now a new group of jazz composers has arrived with the claim that they are uniquely "serious...
...players, not to composers who study the form at the distance of a good conservatory. Leonard Bernstein has captured the sound of its blue notes-the appoggiatura tones that mimic the human voice in lament-and others have used its reiterated play-song melodies. But even among jazzmen, the only composer who has consistently written good jazz for orchestral players without merely repeating George Gershwin is Duke Ellington, and Ellington's "classical jazz" swings only because it is safe, sensual music. "We're going to do this thing," he has said in a little lecture on swinging, "until...
Some day someone may actually teach symphony orchestras how to swing; but short of that improbable achievement, the highest moments in jazz will still belong to working jazzmen whose own free sound is their best and clearest standard...