Word: jazzmen
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...Straight-ahead jazz music almost died in the 1970s as record companies embraced the electronically enhanced jazz-pop amalgam known as fusion. Now a whole generation of prodigiously talented young musicians is going back to the roots, using acoustic instruments, playing recognizable tunes and studying the styles of earlier jazzmen, from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Moreover, with major record labels rushing to sign them up, many of these so-called neotraditionalists are starting to enjoy commercial success, and some are on the road to real wealth...
...fusionists. Back in his Jazz Messengers days, Marsalis would go onstage in tennis shoes and overalls. "But once we started to talk about appearance," says Butler, "Wynton began to epitomize what jazz musicians ought to look like." Indeed, sartorial elegance has become de rigueur among the new generation of jazzmen...
Woody remembers that trip, along with two earlier jaunts to the Crescent City, as high points of his life. Accompanied by Diane Keaton, he scurried around the French Quarter with his clarinet under his arm, looking, listening and sitting in with local jazzmen. "It was like watching Willie Mays all your life and then finding yourself in the outfield with him," Woody recalls. Festival producer George Wein even talked him into playing a set at one of the official concerts...
...mean, I'm totally eclectic and derivative of the guys I've heard and loved." His one advantage for playing the old-style New Orleans stuff, Woody feels, "is that I am genuinely crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful, wailing tone of the original jazzmen. The biggest compliment he ever got as a musician, Woody says, was when he was jamming in New Orleans and local people told him how "indigenous" his sound was. Jazz clarinetist Kenny Davern agrees: "He has sought to get that New Orleans plaintive sound, and he has really captured the thing...
Traces the overall progress of jazz music from its distant origins in Africa and the New World to current trends. Emphasizes "jazz listening," in the analysis of musical form, of the different period styles...and of the personal styles of the greatest jazzmen...