Gabbard Krin - Better Git it in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Cha

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

It was 1963 and I was fifteen, growing up in Charleston, Illinois, a town with a population of ten thousand located two hundred miles south of Chicago. I may have been especially prone to a transformation at that moment because of my devotion to Mad magazine. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, long before it was a childs comic book featuring Spy vs. Spy, Mad approached American culture with irreverent satire, much of which I understood, and with New York Jewish humor, much of which I did not. Nevertheless, had it not been for Mad, I might have grown up believing that tail fins on cars were not stupid.

Mad essentially confirmed what I was already learning from my nonconformist parents: that much of what seems healthy and normal must be approached with scrupulous skepticism. Like my slightly bohemian father, a professor of theater arts at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, the writers at Mad were much more critical of The Day People, who carried briefcases and wore generic fedoras with small brims, than of The Night People, who lived mostly in New York and stayed up all night, without watching television.

In Mad, jazz artists were definitely among The Night People, but that did not prevent them from being frequent targets for ridicule. Of course, with their berets, cigarette holders, goatees, and bopspeak, they were asking for it: they relished bourgeois contempt, even going so far as to embrace the claim that they and their music were insane. With the kind of irony I was just beginning to appreciate, they made crazy a synonym for excellent.

I had become unironically devoted to jazz as a high school sophomore, largely because of Alan Coutant, a senior who played alto saxophone in the school band and the university jazz ensemble with the liquid, lickety-split facility of Lee Konitz. His ability with the saxophone was especially astounding in contrast to my clunky cornet, an instrument that did not allow for the speed with which Alan could play his saxophone. Just warming up before high school band practice, Alan would play mysterious but logical patterns, always with startling velocity. He buried his head in his music stand as he played, so I assumed he was playing something written down. I was amazed the first time I walked around behind him and discovered there was nothing but an unopened folder on his stand. He was improvising!

Even though I certainly could not play improvised jazz myself, I knew this was my music. Soon I was buying jazz LPs at a record store in nearby Mattoon, Illinois. The jazz aficionado who owned the store sold me LPs by Stan Kenton, Shelley Manne, Stan Getz, and Andr Previn. I also began listening to a disc jockey named Pete George who played jazz for two hours every Sunday afternoon on a Mattoon radio station. Petes tastes ran to Dixieland and the white swing bands, but he did introduce me to Duke Ellington. I have maintained a lifelong devotion to Ellington, ever since Pete insisted that I start listing seriously to Duke after I called to tell him I preferred Count Basie. To this day, I feel a bit smug when someone tells me they prefer Basie to Ellington.

I was still fifteen when I acquired a copy of the Schwann Catalog, a monthly periodical that listed every record in print. Although I would never hear many of the jazz musicians listed in that issue of the Schwann, including a group with the intriguing name Firehouse Five Plus Two, I knew all their names from my careful and repeated perusings of the catalogs jazz section. The pages were eventually dog-eared down to the print.

One night I was listening to the little cracker-box AM radio my grandmother had recently given me. It was eleven oclock, and I was supposed to be asleep. My parents may have been unusual, but they did try to enforce bedtime rules, except on Sunday nights when I was allowed to stay up to watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But listening to the radio after ten was not even in the gray zone, so I had to be careful.

Usually I listened to WLS, a station out of Chicago that played the pop music so essential to the lives of me and my high school friends. One night, while trying to tune in WLS at 890 on the AM dial, I discovered a station out of Dallas/Ft. Worth, probably at 870. They were playing jazz, and it was modern. No Dixieland or Tommy Dorsey. I had never heard such enchanting music on the radio. The DJ, I learned, was Dick Harp, and he had a regular Tuesday-Thursday show, beginning at 11:00 P.M . From then on, unless I was totally exhausted, I would tune in. Many years later, at a jazz studies conference in Dallas, I asked some colleagues who were roughly my age what they knew about Dick Harp. One remembered him and his program and told me that Dick also played polite piano jazz in Dallas night clubs.

Like most jazz DJs in those days, Dick Harp played the LPs the record companies sent to his radio station. These included the conscientiously marketed, strikingly designed LPs on the impulse! label. In the 1960s, impulse! released some of the best jazz records ever, among them Benny Carters Further Definitions, Oliver Nelsons Blues and the Abstract Truth, Max Roachs Percussion, Bitter Sweet, Gil Evanss Out of the Cool, and several LPs by John Coltrane that represent his most distinguished work at the end of his life. The producers Creed Taylor and Bob Thiele made sure that most of the music they released was recorded at the state-of-the-art studio of Rudy van Gelder, without question the most important recording engineer since the 1950s.