Boston Jazz in the 1970s – An Overview
During
the Swing Era the evolving jazz world planted seeds that would guarantee the
demise of jazz as a broadly popular music form.
Miraculously, the music hung on during World War Two and the Bebop
Era. Then, with the music on the verge
of last breaths, something remarkable happened.
At mid-century there was an explosion of popular interest in jazz
throughout the U.S. One would have a difficult time convincing
historians that public awareness of Chet Baker and Cannonball Adderley after 1950 was as great as that of Goodman and
Basie in 1939, but the music was on the radio constantly (and even sometimes on
TV). For about fifteen years the music
was alive and flourishing, in the same way that a candle or incandescent bulb
is brightest just before the light goes out.
In
the mid-1960s things began to crumble. A
personal reference may be helpful. When
I was in high school in the late 1950s, a group of us would gather in the
cafeteria before school started and read aloud the poetry of Bremser, Di Prima, Ferlinghetti, and others of the period
and sometimes mention a recent LP purchase that would initiate questions about
where Monk and Miles were taking their music.
Fast forward less than ten years.
I’m talking about jazz with a freshman high school class from an upper
middle class town. These kids are bright
and curious, and the discussion is a joy all around. Except for the fact that no
one in the class has any idea who Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington are. Less than ten years.
And
things have not improved. Now we have
discovered that jazz is not dance music.
Rather it is art music without the art funding. And maybe that’s a good thing.
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During
March 1978 bandleader/arranger Ernie Wilkins, in the city for a teaching stint,
told The Boston Globe: "Outside
of New York and possibly Los
Angeles, Boston
is one of the few cities that has more jazz happening
from week to week than the others."
His discovery is something that musicians from other cities settling in Boston
almost always experience. But what Ernie
Wilkins did not know is that in 1978 Boston
was experiencing one of its down periods, as far as jazz activity is
concerned. From approximately 1950
through 1965 Boston hit what many
local musicians and fans would regard as the peak for jazz activity. The apparent decline of jazz activity in Boston
began during the middle of the 1960s.
Since the middle of the twentieth century Boston--although
most "locals" at the time would not believe it--developed into a city
that until the 1970s consistently was second or perhaps occasionally third only
to New York as a haven for the
jazz fan.
If
the Boston jazz scene was in
decline during the 1960s, it hit bottom during the 1970s. Probably no single event marked the extent of
the crisis more significantly than the closing of the last major jazz club of
the period in Boston, the Jazz
Workshop/Paul's Mall performance complex on Boylston
Street. The
"names" wanted more money, and the seating capacity could not be
increased. The complex brought in more
non-jazz acts to offset the losses, but the doors closed on April 9, 1978. From the early 1970s various attempts--the
Rise Club, Debbie's, and Jonathan Swift's among others--were made to prevent
the club scene crash, but nothing durable and consistent came along until the
end of the decade, about a year after Lulu White's opened and got rolling on
Appleton Street.
Throughout
the decline the real jazz fans were not sitting still. If anything, the 1970s jazz scene in Boston
may be thought of as the time of jazz fusion and the birth of the jazz support
groups (the former to some extent an impulse for the latter). For the most part, the birth of these jazz
support groups was rooted in an attempt to counter a dying public interest in
jazz. One of the new groups, the Boston
Jazz Society, even had the ironically optimistic slogan, "Jazz is
Alive." Among the best-known and
most respected jazz support groups born in Boston
in the 1970s are the Jazz Coalition, Studio Red Top, the Friends of Great Black
Music, and the Boston Jazz Society.
The
Boston Jazz Society, which celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2008, is
best known for sponsoring events to raise money for jazz scholarships and the
apparently now-defunct annual food-and-jazz blowout known simply as The
Barbecue. Although scholarship money has
gone to some pretty well known area students (such as Antonio Hart and Branford
Marsalis) some of the better-known Boston-bred musicians (such as Terri Lyne Carrington and Christopher Hollyday)
missed out on the funds because their parents were BJS executives at the time.
The
Great Black Music Loft in Roxbury (perhaps inspired by New
York lofts of the time) was both a center of activity
for jazz support in black Boston
and a performance venue. People such as Syd Smart and Larry Roland paved the way as leaders of the
Friends of Great Black Music. Building
on the groundwork of such former Bostonians as Cecil Taylor and Sam Rivers, the
Black Music Loft and its patrons helped local musicians make new music and
eventually were a force behind the creation of the now-annual John Coltrane
Memorial Concert Series.
Studio
Red Top was promoting the best in local and national female improvisors long
before it became politically correct to do so.
More often than not (again ahead of the pack) when Studio Red Top
produced events with people as diverse as Janet Grice and Marilyn Crispell it did so by presenting ensembles that included
the best men also.
The
Jazz Coalition, spearheaded by Mark Harvey and others with the help of Emmanuel
Church, was one of the most important jazz support organizations to come to
life in the 1970s. Founded in 1971, it
presented musicians who performed using a variety of jazz styles, including
some genuine cutting edge music. Although
the organization sponsored a number of single events of note, such as the January
12, 1980 Emmanuel Church performance by the George Adams Quartet several years before he signed with Blue Note and
which featured such fine percussion work by Joe Chambers, the Jazz Coalition is
best remembered for the annual Jazz Week series beginning in 1973 and the Jazz
All Night sessions. Emmanuel Church,
under the direction of the Rev. A. L. Kershaw, began its jazz ministry in the
mid-1960s. In 1974 the Rev. Kershaw brought
in Mark Harvey to administer the Jazz/Arts Program at the church, a program
that would continue under Harvey's
direction until 1983. During the 1970s
the Church of the Covenant, a short distance west of Emmanuel Church on Newbury
Street, was home to the annual music highlight,
the Jazz All Night concerts. The Jazz
All Night events started at 8 p.m.
and concluded with an 8 a.m.
breakfast. These jazz marathons featured
one or two "name" performers and virtually all the top musicians in Boston.
A few of those dozens of local and national lights featured at Jazz All Night
and other Coalition events were Claudio Roditi, Eula
Lawrence, Billy Thompson, Pat Metheny, Randy Weston,
Mark Harvey, Erica Lindsey, Al and Buzzy Drootin, Webster Lewis, Ricky Ford, Vic Dickenson, Stanton
Davis, Mary Lou Williams, Julius Hemphill, Gunter Hampel,
Arni Cheatham, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Phil Wilson,
Sue Auclair (before there was Publicity!), Ronnie
Gill, and Manny Williams. For example,
an audience might be treated to Archie Shepp but also
Jaki Byard (before he moved
to New York), The Fringe (before
their first trans-Atlantic tour), and Bill Pierce with James Williams (before
they joined Art Blakey). One of the current legacies of those efforts
is the local treasure, Mark Harvey's Aardvark Orchestra.
The
image below consists of ticket stubs for the May 4 Jazz All Night Concert and a
portion of the calendar of events in the Boston
area for Jazz Week 1974:
The
tickets were for just one of the annual Jazz All Night concerts I attended over
the years. Music began at 8 p.m. and ran all night to 8 a.m.
If you made it through the entire concert, you could take advantage of
the free 8 a.m.
breakfast. I confess that, as much as I
loved the event, I never made it to breakfast.
Boston Jazz Week lasted from May 1 through May 5 in 1974. Anyone who wants more information about those
fine events should start by asking questions of Mark Harvey who was at the
center of most of it all.
Out
of all this organizing came two distinct—perhaps contradictory—paths of
activity. On the one hand, there was a
wave of post-Ayler activity resulting in the birth of John Coltrane Memorial
concerts and a surge in post-Ayler and Coltrane-oriented musical activity in
local clubs--everything from performances sponsored by the Friends of Great
Black Music to weekly gigs by the Fringe at Michael’s Pub. This activity would bear particularly
significant fruit in the 1980s.
On
the other hand, with the support groups came a wistful look backward and anxiety
over the future of what many fans defined as jazz (e.g., having chord changes
and conventional time signatures) and a nostalgic longing for the “good old
days.” This nostalgic
component of jazz in the 1970s manifest itself primarily in three
developments: the rebirth of trad bands, the general
popularity of ragtime, and the birth of retro-jazz as a pervasive
phenomenon.
Both
nationally and locally there was a virtual explosion on the scene of
“authentic” two-beat jazz ensembles and supportive magazines and journals. In the Boston
area, there was the New Black Eagle Jazz Band and more than a half-dozen other
like-minded outfits, some of which continue performing today. Ragtime, particularly with the success of the
score to The Sting in 1973, became
popular nation-wide. But few people or
events brought the music to the public consciousness more effectively than the
ragtime recordings by Brandeis University's
Joshua Rifkin (beginning in 1970) and New England Conservatory's New England
Ragtime Ensemble (1972).
The
retro-jazz movement became a pervasive phenomenon nationally and locally to a
great extent because of the success of several New Englanders who often used Boston
as a base of operations, particularly a Rhode Island-bred youngster named Scott
Hamilton and Vermont's Widespread
Depression Jazz Orchestra. Before the
decade was over the youngster who would become the most famous retro-jazz
champion, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, was sitting in
with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at Lulu
White's. But by then the retro-jazz
phenomenon was well underway, and even today we have
not completely recovered.
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Some Moments from the 1970s
New
York's Collective Black Artists in Boston in 1974
Today spontaneous
improvised conducting of jazz ensembles is fairly common in places such as New York and Boston. The
practice goes back several decades during which young and now-fully mature jazz
musicians and other improvisors have picked up and used improvisational
architectural techniques. Improvised
arrangement through signaled plug‑and‑play elements was inspired at
least partially via the hand signals employed by New York's Collective Black Artists ensemble during
the early 1970s. The spontaneous or
improvised arrangement techniques likely were not the only influence on the
third generation of leading edge musicians.
Even though the Collective Black Artists used a music director (Stanley Cowell for example), in performance it was not uncommon for
various musicians in the group (often the arranger of the work to be performed)
to be given responsibility for conducting specific works. Although some of the music played by the
ensemble in Boston in 1974 was organized and performed in a
somewhat conventional manner, the performance of several of the works employed
spontaneous conducting techniques. Some
of those musicians would use "spontaneous arrangement" hand signals. For example, during the performance of a work
that evening a musician might stand up and point to three or four musicians in
the ensemble, indicate by hand signal what portion of the arrangement they
would play, and give them a countdown by hand signal to specify exactly when
the designated portion of the arrangement was
to be played. And so forth. It is likely that the dispersion of
responsibility among the musicians to modify the flexible arrangements was the
original inspiration for the current technique in bands of spontaneous decision‑making
by non‑soloists. The Collective
Black Artists, a New York‑based non‑profit group, was founded in
1970 and, in addition to Cowell, included a diverse
range of musicians such as Reggie Workman, Jimmy Owens, Charles Greenlee, Charli (then "Charles") Persip,
Bob Stewart, Frank Foster, and others.
The Collective Black Artists were politically involved in the New York area, among other activities offering concerts and
lessons in prisons and public schools.
One wishes that their constructive activism‑‑in addition to
their music techniques‑‑were more commonly emulated today. The group performed occasionally outside the New York area, as in the case of the concert I witnessed at Northeastern University’s Alumni Hall on March 22, 1974. Of course,
the musician best known today for pursuing these techniques is Lawrence "Butch" Morris who expanded the half dozen
or ten hand gestures used by members of the Collective Black Artists ensemble
eventually to more than twenty. We are
fortunate that he and other creative musicians carry on and expand the
improvisational practices first created and developed by musicians of New York’s Collective Black Artists.
A Studio Playback Session circa 1975
In the late 1960s through
most of the 1980s the training research and development department I worked for
developed self-instructional materials that incorporated audio and color images
as well as readable text materials and other resources for students. One of the final steps in the development of
audio components was the recording of script narration by professional
announcers. We used Fleetwood Studios in
Revere, Massachusetts for those sessions.
As script writer and/or project supervisor on many of these projects
often I was present at the recording sessions.
The work was tedious, but the professional announcers were so good at
what they did that the productions usually went along quite smoothly.
At the end of one session in
1975 (I think) two gentlemen walked into the studio for the next session with
the engineer. Out of the corner of my
eye the smaller of the two men looked familiar.
Almost at the same moment my brain began processing that data. The sound engineer said, “That’s a famous
jazz musician.” It was Bobby Hackett and
his manager or agent. They had shown up
to listen to a playback of Bobby Hackett’s most recent recording.
They probably were looking
for sound problems and selecting tracks for his next album. I took advantage of the opportunity to return
late to my office. I stayed in the
studio control booth. I heard some fine
music, talked off and on briefly with the cornetist, and had a delightful time
just soaking up the experience. One
conversation with the manager/agent sticks with me. The gentleman was determined to make the case
that Hackett mopped up the floor with Dizzy on the 1971 recording Giants (Perception PLP 19). Neither Bobby Hackett nor I would have
anything to do with that viewpoint about such an odd but fascinating pairing.
I was late getting back to
the office, but with the perspective of time I wish had been a lot later.
A Benny Goodman concert at Symphony Hall – February 14,
1976
It was a Saturday night in
Symphony Hall, and Benny Goodman showed up with Bobby Hackett, Al Klink, Peter Appleyard, Urbie Green, Hank
Jones, Slam Stewart, Bucky Pizzerelli,
and Connie Kay (with Grady Tate on drums during the warm-up session). The band offered more than two hours of fine
music (including encores).
Goodman played well but
didn’t solo as frequently as I would have liked. Maybe performing is getting to him. He’s in the middle of a series of one-nighters (NY yesterday, Boston tonight, Montreal Sunday...).
After the concert he looked quite tired.
But longtime Goodman veteran Klink demonstrated that there was no rust
on him. I had brought my young sons to
the concert, and fatigue would set in on occasion. Slam Stewart, with his musical and
entertaining solos, was the perfect yawn antidote for them. And there were other fine performances. For me the biggest surprise was Peter Appleyard. With the
possible exception of the leader, the vibes player consistently was the best
soloist of the evening. He offered an
array of intelligent, imaginative lines that included everything from rapid
flashes of melody to complete silences.
Given the mainstream context of the music, the constructive impact of his well-placed silences were eye-opening for
me. So few musicians
know when and how to leave “silent gaps” in their solos.
My kids and I went backstage
for autographs. The experience was
odd. When I walked into the room to meet
him, I didn’t recognize Goodman at first (even though I’ve witnessed him
onstage performing on a number of occasions).
Standing at the same level as Goodman, I noticed he was shorter than I
imagined, somewhat hunched over like an old man, and he looked very tired and
frail. As we waited in line for the
autographs, a very odd thing happened.
He did not have a pen to use, and I gave him my pen so he could sign
autographs for us. When he finished and
we were about to leave, he still had my pen.
It might have been a type of absent-mindedness on his part. I didn’t care about the pen, but I thought he
might feel bad when he discovered that he had kept someone’s pen. So I offered him the pen, saying, “Would you
like to keep the pen?”
His reaction was strange and
wonderful. He realized that he had my
pen and came out of a fog and smiled at his mistake. And with the sparkle of life that came to him
with the smile, Benny Goodman once again looked like the band leader I saw
onstage just a short while before this meeting.
It was a rather startling transformation.
Note: Those with interest and
the search bug can check out Ernie Santosuosso’s fine
review of the concert in the February 16, 1976 issue of the Boson
Globe.
Memories of Lulu White’s
During the late 1970s until its closing in 1981 Lulu
White's on Appleton
Street was
the place to catch the most famous jazz musicians. There were other contemporaneous clubs around
briefly--such as the Rise Club and Tinker's--that brought in the likes of Art Blakey and Archie Shepp. But Lulu White's was the place, particularly
for mainstream jazz.
I hung around there pretty frequently, and, when the
owners decided to encourage attendance with a "Lulu's Club"
promotional deal, I could not refuse. The
irresistible deal involved a $100 annual fee and a series of benefits for the
club member. The primary benefit to club
members was unlimited free entry to the venue for the member and a guest. Because the booking was similar to but much
more substantive than that of such more recent clubs as the Regattabar or
Scullers, for me it was a membership made in heaven. I am sure there were some weeks during which
I did not show up, but they were the exceptions. At the time I had not yet learned that
consuming large quantities of alcoholic beverages interfered with hearing the
music. So Lulu's probably got its money
back from me through purchases of drinks.
I found the place very comfortable. The waitresses were good-looking enough that
they probably were worth catching even if there were no music. And they got to know me well enough that,
when I showed up, they immediately would lead me over to my favorite table and
bring me a Jack Daniels on the rocks without my saying a word. In addition to all of that, Lulu
White's--from the standpoint of the jazz consumer--was the finest jazz venue of
my experience. With the exception of a
couple of poles, the site lines were superb.
And even the table farthest from the action allowed for the most
intimate of musical experiences. As a
final touch, the club had atmosphere.
Designed as a tribute to the famous New Orleans bordello, Lulu White's
had visual style, including everything from a large portrait of the madam
herself to the requisite red velveteen walls covered with photos of early jazz
musicians to the wonderful E. J. Bellocq photos near
the bar. Today few clubs in Boston and New York are more than a group of tables and a stage. A handful of basement clubs have
atmosphere. But I've never known a club
first-hand that had the combination of style, atmosphere, good seating
arrangements, and high-quality music that Lulu White's had. On the other hand, Lulu's had its problems.
Various "acts" were attempted at the
club. For several week ends Herb Pomeroy
brought in a small band for dancing. My
wife and I tried dancing, but--as in the case of the others who showed up--our
hearts were not into dancing. We just
wanted to sit there and listen to Herb, Alan Dawson, Andy McGhee, and the
rest. Sometimes the word would not
spread effectively, and I would find myself almost alone at one of the tables,
witnessing some of the finest music I've ever heard, as when Joe Albany's solo
piano work substituted for Jackie McLean's group or when Sam Rivers and Dave
Holland surpassed by far anything they documented as a duo in the studio. Sometimes there were jam-packed one-nighters,
as when the Art Ensemble of Chicago
or cabaret star Blossom Dearie blew in. But usually the musicians that were brought
in from New York and elsewhere performed for three or four days at a
stretch. Phil Woods (eventually
performing without the sound system because he liked the room’s acoustics) and
some other leaders would insist on bringing in their own bands, but most
headliners used the extraordinary house band consisting of Ray Santisi, Whit Browne, and Alan Dawson.
One of Alan Dawson's favorite musicians, of course,
was Jo Jones. Jones did perform at
Lulu's a couple of times, and for a period of about six months--and I'm not
really sure of the duration--lived in the Boston area. He
became a frequent visitor to Lulu's, hanging out at the bar and mostly
complaining that he could find no work at Lulu's or anywhere else. He certainly could play well at the time, but
he was a difficult man to deal with, a fact that may have resulted in a
dwindling number of job opportunities.
My brief observations of and encounters with Jo Jones revealed a
cantankerous and bitter man who lit up only in the presence of women and
children. He would revel in ostentatiously
giving me the brush while burying my wife in complements.
One evening I asked him for an autograph for a young
would-be drummer who had seen and been mesmerized by his work. He lit up and enthusiastically asked about
the youngster. But soon, for some
reason, he became wary and got it into his head that I was asking for the
autograph for myself and did not want to ask for it on my own behalf. The simple request became a game during which
he cajoled me into buying one of his albums (not really a burden for me) before
he would sign anything.
Here's a table card from Lulu's in 1979. Notice that the weekly lineup included major jazz musicians consistently each week. Most jazz clubs today have lost touch with quality improvisation. It's just one reason those clubs today draw tourists almost exclusively:
