Five Lives in the Bebop Business by Sid Herpes of the renowned metamusic group The Anachronisms
Reviewed in this article:We have frequently wondered on this site about just what functions biography serves. Well, after accidentally reading Oscar Peterson's autobiography and A. B. Spellman's highly regarded work of jazz biography in succession, I finally managed to see one obvious function of biography, which is debunking the myths by which we are supposed to live.A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, Limelight, 1966 (text), 1985 (introduction), 235 pp.
Oscar Peterson, A Jazz Odyssey: My Life in Jazz, Continuum, 2002, 373 pp.(editor/consultant: Richard Palmer)The myth debunked by these two books is the myth of success. Over the last twenty years the Puritan ethic has staged a strong comeback in North America. In fact, it has mutated into an even more attractive version. We used to be told that if we worked hard we would be rewarded, now we are told that if we are only willing to work hard enough we can achieve whatever we want. That's right, whatever we want. In emphasizing that I am not implying that you, dear reader, have been unable to notice the continual reiteration of this tenet of our modern faith. I am implying that I find people's ability to parrot this belief as if it were a profound insight into the nature of being utterly flabbergasting.
So what do these two books have to say about success? They detail the lives of five jazz musicians: alto saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Jackie McLean, and pianists Herbie Nichols, Oscar Peterson, and Cecil Taylor. I'm sure even many jazz fans will be asking "Who is Herbie Nichols?", and that question immediately disproves the myth of success.
Herbie Nichols is best known as the composer of "Lady Sings the Blues." That is, if he is known at all that is who he is best known as. Most people just don't know who he is. Herbie Nichols worked like a dog and he got nowhere. As Spellman observes, Nichols' music is beautiful and original, but record companies refused to believe it would sell. He was allowed to make few recordings of his own music, and they didn't sell. And it's not as if his music was unusual. It was different from the dominant jazz of his day, but it wasn't as different as Cecil Taylor's or Ornette Coleman's music or Jackie McLean's modal efforts, but they all sold more records than Herbie Nichols did.
The other four musicians whose lives are described in these two books would now all be considered successes. Peterson and Coleman are considered titans of jazz – not always by the same people, but they are considered titans. McLean has remained popular since Spellman wrote about him in 1966 and has also earned a reputation as a distinguished educator and supporter of the arts. Coleman has held a MacArthur Fellowship, and Taylor has held both a MacArthur and a Guggenheim and played at the White House.
I think it's fair, however, to consider Oscar Peterson and Jackie McLean more successful than Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. The chief reason I say that is that Peterson and McLean have sold many more records than Taylor and Coleman. Of the four, Peterson could fairly be judged as the most successful because in addition to his record sales he has a list of honours that dwarfs those of the other players, who aren't wanting for honours themselves.
So, did Oscar Peterson work harder than Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, or Cecil Taylor? Well, he worked hard, but if any of the four worked the hardest it was, according to the accounts in these two volumes, Ornette Coleman. The account of his early career is close to heartbreaking. As a teenager he played every night in Fort Worth dives to support his mother and sister (he had to skip his high school prom to play a date during which one man was shot to death and two more stabbed). After high school he worked with a minstrel show whose dates made his Fort Worth gigs seem tame. He then moved on to Clarence Samuels' rhythm and blues band. One night in Baton Rouge, after he played a solo that was too jazzy for some of the music lovers in attendance, three of them beat him up and smashed his sax, which of course cost him his job. Things did improve after that, but his attempts to get into jazz usually resulted in other musicians leaving the stage, or leaders (Dexter Gordon, for example) ordering him off it. And while racism put many obstacles in each man's way, it put more in Ornette Coleman's.
In short, if effort were crucial Ornette Coleman should have been more popular than Britney Spears. Even today, though, many jazz fans regard him as a fraud (one of the benefits of Spellman's book is that it establishes that however fraudulent Coleman's music may sometimes sound, it has a serious foundation and intent).
In fact, all of these men worked hard. You don't even have to take their word for it – the world of the performing musician is a very demanding one, and it was more so in the days in which these men began their careers. Everyone in their world worked hard. It was a condition of having work.
Of course, a defender of the new Puritan ethic might point out that it requires you to be willing not just to work hard, but to work hard enough. Sure, this argument would go, Ornette Coleman worked really hard, but if he had only been willing to work harder….
Well, anyone who makes that argument has to admit that the new Puritan ethic has been phrased misleadingly. It should read "If you're willing to work hard enough, you can achieve whatever you want, except when working hard enough isn't humanly possible." If you don't believe me, read what Ornette Coleman went through.
As I was saying, though, jazz musicians are required to work hard. A Jazz Odyssey provides interesting descriptions of the work involved in simply playing. For example, Peterson makes it clear that the rhythm section isn't just up there playing chords and setting time. For example, when accompanying a singer he adjusts his accompaniment to the singer(by varying the chord voicings so they're appropriate to the singer's use of his or her range, for example). The singer will also use signals to tell the accompanists of problems with the accompaniment or of the need to change the accompaniment to accommodate a change in interpretation. The pianist also watches the singer for unconscious signs of discomfort with the playing.
When playing in a trio, Peterson uses musical signals (particular figures, for example) to tell his accompanists about changes he wants in the accompaniment, and they have their own signals to let him know what they are planning to do.
And for much of Peterson's career he was playing in a different town every night.
If Taylor's, Coleman's, and Nichols' performing careers were less demanding than Peterson's or McLean's it was only because they had more trouble finding work. When they didn't have performing work they worked teaching or doing menial jobs while at the same time trying to find performing work, get music published, run musical businesses, and so on.
To make a long story short, Peterson and McLean seem to have had more success than Coleman, Taylor, and Nichols because they were lucky enough to run into people who realized they could be successes. Listening to Herbie Nichols play his own beautiful and invigorating pieces you have to wonder how he could not have run into someone some time who realized his and their possibilities and could do something about realizing them, but he didn't. Maybe our disbelief is simply a sign that we believe a bit too strongly in the Puritan ethic. Maybe most talented people in every field are overlooked for their entire lives.
Well, I've now had enough of riding that hobbyhorse and will turn to the ostensible purpose of this article, which is to review the two books. To be fair, Spellman's book is journalism rather than biography, and should be judged as journalism. However, it was published at a time when the phrase good journalism was not yet an oxymoron, and it is good journalism.
The book is largely a precis of taped interviews with the four men, and the precis is competent and intelligent and elaborated with insightful commentary. Spellman was originally writing for periodical publication, an undertaking which doesn't allow the undertaking of a lot of expense for fact-checking, but he did use sources other than his subjects, and the differences between the four mens' accounts are so striking that it's reasonable to conclude that they reflect actual differences in experience. Four Lives in the Bebop Business provides a comprehensive and striking account of the lives of jazz musicians in the middle of the last century and of four men with four different and remarkable personalities.
A Jazz Odyssey is a fascinating account of Oscar Peterson's life in jazz, although it is less than comprehensive (editor/consultant Richard Palmer occasionally has to insert brief accounts of periods Peterson didn't cover). However, a comprehensive account probably would have been too heavy to pick up, and at least some of Peterson's glossing over seems to be due to modesty, a shortcoming of the autobiography, and in particular of the Canadian autobiography.
Peterson's book differs from Spellman's in that it is not just an account of his career but also a set of tributes to the men and women he has performed and recorded with, and to legendary promoter Norman Granz, whom Peterson considers the architect of his career. A remarkable feature of Peterson's book is the objectivity of these tributes, many of which are about people who were his friends for years. He is even objective about his idol Art Tatum. Peterson is also remarkably objective about himself (something which will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the earlier documentary In the Key of Oscar.
The chief difference you notice between Peterson and the other four musicians is his extreme competitiveness. One may reasonably conclude that his early development of stunning piano technique was motivated by a desire to cut everyone he ever appeared on a bandstand with, a desire which continues to burn within him to this day. It was this competitiveness which seems to have motivated his perpetual striving to improve his playing.
The chief deficiency of Spellman's book is his decision to preserve the colloquial English his musicians used in their interviews. Of course, the book was published in the 1960s, when street talk seemed direct and real. In fact, though, it's less direct and less real than the articulate standard English used by Peterson, or the articulate standard English I've heard Jackie McLean use in more formal interviews. Spellman's four subjects are or were all intelligent men, and a presentation of their ideas in more direct standard English would have been helpful.
The chief deficiency of Peterson's book is that his admiration for his colleagues over the years is so great that he includes many anecdotes about them which are less fascinating to us than they are to Peterson, simply because we don't know the men and women he's talking about as well as he did. He also could profitably have incorporated some observations he had published earlier. For example, his discussion of Duke Ellington would have been helped by including observations he has published elsewhere about the relationships between Ellington and his musicians.
The flaws in either book are far from fatal, though, and the few comments here reviewing the books do not do justice to them, simply because doing justice to them would probably require another book. Both books are packed with interesting and informative information, intelligently presented and analyzed, about important musical and social issues. For jazz fans they are valuable resources which will help most of them understand jazz better. For all of us they are appealing and enlightening accounts of how five remarkable men made their way in the world, or failed to make it.
Five Lives in the Bebop Business © John FitzGerald, 2004
Posted on September 29, 2004
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