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Saturday 31 March 2012

J is for Jazz 001: LESTER YOUNG



Blue Lester
Savoy LP, c 1950





The trouble with most musicians today is that they are copycats.  Of course, you have to start playing like someone else.  You have a model, or a teacher, and you learn all that he can show you.  But then you start playing for yourself.  Show them that you're an individual.  And I can count those who are doing that today on the fingers of one hand.

 

LESTER YOUNG
DownBeat 
6 May 1949  





 

 

He played the tenor saxophone, tilting it at a forty-five degree angle when he did so he wouldn't be mistaken for Coleman Hawkins, one of his greatest rivals on the same instrument throughout the 1930s.  He joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1936 and played on many of its most memorable recordings –– including Honeysuckle Rose, Lady Be Good and Taxi War Dance before leaving the band in 1940 to pursue an artistically if not always financially rewarding solo career.

 

He also featured on many of Billie Holiday's finest small group recordings, including the sublime This Year's Kisses and Mean To Me, and gave her the nickname 'Lady Day,' a tribute she returned by dubbing him 'The President' — a moniker the other musicians he played with invariably shortened to 'Pres' (pronounced 'Prez').  He wore flat little porkpie hats, stylishly-cut clothes and is alleged to have once thrown a brand new pair of shoes in the trashcan because he said their leather soles felt too hard against his feet.  

 

'It had to be soft and gentle,' a former bandmate of Young's once told jazz critic Leonard Feather, 'or Pres wanted no part of it.'






THIS YEAR'S KISSES (1937)  
BILLIE HOLIDAY [vocal]  
LESTER YOUNG [tenor saxophone] 
TEDDY WILSON [piano]  
BUCK CLAYTON [trumpet]
BENNY GOODMAN [clarinet]  
FREDDIE GREEN [guitar]
WALTER PAGE [bass]  
JO JONES [drums]
Brunswick Records single, 1937
The opening saxophone solo is performed by Young   




 

He referred to himself in the third person (he would say 'Pres is splitting' when he left a room and was supposedly the first musician to use the term 'bread' to describe money) and called white people 'Oxford Greys' or simply 'greys,' often choosing to walk deliberately out of his way to avoid having to speak to them.  He would sit alone in a corner for hours sometimes without saying a word to anybody, then climb up on the bandstand and blow audiences away with the sheer beauty of his playing.  He drank so much gin and bourbon in his later years that he frequently forgot to eat and had to be hospitalized on more than one occasion because he was found to be malnourished and severely dehydrated.


 

He was also a musical genius whose fluid phrasing and deceptively light tone came to define the concept of 'cool jazz' long before its official birth in the early 1950s.  He influenced almost every major tenor saxophonist who came after him, including Dexter Gordon, Paul Quinichette (who was nicknamed 'Vice Pres' because he modeled his style so closely on Young's) and Stan Getz.  Getz even went so far as to say that if he hadn't had Young to copy from when he first started out, he might never have played anything worth hearing on the saxophone at all.   

 

In 1944 Young was drafted into the army, where he was persecuted by a white officer who noticed that he carried around a photograph of a white woman in his wallet –– a white woman who also happened to be the black saxophonist's second wife.  Young deserted his post, but returned voluntarily after twenty-four hours, where he was promptly charged with going AWOL and locked up in the base stockade.  Except for a few visits to the hospital, where he found some relief from the brutality of his situation by drinking liquid cocaine smuggled to him by a sympathetic orderly, he was to remain behind bars until he received a dishonorable discharge in the summer of 1945.


   



ALL OF ME (1956)     
LESTER YOUNG [tenor saxophone]  
TEDDY WILSON [piano]   
GENE RAMEY [bass]   
JO JONES [drums]
From the 1956 Verve LP 
Pres and Teddy




 

Luckily, Young's playing wasn't affected by the mistreatment he suffered while in uniform.  He returned to the studio in the late 1940s, cutting more than a dozen sides for the Los Angeles-based Aladdin label that confounded fans who were unwilling to accept the idea that his style had evolved into something new while still remaining quintessentially 'Presidential.'  During the 1950s, which were arguably his leanest years creatively, he appeared on several outstanding duet albums with Oscar Peterson, Harry 'Sweets' Edison and the equally gifted pianist Teddy Wilson.  He was also a regular participant in Norman Granz's popular Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, where he was reunited with his old friend Billie Holiday and occasionally had the chance to perform with her on stage again. 

 

 

 
  

LESTER YOUNG, c 1956

 

 

By 1958 his drinking had begun to spiral out of control.  A trip to Paris – a city he had enjoyed visiting as a member of the Basie organization in the 1930s – proved to be the beginning of the end not only of his career but also of his life.  It took him a week to find the strength to board the plane that would take him back to New York and once he got there he resumed what had now become a sad but all too familiar routine.  He checked into a seedy hotel directly across the street from Birdland – at that time the most famous jazz club in the city –– and drank himself senseless while listening to the same records by Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes over and over again.  This was what he was doing the night before he died on 15 March 1959.  He was forty-nine years old.    

 
Young's contribution to jazz is immeasurable.  Along with Coleman Hawkins, he helped to make tenor saxophone –– which until their arrival had usually been dismissed as little more than a novelty instrument by the older generation of New Orleans-trained musicians – the dominant sound of the music from the 1930s well into the be-bop and post-bop eras.  But it was above all Young's elegance, his air of world-weary romanticism and his much imitated but never equaled lightness of tone that made him stand out as a musician who could stir the heart and make poetry out of the simplest phrase by remembering and applying just one simple rule –– technique alone is never a substitute for genuine, heartfelt emotion. 

 
 
 
 
Use the link below to listen to more great music by LESTER YOUNG:
 
 
 
    

 
 
 
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.  
 
 


 
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Last updated 1 October 2021 § 
  

Thursday 29 March 2012

The Write Advice 011: JOHN CLARKE


I’ve known a few people in my life who wanted to be writers but they were waiting for the finger of God to light upon them, whereupon they would jump on their steed and race down for some ink, and come back and lay the parchment out, pause briefly and write the definitive novel.
       Doesn’t happen.  One of the things you need to do if you’re interested in writing, is write.  You need to write letters, write emails, write stuff.  And any writing is good training for working out who you are and what sort of writer you want to be.

The Sydney Morning Herald (May 2007)

 


Use the link below to visit the website of New Zealand/Australian writer JOHN CLARKE (1948–2017):


https://mrjohnclarke.com/

 

 

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Wednesday 21 March 2012

The Ten O'Clock Horses (1996) by LAURIE GRAHAM



Black Swan UK, 1996



 

 

Ronnie, something hungry and vile worming inside him, swelling till it fills his whole chest, pedalling faster, away from the silence of wet empty streets and the terror of something that is gaining on him fast.

 

You run straight home else the Ten O'Clock Horses'll get you.  Listen.  Can you hear them?  I can.  They're on the way, so straight home and don't look behind you.  I've told you what happens if you look behind.  'Ah, come on, Glover.  It's only twenty to nine.'



 
 
The Novel:  England. 1962.  Ronnie Glover, painter and decorator, lives in the East Midlands city of Leicester with his loyal but dowdy wife Eileen and their daughters Gillian and Susan.  He does his job, dutifully brings home his pay packet each week and looks forward to Friday nights –– the one night in seven when Eileen allows him to ‘get his end away’ even though she insists on them doing the deed on a towel so it won’t mess up her sheets.

 
But Ronnie’s familiar if constrained world is changing.  The war he helped the Allies win is long over and working-class people everywhere are beginning to expect more from life than what they were previously taught to believe was their rightful due.  They’re buying cars, getting the telephone connected, hosting anniversary dinners in the ballrooms of fancy hotels, playing cricket like the toffs and even doing 'peculiar' things like painting pictures and learning conversational Italian in their spare time.  Ronnie's own comfortable if uneventful life –– going to work, visiting the pub and the local chippy (or ‘fish and chip shop’ as we call it in Australia), walking his dog Gums late at night, refereeing his parents’ increasingly bitter arguments, taking his annual seaside holiday –– suddenly feels empty and unsatisfying.  There has to be more to living, he thinks, than eating the same stodgy meals night after night, watching Z Cars and The Dick Van Dyke Show on television and yarning away to Eileen about avocados, those exotic new fruits their local greengrocer has been after him to try.  

 
But what is it?  And how does an ordinary bloke like him go about finding it if it is, in fact, out there to be found?

 
These questions appear to be answered when he meets Jack –– Jacqueline Granger, his younger daughter Susan’s glamorous new dancing teacher.  Jack is married, speaks in a posh accent and lives in a large fancy house that backs on to the local golf course.  She's clever and charming and has long legs and a bum every bit as nice as that of his television dreamgirl Mary Tyler Moore.  When she asks Ronnie if he’d be interested in re-papering her kitchen he can’t believe his luck.  He fancies her something fierce but has convinced himself, while riding home on his bike, that a woman as sophisticated as the lovely Mrs Granger could never in his wildest dreams be attracted to a useless git like him. 

 
On his second visit to her house to start the job, however, Jack treats him to a free dancing lesson in her front room –– a lesson that quickly leads to him getting everything he’s ever dreamed of getting from a woman and more.  But there's a catch.  He feels guilty about it.  He starts lying to Eileen and to his workmates Vic and Pearce about why he’s spending so much time on that new job up on Gartree Road.  And there's also the unsettling question of how old the daringly sexy Jack really us.  Is she forty, like he so desperately wants her to be?  Or is she closer to sixty, like his mate Vic keeps hinting none too subtly each time her name crops up?  Can Ronnie hold on to her and the new life she seems to promise or will The Ten O’Clock Horses –– the nightmare nags that haunted his childhood thanks to the cranky neglectful mother who never really wanted him –– gallop in from nowhere and steal everything, his family included, away from him forever?
 
 
 

Quercus Books UK, 2010
 
 
 
What makes The Ten O’Clock Horses such an outstandingly perceptive novel is the way that Graham’s unique dialogue-based style manages to capture all the humour, frustration and banality of Ronnie's world and contrast it so poignantly with his growing sense of guilt and inner turmoil.   Her characters think, talk and behave like people you've probably known all your life –– that scruffy uncle who should wash a bit more than he does, that aunt who wears too much make-up and has a silly hair-do, your downtrodden grandpa who's quietly enjoying his own bit on the side now that grandma's too old and sick to be bothered keeping tabs on him.

 
While many critics have praised Graham's uncanny ear for dialogue –– she has a remarkable talent for capturing the natural rhythms of speech that any writer, past or present, would envy –– it's her ability to reveal and explore the emotional lives of her characters, and to describe the rapidly changing society of the early 1960s, that makes The Ten O’Clock Horses the equal, in my view, of earlier classics of post-war British social-realist fiction such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960).  Ronnie Glover is every smart, sensitive but basically lost and desperate man who yearns for more than what he has but doesn’t necessarily want to hurt or alienate those he loves in order to get his hands on it.  While he's basically decent he's also human and prone to temptation and selfishness and therein lies his tragedy.  The nightmarish horses of the title serve as potent symbols not only of his unhappy childhood but also of what his future might become should he refuse to stop deluding himself and face up to reality.  His is, ultimately, a deeply moving story that raises issues we're all forced to confront as we age and our regrets begin to outnumber our dreams and the opportunities we're granted to realize them.

 
The Ten O'Clock Horses is sad, whimsical, angry, funny (it's very funny in places, so please don't be put off by my perhaps heavy-handed description of it) and, above all, highly entertaining.  It's also an underrated classic of late twentieth century British fiction that deserves to be judged on its merits and not solely by its cover(s).
 
 


LAURIE GRAHAM, c 2000


 
 
The Writer:  Everything you could ever want to know about the life and career of Laurie Graham is available on her website.  You'll also find photographs of her, links to her blog and further information about many of her other funny, compassionate and brilliantly insightful novels there.  The Dress Circle (1998) is another one well worth seeking out, if only because it might permanently alter the way you think about transvestites.
 
  


Black Swan UK, 1998


 
 
 
Use the link below to visit the website of English novelist and journalist LAURIE GRAHAM:
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 23 September 2021 §
 

Thursday 8 March 2012

The Write Advice 010: FORD MADOX FORD


The only human activity that has always been of extreme importance to the world is imaginative literatureIt is of supreme importance because it is the only means by which humanity can express at once emotions and ideas.  To avoid controversy I am perfectly ready to concede that the other arts are of equal importance.  But nothing that is not an art is of any lasting importance at all, the meanest novel being humanly more valuable than the most pompous of factual works, the most formidable of material achievements or the most carefully thought-out of legal codes [Samuel Butler’s] The Way of All Flesh cannot be superseded because it is a record of humanity.  Science changes its aspect as every new investigator gains sufficient publicity to discredit his predecessors.  The stuff of humanity is unchangeable.  I do not expect the lay reader to agree with me in this pronouncement but it would be better for him if he did.  The world would be a clearer place to him.

Return to Yesterday (1931)

 

Use the link below to visit THE FORD MADOX FORD SOCIETY, an international organization founded in 1997 'to promote knowledge of and interest in the life and works of Ford Madox Ford':


http://www.fordmadoxfordsociety.org/

 

 

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Thursday 1 March 2012

Babbitt (1922) by SINCLAIR LEWIS




Dover Thrift Edition, 2003

 

 

 

As he approached the office he walked faster and faster, muttering, ‘Guess better hustle.’ All about him the city was hustling, for hustling’s sake. Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic.  Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators.  Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry.  Men in barber shops were snapping, ‘Jus’ shave me once over. Gotta hustle.’ Men were feverishly getting rid of visitors in offices adorned with the signs, ‘This Is My Busy Day’ and ‘The Lord Created The World in Six Days You Can Spiel All You Got to Say in Six Minutes.’ Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.    Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to sit down with nothing much to do except see that the staff looked as though they were hustling.



 

 

The Novel:  Not only was the 1920s the era of wealth, glamor, jazz and unprecedented sophistication in North American life, it also saw the rise of the businessman, the Booster, the ‘good fellow trying to get ahead for his family’s sake.’  George F Babbitt is one such minor league tycoon –– a modestly successful, college-educated real estate salesman with a wife, three children, a home in the pretty suburb of Floral Gardens and a firmly-established position in the second tier of ‘important personages’ in the growing midwestern town of Zenith.

 

Babbitt eats too much, smokes too much and has a tendency to become loud and overbearing after drinking too much bootleg whiskey or putting away one too many cocktails at dinner parties.  He's overweight and doesn't exercise half as much as he should.  He tolerates, rather than loves, his simpering wife Myra and frequently dreams of escaping his dull workaday world with a lissome young 'fairy child' on his arm to which end he flirts with a neighbor's wife and makes a date with a manicurist young enough to be his daughter, only to have the latter embarrassingly reject him when he makes a pass at her.  He argues with his children, craves the friendship of the rich and the respect of the poor and generally does a fine job of pretending not to notice or care when neither is forthcoming.

 

But Babbitt is no fool.  He realizes what a walking cliché he is and cannot help feeling miserable about it.  He dreams of cutting out the booze and ditching all the gladhanding he's forced to do to stay one step ahead of the competition in the real estate game, finding himself a quiet place to live where, at long last, he'll be able to settle down and get some 'proper thinking' done.

 

When his best friend Paul Riesling, henpecked husband and failed violinist, is arrested and imprisoned for shooting and seriously wounding his complaining shrew of a wife, Babbitt finds himself suddenly cut adrift from his normal workaday life, lacking the support system which, up till then, had made it tolerable if seldom exciting, romantic or professionally satisfying.  Tired and disillusioned, he takes up with the imaginatively named Tanis Judique –– a semi-refined woman who has rented an apartment from him – and her 'fast' set, regularly attending their parties in preference to meeting his responsibilities as husband, father and somewhat unsteady pillar of the well-to-do Zenith community.  He even defends the local socialist, declaring that he's not such a bad fellow to his horrified business associates when they get together to discuss the idea of running the alleged troublemaker out of town.  But little by little Babbitt finds himself returning to his former 'safe' habits, trading this brief taste of social and intellectual freedom for the familiar banalities of a suburban existence which remains as predictable as it does frustrating and emotionally stultifying.

 

Babbitt was one of the first truly 'modern' men to be depicted in twentieth century North American fiction, the forerunner of characters like John Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom (Babbitt/Rabbit – coincidence or homage?  I tend to think the latter but I could be wrong), Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe and a dozen others like them whose alleged 'ordinariness' is, to some degree, an intrinsic part of what makes them so fascinating.  George F Babbitt's world is not the glamorous 1920s milieu inhabited by Jay Gatsby or Daisy Buchanan or her immoral, loose-living husband Tom.  Nor would you have found George living la vie artistique on the Left Bank in Paris alongside Hemingway's Jake Barnes.  The 1920s saw the birth of the world as we know and love (?) it today –– a world unashamedly obsessed with money, status and celebrity (the idea that anyone could make a living from, let alone be idolized for being a 'movie star,' was unthinkable before the phenomenal success of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin proved it could be done in the 1920s), rushing to embrace the new and reject everything it considered to be even remotely outré or old-fashioned. 

 

 

Bantam Books, c 1950

 

 

Babbitt, and 'Babbittism' as this phenomenon quickly came to be known, both symbolized and defined this frantic quest for modernity at any cost, a world where greed was revered and the poor man was only believed to be poor because he lacked the necessary amount of 'pep' and 'know-how' to go out and make himself a millionaire.  As the critic HL Mencken so perceptively wrote when the book first appeared:  'I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America.'  But it was Lewis himself who best understood that 'real America,' a place where the Boosters and the go-getters were becoming increasingly desperate 'to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.'  Ninety years later it could be argued that nothing much has changed in the Western world. 

 

 


SINCLAIR 'RED' LEWIS, c 1930

 

 

 

The Writer:  Harry Sinclair Lewis (he earned the nickname 'Red' thanks to the colour of his hair) was born on 7 February 1885 in the Minnesota town of Sauk Center –– a place still considered to be part of the rapidly vanishing North American frontier at that time.  His father was a doctor and his mother, a consumptive, died when he was six. 

 

An indifferent and often troublesome scholar, Lewis nevertheless absorbed enough knowledge from his own prodigious reading to gain admission to Yale, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1908 following a brief hiatus which saw him quit school to work as a janitor in a socialist commune, take a trip to Panama and fail to make any headway whatsoever as a freelance journalist.  After losing the religious faith which had inspired his boyhood dream of traveling overseas to work as a missionary, he dedicated himself with equal fervor to establishing a career in literature, writing children's adventure stories, verse and articles for magazines and periodicals first in New York City and then in San Francisco and Washington DC before returning to New York to accept a job in publishing.  Always disgusted and appalled by the miserable living conditions the working-class poor were forced to endure, Lewis joined the Socialist Party in 1912 and remained a committed Socialist all his life, his beliefs both inspiring and underscoring the biting sense of outrage which drives so much of his fiction.

 

His first novel, Our Mr Wrenn, appeared in 1914 and in that same year he married his first wife, Grace Livingston Hegger, instigating what was to become a lifelong love of traveling from city to city and, eventually, from continent to continent.  His second novel, The Job, was published in 1917, as was his third, the poorly received The Innocents.  It was only with the publication of his fourth novel, Main Street, that Lewis was to find the fame and financial success which had eluded him prior to this.  The tale of a strong-willed bride who moves to a stuffy Midwestern town (closely modeled on Sauk Center) with her new husband and unsuccessfully attempts to 'civilize' it, Main Street would go on to sell 180,000 copies by the end of 1920 and earn its author praise from the likes of John Galsworthy, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson and the young (and then very fashionable) F Scott Fitzgerald.  Babbitt appeared in 1922, selling 141,000 copies by the end of the year and guaranteeing Lewis's continued financial independence.  This allowed him to separate from his first wife and visit Europe and the UK for extended periods, where he was befriended by many celebrated English writers of the day including Somerset Maugham, Lytton Strachey and the Socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

 

Other successes followed.  His novel Arrowsmith, about an idealistic doctor, appeared in 1925 and earned him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize –– a nomination he rejected because he felt the prize should be awarded on literary merit alone rather than because the nominated work happened to meet all the patriotically inspired selection criteria.  (He was a harsh and outspoken critic of the North American literary establishment in general, once referring to his nation's professors as people who 'like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.')  His next book, Elmer Gantry, was roundly condemned by religious leaders when it appeared in 1927 because its title character happened to be a hypocritical minister who takes financial, moral and sexual advantage of his gullible parishioners.  Despite being banned in some cities, the novel would go on to become another runaway bestseller.

 

SINCLAIR LEWIS and DOROTHY THOMPSON, 1928

 

 

In 1928, Lewis divorced his first wife Grace and married the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whom he proposed to the first time they met and allegedly kept proposing to each time their paths re-crossed until she finally relented and accepted him.  He continued to lead his usual peripatetic life with her and in 1929 published the novel Dodsworth –– another satire about a wealthy middle-class couple traveling through Europe who come to realize how empty and pointless their lives are that would win him the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature.  (He was the first North American writer to win the award.)  A heavy drinker all his life, Lewis made several attempts to give up alcohol, none of which lasted for more than a few weeks despite his frequent stays in various sanitariums, hospitals and rest homes.  His last truly 'great' novel was It Can't Happen Here –– one of the first to directly attack Fascism, a political system widely seen in 1935, the year the book was published, as being the potential 'savior' of a world still in the grip of a Depression that would only end with the outbreak of World War Two.

 

Lewis divorced Dorothy Thompson in 1942 and spent the last nine years of his life traveling, writing still more novels, stories, articles and plays (some of which he acted in), unsuccessfully romancing women much younger than himself and drinking like a fish.  He died in Rome in January 1951 of what was described by the attending physician as 'advanced alcoholism.' 

 

 
 
Use the link below to visit the website of THE SINCLAIR LEWIS SOCIETY:
 
 
 
 
 
 
Use this link to read Babbitt and many other out of copyright novels by SINCLAIR LEWIS:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are many biographies and critical studies of his work available, including a memoir by DOROTHY THOMPSON which charts the course of their stormy and ultimately disastrous marriage. 


 

DOROTHY THOMPSON was an amazing woman in her own right.  She was one of the first foreign journalists to interview Adolf Hitler and also the first to be expelled from Nazi Germany.  After the war she became an avid supporter of Zionism and, when that movement became 'too imperialistic' in her view, began to support the even more contentious cause of Palestinian liberation. 

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 17 September 2021