Music provided by record players, radios, and jukeboxes complements live performances within the general soundscape.2 People “could listen to jazz all day long” on the jukeboxes of Cleveland’s neighborhood restaurants, cafés, and nightclubs in the forties: “You heard this music every place you went” (BB). Since the fifties, television has sometimes featured jazz as well. Record stores also offered places for young enthusiasts to gather and socialize, particularly when the stores provided listening booths for customers to sample the latest albums before deciding whether to buy them.
Some homes of musicians actually “looked like record stores” because the families owned so many recordings; they listened to music “constantly” (DP). In other instances, children participated in an “extended family” that shared and distributed recordings among adults. Patti Bown remembers private records circulating from house to house in the black community of Seattle. In another musician’s neighborhood, few could afford records or record players; however, a neighbor whose generous spirit equaled his enormous collection made others welcome in his home. Evenings, everyone met there to listen to jazz.
Record collections of aficionados typically represented a wide range of popular jazz artists, including Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Ronald Shannon Jackson does not recall hearing the term jazz or such idiomatic designations as New Orleans jazz or swing when he was a youngster. In describing the music of “black dance bands” during the thirties as “jump music,” his community simply viewed the music some called jazz as part of the larger family of African American musical traditions. The record collections of black families typically included examples of spirituals, gospel music, boogie-woogie, blues, and rhythm and blues, as well as selections of Western classical music and light popular classics. This discussion of early jazz musical education reminds us that exposure to their own community’s music as well as that of the mainstream is one advantage commonly afforded minority children in America.
Musicians reflecting on their impressionable years tell insightful, touching stories of the importance of recordings in their childhoods. Melba Liston often contended with bouts of loneliness at home, for she had no siblings; early in life “music” became her “very dear friend,” with the radio its primary vehicle. In another case, operating the record player was one of Kenny Washington’s first manual skills. He often spent the day by himself listening to recordings while his father was at work. Family anecdotes attest to his emotional attachment to favorite recordings. As a toddler, Washington had learned to associate the designs on record jackets with their respective sounds. One day, he observed his father misfiling one of his albums. “I couldn’t really talk yet,” he explains, “but I started going through changes, trying to tell him that he’d put the record in the wrong case.” His father was baffled, but his mother “insisted that he check it out. Sure enough, he’d put the record in the wrong case.”
On another occasion, when Washington was intensely listening to recordings, his father interrupted him by placing a new one on the turntable. Noticing his son’s agitation, he promised that he only intended listening to one cut. The younger Washington became increasingly upset as his father extended his promise, cut by cut on the album’s first side, ignoring his son’s appeals. When his father turned the disk to begin side two, Washington “went through a temper tantrum and ran down the hall,” tripped over his pajamas and hit his mouth on a bed with enough force to knock a tooth up into his gums. “This was all over a record,” he muses.
Early Training and Performance Opportunities
As youngsters absorb musical materials from the performances of others, they simultaneously cultivate a few skills in formal settings. The church typically provides children with their first experiences as performers. Yet Williams participated in church choirs that made progressively greater demands upon their members. Music and religion “were always intertwined” in Carmen Lundy’s background. She remembers that “all the women from grandmother to granddaughter” sang in church choirs, commonly three to five days a week, and her mother led a gospel group that met regularly in their home. Lundy attended every rehearsal and performance.
Ministers of fundamentalist Christian churches sometimes provide congregation members with musical instruments during services or encourage them to perform on instruments brought from home to add color and intensity to the choir’s performances. Jimmy Robinson remembers Pentecostal churches in which instrumental performance was as “natural” as singing: “Everybody in the congregation would grab any instrument and play it—tambourines, guitars, banjos, drums, anything.” Some churches also offer music instruction and organize small ensembles ‘to accompany services or to provide youngsters with recreation. Art Farmer began his musical development as a brass player with the church’s tuba before a comet became available. Melba Liston made her debut in church as a trombonist; so did Max Roach, as a drummer.
The meaning that such experiences holds for learners became apparent to me when I attended a Holiness church service at the invitation of a jazz musician, a former congregant. Before the service began, a frail boy of seven years propped himself up amid the components of an enormous drum set arranged midway between the pews and the pulpit. As the congregation members sang and swayed—accompanying themselves by syncopated handclapping patterns and a collection of instruments—the child thrashed about on the drum skins, attempting to maintain a steady beat and to perform rhythms that fit the changing musical parts around him. Every eye was upon the young drummer, who beamed with tremendous pride as he performed. What greater inducement for the young musician’s development could there have been than the warm approval and affection that the congregation showered upon him as he held center stage in this adult world?
While continuing to cultivate their skills in the nurturing environment of the church, young musicians also attended public schools, where they gained additional experience within various extracurricular performance situations. Moreover, schools commonly offered music appreciation classes devoted to the works of Western classical music composers; instrumental instruction programs typically taught groups of beginners how to read music. Schools also afforded them exciting access to a greater variety of instruments than many had ever seen. Arthur Rhames “hung around the band room” during all his free time in grade school and “fooled with every instrument I could get my hands on.” Max Roach “dabbled” with trumpet and clarinet in elementary school as well as learning piano and drums, and Buster Williams studied drums and piano before taking up string bass. Whereas some youngsters cultivated multi-instrumentalist skills over their careers, most explored the band room’s diverse options as a prelude to selecting an instrument of specialization.3
Factors beyond the control of students sometimes determined their initial courses. Some adopted the one instrument that had been passed down in the family or that band directors assigned them on the basis of the band’s needs, the availability of instruments, or some, perhaps dubious, personal theory about the physical suitability of one instrument or another for a particular student. In other instances, youngsters selected instruments, thereby revealing their early tastes and sensitivities. Logically, an instrument’s sound was the most impressive feature for many, although sometimes the physical features of an instrument had important bearing as well. The “beautiful way” the trombone and saxophone “looked in music store windows” immediately attracted Melba Liston and James Moody to their respective instruments. The “personal images” that performers of particular instruments projected in concert inspired others. The first time Curtis Fuller attended a performance by J. J. Johnson, “I fell in love with him,” Fuller remembers, “just the way he stood there and played. He looked so elegant” compared to the behavior of other musicians on stage who were “crowd-pleasing.”
School bands, orchestras, and choirs allowed musicians to perform a diverse repertory that included marches, tunes from musical theater, and simplified arrangements of selected movements from operas and symphonies. Additionally, “every black school had its swing bands that played stock arrangements,” orchestrated versions of jazz pieces that were initially popularized by Erskine Hawkins, Count Basie, and others (DB). Also known as stage bands, these groups performed in school concerts, assembly programs, and occasional dances.
The public school system fostered a “healthy sense of competition” among young artists that contributed to their musical development (RSJ). Junior high school graduates typically attended a central high school where, pitting their skills against those of the best performers from the larger community, they competed for positions in new band organizations. Some programs featured a succession of stage bands starting with more elementary bands and progressing to the most advanced stage band, in which membership was the object of great pride and considerable striving among teenagers. “All-city” and “all-state” honor concert bands, stage bands, orchestras, and solo competitions further motivated serious young musicians.
David Baker stresses the important role that “enlightened high school band leaders” played in African American communities across the country in developing the sensitivities and abilities of prospective jazz musicians. “Every community had its Walter Dyett,” he says, referring to the renowned Chicago music educator who inspired young artists Gene Ammons, Richard Davis, Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan, Julian Priester, Harold Ousley, and many others. Similarly, in Indianapolis, Baker’s early teacher and band director “also taught the Montgomery brothers, the Hampton boys, Jimmy Spaulding, Virgil Jones, and many others.” Although the band leaders did not actually teach improvisation, their sympathy and respect for jazz encouraged students to apply the general skills they had acquired through more formal musical education to their practice of jazz.
Many serious young performers ultimately supplemented their training at school with coaching by relatives at home or in the neighborhood. In Vea Williams’s household, her earliest “voice lessons” consisted of singing with her mother and sisters as they all washed dishes after meals and did other household chores. When Max Roach grew up in New York City, “there was always somebody’s uncle next door or across the street who had a band, and when they took a break, the kids were allowed to fool with their instruments.”
Alternatively, they received private lessons from professional musicians in community music schools and local music stores, where they could study instrumental performance technique, classical music repertory, and, in some instances, elementary music theory and composition. Strongly motivated students commonly learned musical instruments without formal instruction by synthesizing bits of knowledge from commercial method books, other young performers, and their own experimentation. Chuck Israels studied guitar and cello formally, then combined his knowledge of both instruments to teach himself bass. Doc Cheatham received a comet and a few prepaid lessons as a gift from his father but chose to ignore the instruction in favor of copying the “adlib playing” of local jazz musicians. He subsequently learned the C melody saxophone on his own as well.
As a consequence of formal training, instrument selection, and performance participation, youngsters acquired different kinds of knowledge, including musical exercises, tunes, and different parts from band arrangements of compositions. Such knowledge reflected the youngsters’ characteristically diverse, polymusical environment, spanning sacred and secular African American and Western classical traditions, among others. As was typical, while still a teenager, pianist Lil Armstrong had not only attained enough proficiency in jazz to be hired by Joe Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band but felt confident performing Bach and Chopin during her impromptu meeting with Jelly Roll Morton.4
Moreover, such early knowledge commonly assumed different forms of musical representation from student to student. Singers without formal music education primarily learned their parts in choirs by ear, thinking of them as precise paths of rising and falling pitches, sometimes accompanied by imagined visualizations—graphic representations of their contours and rhythm. Many other self-educated performers also initially learned music by ear, as well as by hand and by instrument: memorizing the sounds of phrases together with their corresponding finger patterns and positions on an instrument. Having, in effect, formulated an internal tablature representation, the student can draw upon its visual and physical imagery to aid the ear in retrieving and rendering a part. Still others underwent successful training in reading and writing music, and they envision sounds in terms of symbols of conventional Western staff notation. Those with the extraordinary aptitudes of perfect pitch and photographic memories can translate sounds into notation almost instantly and store their images.
Attitudes toward the benefits of music literacy differed among youngsters, however. Youths with exceptional memories for sounds could recall pieces after hearing them demonstrated during lessons. A newspaper in Bix Beiderbecke’s hometown described his ability at the age of seven to reproduce instantly, in any key, the melody and bass accompaniment to a piece after hearing his mother play the piece just once on the piano. Great artists like Louis Armstrong carried such gifts throughout their careers, evidencing the extraordinary ability to apprehend and remember tunes after a single hearing.5 Several musicians I interviewed tell of teachers who were surprised indeed when their inability to perform a complex composition revealed that the students had all along resisted learning to read. They had simply pretended to follow the notation. For some of them, the subterfuge had gone on for a year or more.
On the other hand, some felt limited without written musical representation and, as early as grade school, invented personal notation systems or adapted those of instrument instruction manuals to assist them in recalling pieces. Melba Liston “wrote down tunes remembered from church and simple popular tunes” by assigning each pitch a different number according to her own construction of a seven-pitch scale. She vividly recalls puzzling over how to reconcile the chromatic pitches of tunes with her system—”sitting out on the back porch trying to figure out ‘that’s not a 4 and it’s not a 5, but it’s somewhere in between.’” Lonnie Hillyer “gave each trumpet valve a number” and recorded the sequence of valve combinations that produced the pitches of simple melodies. Some youngsters also approximated the rhythms of pieces within their notational schemes through varied spacing arrangements on the page. Others avoided the difficulties inherent in such practices and supplied the rhythms from memory during performances. Ultimately, different mixtures of representation colored each student’s distinct world of musical imagination, whether engaged in remembering, performing, or inventing pieces.
The Benefits of Cultural Milieu in Shaping Musical Development
Training received within the overlapping religious and secular musical domains enabled many learners to experiment with African American music performance at the same time as they gained control over instruments: re-creating, if only on an elementary level, the sounds with which they had become intimate. They shaped melodies according to such models as a relative’s habit of humming the blues, fellow students’ renditions of soul music on the school bus, and patterns heard on household jazz recordings. They comfortably placed intricate figures within a framework of rhythm and meter absorbed through a succession popular dances fashionable among their schoolmates and the handclapping patterns that accompanied hymns. They endeavored to i
mitate harmonic structures that reappeared in a local peddler’s impromptu performance, in the improvisations overheard at the apartment manager’s weekly jam sessions, and in the organist’s accompaniment to religious services. “Like most black musicians,” Dizzy Gillespie explains, “much of my early inspiration, especially with rhythm and harmonies, came from the church.”6
Moreover, they explored other musical implications of the church service, a complex, integrated model for performance derived from the testimonial cries of ministers and worshippers engaged in vocal exchanges, spirited sermons that stand tantalizingly on the. border between speech and song, and the soulful musical interludes that enhance the service’s emotional intensity and its message. Max Roach explains that, in church, young musicians were judged on the basis of “their abilities to stir the congregation’s feelings” rather than on the basis of “their technical proficiency” alone. The emotional intensity of performances at black “hallelujah possession churches,” where hymns build to “fantastic climaxes” over forty-five minutes until “sinners shout and preach,” epitomizes this value (LD). Don Pate first “heard talk about that spiritual feeling” from his mother in church. When he asked “why some of the old ladies would get up and have fits and scream and holler,” she answered that “they were feeling the spirit, the spirit being Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost.” Pate elaborates,
Thinking in Jazz Page 5
