Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  There was one medium in which modern jazz was not just tolerated but almost demanded, however. Just as the public was prepared to accept modernist classical motifs when they were tied to the madcap antics of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, jazz became an increasingly familiar adjunct to Hollywood thrillers from the 1950s onwards – signifying urban angst, tension, a bohemian milieu and the threat of violence. Film soundtracks began to attract maverick talents from diverse backgrounds: Italian pop arranger Ennio Morricone, former Dizzy Gillespie sideman Lalo Schifrin and, most successfully of all, jazzman turned British rock ’n’ roller John Barry. He supplied scores for no fewer than eleven James Bond vehicles, his collaboration with Shirley Bassey on the theme for Goldfinger inaugurating the tradition whereby contemporary pop stars would routinely deliver a movie’s keynote address. This was the future of jazz, it seemed: increasingly ostracised as a commercial medium in its own right, but considered almost essential as an atmospheric cinematic accessory. Rock, by comparison, began to occupy the cultural stage which jazz had once considered its own.

  There were hit jazz albums after the late 1950s: reissues or re-recordings by the swing bands of the 1930s; Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook collections of standards, and her duets with Louis Armstrong; an occasional Kenton or Ellington; revivals of Dixieland; orchestral sets by Erroll Garner or George Shearing, which offered mood music with the faintest of jazz trimmings; and, out of nowhere, live recordings by Ahmad Jamal’s mellow trio, which sold on the basis of his original tune ‘Poinciana’ and the familiarity of songs such as ‘Cheek to Cheek’ and ‘Secret Love’. But only two jazz formulae really connected with the American public; and each of them demonstrated that what people wanted from jazz was not the ‘complete freedom of expression30’ sought by Ornette Coleman, but a diverting, though not disturbing, sense of timing.

  One was the combination of jazz soloists and Latin rhythms; the other, the work of Dave Brubeck, whose popularity and playing infuriated the critics. ‘It would seem that jazz31 is not his natural form of expression,’ wrote Joe Goldberg, ‘as if a man who knew 500 words of French were to attempt a novel in that language.’ Those who believed that jazz was fundamentally an African-American art form resented the colour of his skin, while the fact that his quartet included a black bassist caused some venues to cancel his bookings. There was almost universal agreement that the Brubeck quartet didn’t – indeed, couldn’t – swing. But this critically derided group achieved a run of ten successive Top 30 albums in the US; became virtually the only American jazz act of the era to make a commercial impression in Britain and Europe; and also achieved the biggest jazz hit since the swing era, with ‘Take Five’.

  It came from Time Out, which (like its successor, Time Further Out) was an almost mechanical exploration of time signatures. Experts believed that the public would only respond to songs in 4/4 and 3/4 (waltz) time; but ‘Take Five’ was in 5/4 and another single, ‘Unsquare Dance’, in 7/4. Brubeck’s rhythms were tied to accessible melodies, allowing the audience to congratulate itself on its daring leap of taste without being subjected to atonality or dissonance. His quartet also carefully groomed the college market.

  The taste of American students was not always predictable (unlike in Britain, where undergraduates were divided between classical-music buffs and aficionados of traditional jazz). A fertile audience for ‘hot’ jazz during the 1920s and 30s, college kids opted for smoother rhythms during the 1940s. In 1950, the author Studs Terkel took a roadshow entitled I Come for to Sing around US campuses, introducing impressionable students to the blues stylings of Big Bill Broonzy. Echoes of that intervention persisted, until the folk revival of the late 1950s saw the clean-cut Kingston Trio, the Journeymen and the Chad Mitchell Trio become role models for the college crowd. Yet in 1957, a wide-ranging survey across US educational establishments found that the most popular musical act was not a trio of harmony-singing folkies, or Brubeck, or Broonzy, or even Elvis Presley, but Mantovani. There was a high proportion of students amongst the audience at the Newport Jazz Festival, but their goal was cheap booze and easy sex, rather than jazz, and they were regularly accused of inciting drunken disturbances.

  While students enjoyed the fringe benefits of jazz, many of their parents relished easy-listening records which claimed to swing, but never did more than sway. These were tightly orchestrated and mellifluous collections by jazz musicians who never strayed away from their scores; Al Hirt, for example, whose fluent, ever-smooth trumpet playing hinted at jazz just as a Tom and Jerry cartoon might hint at surrealism. Those with vivid imaginations sampled albums that promised to bring the jungle, the southern seas or a desert island into the American home. Les Baxter, a former jazz arranger, first adventured into these uncharted lands as the producer of Yma Sumac, the girl with the ‘wonder voice’, which supposedly spanned four octaves. A soprano folk singer from Peru, she was promoted as being an Incan princess, though her vocal performances were sufficiently exotic not to need further hyperbole. Baxter followed with his own ‘jungle’ albums, such as Ritual of the Savage, which mixed jazz scoring with vaguely ethnic ornamentation. But the most effective, and successful, exponent of sound-effect jazz was Martin Denny, whose two albums of Exotica from 1959 were laden with animal noises and instrumental subtleties, any of which might have been drawn from the soundtracks of vintage Tarzan movies.

  Within three years, however, American music was visited by exotic rhythms which could be traced to an exact location, and a precise moment in cultural history. For the Brazilian authorities, music had long been a tool of international propaganda. Now the nation launched a new rhythm upon the world, with a dangerously bohemian ethos. The bossa nova was not just an innovation in jazz, but a way of moving which was both easeful and yet laden with a strange tension.

  As far as the record business32 is concerned, it’s a great, big bossa-filled world we live in.

  Billboard magazine, October 1962

  The whole thing is pretty much a bore33 … So the samba now swings. This proves what? That modern jazz people can blow long, tedious solos in front of a swinging samba beat. Wonderful! Practically without exception, all bossa nova records sound alike.

  American Record Guide, March 1963

  Carnegie Hall, New York, 21 November 1962: the venue which had once played host to Paul Whiteman and Benny Goodman opened its doors to an event billed ‘Bossa Nova (New Brazilian Jazz)’. So effective was the publicity that more than 1,000 people were turned away at the door. Yet the show, co-ordinated by jazz critic Leonard Feather, was a disaster: ‘sloppy and non-professional34’, with microphones ill-placed on stage, performers apparently unused to connecting with an audience, and a sound balance that rendered much of the music inaudible. Only one act survived with its reputation intact: the combo led by saxophonist Stan Getz and guitarist Charlie Byrd, who were also the hottest commercial attraction on a bill divided between Brazilian visitors and the American jazzmen they had entranced. Their instrumental version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s tune, ‘Desafinado’ was already one of the best-selling singles in America; their album, Jazz Samba, became the first instrumental jazz LP to top the US charts.

  ‘Desafinado’ translated as ‘Off-Key’, with lyrics – by Newton Mendonça, though unheard on Getz’s rendition – which parodied a frequent criticism of the bossa nova style. A cunning marriage of words and music, ‘Desafinado’ offered such a demanding melody line that vocalists had to cling to their technique for dear life.

  Jobim was among the native Brazilians who arrived for the Carnegie Hall concert, and stayed in New York. Another was João Gilberto, who had originally performed ‘Desafinado’ in Brazil with an intimacy that was both sensuous and yet symbolically held in check. For bossa nova was not just a rhythm, or (as it rapidly became) an exotic gimmick for the global music industry, but a generational statement, a philosophy of life and thereby, in a country which was stumbling from corruption to dictatorship, a stark refusal by the young to sustain the culture of their parents.


  If Anglo-American popular music had reached a pinnacle of musical and lyrical sophistication during the 1930s – which would (so traditionalists said) never be matched again, or perhaps only be surpassed in the late 1960s – Brazil’s was a culture in which poetry was always expected from its wordsmiths and melodists. Their influences were diverse: the maxixe, for example, which reached Europe around the time of the First World War, threw the Argentinian tango, the Cuban habanera, the European polka and the Brazilian lundu into a melting pot, to emerge with a dance that required men and women to press their bodies together in ecstasy.

  From the maxixe emerged the samba, Brazil’s most durable export of the twentieth century: percussive, joyful, idiosyncratic, and designed to shift the body from side to side with seductive informality. Samba represented an idealised Brazil: smiling, effervescent, irresistible, perpetually in motion. The arranger and composer Pixinguinha carried the samba to Europe in the 1920s, describing his music as jazz to ensure he garnered an audience. Yet the most effective ambassador of Brazilian music before the Second World War was also the most controversial. Carmen Miranda became a star in Hollywood and on Broadway by offering a caricature of South American ethnicity: her head topped by what looked like a basket of fruit, her clothes scanty, her songs (for Brazilian taste) too Americanised. She answered this criticism with a bitterly humorous song, ‘Disseram que voltei Americanizada’ (‘They said I came back all American’). As Caetano Veloso explained, ‘Carmen Miranda was first35 a cause of a mixture of pride and shame … the opposite of our craving for good taste and national identity.’

  The samba was not a straitjacket: it could encompass ballads, dance tunes, lyrics that were romantic or wry or satirical. There were subgenres of samba: samba-canção from Rio, the music of urban sophisticates; samba exaltação, paeans of praise to Brazil and its culture; samba de morro, the sound of the hills rather than the city, as traditional in its claim to unpretentious virtues as was country music in America. Ary Barroso wrote the samba with the longest reach: ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ (‘Water colour [portrait] of Brazil’) was used by Walt Disney in the movie Saludos Amigos, where a talking parrot taught Donald Duck how to dance Brazilian-style.

  The bossa nova arose out of the cultural ferment that greeted the democratic government of Juscelino Kubitschek in 1956. Brazil belatedly dived into modernism, compressing fifty years of European artistic development into five. Its arts seized upon the new: first Cinema Nova; then, inevitably, the bossa nova (an untranslatable phrase denoting that this was a new rhythm with an ethos to match). The style could be dissected to reveal jazz chords, the cool elegance of samba-canção and unexpected harmonies; or accepted as the sound of a youthful generation which wanted to reflect its Brazilian identity and its utopian dreams. Gradually, the key figures fell into each other’s company: composer Antonio Carlos Jobim; poet Vinicius de Moraes; guitarist and singer João Gilberto, from whom came the single ‘Chega de saudade’, which drew the barbs about a style that was off-key and almost insultingly lazy. After ‘Desafinado’, bossa nova historian Ruy Castro explained, ‘a common obsession united36 young men: to free themselves from the accordion and take up the guitar which, incidentally, would make them much more popular with girls’.

  João Gilberto, said Miles Davis, ‘would sound good reading37 a newspaper’. Like Sinatra, his phrasing was as precise and certain as a surgeon, maintaining perfect composure even as his guitar and his voice obeyed different rhythmic commands. His music gradually infiltrated the USA. Lena Horne was the first to tackle a bossa nova tune; Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole also paid close attention. But it was Charlie Byrd who brought a copy of Gilberto’s debut LP home to play for Stan Getz, with the result that Americans assumed that bossa nova was a school of jazz, a rhythm rather than a youthful revolution. During 1961 and 1962, several American acts devoted entire albums to the sound of Brazil, with varying degrees of integrity. Flute player Herbie Mann was the first to record in Brazil; Paul Winter and Cannonball Adderley followed. But these ‘authentic’ excursions were swamped by more exploitative ventures. Records such as Elvis Presley’s ‘Bossa Nova Baby’ and Eydie Gorme’s ‘Blame It on the Bossa Nova’ were as authentic as Carmen Miranda’s headgear, and merely convinced the casual listener that bossa was an ethnic novelty. No commercially minded jazzman or bandleader could resist cashing in; nor could advertising agencies, who tied the bossa nova tag to everything from restaurants to clothing lines. By 1963, the business decided that the bossa nova was stale, and plans for bossa movies (Don’t Knock the Bossa Nova, to follow Don’t Knock the Rock and Don’t Knock the Twist) were abandoned.

  That March, Stan Getz and João Gilberto recorded an album of duets, augmented on two songs by João’s German wife Astrud. ‘Garota de Ipanema’ was a sinuous ode to an anonymous girl whom its composers had seen passing a café day after day. Several Brazilian artists had already cut it: the Getz/Gilberto album rendition was five minutes long, Astrud’s untutored vocal (off-key, indeed, and off-tempo too) a mere afterthought. But the track was edited to create a single (‘The Girl from Ipanema’) which sold in its millions, and enabled Getz/Gilberto to stay in the charts for almost two years. From this marriage of Brazil, America and Germany came one of the defining records of the 1960s. And then Brazil’s democracy was overthrown by an American-backed military coup, and bossa nova, with its vision of a society liberated in body and soul, lost its birthright amidst the chaos and social repression that followed.

  This political turmoil passed Frank Sinatra by, and his belated bossa nova moment came in 1967, when he made an album of duets with Antonio Carlos Jobim – an exquisite collection, on which the 51-year-old maestro of swing discovered a new way to sing, a fresh rhythm to command, and a vocabulary to replace the one he had been wasting on such fripperies as ‘Winchester Cathedral’ and ‘Downtown’ (a song he hated so much that he mocked it as he sang). It was his last major stylistic invention, and it marked the end of an American quest: an attempt to create sophisticated and experimental popular music for an adult audience whose children had already ruled that form of sophistication obsolete.

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  fn1 A dealer wrote to Gramophone magazine in 1925: ‘In most instances when a lady19 is calling with her husband to purchase a machine, her interest is in the instrument as “an article of furniture” only. Its capabilities as a musical instrument are really of little interest to her. I find that the great majority of them simply do not understand tone at all, although they frequently pretend that they do … They will keep talking incessantly when the most perfect records are being played, and one can see that they really do not understand the music at all and do not wish to.’

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  LIKE A BESOTTED adolescent, the UK’s entertainment industry was pathetically grateful for any attention from its more mature American counterpart. If a leading US performer deigned to record a British song, it sparked headlines in the pop papers. When Frank Sinatra agreed to visit London and tape an entire LP of material written by British composers, it was as if the nation had been acknowledged by a global monarch. (Sinatra thought so little of Great Songs from Great Britain that it was not issued in America for thirty years.)

  British chart success in America, no matter how meagre, attracted similar attention. So there was enormous excitement when New York was subject to a barrage of British pop talent which was, said Billboard magazine, ‘taking on the character3 of a mass migration’. It was October 1962, when a Liverpool beat group had just released its first single, and the British performers about to ‘invade’ America were jazzman Acker Bilk, country singer Frank Ifield (raised in Australia) and Indian-born teen idol Cliff Richard.

  Almost a year later, in August 1963, TV variety host Ed Sullivan came to Britain (a newsworthy event in itself) to sample the best of the country’s young talent; he filmed performances by Richard, Ifield, the Dallas Boys, and Kenny Ball. Richard and Ifield then made return trips to Sullivan’s Manhattan s
tudio. It was the most concentrated British assault ever on the heart of America’s pop industry, aided by the surprise prominence in the Hot 100 of the Caravelles’ retro-styled singalong ‘You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry’, which reached No. 3 just before Christmas.

  Elsewhere in New York, there was pandemonium during a pop concert at Carnegie Hall, when an evening of Italian performers, starring teen-beat group Peppino & His Rockers, ‘wound up in a riot4 of screaming fans that had to be quelled by officials’. Ed Sullivan played host to the man Newsweek called ‘The King’ and Life magazine said was ‘a thumping teenage idol5 who is part evangelist, part Pied Piper and all success’: surf guitarist Dick Dale. In California, a bill of folksingers, led by Peter, Paul & Mary, broke box-office records at the Hollywood Bowl. Meanwhile, a talented young group was set for international success: the Osmond Brothers, promoted weekly on The Andy Williams Show, and preparing to introduce their newest recruit, 5-year-old Donny. Williams and the Osmonds won numerous standing ovations at a Chicago concert the day after JFK’s assassination. ‘If we’ve just succeeded6 in giving you a couple hours’ pleasure in this otherwise terrible weekend, it was all worthwhile’, Williams told the crowd. Perhaps expressing the national mood, cabaret singer Eartha Kitt issued a new single two weeks after the tragedy: ‘I Had a Hard Day Last Night’.