Friday Night at 8: Jazz and Such

Miss Sarah Vaughn (“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” featuring a young Bob James (Fourplay) on piano with Larry Rockwell, bass and Omar Clay, drums; courtesy of YouTuber pixaninny)

and Miss Sarah Vaughn (“Perdito” circa 1955 musicians unknown, courtesy of YouTuber JazzVideoGuy)

See I like to sing harmony, that’s my favorite, even in choir in school I loved the vibrations I’d feel when singing with a big group of voices and we’re all singing different parts and it comes together as one sound, that’s a rush.

And I like jazz singing, improvisation, because it’s absorbing to the senses,  you have to stay aware of the chord structure and the beat and the rhythm but you can also find a way to climb all that like some kicked out staircase and then fly like a bird, singing a different tune entirely, leaving all the structure and form behind and just putting out pure music.  That’s a rush, too.  And I think Sarah was one of the many fine vocalists of the time who could do that so well.

Improvisation, that’s the ticket.

I’ve read many times how in all kinds of art, writing, painting, music, dance, it’s that transcendance an artist is aiming for.  They build up all these complicated structures, the music paper, the canvas, the paints, the plot, the choreography, all that and while they’re working on that it’s all there is.

But then after all that work they just throw it away once they have gotten to where they aimed to go.

Jazz, yeah, I think it’s very free music.  There’s all kinds of jazz, of course.  If Bird and Monk and Dizzy and Miles and all came back today, they’d probably be creating stuff I wouldn’t understand in a hundred years.  But they did their thing back in the 50s so I had a chance to study it some.

I grew up in a very unmusical family.  Our thing was reading, books, any book we could lay our hands on.  Our musical understanding was woefully dim and consisted of Broadway Musicals from the 50’s, Perry Como (which came with the mono record player we got), and a very strange album entitled “Hebrew Holidays in Song.”

Then I left home to go to college and met all these boys who turned me on to different kinds of rock and roll but I never quite remembered any of the groups or the tunes.  I now see, through the generosity of Dharmaniacs (most especially the Funkalicious buhdydharma and kestrel), that there’s a lot of improvisation in that genre as well, especially that gitar!  That bass!

And there was disco, which I only mention in passing.

Then I met my ex-husband, who introduced me to jazz, first date we had was going to the University of the Streets, a rickety place on East 7th Street, to their never ending jam session.

I had always sung since I was a kid — our whole family would sing songs from 50s Broadway Musicals, Smothers Brothers tunes, whatever was on the radio, old Jewish songs in Hebrew.  It wasn’t an issue of carrying a tune, we just liked to make noise, and singing was a form of noise we could all do together.

But I liked to go way out, and at first it was harmony that gave me that feeling.

But jazz, and I’m speaking here of the jazz from the 40s and 50s, I had an instant recognition for that improvisation, from swing to bebop, all that.

It’s been a damned long week and I needed some help from Miss Sarah Vaughn.

And for no reason at all, as lagniappe, here’s Jack Kerouac reciting “Charlie Parker” with Steve Allen on piano:

Hope everyone’s weekend is groovalicious.