Toe-tappin' tunes & swingin' lessons in jazz history: 2015 Isthmus Jazz Fest highlights

Esperanza Spalding with her instrument 

Madison (Wisconsin/USA) music fans were treated to several groovy events during last weekend's Isthmus Jazz Fest on the Terrace.  Here are my quick takes on the four most memorable events & gigs that I attended.

ONE

The Girls in the Band:  finally, a documentary film about some key women in jazz history

Ever heard of saxophonist Roz Cron?  Trumpeter Clora Bryant?  Jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi?  Regretfully, neither had I.  This 2011 documentary film, produced & directed by Judy Chaikin, schooled me in a long neglected subject, namely women players (as opposed to singers) who made a mark in the history of jazz.  It covers the topic comprehensively, from the big band-based Swing era to today. 

The audience at the Friday evening (June 19th) screening in the UW Memorial Union's Frederic March Play Circle was - to put it kindly - select.  Serious fans of American music must see this engaging blend of interviews & live performances. Moving from the grainy, black & white 1930s into the digital-color 21st century, these ladies could swing hard.  And many of those profiled, including Diana Krall & Esperanza Spalding, still do.

With the new Nina Simone documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? by filmmaker Liz Garbus, hitting theaters this weekend, the subject (female innovators & civil-rights heroines in jazz & soul music) remains timely.

TWO

Pop & Jazz - When Worlds Collide, a performance talk by Dave Stoler & friends

Yet another substantial treat for a non-musician music-writer like me, this lecture by professorial pianist Dave Stoler was both enlightening & fun.  Joined by sax-playing singer Al Falaschi, bassist Jon Christensen & drummer Jamie Ryan, Stoler offered six songs as exemplars of the happy collision of the usually divergent pop & jazz genres:

1. "I Got Rhythm" - this 1930 show tune by George Gershwin soon transcended Broadway with its lurching rhythms & catchy chord changes.

2. "Caldonia" - a jump blues (proto-rock 'n' roll) sensation for Louis Jordan & the Tympany Five in 1945.

3. "Nature Boy" - a breakthrough hit for Nat King Cole in 1948 (written by Eden Ahbez).

4. "Yesterday": The Beatles' 1965 smash hit that Stoler said shows Paul McCartney's jazz influence.

5. "Moondance" - Van Morrison's 1970 album chestnut, with a modal sound derived from Miles Davis's "So What?" 

6. "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" - Stevie Wonder's 1973 chart-topper features jazz-based harmonies by one of the coolest cats on record.

Stoler holds a Masters degree in jazz-piano performance & he plays with several jazz outfits, including his own trio as well as the Tony Castañeda Latin Jazz Band & Madison's Donald Fagen tribute band Steely Dane.

THREE

Meet Freddy Cole, Gentleman Jazzman - Stories & Jokes in the Play Circle

Nat King Cole's younger brother isn't too hip to admit that he digs "toe-tappin' tunes."  In other words, he prefers dance music, as jazz primarily used to be.  Cole became an international star by virtue of the baritone singing & piano playing on display in his funky Freddy Cole Sings orchestral album (UK, 1976).  The 80-something gentle, elegant Grammy nominee entertained a small audience in the Play Circle with his stories & jokes for nearly an hour. 

Looking sharp in a dark blue pinstriped suit, Cole chided musicians who disrespect their audiences by not dressing well for the occasion. Cole was interviewed by the musically gifted & genuinely curious host Chris Wagoner, president of the Madison Music Collective. A jazzman who understands the value of measured pleasures, Cole released his first album in 1952 (a 78-rpm record). 

"My first big break was being born," Cole said.  "I made it because I earned the respect of my peers."  A resident of Atlanta since 1972, Cole was raised in Chicago, where his mother sang gospel & his father preached.  After the talk I thanked him & shook his hand.  It was an intimate conclusion to a heartwarming event.  I only wish I could've attended his Saturday evening concert.

FOUR

Tony Castañeda Latin Jazz Band: a perfect finale on the UW's Memorial Union Terrace

Tony Castañeda is a serious conga-player & bandleader, but he loves to joke around with his audiences. He was in fine fun-loving form on Saturday evening (June 20th) at the Terrace.

"Were ya gettin' tired?" he asks a couple who'd just enjoyed a long salsa dance number.  "Sorry," Castañeda explains, "but all our songs are nine minutes long.  That's because it's jazz, man." 

The rotating lineup that evening featured guest trombone player & former TCLJB regular Darren Sterud (The Jimmys), longtime saxophonist Anders Svanoe, Roberto Rengel (also in Grupo Candela) on timbales, Henry Boehm on bass & the inimitable Dave Stoler on keyboards.

On a Saturday when storms threatened to put a damper on the outdoor gigs, the skies cleared & the sunset cast a magic glow over Picnic Point & the Lake Mendota horizon.  An appreciative crowd of several hundred listeners joined Tony in embracing that line by gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson:  "Good people drink good beer."

Meanwhile, pianist/singer Freddy Cole was playing Shannon Hall (formerly the Memorial Union Theater) with the UW Jazz Orchestra.  Generous as ever, Castañeda plugged Cole's competing gig, noting that tickets were still available.  

Maybe next year the organizers will let Tony Castañeda's band close the Isthmus Jazz Fest.  This year that honor went instead to the impressive Stan Kenton-inspired Sixties-style Neophonic Jazz Orchestra, a tightly arranged outfit of local jazz veterans.

[© 2015 by J.C. Mrázek]

LINKS:

http://freddycolemusic.com/

http://thegirlsintheband.com/

www.madisonmusiccollective.org

www.madisonjazz.com

Tony Castaneda Latin Jazz Band (May 2014 performance - Cardinal Bar, Madison):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rIeFcBd1k4

"Spies of Mississippi" - Beyond the Beatles in 1964

You might not know it if you're only paying attention to mainstream media this week, but 2014 is not merely the 50th anniversary of the  Beatles' ballyhooed arrival in America.  The beloved Fab Four may have met boxer Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) for publicity purposes in Miami in February 1964, but there was a whole lot more going on in the segregated South at the time.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when hundreds of brave college students (mostly white Northerners) - as well as a cadre of legal & medical support staff - traveled to bloody Mississippi to register black voters, thereby hastening the demise of Jim Crow.  As part of its Independent Lens series, PBS is broadcasting Dawn Porter's documentary "Spies of Mississippi" on Monday, February 10.  Check your local listings & set your DVRs.

Based on journalist Rick Bowers's book "Spies of Mississippi:  The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement" (2010), the new film details efforts by that benighted state's so-called Sovereignty Commission (& its local White Citizens Councils) to suppress democracy.  They tried terrorizing anyone who dared to challenge the disenfranchisement of African-Americans - or any other manifestation of Mississippi's strict racist system of segregation & subordination.  

State-sponsored counter-measures included infiltrating the NAACP, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had spearheaded the Freedom Summer project) & other civil-rights groups with both "Negro"  & white informants.  Peaceful activists were being murdered with impunity in Mississippi while LBJ & RFK dragged their feet.  Public pressure finally forced the president & attorney general to send a team of FBI investigators to the Ku Klux Klan-infested Magnolia State.   

Watch & learn why jazz singer/pianist Nina Simone wrote & recorded the angry "Mississippi Goddamn" in 1964, when American apartheid was finally on the wane.  For a literary take on the civil rights revolution, read Alice Walker's novel Meridian (1976), partially based on her experiences as a black activist-writer married to a Jewish lawyer in Jackson (MS) in the 1960s.  Walker makes history seem less a remote mystery & more a vital story of individuals through the power of intense prose.  

You see, pop music's British Invasion was paralleled in 1964 by a Southern invasion of civil-rights workers armed only with righteous courage.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!

2014 Grammy Awards, "Okie from Muskogee" (a backstory) & RIP, Pete Seeger

The American pop-music establishment has sunk to a weird new nadir of escapism.  The evidence was broadcast Sunday night on CBS.  A pair of French dance-music DJs who pretend to be cyborgs, the helmet-human hybrid Daft Punk, won the Grammy Awards for Record & Album of the Year.  Those pretentious pranksters refused to show their faces or even speak a single word (in any language) as they accepted the trophies.  Fortunately, there were a couple moments that almost redeemed this alienating Hypefest.  And both of them featured country artists.

The first saving grace:  Kacey Musgraves's lovely performance of "Follow Your Arrow," a country-pop song that actually has some substance & bite to it.  I'm glad she won the Best Country Album (for Same Trailer Different Park) & Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round") awards.  Musgraves's gentle composure was a welcome contrast to, say, Pink's strained aerial acrobat act.  And don't get me started on that bizarre group wedding, conducted by ex-rapper Queen Latifah & blessed by a cane-wielding Madonna.  Look, I too support marriage equality.  But I cannot endorse using cult gimmicks to score political points on national TV.  I mean, are these the Grammies or the Moonies?

The second act of contrition:  the appearance of 76-year-old Merle Haggard during a medley of "outlaw country" songs.  That nostalgic detour into humane musical territory opened with sage-angel Willie Nelson dueting with the atonal Kris Kristofferson on "The Highwaymen."  They were soon joined by Mr. Haggard & Blake Shelton, a bland young stand-in for the late Johnny Cash, whom Hag first heard onstage at San Quentin prison (New Year's Day 1959).  How touching to see the grizzled Merle play guitar while singing his 1969 classic "Okie from Muskogee"!  The opening lines - "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don't take our trips on LSD" - included the first street-drug references ever in a chart-topping country song (aside from amphetamine pills, the trucker's little helper).  

To witness joy on the jaded faces of several stars in the audience as they sang along with Merle ("like the hippies out in San Francisco do") was a refreshing bonus.  But I wonder how many people at the show in LA - let alone viewers at home across the USA - knew that Merle's Okie paean is actually a shit-kicking satire?  In what music critic David Cantwell calls the Muskogee Moment (see his insightful book Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, University of Texas Press, 2013), Hag's "Okie from Muskogee" ignited a firestorm of controversy.  It was a sociopolitical phenomenon in the fall of '69, arguably the first shot in the culture wars that still divide the United States.  But the whole mess started as a harmless joke.  It's a good story, so bear with me.

The genesis of Merle's bestselling composition occurred on a tour bus in eastern Oklahoma in the spring of '69.  Haggard & the Strangers, his Californina-based backing band, were passing around a joint when the bus approached a sign saying Muskogee 30 miles.  "I bet they don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," one of the guys quipped.  Stoned & giddy, the bandmates proceeded to riff on this theme, tossing out other taboos that small-town folks of that era wouldn't dare break:  dropping acid, organizing orgies, protesting anything.  "I bet they don't do that in Muskogee neither."  Since they all had working-class roots in hick towns, the jokes bore no malice.  

But Hag had an epiphany.  The Haggard family had migrated from Oklahoma to Merle's birthplace - Bakersfield, California - during the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster.  Now he - along with co-writer Roy Burris - turned his band's cannabis-fueled highway gag into a song that simultaneously managed (1) to express his pride in being kin to those once maligned migrants (signs in WWII-era Bakersfield cinemas directed "Negroes & Okies" to the balcony), while (2) poking fun at the patriotic provincialism of small towns.  Adding to the irony, Haggard told a reporter in the early '70s, Muskogee was about the only place he hadn't smoked dope.   

A gifted artist whose best early hits (from "Hungry Eyes" to "Workin' Man Blues" & "Mama Tried") exude a poetic pessimism, Haggard was able to craft deceptively simple lines.  For "Okie from Muskogee" he wrote:  "We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse" & "We like living right and being free."  In the recording studio he sang those lines in such a sincere baritone that only careful listeners could get the subversive subtext.  Radical folkie Phil Ochs was hip to the trick.  On his live Gunfight at Carnegie Hall album (1970), Ochs praises Haggard to a sceptical crowd before launching into a raucous electric interpretation of "Okie from Muskogee".  The lyrics' clever ambiguity makes you stop and think:  Wait a second, how can you be free when you're concerned about living right in the eyes of your neighbors?  

The song insinuates that hippies & anti-war demonstrators might, in fact, not be the enemies of decency & democracy.  The threat might actually come from the intolerant, sanctimonious citizens of Muskogee - those for whom "white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all."  Dick Nixon called them the Silent Majority, his racist ticket to the White House.  It took a restless ex-felon like Haggard to damn Muskogee with fake praise, offering a wise-ass backhanded compliment to "a place where even squares can have a ball."  

Nevertheless, the yokels - including Hooterville chambers of commerce, backslapping Rotarians & pro-Vietnam War diehards - ate up the cornpone part of the message.  But many others, including some of the emerging country rockers (e.g. Gram Parsons) who idolized Hag, were either confused or angered by it.  "Okie from Muskogee" was a minor crossover pop hit, nearly making Haggard a household name.  He'd suddenly become a populist folk hero to right-wingers.  The song even paid legal dividends:  Gov. Ronald Reagan pardoned Merle, a convicted burglar & car thief, in 1972.  

To his shame, Haggard engaged in some verbal hippie-bashing during press interviews in the wake of this career breakthrough.  He mainly objected to barefooted, longhaired freaks' allegedly poor hygiene.  Merle was understandably reluctant to bite the (square) hands that were feeding him.  Yet, to his credit, he never denied that the song was essentially a joke set to music.  He just wasn't forthcoming about its primary target.  Was it really the hippies or the rednecks?  Subsequent events indicate that Merle sympathized with the rednecks, more out of class loyalty than respect.  

By 2003, however, he had switched sides, publicly backing the Dixie Chicks in the media furor over Natalie Maine's comments blasting fellow Texan George W. Bush for his ill-advised decision to invade Iraq.  In any event, most country music fans back in 1969 missed the double-edged humor of "Okie from Muskogee."  They felt empowered by the surface sentiments, embracing the song as a celebration of small-town values, a conservative slam on the counterculture.  They responded with wild enthusiasm whenever Haggard & the Strangers played it during those days of rage when Sixties fervor was yielding to Seventies malaise.  

Hag was handsome, described in one magazine article as a cross between Audie Murphy & Warren Beatty.  In the '60's & '70s he made frequent guest appearances singing on mainstream television shows.  Like his friend & mentor Johnny Cash, Haggard also acted in a few TV shows & films.  Yet his music gradually fell out of fashion.  It was dropped from most country-radio playlists by the late '80s.  Merle is a proud loner who hated currying favor in Nashville.  Preferring to live in rural California, he continued to tour extensively as the decades passed.  Hag's catalog has long inspired other songwriters.  He has become an icon to (mostly middle-class) fans of the music variously labeled alt-country, roots & Americana.  The official national stamp of approval came in 2010, when Pres. Barack Obama bestowed the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors award on Merle Haggard.

On a lighter note, the massive popularity of "Okie from Muskogee" spawned a throng of less accomplished rhyming imitators.  Among them was Rusty Adams, whose ripoff "Hippie from Mississippi" posits parents so ashamed of their rebel son that they change the family name.  Hag's hit also led some musical liberals to answer him via song.  The best title of that bunch has to be "Asshole from El Paso" by Chinga Chavin, an obscure 1976 parody.  I'm guessing that it got little airplay during the USA's bicentennial.

Finally, breaking news of the death of Pete Seeger, folk-music master & giant among progressive activists, helps me see "Okie from Muskogee" in a new light.  It more or less fits in the tradition of witty American protest songs, beginning with the Swedish immigrant & radical-union bard Joe Hill.  Executed in Utah in 1913, Hill's irreverent "The Preacher & the Slave" promises "we'll all get pie in the sky when we die."  In the 1940s the prolific folksinger & songwriter Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native who inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists onto his guitar during the war, answered Irving Berlin's smarmy "God Bless America" with his generous "This Land Is Your Land."  In one verse - usually deleted in most published versions - Guthrie sings about trespassing in defiance of a Private Property sign because "on the other side, it didn't say nothin' / That side was made for you and me."

Woody begat Pete Seeger, followed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie & countless others during the postwar folk music revival.  The circle came full with the career of Arlo Guthrie (Woody's genetic son), whose draft-dodger masterpiece "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (1967) was a long comical protest song, surpassed only by Country Joe & the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" for popularity among hippies & Vietnam vets alike.  

The sharpest songs by the Sixties generation were frequently tongue in cheek.  At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, for example, an ebullient Ochs performed his deadly playful "Talking Vietnam Blues."  And the contrarian Dylan declined an invitation to appear on Ed Sullivan's top-rated TV variety show in '63 because CBS wouldn't let him play "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," a crazy sendup of anti-Commie witch-hunters.  Back in JFK's heyday the media blacklist (i.e. corporate censorship) kept people like Pete Seeger & fellow civil rights activist Nina Simone, a jazz singer, songwriter & pianist ("Mississippi Goddam," 1964), off network TV altogether.  

Smart artists know that nothing undermines tyranny, injustice, hypocrisy & pomposity as effectively as critical humor set to a catchy melody (Exhibit A:  Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag," 1965).  Songwriters who are both politically committed & musically talented are hardly extinct.  Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg & Steve Earle epitomize those who still dare to take on important social issues in song.  

I just wish they were more widely heard.  The World Wide Web, a medium cluttered with content & demographically fragmented, seems unlikely to launch a benign cultural revolution.  The chances of human survival would surely be enhanced by the popularization of songs saying something that truly matters.  All the better if those songs make us laugh to keep from crying along our troubled journey into the future.  

"Where have all the flowers gone?  Long time passing."  Rest in peace, Pete Seeger, who hoped that the pen is mightier than the Bomb & proved it.