The Real Epiphanic Glow, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Jazz

Prior to the advent of the portable tape recorder, naturalists struggled with descriptions of sounds--a thoroughly unsatisfactory procedure as most investigators realized. One frog is decsribed as having a call "like the loud purr of a cat, with a metallic sound of grinding gears." Other authors described the same calls as "a low toned tirr-r-r-r," as "a loud crah-crah-crah," a resonant yeow," or "a snore-like cry." It is manifest that these descriptions convey almost no meaning.

Charles M. Bogart, from the liner notes to
Sounds of The American Southwest, Folkways Recordings, 1959.

***************************

You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas?

"The King of Jazz" by Donald Barthelme, 1977.
from Sixty Stories


***************************

Specifically, I embarked upon a career in writing blithely undismayed by the fact that, as a writer, I was primarily interested in that which writing obliterates: in the living atmosphere of all that is shown, seen, touched, felt, smelled, heard, spoken, or sung. I knew this was a peculiar obsession, of course, but I thought writers were supposed to be peculiar. I thought it was just a "problem," that it could be solved, and that, once solved, the enigmatic whoosh of ordinary experience would become my "great subject"--that I could then proceed to celebrate the ravishing complexity and sheer intellectual pleasure of simply being alive in the present moment forever after. I thought.

"Air Guitar" by Dave Hickey, 1997.
from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

***************************

I've been wanting to and trying to find something useful to say about Johnny Hodges' "Passion Flower," since the early days of this blog. It's a recording that moves me deeply--depending on the day--from somewhere above my knees to right up the back of my spine.

I've aborted previous efforts, because frankly, I find it difficult to describe Jazz records that I love so intensely, and feel somewhat fraudulent insomuch as my technical vocabulary for this type of thing is limited. And, I'm not much interested in that type of writing anyway.

I could tell you that Hodges was a star in the Duke Ellington band from 1928 onwards, taking a brief solo hiatus in the 1950s and then returning to play with him until his death in 1969. And, like most other great horn players his sound is rooted in his tone, and it's a tone on ballads such as this one, that possesses a quality that is both haunting and otherworldly. The band on "Passion Flower" is made up of a small core group of Ellingtonians including Duke himself in an understated role as pianist and sideman heard only in the beginning and end of this beautiful rendition of the Billy Strayhorn composition.

Several months ago while I was pondering the difficulty of describing a sound, I ran into a friend of mine on the street who is a saxophone player. I asked him what he would say about Hodges' tone. He said, "It's almost obscene. He played as if he was trying to get laid every night."

I couldn't have said it any better.



Download:

"Passion Flower" mp3
by Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra, 1941.
available on Johnny Hodges: Passion Flower 1940-1946

Body and Soul

by Chris O' Leary

It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz people, and I don’t understand how and why, because I was making notes all the way. I wasn’t making a melody for the squares.

-Coleman Hawkins

“Body and Soul,” jazz standard of standards, turns eighty years old in 2010. It is jazz’s benchmark, warhorse, rite of passage, litmus test: I can’t think of a single major jazz musician, post-1930, who hasn’t taken it on, from Roy Eldridge to John Coltrane to Anthony Braxton, from Billie Holiday to Sarah Vaughan to Betty Carter, from Art Tatum to Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra. The fecundity, the sheer number, of its interpretations is staggering--in 1980 Gary Giddins estimated that some 3,000 versions of “Body and Soul” had been recorded, and likely at least a thousand more have come in the decades since.

Still, “Body and Soul” is a strange breed of eternal. It’s an odd song, with a melodramatic, sometimes clunky lyric (“my life a wreck you’re making”), a steeplechase harmonic structure with a wide range and a knotted string of key changes (the bridge alone is dizzying, starting a half-step above the home key of D-flat major, then dropping to a half-step below before it wends its way back to the chorus), and a ghost of a melody which sounds upon hearing it that you’ve dreamt it somewhere first.

The 22-year-old composer Johnny Green debuted the song in a 1930 Broadway show called “Three’s a Crowd”. The producers at first considered “Body and Soul” a dud, cutting it from a few tryout performances, while Robert Sour and Edward Heyman dashed out a series of lyrics in a bid to resuscitate it. (Frank Eyton, an arranger at the song publisher Chappell & Co., is also credited as a songwriter, though he’s there mainly for business reasons.) The final lyric, including the soon-to-be-altered line “my life a hell you’re making,” even got the song banned from a few radio stations in the early ‘30s.

Libby Holman made “Body and Soul” famous in “Three’s a Crowd” and the song’s dark, obsessive sentiments seem keyed to Holman’s brutal pageant of a life. A stage singer with a taste for younger women and men (including Montgomery Clift), Holman may have killed her husband, an heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune. She first claimed he shot himself, and later that she had been so drunk she didn’t remember anything; she was indicted for murder but skipped sentencing because she was pregnant. After another of her husbands killed himself with barbiturates, she toured the world, sponsored Martin Luther King’s trip to India and befriended and bedded, respectively, Paul and Jane Bowles. One day in June 1971 her servants found her slumped in the front seat of her Rolls Royce, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Holman’s recording of “Body and Soul” was one of many first-wave versions rushed out during the last months of 1930, along with those from flapper singer Annette Hanshaw and Paul Whiteman’s and Ozzie Nelson (Ricky’s father)’s big bands. Louis Armstrong’s take, cut at the same time, was released two years later, where it served as the first of many revivals of the song. The Benny Goodman Trio’s elegant version from 1935 did the same.

Making Notes All the Way

It’s possible that “Body and Soul” would have faded over time, in the way Johnny Green’s other standards like “Out of Nowhere” did, into a cult song occasionally dusted off by an enterprising jazzman. And then on 11 October 1939 Coleman Hawkins reincarnated “Body and Soul” as a masterpiece of pure improvisation.



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1939.
available on Body and Soul: The Complete Victor Recordings 1939-1956 Master Tapes

Hawkins’ version is a two-chorus tenor saxophone improvisation that discards the original melody after the first few bars, and some 100,000 copies of it sold in the first six months of its release. Hawkins recorded it in one take, having come into the studio after playing all night at the NYC club Kelly’s Stable. He later said doing ‘Body and Soul’ hadn’t even crossed his mind:

“That tune was the least of my ideas. There were other tunes I preferred…when I got back to America, maybe once in a while in the middle of the night I would play ‘Body and Soul.’ Every time I played it different and people seemed to like it enough.” Told that one of the label execs had heard him do “Body and Soul” live and wanted Hawkins to record it, Hawkins agreed to do one take. He took a swig of Cognac and told the pianist Gene Rogers to play an introduction. No rehearsal, no charts. Off he went. “I didn’t even have an arrangement on it,” Hawkins said. “I didn’t want to play it at all, so I just played it through once and made up the ending when I got to it. The ending, as it turned out, was one of the funniest things I ever played in my life. Like the way the horns came in on the last chord.” (From John Chilton’s The Song of the Hawk.)

The first time Hawkins heard his “Body and Soul,” on a jukebox in Harlem’s Fat Man Charlie Turner’s Rib Place, he was surprised at how good it sounded. His contemporaries were stunned. Chu Berry told Hawkins he was playing “the wrong notes” on the record, while Thelonious Monk couldn’t grasp its appeal to squares and “old folks” (“I could understand if you played melody, because that’s what they like. [But] there’s no melody in there, what are they listening to?” he later told Hawkins). Nat King Cole dragged people into a dive bar on Central Avenue in Los Angeles to hear it on the jukebox. The young John Coltrane played the disc over and over, trying to figure out Hawkins’ arpeggios. Randy Weston tried to work it out on his piano, breaking the solo down note by note.

After Hawkins, “Body and Soul” had two lives. Subsequent generations of jazz players took Hawkins’ cue and used the genetic material of “Body and Soul” for their own ends, as the basis for a series of extravagant self portraits. Some of the finest include Jimmy Blanton’s 1940 take, a phenomenal bass solo that is first bowed and then, after a Duke Ellington piano interlude, plucked as if Blanton had adamantine fingers; Boyd Raeburn’s fusion--part Schoenberg, part Science Fiction movie soundtrack--from 1946; James Moody’s wistful dream, from 1949; Serge Chaloff’s baritone sax reverie, recorded while Chaloff was in a wheelchair due to spinal paralysis in 1955; Sonny Rollins’ a cappella bravado from 1958; Monk’s spiky, burrowing take from 1962, in which he seems to be trying to test the patience of the “old folks” that bewildered him years ago; John Coltrane’s stately version from 1960; Dexter Gordon’s multiple charges up the mountain. Hawkins himself recorded a tune called “Rainbow Mist” in 1944 which uses the same chord sequence of “Body and Soul”; it’s the closest he ever came to doing a sequel.



"Rainbow Mist" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1944.
available on Rainbow Mist

The singers, however, kept up “Body and Soul”’s parallel existence, as a torch ballad that seems to disregard the basic rules of romantic songs. The singer doesn’t seem to really care about his or her lover except as an object of obsession—the singer is reduced to offering only physical release, and doesn’t seem concerned whether the lover responds in kind, saying only that they will keep up the pursuit until they’re satiated or something worse happens.

Its ominous, moonstruck sentiments were captured by singers like Sarah Vaughan, who recorded an elegant trio version in 1954, or Holiday, who took it on twice, a honeyed love song in 1940 (listen to how sweetly she sings a line like “my days have grown so lonely”), and a weary reminiscence in 1957, or Frank Sinatra, whose 1947 take offers the song in its purest form.

Why has “Body and Soul” captivated so many for so long? Perhaps it’s not as much of a mystery as it may appear. Musicians can’t get enough of that melody, and there’s so much bounty in Johnny Green’s elaborate composition that one can tap it for a long time without going dry. And perhaps it’s finally become a self-generating machine—the more the finest jazz players take it on, the more their ambitious successors try to best them at it. A fractured ray of moonlight, a stalker’s set of artless sentiments, “Body and Soul” has persisted far beyond the ambitions of its distracted makers. Listen to the tracks here, revel in them, and know that you’ve scarcely scratched the surface.

Download:

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Louis Armstrong, 1930.
available on The Big Band Sides 1930/32

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Benny Goodman Trio, 1935.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Django Reinhardt, 1937.
available on Django Rheinhardt Anthology 1934-1937



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Billie Holiday, 1940.
available on Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton, 1940.
available on Complete RCA Victor Recordings

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charlie Parker, 1942.
guitar: Efferege Ware
available on Bird in Time 1940-1947

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Ben Webster, 1944.
available on Tenor Men: Titans of the Sax



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Roy Eldridge, 1944.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Lester Young, 1945.
available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Boyd Raeburn, 1946.
vocal: Ginnie Powell
available on Boyd Meets Stravinsky

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Frank Sinatra, 1947.
available on A Voice in Time: 1939-1952

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sarah Vaughan, 1954.
available on Swingin' Easy

"Body and Soul" mp3
Sonny Rollins, 1958.
available on Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1960.
available on Reincarnation of a Lovebird

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Eric Dolphy, 1960.
available on Candid Dolphy

"Body and Soul" mp3
by John Coltrane, 1960.
available on Coltrane's Sound

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sun Ra, 1960.
available on Holiday for Soul Dance

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Thelonious Monk Quartet, 1962.
available on Monk's Dream

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Dexter Gordon, 1970.
available on The Panther!

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Anthony Braxton, 1974.
available on In the Tradition, Vol. 2

"Body and Soul" mp3
Charlie Haden, 1986.
available on Quartet West

**************************************
For more versions of the standard, visit the always formidable and awesome Locust Street. [ed.]

Stormy Weather

Back in the early days of this blog, I did a post on Harold Arlen and his contribution to the American Songbook. In it, I included his version of "Stormy Weather" with Leo Reisman's Orchestra as well as one of my favorites by The Reigning Sound. After I posted it somebody pointed me to a link at the WFMU blog that contained a zip file with another 70+ versions. Here's a few of those as well as an unusually jaunty and swingin' version by Dave Bartholomew that I picked up recently. There must be hundreds of versions of this song. A standard is a standard and there's a reason for this. Anyone can get behind it and make it their own. While I was listening to the great Lena Horne version, I remembered one of my favorite episodes of Sanford and Son, where Fred bum rushes Lena's dressing room on an NBC studio tour. In their dressing room conversation Fred tells her "I saw your movie Stormy Weather thirty-eight times" to which she replies, "You mean to tell me you paid to see Stormy Weather thirty-eight times?" Fred comes back and says "No, I only paid once. I went in on a Saturday and came out on a Wednesday evening."

Hopefully your Monday isn't a stormy one.

Download:



"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Dave Bartholomew, 1951.
available on The King Sides

"Stormy Weather" mp3
by The Spaniels, 1958.
available on The Doo Wop Box, Vol. 2

"Stormy Weather" mp3
by The Reigning Sound, 2002.
available on Time Bomb High School



"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Harold Arlen with Leo Reisman's Orchestra, 1933.
available on Song Is Harold Arlen




"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Lena Horne, 1943.
available on Stormy Weather

"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Billie Holiday, 1952.
available on The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve, 1945-1959

"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Duke Ellington Orchestra, 1953.
available on Capitol Sessions 1953-1955

"Stormy Weather" mp3
by Eric Dolphy, 1960.
available on Candid Dolphy