There was a character in ”The Big Chill” who boasted that he never bought a record after 1970. He spoke as if there were honor in it. As if he`d fought some kind of good fight against younger infidels. As if pop messiahs had wrought miracles during his teens and all later music was a bunch of noise.
Could he have been right? Could the world of the `60s actually have been a Golden Age? Or did the Golden Age exist only in his mind?
With those questions in mind, consider ”The Complete Commodore Jazz Recordings, Volume 2,” from Mosaic Records-a monster package that may be the biggest single record album ever issued (aside from its predecessor, Vol. 1):
– It has 23 LPs.
– It weighs 10 lbs., 3 oz.
– It costs $207, plus $7 shipping.
– It covers 37 sessions from March, 1944, through April, 1945.
– It contains 338 cuts, including 111 alternate takes never before issued.
– The median year of the Commodore songbook in 1945 was 1927.
That last point is worth thinking about. The tunes heard here are not only old today, they were old in 1945. Why should the musicians on these records, most of whom were in their mid-30s, have clung so stubbornly to music of another generation.
The answer brings us back, in principle, to the fellow in ”The Big Chill,” and touches on a subtle but central issue of how we bond to music-popular and otherwise. It has to do with the fact that all music has a life cycle in the experience of an individual. And the music that has the longest and deepest life cycle seems to be the music that strikes, as if on some biological timetable, between the ages of about 12 and 22.
This is because, for most of us, the first music that decisively influences our young taste leaves a lifetime imprint. It becomes an element of our most fundamental awareness of the world, because pop music, unlike movies, theater and books, is a social experience. Though we may go on to appreciate other kinds of music, the music we`ll always love and take with us to our grave probably will be the music we embraced when we were kids. If it doesn`t challenge us as adults, neither does it threaten us. We can relax with it. It`s the spiritual home to which we can always return.
How does all this apply to Commodore Records? By the 1930s and `40s, a lot of jazz musicians, particularly white ones, had grown up in the `20s on the music of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the Wolverines, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Bix Beiderbecke was their Bruce Springsteen.
Many of these kids of the `20s-Gene Krupa, Pee Wee Russell, Art Hodes, Benny Goodman, Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Bobby Hackett, and others-went on to achieve fame in the Swing Era of the `30s. But if you look at the tunes they played for fun, they were the tunes of their teens. Benny Goodman`s band recorded hundreds of new pop tunes. But when the clarinetist wanted to jam, it would be on old pieces like ”I Found a New Baby” or
”After You`ve Gone.”
This is just one example. But it may explain a lot about a lot more than just jazz. It suggests why Vladimir Horowitz played Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, not Cage, Schoenberg or Babbitt. It explains why Chuck Berry sings rhythm-and-blues, not heavy metal. And it may even help explain why old rock and roll tunes started turning up in TV commercials about the same time baby boomers became vice presidents in ad agencies. Youth is immortal in every generation.
Milt Gabler, who founded the Commodore label in the `30s (and who also happens to be actor Billy Crystal`s uncle), grew up in the 1920s listening to the same kind of jazz Krupa, Condon and the others heard. At first, he used Commodore to reissue old jazz records he`d heard as a kid. But by 1938, a hard core of jazz fans and musicians felt that the jazz they remembered from the
`20s was being commercialized by the big swing bands and the big record companies. A lot of them had resented the music`s liaison with Tin Pan Alley ever since Louis Armstrong began recording pop tunes around 1930.
Commodore soon became the response to this feeling of dilution and drift. It was not enough to reissue old records. Jazz needed new records. And since the one true jazz was hot jazz, Commodore`s mission was now to record it without apologies to the marketplace, for a small audience of connoisseurs.
But Commodore was more than just a cult label. It had the distinction of being the first and, for a time, the only record label in America dedicated entirely to jazz. Even Life magazine did a picture story on a Gabler session. This meant that Commodore captured by default a unique monopoly-the power to define what deserved to be called real jazz and what did not. And real jazz was hot jazz.
In 1938, this seemed simple enough. Jazz was still young and relatively monotheistic. Bop didn`t exist. And without a scholarly literature or written history, jazz had not yet acquired any aesthetic theories about itself. So in the absence of an insurgent avant garde, the only alternative to the suspect popularity of contemporary swing was a counter revolutionary retro garde of sentimental restorationists reinhabiting the music they`d heard as
adolescents.
But by 1944-45, when the material in this collection was made, times were changing. Commodore wasn`t the monopoly it had been six years earlier. Keynote, Signature, Savoy, Guild, Apollo, Continental and Blue Note were now serving an increasingly diverse-and quarrelsome-jazz audience. More important, each label defined a specific position on what was becoming a clear spectrum of aesthetic ideology.
If, on a scale of right to left, the Keynote label, with its Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Shavers and Red Norvo sessions expressed the ideological center of independent jazz recording in the mid-`40s, then Commodore lay well to the right while Savoy and later Dial, which recorded Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, spoke for the new left.
The Commodore recordings in this album fall into four categories: piano sessions, most of them two-beat, cat-house keyboard; several excellent middle- of-the-road quartet dates with Ben Webster, Edmond Hall and Pee Wee Russell; the great wild card dates with Billie Holiday, Eddie Heywood, Lester Young and a few others. Yes, Commodore touched most bases.
But by far Commodore`s biggest, most consistent specialty remained Dixieland. And to be sure, you won`t find better examples anywhere of this particular niche of jazz fundamentalism than those heard here. But with other labels now on the scene and new styles challenging the old guard, a classic battle of cultural politics loomed, and each side had its own anthems. While the traditionalists continued to define jazz through such oldies as ”Jazz Me Blues” and ”St. Louis Blues,” the boppers invented a new and self-consciously intricate repertoire (”Groovin` High,” ”Confirmation”) fit only for the hep.
The right-left breach was not only musicological and ideological, it was also racial. Bop was mostly black. But Dixieland in general, and Eddie Condon`s Dixieland in particular, was mostly white. And so were its fans.
In this context, Esquire magazine decided to get into the fracas. It was then, as it is now, an important general interest publication with huge taste- making influence-influence that would reach outside the jazz cult to a large audience of more casual fans. In mid-`40s, it began a prestigious annual poll of leading critics. The results usually reflected a basic center position in jazz taste: Coleman Hawkins and Art Tatum stood alongside Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden. Most were black.
This distressed the right. When Jazz Record, a kind of National Review of jazz periodicals, noted the Esquire poll results, it saw only the black-to-white ratio. It was indignant. The best jazz men, the magazine shot back,
”are predominantly white men.” This incited the modernists, who countered that Dixieland was ”white supremacy music.”
In 1947, through some editorial maneuvering, the Esquire poll fell into the hands of Ernest Anderson, promoter and publicist for Eddie Condon and Commodore Records. The jazz right had no illusions about fooling the jazz world. But that wasn`t their target. The general public was. If Esquire said Dixieland was the one true jazz, the right thought, the public would swallow it.
It was as if Phyllis Schafly were given control of Ms. Magazine. And the results were as transparently false. The putsch did neither the magazine nor the old-guard cause any good. It cost Esquire its credibility as a voice in jazz and Commodore never recovered its original importance.
Today, with all the name-calling over, it`s possible to listen to these Commodore records without feeling like a crypto fascist. They suddenly sound as hot and fresh as one of Mrs. Field`s cookies. More important, the differences between the generational sensibilities that once seemed so absolute and irreconcilable fade away from the perspective of 50 years.
