The Best LessonsBy Alex Rawls February 28, 2008
In last week's "Pop Life," I talked about the reissue of Paul Bley's Closer, with much of the album written by Carla Bley. Like many punks, my entry into jazz was through the avant-garde. Its confrontational sound most closely mirrored a part of my rock 'n' roll aesthetic, and it opened me to other less traditional jazz artists including Carla Bley. One of the reasons I was happy to hear Closer was because for me and my autodidact's approach to jazz, he was a satellite of her rather than vice versa. She was the one I heard first and the one I developed a greater attachment to. As time has passed, I've assembled a more conventional sense of jazz history, but it's nice to finally hear a piece of the puzzle that up until now had remained a connection that I knew but hadn't heard.
How we hear music and the order we hear it in matters. A good friend who loved the Continental Drifters always thought of them as Vicki Peterson's band because she was a Bangles fan and came to the band because Peterson was in it, but when I talked to a club booker in Toronto in 2001 and asked him if he was booking the Drifters on their North American tour, he said no because the dB's never did that well in Toronto. For him, the band was Peter Holsapple's band. In retrospect, it was everybody’s band or nobody's band, which is part of the challenge the Continental Drifters faced.
You can argue that this sort of unsystematic education means that people get things wrong. In the case of the Drifters, almost everybody got it wrong except those who saw them regularly at the Howlin' Wolf and saw the concept of a group played out onstage once a week. Besides, dismissing people's understanding of the Continental Drifters or my own travels backwards through the history of jazz involves overlooking the degree to which we all learn along those lines. Unless it's the culture that we follow in our lifetimes, we learn about almost anything by finding a starting point then pursuing it in all directions. I discovered crime fiction by reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, then seeing James Cain's name on the back of one of the paperbacks and reading him, and when finding out more about Cain, seeing a reference to David Goodis and Black Lizard Books, and then I found modern iterations as well. I suppose there are people in the world who pick a starting point and read/listen/watch in chronological sequence until they've completed the field of study, but I doubt there are many. And if they don't stop and periodically read/listen/watch contemporary or earlier works that influenced the work they're studying, how thoroughly are they really learning?
These thoughts started when John Swenson and I were watching Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at the House of Blues. With the exception of Jones, there was no one on the stage old enough to have seen or heard Otis Redding when he was alive, and there were few old enough in the audience to have heard him in his moment. John started casting around for the audience's point of reference; what brought them to a soul show, and what made them so passionate about it? He speculated that it might be The Blues Brothers, but many there were too young for that to be a formative event. (John's review of the show is online at OffBeat.com in Live Reviews).
My suspicion is that the Dap-Kings and their following represented the triumph of the crate diggers, with musicians and audiences alike who learned about soul out of sequence. Their pantheon of soul certainly includes Otis and James Brown and Motown, but it isn't defined by hits or the songs and albums that had the most impact. Their personal Top 40s are shaped by the songs that they liked the best, regardless of how big they were (or weren't) in their moment. We saw a hint of this when Marc Broussard included the lesser known Stevie Wonder track "You Met Your Match" on his otherwise classics-laden S.O.S. last year. After the British drug store chain Boots used Ernie K-Doe's "Here Come the Girls," there will be young music fans who value the obscurity from 1970 over "A Certain Girl" and "’Taint It the Truth" because it's the song that provided them an entry into the musical world of K-Doe.
I keep trying to think of a downside to people assembling their own understanding of soul or jazz or blues or crime novels or horror movies or whatever in the unsystematic way, and I keep coming up empty. After all, chronological sequence is only one way to organize information. It's the most conventional, it's how schools organize subject matter, but libraries sort information by genre, sub-genre, then within the sub-genre, by alphabetical order of the author's last name. I once had a teacher who obviously associated ideas with anecdotes, and the stories he told were his mental organizational device. I imagine some DJs sort by beats-per-minute or the nature of grooves, and if they don’t, why don't they?
Besides, as we form our own understandings and write our histories of genres, we make the genres our own and develop a sense of personal investment. The nature of their understanding of soul history seems to lead the Dap-Kings lean a little too heavily on classic sounds and grooves at the expense of songs, but so what? Others have listened to soul music and learned that passion is everything, or that the lover man rules the world. Each came to that conclusion for legitimate, personally resonant reasons.
And, frankly, I'm far more interested in the individualized histories/understanding of music than I am in any official Rolling Stone story of soul. If art does anything reliably, it reflects people's responses to a given social/artistic/personal moment, and I trust our equally personal takes on music history than any history that pretends authority without actually reflecting any single person's point of view. Subscribe to offBeat and receive a FREE JazzFest CD! |
