Ornette, Emily Dickinson, and Adversity

Plenty of interesting factoids gleaned during the first few days of classes, e.g., that Emily Dickinson's poems are numbered according to Dickinson scholars' estimated chronological order, which is based primarily on the variation in her handwriting. Other scholars have apparently put a wrench in this approach by suggesting ways in which the movement of the sun might have changed the lighting of the room in which Dickinson was writing, causing her to write slightly slanted this way or that at different times of day.

Of course, the well known fact about Dickinson is her status as the ultimate literary recluse, which might not necessarily have been entirely a result of her own choosing: she wrote over 1000 poems in her lifetime, but was unable to publish even a dozen of them. Literary magazines and other publications often deemed her poems unpublishable, and the ones that were published were homogenized by editors to reflect contemporary cultural norms. 

Starting the semester with Dickinson made me think of the great misfortune of being born in the wrong era, or being set up to be unrecognized in one's lifetime. I recently read A.B. Spellman's Four Jazz Lives (originally published in 1966 at Four Lives in the Bebop Business), which goes into extensive detail revealing the forms of adversity four particular musicians faced: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean. Of the four, Herbie Nichols's biographical story may have been the one that I found most disheartening: having struggled continually to play his own compositions and record them over the years, he passed away in 1963 in relative obscurity after years of playing mind-numbing accompaniment for traditional and dixieland bands, which enabled him to make a meager living but provided no outlet for his personal voice and creativity. 

Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Jackie McLean went through their share of life obstacles as well, though, although each is now far better known than Herbie Nichols, it seems. A common theme between the stories is the lack of opportunities to perform one's own music in the '50s and '60s. This called to mind a Stan Getz quote from an interview or piece I read recently (I can't remember exactly where), where he responded to a question about the "Golden Age" of jazz in the '50s and bluntly replied that there was never many opportunities to make a living playing jazz—that you always had to play different kinds of music. Of course, Getz's music was much more commercially viable than that of the musicians in this book, and he didn't suffer the crippling racial discrimination that Ornette, Cecil Taylor, and many other black musicians faced at that time.

Speaking about his opportunities to perform his own music publicly, Taylor says at one point:
In the Sixties, gigs for me have been mostly, like, a concert a year, filled in with one or two short nightclub or coffeehouse gigs. The coffeehouse gigs may or may not have paid, and if they did pay at all they paid very little. 
It seems completely unsustainable: how can one survive artistically with only one or two chances per year to perform one's art? But, through incredible determination, Taylor somehow pulled through all these years for the sake of his art.

Some of the stories about Ornette's early years are similarly shocking, but more graphic and violent. It's difficult for me to imagine getting physically beaten and humiliated for playing a certain type of music, but this is what he went through:

In Baton Rouge the week before, the band had been playing in a roughhouse dancehall. During one of the dances, Ornette decided that he would make one of those intermittent interjections of his own idea of modern music into the middle of his blues solo. All that he accomplished was stopping the dance and touching the nerves of some of the toughest men in the hall.            
After the set, a girl walked up to Ornette and told him that someone outside wanted to meet him. Ornette closed his horn case, picked it up, and went out the door. All that he remembers about them now is that “goddam those cats were big.” He was standing in darkness on a hill behind the building, near some trees, when at least three men surrounded him, and he knew immediately that they were going to beat him. His first thought was to shield his saxophone case in both arms, and he tried to hide his face behind the case. They pried his arms apart, smashed the case, smashed the saxophone, and threw it off the hill. Then they threw Ornette down, and kicked him. With the exception of a 1962 record date, this was the last time Ornette played tenor saxophone. 

Not only was Ornette being attacked for playing his music, but he was also being taken advantage of in a number of other demoralizing ways:
As it happened so often later, the men around Ornette in Los Angeles took sides about him as a musician and as a man almost immediately. Ornette is a small and frail man, and at the age of twenty-four he was still suffering from the collarbone injury that had not healed properly after the accident that had occurred more than five years before; this may partially explain why some of the “brothers” in the hotel took advantage of him. As he had been unable to find either a night or day gig in his first few months in Los Angeles, Ornette had had to rely for meals largely on canned goods sent to him from home by his mother. As he would always share what he had with the others, before long the other musicians in the hotel began to know when to expect shipments of food from Fort Worth. Ornette received a cake from home on his twenty-fifth birthday. The musicians crowded around him and took it away from him with a round of good-natured but serious threats. Ornette had to stand aside and watch the cake, which he had more than a sentimental attachment for, being devoured. As Blackwell says, “The cake, like it wasn’t that important, but Ornette was hungry and pretty lonesome, and it was from home. And he had had a hard time traveling through the South.
What struck me was how economic realities of the time obstructed constructive collaboration between musicians. People had to take sides:

Rollins and Jackie McLean, recalls [pianist Bob] Bunyan, were still living with their families; they didn’t have to hustle for the jobs or compromise their music by playing patterns that they believed to be outdated. But those musicians for whom music was a livelihood had no choice if they wanted to work. The fight between the old and the new was a very real matter for Bunyan, since jobs were at stake.

Spellman's book isn't all doom and gloom, though; some of the best parts of the book are the words of the musicians themselves, who explain different aspects of how they approach music, which is often deeply insightful. At one point, Cecil Taylor mentions hearing Bud Powell's Un Poco Loco for the first time, which "extinguished" the Tristano influence that strongly colored his playing in the '50s; he cites the sense of Powell's music being "spiritually different," something that he could appreciate on a level beyond the aesthetic. Herbie Nichols gives an eloquent, almost professorial explanation of the significance of the drums in jazz music, based on his personal perspective:

There are reasons why the best jazz must ‘sound’ the same as it did in the beginning. I keep remembering that the overtones of ‘fifths’ created by the beautiful tones of any ordinary tuned drum was purely the first music—the precursor of the historic major scale, no less, which was built on the same principles. That is why the cycle of ‘fifths’ is so prevalent in elemental jazz. In other words, in a great desire to ‘sound,’ the beginner at improvisation grasps at easy and fundamental aural pleasures.            
And so, after tracing this elementary history of ‘sound,’ we can readily understand why drummers start to ‘drop bombs’ to usher in the new music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. Each ‘bomb’ created a newly rich and wholly unexpected series of overtones, beginning in the lower registers. These rich syncopations were fitting accompaniments to the supplemental overtones played by the horns in the higher registers. That is why the pianists became so percussive with their left hands. Among modern drummers, Art Blakey is considered invaluable. He astounds me when it comes to being in tune. I can hear overtones from his snare drum, cymbals, rimshots, everything he touches. Sometimes he ‘pounds’ some of these recalcitrant instruments in tune when the atmosphere is unsteady. I’ve seen Denzil Best rub his bass drumhead with a damp cloth at the start of a gig. He spoke of a ‘whoooosh’ effect that he sought. This effect that he achieves, plus his musical discipline, makes him also one of the best tubmen around today.
 My favorite quote might be from Ornette, who draws a distinction between playing something that sounds "good" and playing something beautiful. He takes a holistic approach and privileges honesty, however unexpected or unconventional, over what he perceives as artifice in making someone sound good just so that you look good:
But back to the bass player. What I have always wanted my bands to do is to have every man try to express anything, but yet at the same time show the thing that is allowing us to make music together, which has something to do with the person seeing in his mind the difference between making music total together or trying to make someone sound good, that’s two different things. I don’t like to do something just to make someone sound good because it’s giving a false image of you. I like to let the total thing make the music, you know. As long as the guy is playing with me, I don’t care how he does it. As long as they don’t do anything to make me sound good but they get with the music, then that’s beautiful [emphasis added].
I highly recommend checking this book out if you haven't already.