Jazz and Longhair
Back to Big Sur
Chinese Opera
I am a lousy guide to a varied nightlife in San Francisco. The town isn’t all
that big, and I am getting old and fat anyway. I tend to just keep doing the
same things once I have found things to do I like.
Ate in La Strada again and left replete with that extraordinary food and lulled into quiet postprandial bliss by the dulcet tones of the cembalo — altogether we felt like the Duke and Duchess of Spoleto, and got as far as the Jazz Workshop.
Chico Hamilton is a remarkable fellow. He is the only survivor of the revolution that began as “Pacific Jazz.” The others with their heads together on that memorable album cover have fallen by the wayside. Unless they are lucky to catch a very good writer or arranger, what their music lacks is brains. They seem to have been capable of originality only once and to have been content to coast along in stereotypes of themselves forever after.
The fact is, most jazz musicians do this, even the biggest big shots. There are never enough Dave Toughs and Mary Lou Williamses to go around. Perhaps it’s just as well, it might be more than the public could stand — understand anyway.
This is the best group Chico has had in a long time. They’re all young fellows, new to the big time. The bass, Albert Stinson, is a real discovery, a most subtle and agile musician. The saxophone, Charles Lloyd, is listed as “musical director,” but what holds the group together and gives its musical expression shape is undoubtedly Chico Hamilton. When he is away for a long solo, things fall apart. When he is there the only word for the music is “svelte.” I suppose that is a term beyond smooth or cool or hot.
Last Sunday night was the “Longhair Jazz” concert at the Jewish Center, with Lee Smit on the piano and Margot Blum singing. The place was more than full. It was a social event and a musical event. But the people interested in jazz were very conspicuous by their absence. It just was not a jazz event.
In the first place, the piano pieces by Tansman, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Hindemith, Copland, are not jazz at all. They were not even derived, however remotely, from jazz, but from ragtime, which is very much something else.
There is only one composition by a longhair composer I know of which resembles jazz. This is La Création du Monde by Darius Milhaud. Not only is it jazz, but it sounds like Billy Strayhorn and it was written when Billy Strayhorn was a small boy and Duke Ellington had yet to even think of the full-dress suites of his “middle period.” So apparently it can be done if a smart enough man wants to do it.
Copland has a tin ear. He has been around both folk music and jazz all my days. He thinks of himself as a bit of a buff in both fields. Alas, when he “goes to the folk for inspiration” somehow he finds only some more Copland.
The other numbers were nowhere, jazzwize. However, anything can be swung. Put a seven-voice atonal fugue by Toch in front of Brubeck or Thelonius Monk and say “swing it,” and they’ll swing it, each in his own way.
Leo Smit played brilliantly, but like a concert virtuoso. Since most of the pieces are inferior products of their respective composers and really exercises, it might just as well have been Czerny. Of course you can swing Czerny if you’ve a mind to.
Margot Blum, on the other hand, is missing a lucrative career. George Gershwin isn’t jazz either and he sure isn’t longhair. But he did write lovely show tunes in a semi-Negroid idiom. (Actually, Porgy and Bess always sounded more like plainsong to me.) Once she had managed to push her accompanist into the beat, Margot swung. In fact, some of it sounded a bit like the Miles Davis Porgy and Bess album, which is jazz.
I wouldn’t wish the life on anybody, but maybe Margot Blum would be better off in the hungry i or the Blue Angel than struggling with an opera company that doesn’t seem to know how to make the best use of her.
Rugged as it is, the entertainment business has compensations. It’s wonderful to feel the audience right out there in the very grip of your hand. If she had them there in the Jewish Center with George Gershwin, what would she do in — oh, well, it’s just an idea.
[February 4, 1962]
Along in the summer of 1928 or ’29 I was up on the ridge trail along the Santa
Lucias [the California coastal range near Big Sur] with a fishing rod, some
books, a zebra dun and a Spanish jennet. (She carried the pack.) The country was
as it will never be again until after the Bomb — profoundly empty — like deep
dreamless sleep, out of time, out of the world, out of all that was or was not.
If a leather-clad Spanish vaquero had come riding up from the San Simeon way
looking for strays, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
However, I had a terrible cold which promised to turn into pneumonia. The topographical sheet said “Slade’s Hot Springs” down on the coast, so down I went, mile after mile of dusty switchbacks and forested canyons.
When I got there I found a little shelf where there had been 2000 years or more of Indian camps, where they’d baked abalones until there was a 10-foot deposit of black oily soil filled with fragments of shell. On this the grass grew so high the stock vanished into it when I turned them loose.
Out on the cliff were two old tubs hung on the rock by rusty wire cables. There was a narrow board catwalk out to them, but it was broken and I had to rebuild it before I could get a bath.
The severity of my cold could be measured by the fact that the water seemed perfectly odorless and tasteless to me until I had been there for three days. I drank and soaked and stayed about a week until I ran out of grub. “. . . out of time, out of the world.”
Years ago Marie and I went there again the year before the road went through, the last chance to see the country as it had always been. I never stopped again until last weekend when I took my two daughters down for a short outing and myself for a conference with Mike Murphy, grandson of the first owner, who has now taken the place under his own management and has all sorts of ideas about developing it.
I must say, Big Sur is not longer out of the world.
Nowadays, in the espresso bars of Reykjavik, Jakarta, Tel Aviv and Montevideo, when they discover you’re from northern California and write books, sloe-eyed maidens in black stockings, sweatshirts and B.B. hairdos cuddle up to you murmuring softly, “Connais-tu le pays où fleurit Henri Millair parmi ses mômes?”
As might be expected, the International Public Image is considerably more outrageous than the facts. Up from the road the Santa Lucias are still lonely and wild. It’s still lovely to soak in the hot water.
But little did I think, a young boy, staring out to sea and pondering the fate of man, that some day I would be sitting at the same spot, planning to conduct a seminar called “The Restatement of Religious Values in a Time of Faithlessness” while a beautiful waitress in black stockings poured me coffee.
The world turns and time does pass. Cheer up. There’s a better time coming.
[February 7, 1962]
One of the best things about living in America is the tremendous richness of
the diverse cultures that still survive amongst us. With a little persistence
you can still ferret them out, even though the immigrant groups that brought
them here are now far more assimilated than they were a generation ago.
There is a congregation of Falasha, black Abyssinian Jews, in New York. The Polynesian colony in San Francisco still get together for pig roasts and hulas. On Burns Day you can stuff yourself with haggis and usquebaugh while the pipes skirl. You can learn to sit down with a mouthful of flaming daggers and flip your legs out with bona fide Cossacks. You can take up tumbling in a Czech Sokoj.
You can even, in an aggressively Low Church diocese like San Francisco, go to garden parties where ladies in flowered prints pour and children curtsey and the new vicar propounds slightly fast conundrums or takes eggs out of his ears.
In fact, be it ever so weird, if it’s a national custom, you can find it somewhere.
I have always been a tireless world traveler in the foreign quarters of America’s great cities. I learned to do that funny wiggle with my head and neck from a Cambodian girl I met in a Chicago speakeasy. Speaking of speakeasies — l also found that the safest drink during prohibition was oozo, moustike, or arak — the anise flavor grappa — served in Levantine coffee shops while the fiddles whined, the belly dancers wiggled and ululated, and the menfolk held handkerchiefs and bounded about on the dance floor like bears.
For me at least, this is the worst thing about living in a monolithic culture — say in Italy. After awhile you get tired of the 570 varieties of pasta and “Ciao, Ciao, Bambino” on the radio. There are only two public collections of Far Eastern art in all Italy, in Venice and in the Vatican, and they are pointless collections of bijouterie. No Swedes dance the hambo in the Pincio. Only more little beggar boys with trained sparrows.
And you remember how the Hasidim of Williamsburg on Long Island come out in the park and dance their unearthly akimbo dance, welcoming the new moon and showing her her own stigmata — the lunes on their fingernails.
For a time it looked as though all this cultural diversity would die out. The second generation was ashamed of the ways of their parents. But now the third and fourth generations have come along, and they are all for a return to their traditions.
We are all aware of this in the Jewish community and are inclined to put it down to the shock of the Nazi persecutions and the establishment of Israel. I think it would have happened anyway. It is happening amongst people of the most diverse ancestry — Greeks, Chinese, Armenians, Japanese.
This is all a preface to the news that Chinese opera is playing at the Great Star Theater on Jackson St. between Grant and Kearny. They will be there through the 22nd of February, the longest continuous run in years.
Most of the troupe are from Hong Kong, actors and actresses of first quality. The repertory is stunning, and includes many of the greatest classics of the Chinese theater. There will be a whole series of “military plays,” which means the most spectacular costumes and most acrobatic pantomime to be found on the stage anywhere on earth.
Going to the Chinese theater is my favorite indoor sport. I used to go at least once a week, back in the days when it cost only 35 cents after 10 o’clock. (Prices are now the same as other theaters.) I learned more about dramatic technique, playwriting, audience communication, than I have from all the Western plays I have ever seen. If these plays were put on under the auspices of a foundation, in a downtown theater, the audience would be full of enraptured highbrows and sensation shoppers. Here it is in its natural habitat, with an audience in total communication.
Go. You’ll get used to the noise in a few minutes. Much of the action is self-explanatory and you’ll find somebody near you only too glad to interpret.
Tonight, Sunday, there will be one of Mei Lan Fang’s favorite plays, The Legend of the White Serpent. On the 14th, 17th, 18th, and 21st, there will be a series of “Three Kingdoms” plays. The drowning army scene in the one on the 21st is one of the greatest moments in all theater. The 15th and 16th will be the two parts of the classic romance, Lady Precious Stream. On the 20th will be the episode of the cake peddler and his wicked wife Golden Lotus, from the novel of that name. Thursday will be another romance, The West Chamber.
This is the very cream of the Chinese repertory. See at least one. I’m going to everything, myself. And do my children love it!
[February 11, 1962]
The next column will be posted on February 14, 2012.
“San Francisco Fifty Years Ago” is an ongoing project of posting all of Kenneth Rexroth’s columns for the San Francisco Examiner (1960-1967). Each of the columns is being posted on the 50th anniversary of its original appearance. Copyright 1960-1967 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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