Coventry Jazz Clubs

Wow, just pressed the wrong key on my laptop, and back to the beginning I go, having written a major essay on what went wrong with jazz!! Lewis maintained that European music was as essential an ingredient in jazz - its harmonic sophistication and such - as was the rhythmic complexity of African music. Nothing here, then - one would suppose - to engender much in the way of critical outrage, but critical outrage there was aplenty. Partly because the prime mover in third-stream music was of black heritage, rather than white, partly because the claim contradicted much of the history of jazz generally expressed by white (often European) jazz historians who - fans and all as they were - had little or no musical education. (Here, I perhaps should point out that neither did I, neither do I; in fact, I have - more or less - the same musical education/lack of musical education.) What was absent from this early jazz enthusiasm, what informed the writing of those early white jazz critics, was the misunderstanding of the level of harmonic sophistication epitomized by the Louis Armstrong-led ensembles (the Hot 5s and Hot 7s), harmonic sophistication entirely alien to African music. So, whence came this harmonic sophistication? Well, a jazz fan does not have to reach far to read of musicians who told of the early influence of the their mother's/their father's church music, a pianist here, an organist there. I have long posited the notion that jazz was the result of the mixture of European music's harmonic sophistication with the rhythmic complexity of African music, and such a notion does not signal a change between my understanding of jazz from the the understanding that went before, for those early jazz critics/historians said much the same thing. Where they and I differ, is that - having stated as much - the early critics went on to ignore completely European music. John Lewis, a well-educated musician, stuck to the original text, and - for a while, at least - maintained that a music we called third-stream, a synthesis of European and African music - not concert hall music, perhaps, but not entirely rhythmic expression either, might have something to express in the world of jazz. The black jazz critics/historians were unanimous is their disapprobation of such nonsense, the white critics (with one or two exceptions) likewise, but Lewis, as the musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, already had made his point, and certain of his subsequent recordings under his own name, JAZZ ABSTRACTIONS, THE GOLDEN STRIKER - MUSIC FOR PIANO AND BRASS, THE MODERN JAZZ SOCIETY'S CONCERT OF CONTEMPORARY JAZZ and THE BIRTH OF THE THIRD STREAM, proved his point - for all that the jazz audiences and the critics/historians ignored these efforts. Unfortunately for Lewis, unfortunately for jazz development, alongside Lewis's efforts in this jazz fusion, along came the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, a free jazz that threw off any consideration of chordal observance, and consideration of harmonic observation. And, not so long after, another development that fused the cement-mixer rhythms of rock with the melodic/harmonic fluidity of jazz. That neither of these developments proved of great interest to the jazz audience is now a matter of record, for all that Coleman's sophisticated combination of the traditional with the adventurous, the Gary Burton Quartet's combination (as one example) of the rock beat with the melodic/harmonic future-look of our music, proved tantalizing for a time. (And here I should say that much of the music of this period continues to resonate, continues to evince a timeless quality, as all good music does.) But both these developments were blind alleys, and its exponents have largely faded away, or - in the case of Gary Burton - returned to music well within the form as he originally knew it. But, Flapdoodle, to get back to your point, yes, there was much to commend third-stream music, there was much to commend the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but was there ever an audience? There was for Burton's quartet, for he played Toronto two or three times a year at the height of his fame, but I cannot recall a similar success for Ornette Coleman (traditional and all, as he was in my musical ears), or for the AEC, Cecil Taylor, or any of the supposedly avant-garde musicians of the 60s IN the 60s; indeed, even later, these performers have not commended themselves well to Toronto audiences. And, yes, as I hope I have made clear, Coleman is a giant to me, Taylor ditto, AEC likewise, and any number of other performers of the time. They engaged me. Unfortunately, they seldom engaged audiences. Try as I might, I cannot recall a Toronto engagement in a Toronto jazz club (dating - my my memory - back to early-65) of Ornette Coleman. It is my belief that jazz lost its audience in the 1960s. Club dates for musicians were becoming fewer and farther between, but still the audience was treated to 45 mins solos on tunes they previously had never heard. Sacrilege and all as I know this to be, JAZZ was a dance music, and nobody may offer their dancing all for more than three-to-five minutes. Jazz musicians, desirous of turning their music away from the dance hall tradition, failed to find an audience for their new music in their traditional homes (dance halls/night clubs) and failed to find a lasting audience in the new homes of their aspirations - recital/concert halls. Now, I have found jazz in such places, but from musicians willing to compromise, desiring still to engage the audience. That aside, yes I have recommendations to make, recordings I'll share with you, but - yes - many years of enjoyment and such aside, I fear that our music is dying. LongfordLad

Longfordlad, I read you post twice so I hope I have not misunderstood you. You make a point that some of this music just did not appeal to the audience and that is exactly what went and is still going wrong! You need a recognisable melody/tune and a recognisable beat/rhythm you also need to be able to predict to some extent what is coming next this was easy with the 12 bar tunes that were common in trad jazz also the 32 bar tunes that bands used taken from tin pan alley and the musicals, these are missing in the small amount of free jazz that I have managed to listen to, the same has happened in the classical music scene and turns people off. It (avant-garde) may be technically very advanced and clever but if it is not wanted by the audiences in general what is the point.

Hi, MICH, I suspect you have understood me only too well. Jazz critics were long embarrassed by the music's origins as dance music, and they welcomed the move to the concert halls (made in the 50s by - among other the Dave Brubeck Quartet - though the critics never particularly warmed to Brubeck's piano-playing - and the Modern Jazz Quartet. Earlier still, Norman Granz had done one hell of a job with concert jazz via his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. These lowly (in their own opinions) jazz critics, while wanting/demanding the elevation of jazz to the concert hall level, besmirched the specific concerts, while wanting the music to absent itself from dance halls and night clubs, so always beware the critics (but, as a performer, you know that). In Free Jazz, these same critics found much to commend - yes, the musicians were playing in jazz night clubs (though never in dance halls) - but this had much more to do with the civil rights movement (perhaps, understandably so) than with the music itself. Black musicians, the critics asserted, had - at last - found their "voice". What a load of nonsense! Did King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Count Basie NOT have "voices"? In the jazz with which you were most familiar, the improvisation largely dealt with the melody - an embellishment here, a chordal resonance there - but not deconstructing the piece - 12-bar blues or 32-bar popular song - to the point where it bore no resemblance to the original piece, no anchor-point to bring back the audience to the original composition. And you are right, you may get away with much in a 12-bar blues, but so many of those 32-bar songs, songs we now refer to as comprising part of the Great American Song Book, including the lyrics, not so easy, because the audience knew the melody and knew the lyrics. Screaming harmonic declarations in the upper register of a tenor saxophone, most satisfying to the "creative" saxophonists, were most unsettling to listeners who enjoyed the melody and the lyrics of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square", for example. In English have a way of dismissing a person as "too clever by far", and this expression encompasses a variety of meanings, including "self-defeating". The music you played in the 1950s, MICH, had a "look-at-me - I'm doing something different" air about it (notwithstanding its being a music of thirty years' earlier), but it had a sound of joyousness that embraced and engaged the audience. Much might be said of the those who followed the "mainstream", the small-group music that first made its appearance in the early-30s, or even the modernism of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, with its sophisticated counterpoint and its wry humour, but the music that flowed in the post-Ornette Coleman, post John Coltrane, years had an understandable political implication (the Civil Rights Movement) that cherished anger over beauty, righteousness over clarity of purpose. In short, it pissed me off, for all that I understood the anger/puzzlement of black creative artists after one hundred years of freedom from slavery without any serious attempt to accept blacks into an integrated society. Is it possible to separate music from the social conditions that spawned it? In the short term, probably not, but in the long term, it should be, and one hundred years of freedom constitutes the long term for me. By the late 60s/early 70s, Miles Davis, the consummate interpreter of the Great American Song Book, had put this accomplishment behind him in pursuit of a music (R&B with embellishments) that might reach out to what he described as his "own people", black Americans that had not given a monkey's toss about jazz for more than a generation. It failed, for - yet again - his music appealed to a white audience that was younger and more attuned to rock & roll and its variant forms. Miles enjoyed audiences in his latter years no different in size from those of earlier days, but he certainly did not achieve his objective of reaching his "own people", any more than the many and various other allegedly jazz groups did. I started writing about jazz as the "Coventry Correspondent" of Jazz News & Review, a weekly that owed its short 1960s life (despite its coverage of all schools of the music) to the popularity (the inexplicable popularity) of "trad-jazz", the exponents of such being - in Britain - the "usual suspects" - Barber, Ball & Bilk. And, in one form or another, continued to contribute on a regular basis to magazines such as Jazz Times, The Professional, Jazz Journal and (Canadian) Coda. I gave that up long ago, and - subsequently - I have been accused (even by friends) of abandoning jazz. My response from the outset, was that jazz abandoned me. So I am stuck with records/tapes/CDs of music that for "one brief shining moment" (apologies to the late William Manchester and the title of his biography of John F. Kennedy) brought to popular music, dance music, an intellectual rigour and a musical imagination that will not come our way again, save for the recreational musicians. Regarding the music of the concert hall, oft-called - in error - classical music, I am more confident, for the programmers of the concert halls display a propensity to disregard the putative music of "modernism" in favour of the well-regarded (by audiences) music of the pre-modern age. All form of "serious music" have an audience, from those who favour the baroque to those transported by the music of the Romantics. Some poseurs may have found favour with the modernists and post-modernists, but they never were a significant part of the demographics, and programmers these days largely ignore that school of music. John Cages 4 minutes, 33 seconds - a piano piece in which the pianist lifts the piano lid, replaces the piano lid, and so on until the 4 minutes, 33 seconds have elapsed is sooooo yesterday! Another jazz piece, if I might dignify it a such, for which I will not be paid. I'll send this unedited because I am otherwise engaged. Needless to say, I hope, the music you played in Coventry as a youngster, the music you play (based only upon your own testimony) is exempt from the criticisms to be found in this posting. As Vic Dickenson, one of the music's great trombonists, added to a photograph of me with him (Toronto, the Colonial Tavern , 1965) "keep swinging".

As a founder member of the Sherbourne Jazzmen and still swinging at 80 the old Coventry jazz scene is most interesting

A bit of nostalgia, poor vid quality but what the heck??? Dr. Jazz - Tierra Buena Jazz Band

I used to get dragged to the 'Cottage' by a friend who was into 'brass', marching bands and jazz. My father had hundreds of 78's, all trad jazz I think, and that was enough to put me off Jazz forever. I would sooner listen to a newcomer to bagpipes than suffer another night at the 'Cottage'

There should have been bye-laws preventing the playing of Jazz in public places, buildings, and pubs especially. Having to sit for what seemed like an eternity, people all around me bobbing up and down, tapping feet and drubbing the edges of tables incessantly was enough to drive me to distraction, nay almost insanity.

Playing music at weddings has been a very old tradition. Nowadays almost all of the weddings take place with a wedding band playing some music. Before hiring any wedding band first you need to determine your budget. Also, keep in mind your taste of music before hiring any wedding band for the occasion.

Hello & welcome to you Daniel We hope that you will enjoy your time with us. I have played for many weddings both as organist & also in band accompaniments. I do like Jazz, but my play taste is more orchestral.

Err........ It's just an ad.

I am also a jazz enthusiast, Terra Buena Monday night at the Pilot, Mercers Arms Friday for major artists (not that Terra Buena was not major). Also was at the Hippodrome when Count Basie appeared 1958? '50s & 60s Cov had many jazz venues. Lived in the U.S.A. since 1968, have been fortunate to see my hero Miles Davis on three occasions. At the Cocked Hat in 2009 to see the Terra Buena band, they gave me a cassette "Our Monday Night Date". Who was the Terra Buena musician who worked at Brico on Holbrook Lane?

Poor old Mike H you did have to suffer a lot An interesting bit of history on the Terra Buena Jazz Band by Brian Bates

I'm listening to the new album by 'Sons of Kemet', an unusual lineup with a Sax/Clarinet player, a tuba player and two drummers. I was pleased to find this new release in HMV in Coventry city centre today for a good price. It's hypnotic and quite 'free' in places. Just waiting now for the new 'Get the Blessing' album. There are some superb European jazz bands now, bringing in influences from the classics (Get the Blessing are influenced by Ornette Coleman) as well as ideas from Rock and Pop. If you like piano trios check out 'Triosence', an excellent German group.

I'm sure I remember Brian Bates playing with the Dud Clews Orchestra at the Mercers Arms in the 60s. Am I right?

You are right to remember Brian Bates with the Dud Clews Jazz Orchestra (Saturday nights) at the Mercers' Arms. When the band was formed and commenced playing at the Mercers', the trumpet section comprised Dud Clews and Jock Falloon. Jock's trumpet style was more modern that Dud's, more modern that the overall style of the band, which was the early (mid-1920s) style of the King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington orchestras. When Dud Clews died in a car crash, some thought band would die with him, but the band members wanted the experiment in early recreating the sounds of early swing to be continued. Brian Bates was invited to take Dud's chair. Brian was a great admirer of Dud's playing, a great admirer of Dud's orchestra, so it took a little while to convince him, but convince him they (the boys in the band) did. I recall Brian's buying from me a trumpet that I had acquired some years earlier. The price, I believe, was twenty pounds. Brian always played a cornet in the Tierra Buena Jazz Band but though he needed the brilliance of a trumpet to be heard clearly in the DCJO, a band almost twice the size of the TBJB. Brian debuted with the DCJO playing my trumpet, but by evening's end the trumpet belonged to Brian. From recent photographs and videos of Brian I have seen on the Internet of late, it is clear that he continues to this day to consider the cornet his primary instrument.