The Guardian (London)
September 16, 2004
Anything goes: Wooden legs, slobs in love, Armenian menus… Alan
Plater on what makes a great jazz song
Mr Topsy-Turvy . . . Slim Gaillard, who played piano with his hands
upside-down
In 1923, at the Palais de Danse in Ladywood, Birmingham, 17-year-old
Lily Goodman from Cannon Hill broke the British record for marathon
dancing. She danced for 24 hours and five minutes, covered 68 miles,
used up two partners – Mr Harold Quiney and Mr R Webster-Grinling –
and 482 tunes. This was the inspiration for Lily’s Dancing Feat, a
swinging instrumental by reeds player Alan Barnes, which he performed
in the year 2000 as part of a Birmingham jazz festival programme. (I
introduced it: my job was to tell the stories behind the music and
divert the audience’s attention from the bar.) Another of Alan’s
pieces celebrated Peg-Leg Bates, a tap-dancer with a wooden leg, who
toured the UK in the 1950s with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars.
After hours, Alan and I discovered a mutual interest in writing songs
about unsung heroes like Lily and Peg-Leg, and places and
institutions largely neglected by the music industry. It was, as Eric
Morecambe might have said, like the moment when Gilbert met
O’Sullivan. Since then, we have celebrated fast food joints on the
A66, being in love with a slob, and the psychological complexities of
a vegan chicken.
A key element of our approach to songwriting is laughter, a quality
that doesn’t always sit comfortably in jazz clubs and concerts. The
larger-than-life exuberance of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy
Gillespie, while adding enormously to the gaiety of nations, was
frequently victim of tut-tutting from some of our music’s most solemn
devotees. For years, the music of the US pianist/composer/ bandleader
Carla Bley was under-valued because of her triple error of being
political, a woman and funny.
This is odd, since jazz musicians themselves are legendary for their
relish of the comic and the absurd. The tenor player Zoot Sims, for
instance, following a US State Department tour of the Soviet Union
with the Benny Goodman band, was asked about the experience. He said:
“When you’re working for Benny, everywhere is the Soviet Union.” The
same Zoot Sims, watching the first moon landings in the back room at
Ronnie Scott’s in 1969, commented: “Imagine – we’ve got men on the
moon and I’m still playing Cherokee.”
Despite this attitude, many of the most original, inventive and witty
of performers tend to be marginalised and redirected to the cabaret
room: singer/pianists like Mose Allison, Bob Dorough, Blossom Dearie,
Dave Frishberg and our very own George Melly. The central stance is
one that Allison has defined, naturally enough, in song: “I’m another
little middle-class white boy who’s out to have some fun.” Allison
would be the first to acknowledge everyone’s debt to the great black
rhythm and blues singers like Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris, and
the blissful surrealist Slim Gaillard, whose considerable oeuvre
includes Yep Roc Heresy, with lyrics taken from the menu of an
Armenian restaurant in New York.
In a long, colourful career, Slim invented a semi-private language
called Vout, was the centrepiece of a chapter in Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road, played Clair de Lune on the piano with his hands
upside-down and, with Down at the Station, could claim to be the only
jazz musician to contribute a genuine nursery rhyme to the children
of the world.
His early life – or legend, the two things being difficult to
disentangle – included time spent as a professional boxer, a
mortician and a truck-driver for bootleggers before going into
vaudeville as a tapdancing guitarist and singer. He became a handsome
young man about Hollywood (“They used to call me Dark Gable”), who in
his later years was a genial and benign presence at the Chelsea Arts
Club. Slim’s verbal gymastics concealed a serious and poetic
understanding of the music. Of the tenor player Lester Young, he once
said: “He played real quiet – like a rat walking on silk.”
Among the middle-class white kids, Dave Frishberg, an outstanding
jazz pianist by any standards, has contributed many of the definitive
songs to the canon, from I’m Hip, co-written with Dorough, a guide to
being cool in a square world, to My Attorney Bernie, a sardonic hymn
to the American legal profession:
“Bernie tells me what to do
Bernie lays it on the line
Bernie says we sue, we sue
Bernie says we sign, we sign
On the dotted line.”
Frishberg’s announcements reflect the same sweet-and-sour attitude.
“I have reached that time of life when everything gets worse,” he’ll
say, before drifting into a song bemoaning such footnotes to life as
unwanted changes to the rules of baseball. With the seriousness of a
true clown, he also wrote Dear Bix, an exquisite tribute to the great
Beiderbecke.
This isn’t, and never will be, mainstream music, but it is a lovely
tributary where writers, musicians and audiences can splash about,
irritate the grown-ups and have a lot of fun. That’s pretty much what
Alan Barnes and I have been doing this past couple of years, enabling
Liz Fletcher to sing our hymns to the unnoticed, the unwanted even
the unwashed – not to mention a tenor saxophonist who’s still playing
Cherokee.
(C) Alan Plater. His Songs for Unsung Heroes is out now on Woodville
Records. It will be presented as part of the Scarborough jazz
festival on Saturday. Box office: 01723 376774.