Snapple From the Apple
Some lighter fare for a Friday night: clips, memories, bebop prosody
I want more representation. As a recovering jazz musician, I need it.
I don’t mean legal representation, though the way I play you never know (yuck-yuck, rimshot, fart noise). No, I need representation in the media.
I need films, shows, and content where I can see myself. Content where I can find people who look like me and sound like me, doing what I do.
Which is: running Sonny Stitt’s treatment of “Au Privave” on a loop in my earbuds as I stomp furiously down Avenue B to Trader Joe’s, vocalizing its chatty head — much less sotto voce than I think, in way that likely reads as trad-Irish lilting — and making even the flagrantly mentally keep a cautious distance from the glowering figure moving down a blazing August sidewalk at Buster Keaton speed, going: zodie-ah-dum, zodie-ah-dum. dote dee-ah-dum, dah-dun-didee-ah-dem-day-dote—DWEE!
You know, Jon Hendricks by way of Ned Flanders by way of Batman nemesis Bane.
Admittedly I only do this when I’m pretty stressed out. And whenever I catch myself at it, usually before the soloist reaches the B section, I sharply turn a corner and put as much distance between myself and witnesses as possible, fast.
But isn’t this sad? This internalized judgment of non-initiates?
People who spent 20 formative years practicing jazz in the manner of fin-de-siecle whiteboys need media figures who reflect our lived experience. We need to see people who model the vibe you retain from spending decades studying the methods, forms, and musical dialects of another culture, largely in academic settings, transcribing countless solos, and coming out of the monastery transformed: cool, hard to read, a bit detached, and, let’s face it, a little intimidating.
Thank God, this very presence recently appeared as internet content.
Possibly the jazz standard, with that eternal recursion of ii-V-I’s in the bridge that separates muppets from boys. Chestnut or workhorse, it’s first on the syllabus of any Great Works Course. I especially like that trembling pent-up energy you see right before she/Brownie starts blowing, auguring the kind of explosion that usually sends cookie shards flying around the set and instead launches into bebop genius.
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Another ominous opening here: a full-body tremble to the roll with which Art Blakey sets Lee Morgan off, like a fuze. Here, the phrase-synched cuts in and out give it a very subtle blaxploitation quality. The trumpet menace downshifts a bit to…
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…the cool. The acting sets this one apart. And actually feels more Bill Evans than Miles Davis. On what inner quandary is she puzzling as she sings that opening sigh? I like her circumspect quality of watchful waiting, curious about where each phrase will take her. No human being who listens to “So What” twice doesn’t sing this solo’s opening phrase on the third listen. I assume the rocks glass and smoke-trailing Galouise are somewhere out of shot.
The inevitable bop-historical précis. I like the kid newscaster presentation: medium shot, direct address, the muppet seems to be anchoring as she gives you the news from Charlie Parker. I realize this also could read HR hatchet lady, putting you on a WFH Zoom call to fire 2/3 of the staff, but what a way to go!
The zoom-cuts to the two-note jabs Sonny Rollins opens up with are these clip’s clearest nod to the godfather of this project, which first aired in 1969 on Ed Sullivan,“Mahna Mahna.” Not that all of these clips aren’t so indebted, but this tune’s buoyant calypso feel drives it home. I guess Henson’s original would be this character’s Louis Armstrong. Or Buddy Bolden.
A saxophonist friend shared a horror story from attending the highly respected North Texas College of Music, where he found himself in a concert hall as two 20-year-old male tenor sax players stood onstage with a combo and played “Giant Steps” — head and entire solo — in unison. This version is, to say the least, preferable.
I can’t tell quite what’s up with this Blossom character, whose account name, Dearly Blossom, riffs on the not so un-muppet-like jazz singer Blossom Dearie. It has under 20 posts which have one decent tag (“Sheds harder than a mohair rug”) and one dismaying one (“Where jazz meets inspiration”) but it appears that the algorithm hath anointed.
Is the puppeteer also the singer? Is singing a solo from memory really the same thing as, per the captions, “transcribing” it. When they’re reenacting the Reichstag fire in DC and brown shirts are on maneuvers in LA, I say no.
I’m too busy savoring what it’s like to be seen and heard. Seeing my inner artist rendered so faithfully and to 32.5 K followers.
Can't wait til she goes through her Albert Ayler phase.