on Formation: Building a Personal Canon, part one, a memoir by Brad Mehldau
Speaking about writers, William Meredith said that the ones “who go on concerning us … have escaped from a confused human identity into the identity they willed and consented to.” Reflecting on the first 25 years of his life, Brad Mehldau’s Formation devotes much psychic energy in reexamining the early humiliations, uncertainties, and internal conflicts from which he forged a person and profession for himself. Now 52, Mehldau portrays his younger self – a jazz upstart in New York City during the late 80s — as stubbornly receptive to a wide variety of influences, from Beethoven’s string quartets and Public Enemy’s hip hop to the diverse range of iconic jazz innovators and players. This was his period of Bildung – the formation of both moral and emotional maturity leading both to personal and creative autonomy, and the temperament and skills required to interact effectively with others.
He writes, “I wanted to be Cain, yet wanted a place in the tribe. I wanted to be a sexual free spirit, yet was plagued by insecurity and self-questioning. I was the bastard child who was given away, yet also the well-situated child in a ‘normal’ family.” Disinheritance and a confused sexual identity, tentatively bisexual, marked his early adulthood – made shameful to him by the sexual advances of his gym teacher and other dissatisfying or clumsy encounters. Meanwhile, his adoptive parents encouraged his musical aspirations and arranged for his essential music lessons.
Mehldau’s narrative swings between cerebral analyses of his behaviors and ongoing semi-conclusions about art and politics, to memories of his first bands and performances. He and his Gen-X’er jazz peers faced a common challenge: “By the time we arrived, jazz had already cycled a particular course from its early origins, through swing, bebop, hard bop, modal and free jazz, and plugged-in fusion. Now we were part of a supposed Renaissance.” Here at mid-book, the reader can feel the breeze as the pendulum swings between veneration of past masters and the open question of “what next?” Here also is Harold Bloom whose canon and its rationale are both questioned and embraced; Mehldau also read the Marxist literary critiques of Terry Eagleton. In the end, Mehldau concluded, “I couldn’t get behind either Bloom’s conservatism or Eagleton’s Marxism unconditionally, because I realized that finally they were both elitists and, however edifying it might be, elitism still smells finny, because ultimately it is divisive … On the other hand, fleeing from the establishment on the grounds of retaining one’s own supposed originality was to misunderstand what constitutes originality in the first place.” Still, Mehldau found in Bloom’s canon the key attributes he discovered in great artists: authority, vastness, and strangeness.
The events and encounters that filled out Mehldau’s Bildung arrive one by one in Formations. There is also a staggering array of influences – from classical composers to teachers such as Kenny Werner, Joe Chambers, Fred Hersch, and Jorge Rossy. But Mehldau will also tell you that he learned from players like George Winston and Billy Joel. His embrace of Americana – music made by Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and others — points to his prevailing style. Joshua Redmond, with whom he played, became a close contemporary. Literature also made an impression – Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger, Joyce’s Ulysses, Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Towards the end, Mehldau documents his heroin habit and its damages – gigs he was unable to attend, an intervention with no positive result. In one sense, Formation is obsessed with transgression itself – the necessity and peril of violating standards, the power waywardness can exert over others and oneself.
Stanley Plumley once observed that “autobiography is the means by which archetypes are renewed.” What Mehldau discovered is that the artist as disrupter is an archetype, and that each of its incarnations brings both an innovative maker and a repetition of a strange gesture. Yet in the end, he really doesn’t deliver a list of the members of his canon, though many contenders perhaps are mentioned – nor does he attempt to describe his own stylistics, though certain aspects are implied. That’s one reason, at least, to anticipate part 2 of his memoir.
[Published by Equinox Publishing on March 13, 2023, 311 pages, $50.00 hardcover]
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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song by Judith Tick
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) recorded “A-Tisket A-Tasket” with the Chick Webb Orchestra on May 2, 1938. In the pre-chart era, there was no ranking of popularity, but the song was noted as number one in Billboard’s sheet music sales and on the radio music program “Your Hit Parade.” Earl Wilson, then a fledgling reporter for the New York Post, interviewed Fitzgerald, claimed that the song “was driving a lot of people nuts,” and said that she had “pleaded guilty to writing it.” He went on:
“’Aw right, aw right,’ said Ella, grinning to her ears, ‘but don’t say I STOLE it, jes’ say I borrowed it.’ Now she dated the song as a game she played in Newport News and at Yonkers, ‘and that orphanage which some folks say I run away from … We was playing in Boston in April, and I says to Al Feldman, our arranger, ‘Look here, I got something terrific! They’re swinging everything else – why not nursery rhymes.’ I had most of the words wrote out, so we sat down and jammed around til we got the tune, and that’s the way it was.’” (Two decades later, Wilson revisited his column and apologized for having been ‘a bit superior’ in how he treated Fitzgerald.)
In Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, Judith Tick gives us the Ella that has gone unnoticed – a spirited innovator who played an active role in devising her sound. About Fitzgerald’s work around 1940, Tick writes, “Fitzgerald was blending swing momentum and melodic relaxation in material ranging from romantic to hip, foretelling as flexible jazz style for popular song. Along with Billie Holiday and other singers, she was bringing the musical language of jazz to songs from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and the blues tradition, before any notion of ‘jazz-pop’ had entered common parlance. This process owed little to commercial pressure from her white manager, Moe Gale, or her handlers at Decca. On the contrary, her innovations were rooted in her experiences touring the country, performing mainly for Black audiences.”
Tick’s focus on crafting “new scholarship on Fitzgerald, shining a light primarily on three neglected aspects of her work” finds her citing a range of archival materials to illuminate three emphases of the artist’s life and development – first, her familial background in the years before she entered the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronx; then, her years working as a touring band singer, and the expressive freedoms she allowed herself on stage; and finally, per personal life in the years after becoming a star, not a subject to which Fitzgerald offered much access to reporters.
She evolved from a swinger in Webb’s band, to a bop singer in the mode of Dizzy Gillespie, to the elegant reinterpreter of the American songbook after she left Decca and took on Norman Granz as her manager who built Verve Records around her. She regarded Ella Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (1956), her dismissal of bop, as a major turning point. Tick positions her at the center of a “jazz pop apotheosis.” There were seven songbook albums to follow, and my parents played them all on their new reel-to-reel tape player. During this period, she toured for as many as 45 weeks a year in the U.S. and abroad. On a flight to Australia in 1954, Fitzgerald and pianist John Lewis “were bumped from their first-class seats into tourist class on an oversold Pan American flight … Three days after the incident, an Australian newspaper reported her arrival on Qantas Airways with ‘1,000 fans there to greet her.’ Granz sued PanAm for $270,000 in damages, triggering press stories throughout the United States and in Europe, Japan, and Brazil.” The same year, Fitzgerald’s troupe arrived in Charleston, South Carolina with “a ticket-seller from New York to ensure mixed seating. Ella recalled, ‘When the show started, the people were all staring at each other and so afraid that they couldn’t even applaud.’” Noticing a crowd of “local toughs” gathering at the stage door, the troupe escaped through a different exit.
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald required tireless drive and shrewdness in how she selected her repertoire and managed her business dealings. Much of the narrative simply follows her from date to date – but the prose never slips into monotony. Tick’s Fitzgerald is a performer who sets out to please – in her own way, but persistently. The wish to be admired and appreciated was a constant urge, leading her to adapt her talents to perform in concerts with other major singers and in performances on television. She also needed stamina. As for speaking out against racism, sexism and fat-shaming, Tick doesn’t go so far as to portray Fitzgerald as an engaged activist. Rather, Fitzgerald’s projection of playful innocence, especially on stage during her band years, emerged from a conviction of her own self-regard that seemed to sweep aside the negativity around her. The title song of her 1971 album Things Ain’t What They Used To Be (And You Better Believe It) addressed race relations.
Fitzgerald lip-synchs “A-Tisket A-Tasket” in the opening scene of the 1942 Abbott and Costello film “Ride ‘Em Cowboy.” She is depicted standing in the aisle of a bus, searching for her basket. Clearly, there is nowhere for her to sit among all the white faces. And if there were, it would be at the very back of the bus. You can watch the scene on YouTube by clicking here.
[Published by W.W. Norton on December 5, 2023, 592 pages, $40.00US hardcover]
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Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): a Memoir by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman
I imagine that nothing was handed to Ben Greenman in order to devise this memoir by 80-year old Sly Stone. He did the biographical and discographical research, collected shards from Stone’s memory, heard or read what critics had to say about the influence of Sly and the Family Stone, and proceeded to shape a narrative voice more coherent and sustained than anything Sly could devise by himself. Greenman achieved the same kind of resurrecting effects with I Am Brian Wilson (2016), and with Sly he has voiced some of the animation, irreverence and slick talk you can hear in the videos from the 70s. So when In Thank You Sly remembers and comments on Muhammad Ali’s dialog on the Mike Douglas Show in 1974 for which Sly was that week’s celebrity co-host, one knows that’s Greenman is simply repeating what’s on YouTube.
But Greenman also realizes that this talk show segment speaks to Sly’s posture in contrast with the irascible Ali – not just Sly’s clownishness versus Ali’s fractious displeasure, but the former’s desire to appeal to all parts of his audience versus the latter’s focus on discomfiting the whites. Sly and the Family Stone had brought mixed races and genders into the pop psychedelic scene, sometimes to the displeasure of blacks. Greenman’s Sly notes that in 1969, shortly after the group thrilled the crowd at Woodstock at 3:30 am with “I Want to Take You Higher,” “the Black Panther Party had come up to Oakland … and the rumor was that they didn’t like the way I was doing things, that I was stepping too much toward what White America wanted, that they didn’t like that I had” white players in the band and a white manager. “I didn’t have an issue with being black. I was proud of it. But I couldn’t get behind the way the Panthers expressed their message, the calls for violence.”
By the time of the 1974 Mike Douglas appearance, the band had recorded all of the top-10 hits that made Clive Davis happy at Columbia Records; Sly disparaged “Dance to the Music” as bland. Success had come quickly for Sly. He started as a deejay at KSOL in 1964 where he was the most popular nighttime host; he integrated music by white artists into the playlist at this black station. He produced music for The Warlocks (soon to become The Grateful Dead) and Grace Slick, which drew him closer to the sounds and social mentality of the hippies. In 1967, Sly and the Family Stone made their first album, A Whole New Thing of funked-up “psychedelic soul.” In 1968, Sly’s sister Rose Stone joined as lead female vocalist – and “Dance to the Music” (in the album titled as such) reached number 8. Life, also released that year, didn’t resonate widely. But then came Stand! in 1969 with hits like “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Sing a Simple Song,” “Everyday People,” “You Can Make It If You Try” and the title song. Although Sly continued recording through 1983, the flush times were over. He bought Isaac Hayes’ house in Coldwater Canyon and “moved in with my equipment, my clothes, my cars, and my guns … I started with a few and added more and more: a .38, two 16-gauge shotguns, a .22/410 over/under … There were lots of people coming in and out of the house and not all of them were bringing flowers.” As Sly recounts, those people brought lots of cocaine and other drugs; “I had a violin case filled with cocaine that I would carry around town with me.”
But I went to Thank You looking for insights to the music, not for the druggy tales. I found Sly explaining how he shifted from funk to the more straightforward hit “Everyday People”: “I didn’t just want ‘Everyday People’ to be a song. I wanted it to be a standard, something that would be up there with ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Moon River.’ And I knew how to do it. It meant a simple melody with a simple arrangement to match.” Not much insight there – except into his hunger for acceptance. But there simply isn’t much here about how Sly’s sound was written, arranged, performed, and produced. Apparently Sly can’t articulate or remember it now, and such material lies beyond the mimicry of a ghost writer.
How reasonable or inflated are the claims made for Sly’s impact on the evolution of music? James Parker in The Atlantic put it this way: “His music married ballooning hippie consciousness to the tautest and worldliest and most street-facing funk: Its end product, its neurological payload, was an amazing, paradoxically wised-up euphoria. A rapture petaled with knowingness, with slyness.” But in the memoir, Sly has little to say about how the sound was conceived and deployed. His genius came with an expiration date – and his demise is chronicled here. Nevertheless, if his music means something to you, then Thank You will deliver enough this-happened-then-that-happened to bring his band and his times alive. In the meantime, to watch Ali and Sly on Mike Douglas’ show, click here.
[Published by AUWA Books/MCD/FSG on October 17, 2023, 297 pages, 30.00 US]
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on Rock & Roll in Kennedy’s America: A Cultural History of the Early 1960s by Richard Aquila
Don McLean sang nostalgically about “the day the music died” in “American Pie,” a number one hit for four weeks in 1972. He was referring to the alleged demise of pop music after the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson in a 1959 plane crash. But Richard Aquila, in Rock & Roll in Kennedy’s America, dismisses the notion that early-1960s pop was a diminished sound that reveals little about pre-Beatles America. In 1972, I and my friends weren’t listening to McLean and top-40 radio where ballads like Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” and Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” were the first, second and fourth most played songs that year. McLean came in third. Those songs represent for me part of the continuing legacy of the earlier period Aquila audits. In JFK-inspired America, teens tuned into Roy Orbison, The Shirelles, Booker T. and the MG’s, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Vee, Neil Sedaka, Chubby Checker, Mary Wells, the Four Seasons, Little Eva, Brenda Lee, Sam Cooke, and Elvis (toned down after his stint in the service). Some of their output qualifies as rock & roll, and some of it is a younger and more upbeat variation of 1950’s and 60s stars – Bobby Darin following Sinatra, Frankie Avalon following Perry Como, The Fleetwoods following The Andrews Sisters.
But what did the “upbeat” signify? For Aquila, the early 60’s pop music vibe (for me, rock ‘n roll is a subset of that vibe) expresses shifting socio-political values. The Ronettes sang “Be My Baby” while Martin Luther King Jr. was leading protest marches in Selma; Aquila writes, “Just as Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1948, Black girl groups helped desegregate the music business, the national pop charts, and concert venues in the early 60s.” Listeners today hear the blatant racism in Pat Boone’s hit “Speedy Gonzales,” but “back in 1962 most people felt the song was a harmless novelty hit that satirized a common ethnic stereotype.” Motown and surfer music represent two other formidable pop modes for Aquila, who attempts to be as illuminating about the national psyche as he is about the music.
He notes that the “first wave of baby boomers entered high school in the fall of 1960. That freshmen class boasted almost half a million more students than the previous one, an upward trend that continued every year of JFK’s presidency.” It was a huge market – and even if the music “offered a means to generational solidarity,” I’m unwilling to accept that people of color thought Rickie Nelson was cool. Aquila could have gone deeper into the demographics to cite differences in the tastes of white and BIPOC audiences. Still, it’s interesting to note that on the day JFK was inaugurated, the Miracles “Shop Around” reached #2 on the charts, lending a new verve to do-wop.
Aquila also manages to tie music trends into reflections on the Cold War. Were the kids who listened to the music on their transistor radios rebellious and needing a diversion from the Cuban Missile Crisis? Aquila quotes Brenda Lee who said, “It was just kids coming to shows identifying with a person that was finally their own age who was singing music that they liked and was exciting and fun.” Maybe it was just that simple.
[Published by Johns Hopkins University Press on November 29, 2022, 416 pages, $29.00 hardcover]