AS I sat and watched the film of a 1975 reunion of some of the finest musicians to come out of the Kansas City jazz boom of the 1930s, emotion stirred with the elation which came from watching them hearing their music.
It was anger. Anger that Joe Turner, who began 'shake, rattle and roll...' household name. Anger that Charlie Parker Lester Young could only be in the reunion on scratchy black and white film clips.
Anger that these great black jazz blues musicals whose talent sparkles forty and fifty years atter they started, are less well known than their white imitators over those forty years not to mention the fame afforded to groups with only a couple of years' experience which are pushed on our radios today. and and are the the Art will Milford Grayes playing in a street in Harlem.
came from the experience of the Black community.
the and However, because this new music not only moved in new directions, but also consciously raised black pride always present link with Africa, the white record companies and critics have given it a rough ride from the start.
Cecil Taylor, the pianist, is today hailed in jazz circles as a genius. But he began playing the new music in the mid-'50s. He remembers times when he worked restaurants where his records and the were on the juke box.
The inspiration commonly credited revolution John a dishwasher Afro-American music, the new music.
leading this in music is the quartet 'classic' quartet of saxophonist "classic')
Coltrane. Although Coltrane died of cancer in 1967 1965. he is still regarded as a giant of Originally unsurpassed in his contribution to jazz' that the term used relegate McCoy Tyner, then 20 years old, joined the first Coltrane entertainment.
out: (now called the when it formed in 1960 and stayed with it until So what is this new music?
it was called 'free but the musicians feel 'jazz has been by white society great musical form to the status of bar-room the music departs previous jazz traultions such as oeDop Is I the freedom of its improvisation from 'the restriction of and time' or from being limited to 'variations on a • chord pattern,' according to Valerie Wilmer in her book on the new music, As Serious As your Life. Drums In fact the new music is solidly rooted in the heritage of black Many innovators are drummers, like Milford Graves pictured on this page at a surcel Harlem.
As Valerie Wilmer points "The use •of additional percussion as an assertion of black identity effectively reverses the situation crented when the slave owners exerted their control by banning the drum British and American slave owners destroyed all drums. Both reggae and the new music are identified by their drum and percussion beats.
Next Week: The Blues.
'The Last of the Blue Devils' is showing at the Electric Cinema, Portobello Road, West London until Saturday March. It will also be shown at Norwich Cinema 5-12 23-26 June How to find jazz events in your area: The Jazz. Centre Society based in London has affiliates in the North and the Midlands. Its newsletter lists lazz events and all new music events.
Write to: JCS, 35. Grea Russel St, London WCI THE OTHER BOOKSHOP BLACK NATIONALISM REVOLUTION IN MUSIC by Koisky Pathfinder Press, £2.45 AS SERIOUS AS YOUR LIFE . by Wilmer Quartet, £2.95 328 Upper Street.
London, N1 2XQ
(Tel. 01 226-0571).