JazzGram, July, 2022

JAZZINCHICAGO.ORG

by Rafael Alvarez

Memphis, awash in blues from the moment hollers emerged due south of the Bluff City about the time of the Civil War, was busy with dreams of 12-bar fame last month, [may 2022]. It was the week of the International Blues Challenge and Beale Street was thick with the ghosts of legends, tourists in search of a rockin’ good time and hopeful musicians from around the world.

But only the most knowledgeable (perhaps a few professors at the Scheidt School of Music) were hip to the Chickasaw Syncopators and how this longago

student orchestra once navigated the music of the Mississippi River from Memphis to New Orleans and back again.

How to classify – with the specificity of taxonomy -- each stop along the way? “Categorizing music is done for commercial reasons more than for anything else,” said Robert Ross, 73, a lifelong grinder on blues guitar and vocals who made it past the first round of the Blues Challenge but not the finals. “The human brain loves to label everything. If we’re gonna play that game, yes there is

a fine line between blues and jazz, but it seems damn arbitrary to me.”

The great Tom Waits once said that a good song is like a heavily pregnant insect: cut it open to find a hundred other songs waiting to take flight. In doing so, you kill the bug that lays the golden songs.

Continued Ross, donning surgical gloves, “Musicians would define blues as any music that uses 3 chords [I, IV, V] and one of three scales -- minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, or mix- olydian scale. Usually 12 bars in length but it is also found as 8, 16, and even 24. Many old blues have structures that are not divisible by four – all kinds of crazy variations. But only nerds are interested in the complexities of these distinctions, right?” Nerds, writers, academics, and everyone else who wishes they could thrill a crowd with music, the only religion, according to Frank Zappa, that “delivers the goods.” I began learning how much I didn’t know the hard way when, as a young newspaper reporter in 1981, I interviewed Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (1924-2005) at a gig in Baltimore.

Louisiana-born, Brown was a singer and multi-instrumentalist proficient on guitar, violin, viola, mandolin, harmonica, and drums. Though strongly identified with the blues, he disdained purity (if, like truth, it even exists) while recording everything from “Frankie and Johnny” to “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and Delaney & Bonnies 1971 hit “Never Ending Song of Love for You.”

In his first set at No Fish Today (a fabled Crabtown venue soon-to-be destroyed by arson), Brown played Texas Swing, Tex-Mex, old-school country, and jazz in addition to some R&B in the style of Johnny “Guitar” Watson. During the break, he bitched me out so vociferously that a guy in his band said, “Come on, Gate, leave the kid alone.”

I had made the mistake of asking Brown why he hadn’t played more “real” blues. I was 23, as ignorant about African- American music as I was passionate. He shot back, “All that Mississippi Delta stuff and the Chicago stuff is just a bunch of old ignorant Negroes feeling sorry for themselves. I won’t do that downer stuff.”

That long, embarrassing moment in the woodshed was on my mind in Memphis as I listened to a young man from Belfast named Dom Martin, just a guy and a guitar. Martin’s work is powerful; his voice sweet and raw as called for, original songs grounded in a life – gratefully abandoned -- of booze and drugs and violence which he did not expect to survive.

It was Martin’s guitar work – on display in his 2019 debut album Spain to Italy -- that took me back to the question at hand: Where is that elusive line and is it worth the effort to locate it? Starting with a near-silent, whisper over the strings, Martin worked himself into a near-spastic whirl one might hear from a gitano in a Moroccan café. And then, somehow, the Irishman brought it back to the States, where the arc of our music bends backward toward the Delta and forward to whatever some kid is just now figuring out at the Chicago High School for the Arts. “The development of harmony slowly separated jazz from blues,” said Jacques “Jack” Titley of the Wacky Jugs from Brittany, France, winners of “best band” honors in Memphis. “One was dedicated to keeping a sense of wild roots in the music and the other took it to the next level of sophistication. It just doesn’t happen with a snap of the finger.”

And then, with a candor so often absent in these discussions, the singer and mandolin man added, “We felt it during our trip between Memphis and New Orleans. But to be honest, I really don’t know.” As Robert Ross observed, “damn arbitrary.”

He has played behind Big Maybelle, Big Mama Thornton and Victoria Spivey and once busked for change in the City of Lights metro before trading a pint of his blood for a few francs and – by chance that same night -- backed-up pianist Champion Jack Dupree (1910- 1992) in a Parisian tavern. He remembers his grandmother singing “Swinging on a Star” when he was a kid in Brooklyn and the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field. “It’s a funny old tune,” said Ross of the Bing Crosby movie number released by Decca in 1944 and long, if seldom played, in his repertoire. “I got interested in doing it after hearing Dave Van Ronk do it at Folk City one night. It cracked me up hearing that gruff voice singing it instead of Der Bingle’s croon.”

And thus, a jazz standard that began as a pop tune written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke migrated toward

the blues of a New Yorker with an ear for anything that might fit into his act. Anything at all if it can be strained through the sifter of American music. Two of the hottest names in 21st century blues are guitarists Christone “Kingfish” Ingram of Clarksdale, Mississippi and Samantha Fish, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, two historic hotbeds of American music. Fish once sat-in with Kingfish and said remembers it as thrilling and, and because of Ingram’s Hendrixlike virtuosity, intimidating.

“Growing up in Kansas City, of course I listened to Count Basie and Charlie Parker,” said Fish, who, despite sharing a keen musical ear with such greats claims she is unable “to touch” jazz onstage. “My favorite musicians will dip their toe in [blues and jazz] and mix it together. In the jazz world there are a lot more artists who straddle that line.”

Still, said Ross, “I have a broader view than most of what blues is, but if you’re going to categorize things there has to be limits.” If so, no one told Jimmie Lunceford (1902-1947), a Roaring 20s saxophone player and football coach at Manassas High School in Memphis. Lunceford transformed the school band into the Chickasaw Syncopators (later the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra) and the toured the nation from the Cotton Club to West Virginia with a swaggering jazz both hot and swinging. Jazz? Blues? The shadow line between? Take it from the other king from Memphis.

“As for my band,” B.B. King once said, “My mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, [and] Jimmie Lunceford…”

Rafael Alvarez is a former newspaperman who has written about the blues since interviewing Muddy Waters in 1978. In September, Cornell University Press will release his biography Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery. Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com