The Velvet Lounge

On Late Chicago Jazz

Gerald Majer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231510127
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Troubled urban neighborhoods and jazz-club havens were the backdrop of Gerald Majer's life growing up in sixties and seventies Chicago. The Velvet Lounge, an original hybrid of memoir, biography, and musical description, reflects this history and pursues a sustained meditation on jazz along with a probing exploration of race and class and how they defined the material and psychic divides of a city. With the instrument of a supple, lyrical prose style, Majer elaborates the book's themes through literary and intellectual forays as carefully constructed and as passionately articulated as a jazz master's solo. Throughout the work, issues of identity and culture, art and politics achieve a rare immediacy, as does the music itself.

In portraits of Jimmy Smith, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Sun Ra, and others, Gerald Majer conveys the drama and artistry of their music as well as the personal hardships many of them endured. Vivid descriptions and telling historical anecdotes explore the music's richness through a variety of political, social, and philosophical contexts. The Velvet Lounge, named after the famous Chicago club, is also one of the few works to consider the music of such avant-garde jazz musicians as Fred Anderson, Andrew Hill, and Roscoe Mitchell. In doing so, Majer builds a bridge from the traditionalist view of jazz to the world of contemporary innovators, casts a new light on the music and its makers, and traces connections between jazz art and postmodernist thought.

Present throughout Majer's spirited encounters with the worlds of jazz is Majer himself. We hear and appreciate the music through his individual sensibilities and experiences. Majer recounts growing up in racially divided Chicago—his trips to the famed Maxwell Street market, his wanderings among its legendary jazz clubs, his riding the El, and his working in a jukebox factory. We witness his awakening to the music at a crossroads of the intimately personal and the intellectually provocative.

monstrosioso

1965: The Creeper

The fussy encyclopedic gravity of the Hammond B-3 overcome and the electric organ lofted to hard-bop orbit, still trailing diapasons of his mother’s church music and the boogie-woogie tap-dance routines of his father’s band—The Incredible Jimmy Smith proclaimed the block letters on a score of albums since the 1956 breakout recordings on Blue Note, those words celebrating a nearly miraculous mating of technology and soul. The thing had first stirred to life at a club in Atlantic City where he heard Wild Bill Davis make the Hammond roar like a big wave. It was a monster, upsurged through chocked, choppy chords and backwashed through rilling legatos, wattage enough there to power the entire Basie band. Davis was gruff, brash, gloriously loud, a bumptious lumbering attack, great swoops down on the keys and shameless ripsaw goosings of reverb and tremolo, the organ not so much singing as signaling, the music stripped to pure swelling impulse. For a piano player schooled in the over-brimming muscular lines of Art Tatum and the stabbing, nervous prances of Bud Powell, it was almost risible, the goddamned wired-up thing rocking on stage like a gurgling showboat. Fats Waller on “Jitterbug Waltz” coaxed over the organ with a percolating finesse as if running a trapeze artist up a swaying wire, but Davis almost seemed clumsy by design, as if in awe of the organ’s powers yet unable to forego provoking them. A bristling, striding approach, a monster dog named Lance or Rex baited through the fence of a yard and teased into a frenzy and dashing back and forth, Davis showing a mouthful of white teeth as he shut the racket down at its very peak, a hushed arpeggio crawling down inside the Leslie speaker, Johnny Hodges’s sardonic alto sniffing up the trail.

The golden gullets of trumpets and saxophones, the bright guts of the drums, the broad shoulders of the piano: music connected to the body, vibrating through the teeth, the throat, the fingers, the instruments like real organs depending on systems of breath and blood and muscle. The saxophone participates in the hands, the neck, the mouth; the trumpet is an externalization of the lungs, the throat, the ear; the piano is all phalanges, hinges and angles of wrists and elbows, strings and hammers of nerves. Fingers quivering, we play air solos as though under the spell of creatures of our device for whom we too are devices. Boundaries are crossed and confused between the instrument’s body and our own—we speak of inspirations by which the saxophone comes alive under our hands, the violin does things we never believed possible, the guitar is playing us. In such prostheses our bodies seem to meld with the instruments in intense contact and immediacy. Teachers instruct wind players to relax the throat muscles so the music sounds not only through the body of the instrument but resonates deeply through the chest and lungs, the hollows of the player’s body becoming an extension of the instrument. One of the pleasures of live performance is seeing the body moved and shaped, mastery seeming to demand a share of passivity, the grafting of player and instrument. Louis Armstrong’s eyes open wide as though surprised but pleased to welcome the trumpet suddenly grown from his face in a brassy, cunning flower. Jean-Pierre Rampal’s shoulders hunch and his head cocks, the stick of the flute a renegade appendage that appears to have the power to draw his whole body along its tangent. Riding the bench, Cecil Taylor jabs and hammers as though mimicking a piano taking stock of its own inner equipage.

Wild Bill Davis rollicking through a fast blues or laying a gush of vacuum-tube pipes under a ballad or a waltz, maybe “Stolen Sweets” with the Hammond slapped on thick, dripping, soaking, and Hodges’s saxophone for all its hard cut and its languid precision sounding adjunct to greater forces. Something incredible to begin with about the organ, an instrument that generates sound elsewhere, not in the immediacy of contact with the musician’s body but through an external apparatus. A systematization of the voice, a sonic mathexis resolving and dissolving differentials and frictions, organon and organization of sound, all the moves visible under a single gaze and spread out under the span of two hands. The cathedral organ is God’s instrument, approaching pneumatic automatism and scarcely in need of a human operator, under the pipes the organist dwarfed, functionary in the service of empyrean syntheses. The majesty of the instrument of Bach’s fugues and Saint-Saens’ symphony is however related to organs of a humbler kind. The hand-pumped harmoniums and cranked hurdy-gurdies of street vendors and traveling entertainers, the bubbling calliopes of circuses, carnivals, and riverboats suggest what might be the innate gimmickry of the organ, its aura of a vaguely improper or mocking musical ventriloquism. Instead of a band of musicians playing together, one has the rough equivalent of their instrumental voices resounding from a box of plugged whistles. A confection, an obvious fake, but exciting wonder and admiration because it appears nearly autonomous, automatic. Still, there’s an unsettling aspect to such musical auto-affection, an air of the monstrous about a thing that subsumes the vocal expressivity of music to a mechanical apparatus, redolent of the solipsistic elaborations of hermeticism and alchemy, of Gothic aesthetes in velvet-draped chambers, of spells that capture and enslave voices in jars, trees, the throats of howling beasts.

Under Davis’s command the Hammond tottered and strode, the thing a gas, a ball, by turns indecorous and elephantine, frilly and elegant. You could score a movie or a baseball game with it, run skaters round in spins, quiver the asses of strippers or launch a congregation into getting the spirit. And inside the sound an almost imperceptible hum like the channel clearing for a bullhorn sermon, like a buzz of angels stunned with prayer, that hum offering the neutral and colorless sound of machinery and systems, of sound before anything was happening with it, before it was freighted with a voice, a story, a song. Objective, standardized, indifferent—the frequency of raw electric, the hot potential the Hammond operated on, capacitors and solenoids and resistors webbed under the keys and the organ droning beside itself like an anchorite resolving the dance of phenomena to an uninflected signal, a vibrating om.

Jimmy Smith woodshedding for a year in a Philadelphia warehouse, summer days the streets licking tar, under the wash of red leaves trains blowing off to Camden and Newark, and the slick, yielding keys—walking, striding, dancing on eggs, on water, scarcely any resistance—and learning to crawl up a ghostly wall inside the Hammond, kicking, trampling spiderlike the ribcage of the twenty-five bass pedals. Beating on the wall, singing to it, spit-words, curses and blessings, crossed scrawls. A shrill street-whistle amazed, looking through a sudden window on the traffic of the world. A sliding grip taking hold, but hold with a hole in it where a tentacle of space trembled, where it lashed to the left and to the right. It pawed and stroked the angel body of organ air. On the street one day the wind moved the branches of a beech tree in the same way, in the sunlight the shiny gray bark like wrinkles of finger skin.

Smith: the left hand comping with attitude, the right smashing runs, shoes marching over the bass pedals, fingers jumping off to work the drawbars, a foot shaking loose to stomp the volume pedal. Like his hands on the All Day Long cover, double-crossed over the keyboard, the organ offering such a road that there was a danger of indefinitely wandering or indefinitely sticking in one place. Sometimes it accelerated smoothly and overdriven, other times it was cornered, repeating, sneaking back then on its trail, creeping home and surprising itself there as if it was a new thing again. And a secret that ran inside the fingers—for all its electricity and speakers and watts, next to a trumpet or a piano the organ was weak. It didn’t naturally cut through the air, lay down a weight. No chambers, no hammers, no hollow gut—nothing but wires and tubes, switches and solenoids. Though it promised an instantaneous production, music at your fingertips, there was an ineluctable lag between striking the keys and hearing the sound coming out of the Leslie. It meant working like hell to make the wired heaven of it gather mouth and teeth and bite.

The electric organ—the Hammond wasn’t designed to be blown, hammered, strummed, or beaten. It was doubly monstrous, not only a systematization of the voice but a second-order system, like a sex device made to imitate a sex device. Smith’s music is often characterized in terms of funk, grease, soul, a great boiling kettle bubbling and bursting. In one interview he condemns the thin-toned synthesizer and glorifies the Hammond, which he says has a sound you can feel in your bones. But the electric organ doesn’t so much resonate with corporeality as index it, floating bodiless even as it’s signaling body. The sound is coming loud off the Leslie speaker but it’s detached from the keyboards by its almost imperceptible delay, and in that space, a thing wants to feed. An appetite that wants to feed on feeding itself—feed of the electric, feed of the signal doubled over, turning out the skin of music.

Laurens Hammond modeled his 1930s invention after Cahill’s Telharmonium of 1900, an elaborate machine with hundreds of rotating metal discs inscribed with serrations and projections from which a contiguous array of electromagnets took their imprint and read off the pitches of the tempered scale. Like Freud’s dream-apparatus of the same year, the thing worked by virtue of discharges firing up from a system of coded glyphs, and much as Freud also discovered, the machine was prone to glitches, the purity and stability of the tones susceptible to infections of electricity, even though regulated by batteries of condensers and capacitors and resistors. Hammond’s design for the electric organ reduced the scale of the printing press–like Telharmonium mechanism, though it remained elaborate enough: a tone generator assembly consisting of ninety-one wheels, an electric motor that engaged a set of gears, those gears in turn setting the wheels spinning, inside the prim walnut cabinet of the console organ something like a locomotive’s power train. And as though sublimating a taint of scandal involving the sacred music of the pipe organ being delivered over to commodity culture—the Hammond an instrument of the ultimate Protestantism, a church in your own living room, running on your own electricity—the organ was freighted, burdened, and overdetermined with controls. Not only was the full range of organ-stops replicated, but a system of 38 drawbars for the keyboards and pedals afforded an almost limitless capacity for fine-tuning and mixing, each drawbar sliding through a wide span of harmonics, with the Hammond capable of imitating most of the instruments of the symphony orchestra. The drawbars were color-coded, brown and white for what were called the consonants (roots and lower fifths) and black for the dissonants (higher fifths and thirds), the language of the Hammond suggesting you’d indeed gotten your hands on a universal encyclopedia, the key to all music. There was a host of other devices—a group of preset keys, for specific harmonic effects, which lay on the far left of each keyboard and inverted the black-and-white pattern of the others; switches that regulated the attack and decay of pitches; and, all-important for jazz players, the percussion setting that offered a mock-piano sound possessed at the same time of the timbres of winds and strings and brasses. The expression pedal, down there among the bass ribwork, could push the volume up to forty-eight decibels.

Half late-Victorian fantasy, half modernist elegance, the Hammond hummed and warmed with its load of electro-harmonics, its levels and degrees of switches and settings. Incredible, state of the art, seemingly transparent to all of music, electronically tempered and ordered and running the orchestral gamut, yet for that very reason provoking distempers and abuses. It’s rare to find a parlor with a full-scale Hammond these days, but there have been generations of its later avatars, those home Hammonds and Wurlitzers and Lowrys, thousands of them now languishing in family rooms and basements, stacked with old photo albums and boxes of books. They promised a good time to mom and dad or grandma and grandpa, easy-play manuals with all the old songs and an automatic percussion feature offering waltz, fox trot, rock, or jazz accompaniment. They promised the youngsters an initiation into the world of music, everything they needed to know right there, chords, scales, the sounds of the orchestra. Those hopeful autodidact’s machines have probably suffered the worst songs and the worst music-making in domestic history—I remember a book that started you with “Pennies from Heaven” and moved on to “Wichita Lineman”—as well as absorbing the cavalier and sometimes wildly experimental depredations of bored children trying, say, the oboes and violins and English horns, a nasal calliope issuing from a swoop over the keys, but more often dreaming of phantoms of the opera and with self-pleased dispatch tagging every possible switch, laying the volume-pedal to the metal. Or with both hands strafing across the octaves, elbows, arms, and even heads and feet effecting mighty crescendos in their own way as singular and wonderful as the baby wailing at the unaccustomed noise and at the same time reaching greedily with her hands to make some herself.

The incredible Jimmy Smith: wearing a flannel shirt on the cover of the album The Sermon, displaying his graceful hands like a workman worthy of his hire. Although from a town near Philadelphia, he might be out of Carolina, a country boy, framed as he is with dogs and livestock on Back at the Chicken Shack, swinging from the ladder of a boxcar on Midnight Special, though those records offered big-city music, sophisticated blues workouts with Stanley Turrentine and bebop outings with Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller.

The slick teeth of the double keyboards wanting hands all over them so the air could bite down hard on itself. The thud and thump of the bass pedals banked underfoot, a crateload of tubes and wires circuited into bunched tongues, the Leslie warming like a chimney. Chockablock arpeggios, punchy two-handed heaves and throws, bass-pedal trots and gallops. A wide-chassis, comfortable expansive thing, Fleetwood, Imperial, the pleasure of smoothly tooling over a rough street, railroad crossings and potholes. Your ass in a plush seat, your hands and body sort of hanging over and sort of hanging from the steering wheel. Automatic transmission: the lightest touch and the car leaps, swings, fishtails. The squeal-track of rubber laid down fast and easy so you hardly knew you did it. U-turn coming back around, silver switches in the armrest and the electric windows up and down like spy doorways, the air pouring in.

Incredible: vehicle of nerves, sometimes a reeling eerie hornpipe like the windup of a horror film, sometimes an ominous obbligato like an episode-closing tune from the soap opera “The Edge of Night,” boxed and imprisoned but at the same time master of the chambers, strumming over bones or devising refined tortures of suspense. The thing endlessly clearing its throat: glottal stops, clips and clicks, the clatter of film stock through the projector—The Thing, an extraterrestrial mystery stiff and impervious, figure of ice. Or the Thing of Marvel comic books, man of block and stone, the blind girl’s love, clobberin’ time. And that other incredible figure of the early sixties, the green-glowing Hulk, monster double of a genius nuclear physicist, a phosphorescent outlaw in ragged jeans who couldn’t stand to see wrong and splashed his rage in bursts and stars across the panels. As a monster of color, he spun the wheels of the cultural tone-organ, and most wonderful were the panels where his scruffy, quasi-Frankenstein figure rose over the treetops flying. In those moments, the Hulk, shining with his radium-clock power, broke loose altogether, incredible not because of his atomic-driven metamorphosis from Bruce Banner to Hulk or even because of his just-cause anger, but because still trailing his rags and tatters he struck off into the air with one fist raised like an avenging angel though all the while he looked a devil.

“The Creeper,” an Oliver Nelson composition on the 1965 Monster album, which also included movie and television themes: Goldfinger, The Munsters, and Bewitched. The home style of old Blue Note albums like Chicken Shack was updated in the Verve label package of cover tunes and broad jokes: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf offering Smith in wolf’s-head mask, Respect in snow-white martial-arts gear taking on the Hammond. Oliver Nelson plays the melody on alto, the organ lines exquisite product, swift and ruthless as Sonny Stitt, sassy and sanctified as Cannonball Adderly, in certain phases as passionately systematic as early Coltrane. Along the mellow road of mile-long legato runs, skidding phrases are turned around, they hit back against themselves, the percussion setting catches up the notes with a snapped, crepitant edge. Driving home from the factory in happy paycheck traffic, coming down the hill to the main junction among telephone lines and colored signals, traffic lights and neon signs, brand names and billboards, the machinery of the world operational, switched on and ready to go. Monster, you could gobble it u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• jug eyes
• stitt’s time
• proxima ra
• monstrosioso
• batterie
• the velvet lounge
• le serpent qui danse
• dreaming of roscoe mitchell
• intuitive research beings
• discography