I was very uneasy about the whole thing. I began to notice that I was making sudden attempts to justify my very presence and remind everyone in sight that this kind of music was not really my bag. It was a very peculiar feeling too, because I was in particular surroundings in which I usually feel entirely pleased with myself, completely at home and quite as smug as a bug. But suddenly here I was in my favourite New York City joint - The Village Vanguard - hoping to hear some of the very cool regulars such as Lou Donaldson, Tommy Flanagan or Jackie McLean and what does it say on the door? Dr Michael White's Original Liberty Jazz Band of New Orleans. My heart sank. Oh my jelly roll soul! It was trad jazz!
Michael White's band have become a bit of an annual New Year's thing in the Vanguard and, sure enough, the place was packed. Of course that made me even more jumpy because I have long suspected trad jazz aficionados. They often seem to tend rather towards the square and that's not my idea of a night in Greenwich Village. But this was vacation time in the big city and this was a music your average happy holidays visitor was going to love. This was old-style, old-fashioned, like-Bird-never-flew, New Orleans trad - black music for white folks and I thought I'd give it a go.
I'm exaggerating a little here, because in recent years I have in fact been listening to a certain amount of the old stuff. The Belfast jazz guru Solly Lipsitz was forever trying to point me in a certain direction and although I resisted him with some of my "far-out" and funky favourites, his stories of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet awakened a certain interest. Of course, Solly was never as narrow about jazz as he might have pretended just for the sake of an argument with me. And despite his banter about some piece of jazz I might have played on the radio, he was always quite prepared to take things at least as far as Coltrane, who in his view was the last musician, sufficiently associated with jazz in its original form. Certainly much has happened since Coltrane, but Solly's acknowledgment of him seems quite unique among trad fans - at least the ones I've met. Most of them seem to stop at Satchmo.
Belfast was a big trad jazz town. Solly Lipsitz and Tom Cusack opened a shop called Atlantic Records in 1953 and sold a mixture of jazz and blues records. It was here that George Morrison (father of Van) bought many of the records which were to provide his son with such an extraordinary musical education.
Years later, on a recording of Just a Closer Walk With Thee/See Me Through, Morrison invokes the name of Sidney Bechet as if it were some religious codeword for ecstacy. Certainly the thought of Bechet's music blasting out the windows of Morrison's house, or Solly's house on warm summer evenings seems altogether pleasant even in 1950s' Belfast.'
Through Van Morrison's repeated references to Really The Blues, I once decided to seek out this rather bizarre book and read it over and over again just as he had done. Written by Mezz Mezzrow and first published in 1946, it is the story of a young white clarinettist who falls completely in love with black culture, especially early jazz. Mezzrow was also a bootlegger and marijuana dealer - an activity which earned him the title The Johnny Appleseed of Weed. This quite riotous publication complete with its own very necessary glossary of hip terms, doesn't take long to knock the corners off the square of traditional jazz. This is all a long, long way from Kenny Ball.
And perhaps Kenny Ball is precisely the reason why for years I didn't want to have anything to do with trad jazz. Not just Kenny Ball, but anybody in a bowler hat and a sparkly waistcoat. Worse again was that there was always some kind of dubiously happy trad jazz outfit at the head of all parades - especially protest marches by striking civil servants - thereby losing whatever little sympathy I may have had for them. And most suspicious of all, no matter how hard I looked, all trad jazz musicians seemed to be white and from Europe - unlike Dr Michael White from New Orleans who wasn't either.
There are many reasons why trad jazz took a nosedive among American blacks. But, strictly musically speaking, things developed commercially and moved off somewhere else. After all, as early as 1924, jazz had been made "respectable" by Paul Whiteman (who was exactly that). When his reign ended, the word jazz more or less vanished commercially-speaking and the "swing era" arrived with Benny Goodman. After that, rms there was a New Orleans revival with white collegians leading the charge and deciding what was authentic and what wasn't. Bands began to appear all over Europe and outfits such as Claude Luter's band were reckoned to have made the best possible stab at recapturing the sound of King Oliver.
And so the white folks had finally caught up with the black music of three decades previous. There were certainly some good things about that revival - some of the original black New Orleans musicians had an opportunity to be heard and have their music preserved, but even so. Black music was by this stage, gearing up for bop, what Louis Armstrong famously called the "modern malice".
Enter Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis et al. On stage they were preoccupied with music alone. No hamming it up and no "Tomming around" even, as in Davis' case, playing with his back to the audience. This was not black music for white folks, this was music for musicians and anybody else who cared to listen. But one of the ironies of the huge split between the hip and the square is that the be-boppers had, in fact, much in common with the original music of, for example, Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. As Ian Carr points out in his excellent biography of Miles Davis, "In both bebop and the music of Oliver and Armstrong in the 1920s, the non western elements are very potent". Carr is right. Be-bop reasserted the idea of polyrhythmic drive in which the melodies are interlaced, and also brought back much of the what he calls "the basic blues impluse". All of which meant that "the history of black America was once more made central to jazz."
Times have now changed considerably. Many of the young musicians are rediscovering the origins of jazz and incorporating it into their playing. Wynton Marsalis and his colleagues at the Lincoln Center have done much to reclaim traditional jazz from its often comic/square role in the minds of many jazz fans and re-present it as a fine American art form. And it is Marsalis's desire to see the music appreciated once more, especially by the very people who invented it while in the middle of a most turbulent history.
In the Village Vanguard, with Marsalis rumoured to be on the way down, Dr White's Original Liberty Jazz Band presented a show which was brimful of history. With a six-piece band featuring clarinet, trumpet, trombone, piano, bass and drums, Dr Michael took us through the very origins of jazz - marching tunes, hymns and blues - the whole joyous lot of it. It romped and it stomped and it was as close to the real deal as I'm certainly ever likely to hear. (I'm not so sure Woody Allen's band counts in this context). In short this was irresistible stuff and quite impossible not to enjoy. No bowler hats. No sparkly waistcoats. Just jazz - with the roots showing.
John Kelly hosts a new programme called Season Ticket, which starts today on RTE Radio One at noon. He also presents The Mystery Train on RTE Radio One, Monday to Friday, 8 - 9 p.m., and Later with John Kelly on Network 2, Tuesday, 11.10 p.m.