The elephant and the giraffe

Posted this on Mark's KIND OF BLEUGH thread:

Feeding off the other discussion, I want to say here, right now, that when it comes to token jazz albums, you guys don't know shit! I, Frank Kogan — or I, Frank Kogan, back as a teenager — penetrate to the essence of the token jazz album. Listen, Kind Of Blue is for the serious jazz dabbler. I mean, you guys (I mean, the guys who bought Kind Of Blue without followup), bought it because it topped some poll, right? Or because it was recommended to you, or something? Whereas I, as the pure token of tokenism, got jazz not even because it was jazz, but because it was the cutting edge of whatever it was the cutting edge of (the Revolution? Well, it was on Columbia Records) (followed on by the cutting edge of what used to matter, also on Columbia, iirc):

First jazz album bought by me: Miles Davis Bitches Brew

Second jazz album bought by me (if I even knew it could be classified as "jazz," which I may not have known): some Billie Holiday 2-LP compilation covering the early years, possibly called The Early Years (the label was confusing things by releasing multiple 2-LP and 3-LP sets with overlapping material: this one perhaps begins with "Miss Brown To You" and has the banana-bananah song and perhaps "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (so the alb becomes my intro to the Gershwins, too, but maybe "Can't Take That" was on one of the 3-LP sets) and "Swing, Brother Swing," which was my favorite for rocking hardest*).

Got a token blues album too, the second Robert Johnson compilation (the one with "Love In Vain").

( Oddity confounds tokenism )

Btw, Tommy Mack's brother is right. "If you just put on Bitches Brew it’ll make no sense." I remember reading a jazz interview at the time, some musician who hated Bitches Brew describing it as program music gibberish, "Here's the giraffe. Here's the elephant," which is how it sounded to me, too. Didn't play it much. Not until eight years later, at least, after I'd heard Pangaea, in which the trumpet (and keybs?) sounded like Miles was staging interventions on his own albums, spraying forth bold lines of paint to restructure all the jamming and vamping going on underneath (possibly also a mishearing, but a more interesting one), was I, with my ears readjusted, able to hear Bitches Brew as a weird hostile Louis let loose in the abstract expressionist exhibit, splashing broad brushstrokes and rearranging sky and ground, while the sidemen tore up the joint. And here's the giraffe! And the elephant!

*An intriguing moment in "Swing, Brother Swing" is when Billie sings "Red indigo, and there ain't nobody gonna hold me down." How in the world can you have red indigo? (Turns out it's "Rarin' to go.") [EDIT: Correctly punctuated, the song is "Swing! Brother, Swing!" with 1 comma and 2 exclamation points.] [UPDATE: The albums must've been in a box under another box in a closet back on Arkansas Street and I wasn't feeling Jack LaLanne enough to lift them up. Anyhow, in the bright land of Records Now In A Cabinet, I see that the 2-LP set is The Billie Holiday Story Volume I (followed perhaps by other 2-LP sets with the word "Volume" in the title?) while the 3-LP set is Billie Holiday "The Golden Years" Volume II. It's "Golden Years" Volume II that contains banana-bananah ("Let's Call The Whole Thing Off"), while Story Volume I includes "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and begins not with "Miss Brown To You" but with "Your Mother's Son-In Law." "Miss Brown To You" instead opens the Lady Day LP — Lady Day being the album that true aficionados of token jazz albums would choose as the Billie Holiday album, but I was young and didn't know what I was doing.]

**[UPDATE: Which means, thanks discogs, that they actually bought Joan Baez, Vol. 2, but let me say in my defense that the "vol. 2" was printed in really small letters — it's the one with "Banks Of The Ohio" — and then later my brother got me (complicated story; I hadn't requested it but I walked in on a birthday or Xmas surprise wrapping session and saw Janis Ian and assumed it was for me so to preserve a surprise Richard gave me Joan Baez instead — isn't it absurd we took "surprise" so far? — and later I bought myself a Joan Baez album I actually liked, from the art-folk late '60s, joan (more small letters), the one with the great "Saigon Bride" and no murder ballads but it's got "Annabel Lee" which might as well be about murder; and somewhere Farewell Angelina entered our home as well) Joan Baez In Concert Part 2, and that's the one with "Long Black Veil"!]

The Jazz Singer (One Elephant, Two Elephant, Three Elephant, Four)

More from KIND OF BLEUGH:

Question 1: Is it correct to say that during the '40s and '50s the usage of the word "jazz" both narrowed and changed so that what it denoted became more consistent and less varied and contradictory (but conversely, when there was a controversy over jazz taxonomy it was more fraught than it had been in decades past, and of course the relative taxonomic stability didn't last) and so that what was retrospectively considered historically part of "jazz" (from Buddy Bolden through to bop) was narrower than what had actually been called "jazz" in the '10s through '40s? (No idea what was being called what in the 1890s-'00s.)

Question 2: So is my impression correct that, prior to this narrowing and shifting, terms like "jazz" and "blues," and later "swing" (and what about "western swing"? and "country"? and "pop"?*) had significant overlap, that a broad range of dance music could be considered all three (or six)? How was someone like, say, Big Joe Turner classified when he was performing in the 1930s? If a time warp had let people in 1934 hear "Shake, Rattle And Roll" (either version) would it have been obviously "something other than jazz" to them? (Hat-tip to Swanstep @36 under My Own Private Record Club.)

Data note: Otis Ferguson (died 1943) considered Fred Astaire a jazz figure (probably more for dancing than singing, but also taken as a whole).

Question 3: The role of improvisation and length of solos had a lot to do with the reconfiguring, right? And making a fetish of them? (Assuming I'm right about the nomenclature being reconfigured.) Also, the role of dance.

Question 4: What about singers? In the era covered by Mark, the early LP era, Miles may be the elephant in the room as regards the future, but singers — significantly absent from Mark's list of "jazz expansive" — were the elephants of the present. E.g., in the late '50s Dinah Washington could be considered simultaneously the most popular jazz singer in the world and the most popular blues singer in the world, but she seems now to have been written out of both of those categories. (Or am I wrong about that?)

What about Nat King Cole?

*UPDATE: "Folk" should be in there too. (I remember reading somewhere that through the '40s "folk" was a viable term for a lot of what was eventually called "country," that it was the association with the left and with communism that doomed the word "folk" in this usage (and encouraged it in others). Of course, "I remember reading somewhere" is not a very useful citation.) Um, and while I'm in the update section, let's note that there was a famous movie in 1929 featuring Al Jolson that was called The Jazz Singer.