Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (Dover Books on Music) by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff

Author:Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff [Shapiro, Nat]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780486171364
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

13

“Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is his band.”

REX STEWART

Ah, those were the days—top and bottom, breakfast dances, and real jam sessions. Let’s pause here and pay tribute to Willie “The Lion” Smith, Stephen “The Beetle” Henderson, James P. Johnson, and Willie “The Tiger” Gant. Those fellows were the inspiration of most of the guys who were on the New York scene, many of whom became greats in the swing world—Fats Waller, Benny Carter, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Goodman, and, oh yes, there was a five-piece band from my home town, Washington, who, rumor said, existed on the earnings of its pool-hustling drummer, Sonny Greer, because they worked very little.

DUKE ELLINGTON

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away.

And take my Harlem Air Shaft. So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbors’ laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing, that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish and rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish’s wife is a terrific cooker but the guy’s wife with the turkey is doing a sad job. You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. Jitterbugs are jumping up and down always over you, never below you. That’s a funny thing about jitterbugs. They’re always above you. I tried to put all that in Harlem Air Shaft….

The music’s mostly written down, because it saves time. It’s written down if it’s only a basis for a change. There’s no set system. Most times I write it and arrange it. Sometimes I write it and the band and I collaborate on the arrangement. Sometimes Billy Strayhorn, my staff arranger, does the arrangement. When we’re all working together, a guy may have an idea and he plays it on his horn. Another guy may add to it and make something out of it. Someone may play a riff and ask, “How do you like this?” The trumpets may try something together and say, “Listen to this.” There may be a difference of opinion on what kind of mute to use. Someone may advocate extending a note or cutting it off. The sax section may want to put an additional smear on it….

I got my first break when I was about seventeen, down in Washington, and Louis Thomas sent for me to play piano one night. Thomas was the leader of a society band whose only competition was Meyer Davis. I was to get

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.