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Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 819
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 - 09:20 pm: | 
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I know many of you out there are big jazz-memoir/bio fans. This appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review section last week. It's kind of long so I cut some stuff. Here's the link (tho I think a sub is req to view the entire article): http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i18/18b01401.htm
Enjoy!
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By DAVID YAFFE
"Writers are always selling somebody out," wrote Joan Didion. When it comes to jazz autobiography, Didion's maxim is not just a metaphor. Jazz may not have actually been born in the red-light district of Storyville, but it certainly flourished there, and many of the music's legendary figures have not strayed far from the oldest profession.
Often egged on by ghostwriters or heavy-handed editors more attuned to book markets than to artistic insight, Billie Holiday described her prostitution, and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton recounted their pimping. Their memoirs have tarted up their music in a way that's as often distracting as it is edifying, but also show how outlaw legends have been used to mystify and mythify the jazz experience.
Lady Sings the Blues (Doubleday, 1956) is the bane of Billie Holiday scholars but a source of endless fascination for the fan, the fetishist, and, most of all, the intrepid pimpologist. The ghostwriter William Dufty circulated half-truths, unsubstantiated claims, and outright fabrications in the book. (The opening sentence, claiming that her parents were married, was a fabrication, as was her name.) And many of the tapes and transcriptions that supposedly provided the basis for the book have never materialized, despite the exhaustive searches of Robert O'Meally, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and the late Linda Kuehl. For all that, none of Holiday's official biographers dispute that she was a working girl.
Dufty's account of Holiday's teenage prostitution reads like a pulp novel — exploitative, calumnious, and compulsively readable. Although Holiday is credited with composing a few of the standards in her repertoire, including "God Bless the Child" and "Fine and Mellow," she's best known for her interpretation of songs by others. On her 1952 recording of the melancholy "Love for Sale," Holiday's whorehouse memories define the performance more than Cole Porter's words and music.
When it comes to recounting her experiences, however, she defers to her ghostwriter. The stories of Holiday's mother placing her into prostitution at age 13, like the accounts of physical abuse, drug addiction, and dashed love affairs, can only be deciphered by stripping away the layers of ghostwriter ventriloquism. For that detective work, the tenacious would do well to read O'Meally's Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Arcade, 1991) or Julia Blackburn's With Billie (Pantheon, 2005). Farah Jasmine Griffin, in If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Fred Moten, in his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), interpret the disconnect between the discernible facts and the Holiday myth, which Dufty partly constructed with Holiday's consent...
...Mingus, too, divined in Beneath the Underdog (Knopf, 1971) that his work in the sex trade would make for compelling reading. "You got me so interested in your bitches and whores," he imagines the late trumpeter Fats Navarro telling him, "I want you to go on and tell me that."
The phantasmal Navarro needn't have worried. Even after the manuscript for Beneath the Underdog was trimmed from an unwieldy 875 pages to a more manageable 366 and the title altered from Memoirs of a Half Yellow Schitt Covered Nigger, Mingus's tales of his life as "boss pimp" were sharpened, expanded, and chiseled into commercially viable prose, making them assume an even greater proportion of his tale than he had intended.
He had been toiling over his manuscript for more than a decade and relented to Nel King's edits out of financial desperation. By the early 70s, pimp stories had become good for business. Iceberg Slim's lurid Pimp, marketed as "autobiographical fiction" in 1969, sold over two million copies, and sex-trade stories were potboiler pearls.
Many of Mingus's intimates dismiss the sexual exploits of Beneath the Underdogincluding the squiring of 23 Mexican prostitutes in a single night — as dubious. The subtitle, His World as Composed by Mingus, should warn readers against taking too literally his descriptions of his superhuman sexual stamina or badass pimp reputation.
But the book does not exaggerate his musical achievements — if anything it glosses over them to make room for a portrait of the artist as a young pimp. Mingus, alone among the artists emerging from the bebop era, developed the orchestral innovations of the Ellington-Strayhorn palette, the New Orleans polyphony of Jelly Roll Morton, and even the cadences and shouts of the gospel church, and wove them into something idiosyncratic, strange, and vital. Unlike Ellington's ghostwritten Music Is My Mistress, which hides its debauchery behind a regal veneer, Mingus's memoir highlights sex and violence at the expense of musical descriptions.
Underdog does contain fleeting stream-of-consciousness musical reminiscences, but, for the most part, the music provides the backdrop to a sexual cutting contest with the always menacing white man. The Mingus of this book is not only a boss pimp, he is a neurotic, self-reflective boss pimp. Lying on his analyst's couch recounting his sexual transactions with guilt worthy of an Alexander Portnoy, Mingus is the lover, the madman, and the poet rolled into one.
The book's carnal emphasis was apparently an idea after Mingus's heart. "He wanted to be a pimp, he wanted to be a gangster, he wanted to be a musician, he wanted to be a great lover," said the drummer Dannie Richmond. Note the order. The additions to Mingus's manuscript underline the point. In Mingus's earlier typescript, he and his tricked-out girlfriend Ina meet the pimp Billy Bones without much fanfare. In the final version, Bones, the "Black Prince of Pimps," struts out in "hundred-dollar Stetson shoes." For a book about making a principled turn away from "the life," it spends a fair amount of time gazing at that life longingly, and evidence suggests that it's Nel King who's doing much of that gazing...
...Pimp might not have been the way Miles Davis primarily thought of himself, but the mackdaddy life informs much of his autobiography, too. Early on in Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1989), he tells of sharing a cab with Charlie Parker. The year is 1945 and Davis is 19, still at Juilliard and receiving checks from his dentist father.
After achieving his dream of becoming Parker's sideman, Davis finds himself caught in traffic with Parker one night and witnesses the leader of a musical revolution helping himself to fried chicken, heroin, and whiskey, and receiving fellatio. When Davis expresses his disapproval, Parker tells him to "turn [his] head and not pay attention."
It was a lesson Davis never forgot. He would transform the act of looking away into a carefully constructed persona that was interpreted as rudeness, shyness, or even an expression of black power. Davis was instructed by his father figure to feign a cool indifference to sex and power in the coming years, and whether women were hustling for him or he was hustling his own legend, he remembered Parker's lesson of the averted glance.
Maybe he even averted it from his own autobiography, which hustles the legend of the belligerent, testy, protean Miles Davis. Judging from this narrative, you'd think that Davis's pimping days were as important to him as his embouchure. Like most jazz autobiographies, it is ghostwritten, a litany of myths, partial truths, and unsupported claims, like the one about Davis's "whole stable of bitches working the street" for him in 1952. The book's ghostwriter, the poet and author Quincy Troupe, clearly is in awe of the Prince of Darkness and buys his act wholesale.
Troupe cobbled the book together from a series of tape-recorded interviews in which Davis would riff, reminisce, curse, lash out, and unrelentingly insist that he "changed music five or six times," despite the fact that the fifth or sixth time included synthesizer-drenched versions of 1980s hits like Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." He may have beaten women and recorded commercial trifles for the last decade of his life, but Davis, according to Troupe, never made a false move. Like the young Davis scrunched in that cab with his idol Parker, Troupe does what he is told and feels grateful just to be along for the ride.
The story Davis tells in Troupe's book is mostly one of success; his segue into pimping — after Juilliard, to support a drug habit — is an exception. The pimp life had its pitfalls; ironically, among them was that he wasn't flush enough to dress too well. But the pimp aesthetic has a perennial appeal, and Davis exercised it most powerfully not over his "stable" but over the musicians and reputation that he kept in his grip.
Still, after Davis had revolutionized jazz a few times came acid, fusion, the Fillmore, rock-star status, a silent period, and those embarrassing 1980s covers. By the time Miles: The Autobiography was published, the sexagenarian Davis needed to prove that he was still bad, never mind the Jheri curl weave and the enthusing over Phil Collins. If selling pimp stories to Simon & Schuster helped, then fine...
...Not to belabor the point, but in our moment of pimp worship, the players and the playas must be carefully distinguished...
...Lady Sings the Blues says more about the house of ill repute where Holiday first heard recordings of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith than it does on how she took their musical examples and transformed them into a distinctive vocal style. Mingus's memoir plays up his sexual prowess more than it does the mixed-race teenage prodigy in Watts stealing away from the streets to study 12-tone harmony. And Davis's autobiography lingers more on the life he found so degrading than on his music.
As Holiday understood half a century ago, turning tricks makes for better reading than practicing scales. Ultimately, we gobble up exploitative jazz memoirs by greats for the same reason we buy their lesser recordings of poorly chosen tunes — as part of our fervid hunt for the artist beneath the hustle.
David Yaffe is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. This essay is adapted from his book, Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing, published by Princeton University Press this month. |
Schakspir
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 91
Registered: 12-2005
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 - 10:15 pm: |
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David Yaffe himself has some things wrong about Miles autobiography. I read the passage about Bird going down on a white chick in a cab while eating fried chicken and Miles was pissed about it--and especially since Bird owed his band money. Miles later threatened Bird with a broken bottle. He complained in his book that Bird was a "greedy motherfucker," and does not give the impression of having picked up his particular attitude from Bird. In fact, he got it largely as a result of his heroin addiction, interactions with Dexter Gordon(who taught him how to dress), and, when off the addiction, from Sugar Ray Robinson.
Yaffe is bullshitting here to prove his point--in fact, he is guilty of the same sin that jazz chroniclers often are: exaggerating to boost some myth. These jazz myths are endless--one need only read about white jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke to catch my drift. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 3367
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 - 10:25 pm: |
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Very interesting. The longer I live the more I contemplate the nature of reality. What is truth? What is real? Can thoughts become things? Can imagination energize scenarios into existence? In one of his lesser known works, Langston Hughes touches on this subject thusly:
It is wise to
suffer illusions
Delusions,
Even dreams -
To believe that in this life
What is real
May also be what it seems,
What is not ture
Maybe -
For you...
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Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 821
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 - 11:05 pm: |
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Schakspir, I am sorry to have done such a poor job of cut and paste. You are absolutely correct--and what I excerpted was not Yaffe, himself, but a description he is giving of the very type of "tall-tale-telling" the article is about.
Cynique: Appropriate poem with which to enter my dreamstate this evening. LOL!
Night-night, all. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1740
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 01:47 pm: |
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Who is this Yaffe? I don't see his point. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 3372
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 02:13 pm: |
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We might consider that it's a natural tendency for jazz musicians to improvise on a melody, and pursue all kinds of variations on a theme. That's what jazz is all about. No jazz artist ever interprets a song the same way twice. Their brains are wired to ad lib and the same thing that makes them brilliant musicians is what propels them take liberties with the truth. Not to mention the way drugs altered their minds. But I forgive em all. Who could resist riffing about Miles or Bird or Billie? And who could blame these legends for playing along? Thanks, Yvette, for bringing this article to our attention. It's such a refreshing change from the monotonus drone and off-key calcophony of the colorist choir. |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 822
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 03:21 pm: |
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Chris, is there a specific issue you had/have w/Yaffe or his analysis? In the absence of knowing your answer ahead of time, I will address your question as a straightforward, and not rhetorical or critical, one.
I saw his point as relevant to several recent discussions on these boards: one having to do with truth or fraud in memoir and the other having to do with the glut of "pimpology" and other street themes in Black fiction.
It is interesting to me how with jazz musicians--arguably one of the 3 or 4 truly American cultural prototypes--ghostwriters, publicists, publishers, and the artists themselves seemed to determine that the main points of public interest would involve the underbelly of Black urban life.
I don't necessarily see this as a "Black thing": In general we seem to like our artists of any stripe to be tortured and flawed and the result of extraordinary backgrounds.
Yaffe writes quite a bit about jazz. (Here is one of my favorite pieces: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051205/yaffe; For more of his work you can look at his page at SU: http://english.syr.edu/faculty/yaffe.htm) As an academic, it is his job to peel back layers of taken-for-granted "knowledge" and "facts." Since his interest is jazz, I guess analyzing how jazz musicians are written about is his point. |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 823
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 03:27 pm: |
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Cynique, I like the idea of jazz musicians' memoir-writing as yet another form of "improvisation." I guess one issue for me would be, how much of the riffing came from them and how much from outside sources? In the end, I guess this is the same as with their music, too, though: If you want folks to buy your records and come to your concerts, there has to be at least some consideration of them as audiences, their needs, desires, etc.
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1743
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2006 - 11:07 am: |
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Yvettep:
Who is this Jaffe? |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 312
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 - 03:23 pm: |
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Chris: David Yaffe is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. This essay is adapted from his book, Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing, published by Princeton University Press this month. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 224
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, February 06, 2006 - 04:53 pm: |
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YvetteP, Thanks for the thread. I may have been the one who raised the idea of the 'narrative of addiction' as a subset of the jazz autobiography, but I think that the latter is still very rare and related to the more common oral history of the jazz musican.
The first oral history I became aware of at a young age was that of "Baby" Dodds (Louis Armstrong's drummer), who described the musician's life on the riverboats (now there's a book called Jazz on the River), Wm. F. Ludwig presenting him with the first "hi-hat" (or sock) cymbal, the origin of the phrase "See ya later, alligator," and standing in the hallway outside the Tulane theater in order to hear classical music performed. Originally published in the Evergreen Review and reprinted in Esquire, this is the first narrative of its type that I became aware of. At the time, I thought it was "written" by him, but now I see that it's an oral narrative, however, it was the first piece of writing about jazz that struck me as "real."
"Really the Blues" is a very appealing ghostwritten memoir by Mezz Mezzrow, a self-described White Negro (if I'm not mistaken), and a confirmed pot head and Louis Armstrong hanger-on (and not a bad clarinet player in his own right). It describes events going back to the 1930s and possible earlier.
The Mingus autobiography is highly fictionalized which uses a kind of braggadocio consistent with the whole New Orleans milieu of insult ritual through Muhammad Ali.
I mentioned "Straight Life" by Art and Laurie Pepper, in the context of addiction narrative, but there's also "A Jazz Odyssey" by Oscar Peterson (a very appealing and intelligent autobiography), "God is My Booking Agent" by Dizzy Gillespie alto saxophonist (and fellow Jack McDuff alum) Leo Wright, the "Autobiography of Pops Foster" as told to Tom Stoddard (which I like because it gets into the social life of New Orleans at the turn of the century), and of course, "Miles: The Autobiography" by MD and Quincy Troupe, which seems to be an oral history.
Well, Lady Sings the Blues by William Duffy is obviously not an autobiography, so I don't know where you're going with that. Duffy later converted to a macrobiotic diet and lost a lot of weight, which is where I first heard of him.
"To Be or Not to Bop" by Dizzy Gillespie is considered an autobiography. I'm trying to think of others I've read.
There are some good biographies, "Lush Life," the biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu comes to mind, but as far as musicians' own writing about themselves . . . not very common, I'll have to think about it. "Notes and Tones" is a fantastic book of candid interviews with jazz musicians by Art Taylor, the famous drummer who'd played with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane (and who once came into a club where I was playing, accompanied by Melba Liston and Dakota Staton).
As far as autobiographies, I can't think of too many offhand.
Louis Armstrong wrote a number of autobiographies (there's an Albert Murray review somewhere on the Internet which rates them).
"Raise Up Off Me," the autobiography/addiction narrative of pianist Hampton Hawes, describes how he and Sonny Clark would venture into NYC's Central Park to "jack" people. Sad because he was such a beautiful pianist (in the mold of a Bill Evans). |
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