Stomp and Swerve (eBook)

This book is about hot music. We all know what that means, or atleast what it sounds like when we hear it. We grew up knowing.The Rolling Stones are hot, at least through Exile on Main St. TheBeatles are usually not, and often anything but ('When I'm Sixty-Four'). James Brown is very hot, James Taylor is not at all. Jimi Hendrixis hot, Pink Floyd is cool for a while, and then just uncool.Nir vana is hot, despite its cool name. Merle Haggard and GeorgeJones are hot, Alabama and the entire cast of the CMA are not.Louis Armstrong is hot, always, Benny Goodman usually is, GlennMiller rarely if ever. Bessie Smith is hot, Billie Holiday tries veryhard not to be, not always successfully. Some kinds of music are hotin general: fifties rock 'n' roll is almost always hot, fifties jazz is clearlynot, which is why they call it cool jazz (hot is usually cool, but coolisn't necessarily uncool, it's just not hot-Miles Davis is, of course,both cool and cool). Hip-hop is hot, ambient is most defiantly not.Techno is sometimes hot, but usually not. Punk is hot, new wave . . .etcetera. Pretty obvious-unless you're dealing with music over a centuryold, with no pumping bass or booting solos to tip you the nod.If we're going to put our enterprise on a sound scientific footing,we'll need a theory. This isn't easy, since hot music at first appears tobe one of those phenomena beyond definition, subject to Armstrong'sParadox ('If you gotta ask you'll never know'). You know and I knowit's got something to do with sex, but saying that doesn't help much.The standard New Grove Dictionary of Jazz tells us that 'in jazz par -lance, the term is used to suggest the qualities of excitement, passion,and intensity,' which doesn't help us much either, and that 'hot soloswere generally performed at considerable speed and were characterizedby a frenetic quality, an urgent sense of rhythm, agitated syncopation,eager anticipations of the beat, and an earthy or 'dirty' tone.'This gives us a little more to work with, although it's only part ofthe story. Louis Armstrong's 'Alligator Crawl' from 1927 (Ok. 8482,wherever possible, I shall identify any recording mentioned in thesepages by its original catalog number: reissues come and go, but theoriginal release remains constant) is a slow grind without frenzy oragitation, and it's so hot that it seems to melt the grilles on your speakers.And what if our ears tell us that 'Possum in the Hayloft' bya cracker fiddle band from Georgia, 'Nichts Bei Mir' by a Yiddishclarinet combo from Hester Street, and 'Peephole Drag' by a blackcornet blower from the South Side of Chicago are equally hot,although they seem to have nothing in common? Any theory thatwould cover all three musicologically-that would explain what they're all doing in terms of rhythm, timbre, harmony, melodic development,etc.-would have to be impossibly complex. Luckily, for you and meboth, I'm not a musicologist. And there are other ways of approachingthis question. We don't need musicological exactness here (wejust want to listen to the stuff, not vivisect it), we need what thethought gang likes to call a heuristic: a simplified way of making senseout of a complex situation, of enabling the mind to grasp it sensually,rather than rationally. A model, in other words.