Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) Read online

  The chair and then the sofa broke right down and cried

  I’ll tell you confidentially the tears were hard to hide

  the trumpet and clarinet “act” them out instrumentally. There’s even a ticking clock sound effect accompanying a line about the clock striking twelve. For me, the whimsy in the lyric satisfies without these goofy asides: the mood has been broken. Even so, it’s a cute effort, and the level of musicianship raises it above the standard market value of the time.

  The Boswells’ rendition starts out at a slower tempo, with Bunny Berigan immediately establishing a down-home New Orleans feel. Sounding a bit like Ethel Waters, Connie sings the tune down once, her intonation, as always, dead-on. Whenever she comes to the hook line, “We couldn’t say good-bye,” she reaches up an octave and, thrillingly, blue-notes (flats) the third. Prefiguring the Hanshaw recording, the verse has also been moved forward. But instead of the normal tempo drop, the band speeds up and the girls sing the verse in harmony. And for giggles, they’ve tossed the original chord progression and substituted a modernistic sequence of chords that changes the key from F major to F minor. The juxtaposition is startling: it’s as if we’ve been instantly teleported from the sleepy Delta to Times Square on Saturday night.

  In order to accommodate a chromatic melody line in the last bar, they’ve also rewritten some of the lyrics. As this manic, urban mood continues into the main body of the song, a chord pattern is set up that changes the key center from F major to D major every other bar. It’s the kind of Gershwin-like effect that Otis Redding and Steve Cropper would employ at Stax sessions some thirty years later. Connie takes the bridge alone and then the girls come back in for the last shout chorus, with Connie adding some wailing licks at the finish for good measure. The Boswells have taken care that, from the downbeat to the last cymbal hit, there’s not a boring bar in this arrangement.

  Among the seventy-five or so tracks that the Boswells recorded from 1931 to 1936, it’s hard to find one in which they didn’t use their subversive genius to enrich the given raw material. Aside from the innovations already mentioned, they imitated jazz instrumental effects with their voices, devised tricky phrasing, switched from straight time to swing time, employed “speed singing” and even raced through whole choruses in “Boswellese,” a childhood language of their own invention (“love” would break down to, I think, “luggle-duv”). They may not have invented the word “yowzah,” but, as far as I’ve been able to find, the first recorded “yowzah” occurs on their 1932 version of “The Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia.”

  When singing solo passages, Connie—this formidable musician in a Louisiana belle’s ball gown—is simultaneously hot and cool: she’s emotionally connected to the lyric and at the same time reveals a self-reflexive, ironic quality that’s astonishing for the era. Her self-awareness as an artist (if not her sense of modesty) is borne out by quotes from interviews in later years:

  At that time I’m sure that to the average ear we must have sounded like little green people from outer space . . . We revolutionized not only the style of singing, the beat, the placing of voices, the way-out harmony, but also the musical world in general . . . I used to work wee hours in the morning, but Martha and Vet were loaded with talent and contributed much to the trio arrangements. The band background, intros, fill-ins, and special endings were usually planned by me. Some parts were as free as the breeze, while others were kept right in the saddle . . .

  If you listen you will hear that Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bunny Berigan, all those fellas, though they were great individually, they played as a group completely different . . . When they played for us, we sang and we gave them certain little breaks and things we wanted them to do back of us that made them sound completely different on our records than they did on anybody else’s.

  Jack Kapp, always apprehensive about the commercial potential of the Sisters’ work, often clashed with Connie about the eccentric treatment of the material. After he moved the group to his new label, American Decca, in 1935, he was able to exert more control, especially over the tracks Connie recorded as a solo artist. Her vocals, while never less than lovely, started to lose their drive and the arrangements became more conventional. A year later, Martha and Vet retired to tend to their new husbands and families, leaving Connie, who had married their manager, to continue on her own. Although Connie’s career bubbled along nicely up through the war years, she was never to be quite the innovator she was when she sang with her sisters. After the breakup, the Boswell-worshipping Andrews Sisters, employing a more accessible version of their basic harmony style, stepped into the vacuum and went on to great commercial glory. But the Jazz Age was over. The great swing bands (with a few exceptions) collapsed and the era of the celebrity soloist had begun.

  Connie, now Connee (don’t ask), obliged to share the stage with entertainers like Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Doris Day—folks who could walk and dance and strut in front of movie cameras—couldn’t compete. When she performed with her sisters, Connie had usually been seated next to Martha on the piano bench with Vet standing close behind: three belles in the parlor made a nice picture. Alone, Connie struggled to make up for her disability with cybernetic help: special chairs or braces with wheels worn under her flowing skirts. But by the late forties, her star had grown dimmer. It was fine for Louis Armstrong to stand under the lights sweating bullets and waving that handkerchief around, but a white woman, no matter how good she sounded, needed to be standing up behind the mic, projecting confidence, looking good.

  After the invention of the long-playing disc reinvigorated the record business in the fifties, Connie had a last hurrah with a few well-produced jazz and pop LPs. Her final recording, in 1962, was a rockabilly tune she wrote herself: “You Ain’t Got Nothin’.” Her range had dropped, but Connie was more than comfortable singing over the boogie bass and twanging guitar, sounding a bit like a toned-down Wanda Jackson or Brenda Lee. At fifty-five, more so than any of her contemporaries, she was still a rhythm gal through and through.

  One wonders what trajectory Connie’s life might have followed if not for the complex challenges presented by her disability. On the other hand, the connection between Connie’s childhood misfortunes and her early work might stand in support of Edmund Wilson’s theory of “the wound and the bow.” Wilson suggests that the themes of an artist’s work represent a healing reenactment of some primal injury—in this case, a literal, physical injury. Confronted with a piece of material—a popular song—Connie’s instinct was to pull it apart, reorganize its parts and reshape it into something richer than the original. Like the painter Frida Kahlo, born in the same year, Connie was able to exploit her physical calamity in the formation of her art using similar means: irony, startling juxtaposition of events, even surrealism. Fortunately for Connie, she was able to rely on Martha and Vet, who, from childhood, were enlisted as both her caretakers and her willing conspirators.

  Of course, the first time you hear these dynamic sides from the beginning of the last century, none of this is immediately apparent. Whatever suffering might have contributed to the Boswells’ artistry has been transformed by some alchemy of the human spirit into pure joy. From the downbeat, we’re transported to Jazz Age New Orleans: we hear the music that was in the streets, in the churches, in the improvisations of the piano professors of Storyville, and the laughter of three teenage girls for whom, in the words of W. S. Gilbert’s three little maids from school, “life is a joke that’s just begun.”

  Henry Mancini’s Anomie Deluxe

  In the late fifties and early sixties, Henry Mancini’s music was omnipresent: on TV, in films and featured in select elevators all over the world. For many, his music, along with that of the popular Dave Brubeck Quartet, served as an introduction to the sound of modern jazz.

  I must have been about eight years old when my father, like so many other second-generation American dads, decided to get his family the hell out of the cit
y and make a run at upward mobility in the suburbs. After a couple of years and a few false starts, we finally settled into a ranch-style home nestled among hundreds of its near-identical brothers in Kendall Park, New Jersey, a typical housing development circa 1957. The development was not very developed. I was not happy.

  Sawdust still hung in the air. To walk out of the sliding glass doors onto the slab of concrete that was the patio and stare across an ocean of mud at one’s doppelganger neighbors was, well, awesome. My parents, gazing out the window of the kitchen of the future, delighted in the open space, the gently curving streets and the streamlined look of the cream Olds Dynamic 88 all cozy in its carport. But for me, a subterranean in gestation with a real nasty case of otherness, it was a prison. I’d been framed and sentenced to a long stretch at hard labor in Squaresville.

  The days were filled with whatever a fifth grader’s days are filled with. In the evening, after wolfing down a few servings of fish sticks, I’d fling myself onto the couch in the family room. My dad would sit at the card table doing take-home work on his yellow accounting pad. My mother would be in the kitchen eliminating microscopic particles of food from the counters. My baby sister, Susan, would be flinging wads of Play-Doh at the wall. Of course, the TV would be on. Monday nights at nine, we watched Peter Gunn.

  Beatsters! Brothers in the subculture of the Early Resigned! Reminisce with me: after a suspenseful, highly stylized teaser, we’d thrill to the driving boogie ostinato on bass, doubled in the lowest octaves of the piano and tripled by a raunchy surf guitar, the same bar repeated throughout, never changing. The drummer’s on auto-cook. Close-voiced brass plays the angular, blues-based theme. On the screen we see the title animation, a bogus abstract expressionist canvas with cryptic, splattery forms pulsing in the foreground. Even then we may have known it was jive, but who cared? The titles, action-painted on top of all this, told us the show was created by Blake Edwards and that the music was by Henry Mancini.

  During the fifties there had been a number of TV shows that exploited the combination of film noir and jazz-based music, such as Naked City and Richard Diamond and M Squad. But 1958’s Peter Gunn was the noirest of them all. Edwards’s update of the Chandleresque detective story, with its tense visual style, demanded a suitably chilled-out sound track, and Mancini, who had scored Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil that same year, seemed to understand what this show was all about: style, and nothing much else in particular. “The Miami Vice of its time,” a friend of mine remarked. Craig Stevens as Gunn would cruise around a narcotized and vulgarly luxurious Los Angeles like Cary Grant on Miltown, doing his job of detection and occasionally alighting at Mother’s, a nightclub where his main squeeze, Edie, worked as a jazz singer. (The slow make-out scenes between Gunn and Edie, played by Lola Albright, seemed not to belong in the family room, and it was no cinch trying to conceal my erotic dithers from my parents.) Every so often, he’d check in with his pal Lieutenant Jacoby, the good cop. But Gunn may as well have been drifting through a landscape of boomerangs and parallelograms, so little did the plots matter. What counted was the sense that these people had been around the block a few times, had found a way to live amid the stultifying sleaziness of the modern world, keeping their emotions under control except for occasional spasms of sex and violence.

  Of course, these weren’t authentic hipsters, Mailer’s White Negroes or Kerouac’s Beats. Gunn, Edie and Jacoby were supposed to be more like pallies of Sinatra or James Bond, streetwise swingers: they were hip, but they could operate in the straight world with an existential efficiency. And yet, so strong was the pull toward an alternate way of life that, at least to a hyperaesthetic ten-year-old, the show’s whole gestalt made sense. It spoke to my condition. I could identify with Gunn’s outsider stance and admire his improvised lifestyle without venturing outside the perimeter of comfort and convenience my parents had provided. To the contrary, Edwards’s camera eye seemed to take a carnal interest in the luxe and leisure objects of the period, focusing on Scandinavian furniture, potted palms, light wood paneling and sleek shark-finned convertibles. It was, in fact, all the same stuff my parents adored, but darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger. Sort of like seeing a smiling Pan Am pilot climb out of his 707 with a copy of La Nausée sticking out of his back pocket.

  Mancini didn’t have to look far to find the appropriate sound to enhance Edwards’s vision of anomie deluxe. At the time, West Coast jazz (essentially, white bop) was being offered to college kids as part of the same package that included the Beats, open-toed sandals and psychoanalysis. The white bopper playing a subdued parlor jazz was an easier sell than his black counterpart. Sure, the image spoke, the crew-cut cool-schoolers may be, like the black boppers, wigged out, self-destructive hopheads (something you, the middle class, are fascinated by), but they’re also safely Caucasian and get to spend a lot of time at Hermosa Beach.

  Nevertheless, there were a lot of very talented players on the coast and Mancini was canny enough to bring them into the studio to record the Gunn scores. Future film score titan John Williams was the piano player. The studio band also included trumpeter Pete Candoli, brothers Ted and Dick Nash (reeds and trombone), guitarist Bob Bain, drummer Jack Sperling and vibraphonist Larry Bunker. The idiom he used was largely out of Gil Evans and other progressive arrangers plus the odd shot of rhythm and blues. He utilized the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool school: French horns, vibraphone, electric guitar and—Mancini’s specialty—a very active flute section, including both alto flute and the rarely used bass flute. Instruments were often individually miked to bring out the detail. For small groups, Mancini hijacked the elegant “locked hands” voicing style associated with pianists Milt Buckner and George Shearing. There was a lot of empty space. It was real cool.

  Mancini’s albums of music from the Peter Gunn series and the spin-off show, Mr. Lucky, sold in the zillions, and I was one of the proud consumers. The tunes had titles like “Dreamsville” and “A Profound Gass.” The music inspired me to learn more about jazz and the extramusical artifacts of the jazz life. I listened to late-night jazz jocks broadcasting out of Manhattan and got a subscription to Down Beat, which had lots of live-action photos of the top players. I tried to get through a few Kerouac novels.

  Out of these fragments of hip and hype I constructed in my mind a kind of Disneyland of Cool. I could imagine musicians cruising up and down Central Avenue in cartoon Studebakers and finally assembling in a large sound studio. Folding chairs, music stands. The cats are sitting in a semicircle around a couple of those enormous RCA microphones on boom stands, some in two-tone shirts with roll collars, others in Hawaiian gear and bop glasses. Horns are slipped out of canvas gig bags. There’s a potted palm in the corner. Hank Mancini walks in, not the tanned, carefully coiffed entertainer of later years, but the introspective young professional as pictured on his late-fifties album covers. Everybody’s smoking Pall Malls or some other powerful nonfilter cigarettes. Hank hands out the parts. When they run down the chart, a thick membrane of sound flows forth and hovers in the room. It sounds incredibly plush. Behind the glass, the engineers at the console are digging it. Maybe a few smokin’ chicks in black tights fall by. And so on.

  • • •

  The next time I saw Henry Mancini’s name was in the credit roll of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, also directed by our man Blake Edwards. I was thirteen and ready for love. When the venal waif Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) got out of that cab on Fifth Avenue in a black dress and pearls in the early morning, I wanted to sip her through a straw.

  Whenever I mention this picture to someone around my age, a strange, tragic smile flits across his or her face as if in remembrance of an old lover. Even those who dismiss the film as a piece of typical Hollywood fluff that took the sting out of Capote’s original story, blah, blah, are betrayed by a wetness in the eyes, a heaving chest and an occasional shudder of bliss/pain. Obviously, some part of the ne
rvous system wants to acknowledge the film’s impact.

  Edwards’s special interest in marginality in an expensive setting made him a good choice for this urban romance, but it was his huckleberry friend Hank who really came through. We may have OD’d on “Moon River” long ago, but, as played on the harmonica during that opening scene, it still does the job. The harmonica, an instrument associated with children, stands in for Holly’s rural origins (innocence) and contrasts with the rich orchestration and what you’re seeing on the screen (Tiffany’s, Givenchy shades, sophistication). It’s a great effect, much imitated since. Later on, Hepburn sits on the fire escape and sings “Moon River” while accompanying herself on the guitar. She’s wearing pedal pushers and a sweatshirt. In Capote’s novel, she sings, more appropriately, a mournful country ballad, but why quibble with perfection?

  As in Peter Gunn, the city is presented as a grid of luxe through which the outsider characters, Holly and Paul, drift. To score the scenes in which they goof around town, Mancini used a mixed chorus singing in a skidoo-be-doo scat style similar to that of the Modernaires or the Mel-Tones. This was a little twee for my taste. By 1961 I was starting to wise up about jazz, and I felt that Hank, by exploiting this blanched-out idiom from the previous decade, had exposed himself as a bit of a moldy fig. Nevertheless, it enhanced the concept of a carefree, womblike Manhattan in which the bohemian ruled with a magical, childlike omnipotence. In high school I would have given anything to preserve that sanctified state, to rescue Holly from herself (from growing up, being corrupted), to goof around an enchanted Manhattan with some wild thing forever, scat singers always on call to back us up.

  Eventually, my quest for relevance and authenticity (plus a not unsound instinct as to where the most desirable girls were gathering) propelled me into a phase where even the greatest jazz—Ellington, Miles, Mingus, Monk—seemed slick and sexually coy, and I turned to blues and soul music and Bob Dylan. I started reading about pop art and Timothy Leary’s experiments at Harvard. I went to a lot of Brit movies of the kitchen-sink school. The language of hip was changing.