JAMES COTTON: IN MEMORIAM

If my memory serves me well, I saw James Cotton as the opening act for BB King in the old field house at my university. Acoustically, it was a barn, but Cotton stole the show with his driving Chicago blues, though of course BB's smoother style won everyone over too. I also think he was playing with Otis Spann when I saw Spann in Boston opening for Mountain; my roommate drove up to Boston to see Leslie West, and I went for Otis, but frankly I remember so little of the trip I can't recall if it was Cotton or not. This was the Sixties, mind you.

Cotton's own groups could be really great: his bits in the Chicago/ The Blues/ Today series are uniformly fine; it was his first solo band and included Otis Spann on piano. But they always paled in comparison to his work with Howlin' Wolf and then with Muddy Waters, where he was in and out with Little Walter in that band that included Spann. Cotton and Hubert Sumlin, Wolf's guitarist, were boyhood friends, and they play on each other's solo efforts, and always well. He also had  Matt Guitar Murphy in his bands, whose guitar provided a different, lighter, sound, which matches his vocals well. And of course he played harp on Muddy's Hard Again in 1977, which was a landmark of blues coming out and re-establishing itself after the rock era.

There's a fascinating record from 1996, Deep In The Blues, with Joe Louis Walker and Charlie Haden, which won a Grammy for best traditional blues album, and is truly worth it. Haden said he was 'surprised that...he would call me to do this record. I'd never done anything like this before. But I love blues so I was very happy'. And it shows.

But go back and listen to Cotton in the day. Here's a link to him with Muddy and Spann:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx606E2OzPE 
RIP.

CHARLIE HADEN: AN APPRECIATION AT BOTTOM

Appropriately enough, Charlie Haden was born in Shenandoah. This was in Iowa; the name is the same as one of the greatest traditional American songs. He began singing professionally when he was two, country music, on the radio with the Haden Family Band. Polio turned him into a bass player, when it damaged his vocal chords. He followed his older brother on the upright bass, but he was more taken with classical music, especially Bach, and with jazz. When he was 20 he headed out to Los Angeles to study and to seek out Hampton Hawes. He played with Hawes, and Paul Bley, and Art Pepper, before he wound up in his first great band, the Ornette Coleman quartet, with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, who were busy inventing 'free jazz'

It makes sense, because Coleman was from Texas, with a heavy blues influence, and he could hear the country roots in Haden's bass. There's a lot of modern jazz, particularly involving Bill Frisell, that sounds like what jazz would be had it come out of country rather than the blues, and there's a lot of that underlying Coleman's relentless improvisations. With Coleman, Haden pushed the bass out front.

He left Coleman to enter Synanon, which if you're not of a certain age won't mean anything to you, to kick his drug habit. When he came out he got busy as a sideman for everyone from John Handy to Bobby Timmons, Pee Wee Russell to Red Allen. Then he joined Keith Jarrett's 'American Quartet', Jarrett fresh from Charles Lloyd, along with Dewey Redman and Paul Motian. There's a lot of Coleman and Coltrane there, as there was when he began recording with Old And New Dreams: Cherry, Redman, and drummer Ed Blackwell.

That's probably where I came in, working my way back to Ornette. I was gone from Montreal by the time of the Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden and Carla Bley's always evolving big band—Montreal always seemed to have a special place for him. The 'Liberation' part wasn't taken lightly; Haden had been detained in Portugal when he performed his 'Song For Che' there, and he was quizzed by the FBI after he returned stateside. By the time I left Montreal for London I was firmly embedded in the ECM jazz world—Jarrett's European Quartet and Gary Burton led me to Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber as well as Old And New Dreams. But it wasn't until the mid-80s, when I was again living on my own, that Charlie Haden really made an impact on me.

I caught up with his albums with Garbarek and Egberto Gismondi. I was immensely taken by Quartet West; with the great and versatile sax man Ernie Watts, alongside Alan Broadbent and Larance Marable; by then I was also immersed in film noir and Haunted Heart, their first album, touched a nerve. It's an amazing record, not just for its original compositions, but for the songs sung by Jo Stafford, Jeri Southern, and Billie Holliday. Stafford's 'Haunted Heart' is so, well, haunted, that I ran out and got one of her collections, only to discover it was the arrangement and the quartet that set her voice free; it's its time it was buried under a lava flow of sickly sweet charts, apparently by her husband.

Haden had a wonderful partnership with Pat Metheny, which began with 80/81, with Michael Brecker and Jack DeJohnette alongside Dewey Redman, and the 1986 record Song X, a re-working of and homage to Ornette Coleman which confounded those who found Metheny too glib. They culminated in the 1996 classic Beyond The Missouri Sky; two Midwestern boys playing the most lovely duets imaginable. Go back to 'Shenandoah', whose subtitle is 'Across The Wide Missouri'. I've played the disc almost to death; it played a huge part in winning my second ex, and it played an even bigger part in helping me through the pain of the breakup a decade later.

What's amazing in the two decades from the early 90s is the range of music Haden was playing. Folk songs and spirituals with Hank Jones; Latin music with Gonzago Rubalcaba; with pianists John Taylor and Kenny Barron; with Ginger Baker (a great trio with Bill Frisell); with the Italian guitarist Antonio Forcioni, a disc which my late father-in-law gave me, and which I treasure. In 2008 he made another country record with a new version of the Haden family; his wife Ruth Cameron (listen to the lovely 'Waltz For Ruth' on Missouri Sky, or live in 2009 here) including his son-in-law Jack Black.

I've been listening to a lot of Haden lately. Not the daytime Haden, the trios with Gery Allen and Paul Motian, or Joe Henderson and Al Foster. But the nighttime Haden. There's a 2012 two-disc set called Magico: Carta de Amor; a live recording of that band with Garbarek and Gismonti. There's Live At Birdland (2011) with Lee Konitz, Motian, and pianist Brad Mehldau. Most of all there's Jasmine (2010), duets with Keith Jarrett. By this time Haden was suffering from post-polio syndrome; Jarrett of course had suffered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and come back a somewhat gentler player. Haden also suffered from tinnitus; he attributed it to the loudness of those early groups, and I've no doubt the polio left his ears more vulnerable; the quiet of his late work seems a just response to that. It suited the two of them, and their versions of standards resonate. They made a sequel, called Last Dance, which came out this year and topped Billboard's 'traditional' jazz chart.

I look back on what I've just written and it seems like a list—and a fairly incomplete list at that. I thought to myself, that doesn't do Charlie Haden justice, and then I realised that yes, it did. Because in a sense, I grew up in jazz with Charlie Haden. Everything from the freest of free modern jazz to the softest of ballads, as if to belie the jokes we used to make about ECM standing for European Chamber Music, or Exceedingly Caucasian Music, as much to belie the blackness of the post-bop era. I started flipping through my discs, and finding Haden on some where I'd forgotten he played. I wished I had the vinyl, those records that played on the turntable that sat on top of one speaker on the floor of the one closet in my tiny Montreal flat. I know tonight I will play a Charlie Haden disc as I lie in bed and wait for my mind to find its space in the night, and the melody of his bass will show my pulse the way to go.

MEGAN ABBOTT wants to DIE A LITTLE

Do you know Jeri Southern’s version of Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’? The next line in the song, of course, is ‘I want to die a little’. Southern recorded it in 1954, the year in which this novel is set. I first heard Southern’s version on Charlie Haden’s wonderful album Haunted Heart, on which his Quartet West played behind Southern’s original vocal. It’s both evocative and knowing in that context, and that is exactly the way I felt about Megan Abbott’s novel.

Lora King is a schoolteacher, living in Pasadena with her brother Bill, an investigator for LA’s district attorney. They are orphans, who have washed upin La La Land, as if without pasts, to live the post-war suburban American dream. Then Bill meets Alice Steele, a dish who’s been a wardrobe assistant in Hollywood, and they are quickly married, and Lora’s world is turned upside down. The suburban parties get a bit livelier, Bill gets a bit busier, and although Alice inserts herself into Lora’s world, there is something otherworldly about her. And as Lora gets drawn more deeply into that other world, the story takes on darker implications.

Abbott has done a brilliant job of building her tale through atmosphere. Film noir and pulp fictions of the 1950s lived in this territory, the world kept hidden from the shiny surface of the Eisenhower era dream. It’s the world on the covers of the paperback novels we collect and cherish now, the world of the feverish films of Sam Fuller or Joseph H Lewis. It’s Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, hosting cops like JD Tippett and losers like Lee Oswald. Lots of writers have visited there.

Where Abbott is different is in delineating the ambiguous nature of the line between the respectable and the not so respectable, as if one were the funhouse mirror image of the other. Her suburban parties start out antiseptic on the surface, but soon the reader is getting suffocated by the smells of perfume, hair tonic, highballs, and cigarette smoke; the sweaty desperation of too much close dancing in too small rooms. So as Lora dates her studio publicity fixer, as she moves closer to the ‘other side’, you realise that yin and 50s yang are not that far apart. The title track on Haunted Heart was a hit for Jo Stafford in 1947, and like Jeri Southern's song, I was taken by her singing it with Haden and group behind. But if you go back and listen to the original, with its syrupy big-band arrangement by Stafford's husband, bandleader Paul Weston, you begin to sense the distance between the torch underneath and the sticky song on the mainstream hit parade.

Die A Little is like Dorothy B Hughes or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding rewritten by David Goodis. But though she mines the era's genre, she also manages to avoid the trap of seeming to deconstruct them; she isn’t clinical about her story, characters, or style, the way the Coen brothers were in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Everything happens within the framework of the tale. There are occasional anachronisms, or knowing bits propelled by hindsight, but it rings true as Lora’s descent into the dark side of the 1950s leaves her trapped, and she can get out only by repressing those impulses even as she acts on them. Repression is at the heart of this book, as it was, perhaps in the Fifties. Calling Dr Wertheim! Megan Abbott has written an atmospheric thriller which works on any number of levels. It’s being made into a movie with Jessica Biel, which hopefully will go a bit deeper than say, Hilary Swank and Scarlett Johanssen enjoying the chance for thick red lipstick and constant smoking in Black Dahlia.

By the way, James Ellroy gave this book a plug, and it’s easy to see why--there’s that same awareness of what America’s underbelly was, and is like. Die A Little was published in the States in 2005, and Abbott has written two more since then. The second, The Song Is You, apparently uses the disappearance of actress Jean Spangler as a springboard, like Ellroy used the Black Dahlia. The third, Queenpin, is apparently set in a corrupt little casino town, more Phenix City than Bugsy Siegel's Las Vegas. Definitely worth looking out for.

Die A Little
Megan Abbott
Pocket Books £6.99 ISBN 9781847393463