(first published in American Chronicle – March 2007)
Jazz - the music of Moridura
The Ancient Order of Moridura reflects the three enthusiasms of its hero, Alistair Mackinnon. I say hero - he is certainly a central character, but a number of the male characters could lay claim to being heroes, so perhaps I should call him one of my heroes. (Of my heroines, I may not speak …)
Alistair loves classic jazz, cinema and literature, and he has communicated these enthusiasms to his young friend, Paul Corr, and to others, in an unlikely context. Music features at a number of points in the narrative, and musical analogies are used at times of high tension and emotion.
How do I define classic jazz?
A legion of jazz enthusiasts will doubtless be roused to a fury of indignation by my definition, which is jazz created in the half century from 1917 to 1967. I do not for a moment suggest that the music created after that period is not of enormous artistic value, simply that only time will give it the status of classic jazz. The jazz of the legendary pre-history of the music, what might be called the Buddy Bolden era, would undoubtedly deserve this status, but we have little record of it.
Two of the big Scot's idols are trumpet players - Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, one a poor black boy from the red-light district of New Orleans – Storyville - and the other a middle-class white boy, of German-American extraction, from Davenport, Indiana. They were born within two years of each other, in the ragtime era, and we can be sure that no one could have forecast how their futures would converge in the music that was becoming jazz. They influenced two very different schools of jazz trumpet playing, the hot and the cool respectively, but Louis' towering genius went beyond the trumpet, influencing every jazz instrumentalist, creating jazz singing almost single-handed, with major inputs from Bing Crosby and Connie Boswell, and ultimately influencing the whole of popular music, an influence of which most of our young rock and pop musicians are blissfully unaware.
Alistair’s other idol is Charlie Parker, an alto saxophone player, of a later generation, born in 1920. Parker, together with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, totally transformed jazz into the new form, bebop, virtually inventing a new musical language in the process. The transformation was a painful one for many of the older generation of musicians, many of whom could not, or did not wish to adapt their styles to the complex musical and technical demands of the new form. The great war between the boppers and the 'mouldy figs' has left its legacy to this day, with some doctrinaire - and cloth-eared - adherents of either form totally rejecting the other. Alistair was an impressionable youth when the war was at its height, but never took sides, recognizing the merits of both musical forms. However, he would readily acknowledge that he has not really adapted to many of the forms of jazz created since then, while not denying their validity.
The first jazz piece we are introduced to is Bix's At the Jazzband Ball, played at the party in Alistair's home on the banks of Loch Lomond in Scotland, and designed to lure the shy Paul down from his bedroom to the main reception.
At the Jazzband Ball was the record that Alistair had used to convert the sceptical Paul to jazz many years before, by insisting that he play it twenty times, on a wager that he would then voluntarily play for the twenty first time, and be hooked! It reappears later in the unlikely setting of the monastery of Moridura.
Alistair had also used Parker's Mood, a formidable extended 12-bar blues improvisation by Bird (Charlie Parker), to move Paul's appreciation on to the bebop form, a much more difficult task. Parker's Mood reappears later in the monastery setting.
The third piece of music, It's Tight Like That, belongs to Louis Armstrong, and surprisingly, is not a piece highly regarded by many jazz critics, as opposed to Louis' great masterpieces such as West End Blues and Potato Head Blues.
This melancholy little piece, a popular tune of the time in a minor key, with its odd verbal exchanges, almost certainly sexual in nature, has a simple harmonic structure. However, a least one critic has described Louis' majestic solo as being suffused with a feeling of tragedy, and it is admired by Alistair, who dismisses the critics with an airy "What do they know?" Significantly, the solo fascinates the young monk Mateo, who entertains the sacrilegious notion that Louis might have been an earthly incarnation of the Angel Gabriel. Mateo also finds something profoundly Spanish in the solo, a view ridiculed by Manuel Ortega.
There are other musical references in the book, to Ko-Ko, Charlie Parker's revolutionary improvisation on the chords of Cherokee by Ray Noble, utilizing the upper particles of the harmonic structure in a completely new way, and From Monday On, an old Paul Whiteman tune, with Bing Crosby on vocal and Bix on cornet. Manuel once played tenor guitar - a four-string guitar - and the visiting American industrialist, Pick Carter, takes his nickname from his guitar playing college days.
Perhaps this outline will encourage those of my readers unfamiliar with jazz to expand their knowledge of the music, may illuminate the narrative of my book, and will perhaps prompt them to go further in exploring this wonderful music.
© Copyright Peter Curran 2007/2010
