COMBO: U.S.A.: Eight Lives in Jazz

by Rudi Blesh ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1971

Short, loving biographical appreciations of eight jazz greats -- Satchmo, Sidney, Tea, Prez, Eubie, Gene, Charlie and Lady Day -- Blesh hates formalities. Trying to simulate the riffs and improvisations of the combo he lets his subjects break into long free-form solos, ""a cry, a wail, the other side of laughter"" on love, money, music and hard times. At fourteen Louis Armstrong played cornet in the New Orleans Colored Reformatory brass band. Little Hubie Blake hit the piano keys in Aggie Shelton's five-dollar cathouse in Baltimore and Gene Krupa (a Catholic Pole!) abandoned St. Joseph's College and the priesthood for drums, bootleg joints, small clubs and one-night stands in Chicago. Blesh is happiest in the twenties, the golden age of jazz, with everybody jamming with everybody else and Decca and Victor pioneering on their ""race"" subsidiaries the first scratchy acetates of the classics -- Savoy Blues, Sister Kate, Basin Street. The thirties were hard times -- the era of the Big Bands, the antiseptic, smooth sounds of Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson; the jazzmen felt constrained and so does Blesh writing about decline and loss of direction, Lester Young's alcoholism and Billie's drugs, as well as Jack Teagarden's sterile interlude with the Whiteman band. It's very nostalgic and effusive. The combos were the ""deep, unpolluted streams of the true American music."" And of course there's a message: black or white, all you need is soul. ""Anything to the contrary is Establishment baloney.

Pub Date: March 15, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Chilton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION