Art Hodes/Jazz Critics

(This is a digression from the Lennie Tristano post.)

I got into jazz through the blues piano style known as boogie-woogie.  One my very first LP purchases featured the evocative, mid-tempo “Ross Tavern Boogie” played by Art Hodes in 1939.   You can hear why I have always dug it.

Download Ross_Tavern_Boogie.mp3

This piece led me to a 1970 Hodes LP on Storyville called Selections From the Gutter, and early on in my development I listened to this album incessantly.  (I still love that one, too.)  Just recently I got a few more Hodes discs and decided that I will always like him a lot.  He is breathtakingly unpretentious, with an interesting beat and the some of the best blues tremolos around.  He is closer in feeling to Jimmy Yancey (my favorite blues pianist) than anybody else I can think of.

I’m a fan, but even I don’t consider Hodes really one of the greats;  he wouldn’t consider himself one of them either.  He had a long working-class career as a traditional/dixieland/blues/boogie pianist, but since he never had anything to do with modern jazz, history has passed him by. 

His best-known sides are several dates with Sidney Bechet that were among the Blue Note label's first.  I think that Hodes may be the only white pianist to record as a leader for Blue Note under Alfred Lion, although there must be some other exceptions.  Interestingly, the quintessential Blue Note artist, Horace Silver, once said, "If there was no Art Hodes there'd  be no Horace" (quoted in Hot Man: The Life of Art Hodes).

In addition to playing, Hodes had a side-career as a writer:  His reminisces make up the liner notes on most of his albums and he even edited a magazine called the Jazz Record in forties.  His prose style is even more casual than his playing, with no care to sound anything but conversational and not at all worried about repeating himself. 

Much of his discussion is about how he didn’t know anything about music until he heard black players, and how did anything he could to get next to that sound.  When he became a band leader he always tried to have a mixed-race band (not every club owner would allow this) and when he became an editor he put older black jazz and blues players like Cow Cow Davenport and Baby Dodds on the cover of the Jazz Record.  The magazine's anthology is also called Selections From the Gutter and is an essential volume for anyone interested in early jazz, featuring interviews with many major musicians and in some cases commentary by the musicians themselves. 

Bessie Smith was Hodes’ favorite; in Selections From the Gutter there are four celebrations of Smith by Mezz Mezzrow, Zutty Singleton, Carl Van Vechten, and Hodes himself, who describes seeing her perform in Chicago:

Ah!  I don’t know, she just reaches out and grabs and holds me.  There’s no explaining her singing, her voice.  She don’t need a microphone; she don’t need one.  I ain’t sure if them damn nuisances had put in their appearance in that year.  Everybody can hear her.  This gal sings from the heart.  She never lets me get away from her once.  As she sings she walks slowly around the stage. Her head, sort of bowed. From where I’m sittin’ I’m not sure whether she’s got her eyes open.  On and on, number after number, the same hush, the great performance, the deafening applause.  We won’t let her stop. What a woman.

All of this kind of playing, writing, and humility is as far from the Tristano perspective that you can get.  But both pianists were intimately bound up with the powerful jazz critics Barry Ulanov and Leonard Feather, who called themselves “The Two Deuces” at Metronome in the early forties.

From The Session Label:

"Feather's Lament" is a title assigned in cutting irony. At the time Hodes, an ardent "moldy fig," had become Barry Ulanov and Leonard Feather's chief punching bag in the pages of Metronome. In January 1944, the magazine reviewed a Hodes release on another label: "these sound like an amateur band entertaining in an air shelter. Us, we'll face the bombs." In February 1944, Barry Ulanov declared that a live appearance by Hodes: "presented a pathetic set... tinkly, faltering, vapid... really a chore." In March either Feather or Ulanov really went beyond the pale in a review of another Hodes release: "Many of Art Hodes' personal friends... have taken us severely to task for our unkind review... But oddly enough, none of them tried to offer any musical defense. Even men who have worked with him follow the line of reasoning which runs: 'Don't be hard on the guy. We know he can't play, but he's sincere and he means well and he's kind to children.' Alas, we can't let this influence us..."

In Hodes’ autobiography Hot Man (co-written with Chadwick Hansen), there is a little more from Ulanov on Hodes: 

There are literally thousands of young unknowns who could play more real jazz in four bars than Art plays on all these four sides.  Even one of the Two Deuces, a mediocre amateur pianist himself [Feather], is willing to take Art on and cut him at any session....Hodes, we think, is the worst musician who has ever attained such stature in the jazz world.

Hansen says that Hodes sued Metronome for $100,000 but only collected for expenses, and that the really sad part of the affair is that a chance to record with Lester Young evaporated because of the Metronome attacks. 

All of this extreme bile was formented by the big debate between the traditionalists (the “moldy figs”) and the modernists (the “beboppers”).  In fact, the 1947 Metronome All-Stars with Parker and Tristano were organized by Ulanov to “battle” the traditionalists.  This resulted in the only recording of some traditional classics like “Tiger Rag” by some famous beboppers - incidentally, Tristano’s blazing solo on the very fast “Tiger Rag” is one of the most exciting moments in his whole discography.

In Feather’s autobiography The Jazz Years: Earwitness to An Era, he admits that much of his commentary on the moldy figs was “mean-spirited and clumsily written,” and that “Barry Ulanov and I continually asked for trouble by assuming that the best defense was attack.”  Feather doesn’t bother to make anything up to Hodes, though, who he should have apologized to for having the colossal impudence to challenge to a duel (a duel which Feather would have certainly lost). Instead, Hodes is insulted further in Earwitness to an Era by being only mentioned in passing as the editor of the Jazz Record before Feather’s citation of a few words of a Jazz Record article by Jake Russell Jr. which Feather avers is racist.  Feather thus implies that all of the Jazz Record was racist. 

Russell’s piece may indeed be racist - finding the complete article is beyond my research abilities - but I certainly don’t trust Feather on this topic. The Jazz Record articles anthologized in Selections From the Gutter have nothing but respect for black traditions.  And it seems that traditional black musicians understood this:  when Pops Foster, the legendary New Orleans bassist, made his only record as a leader, an informal date of duos and storytelling, he called Art Hodes to play piano on it.

There is a lot of fascinating information on jazz critics and race in John Gennari’s recent Blowing Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Gennari connects the dots to several events in new and compelling ways.

The complete absence of Hodes in the index of Blowin’ Hot and Cool is a gaffe, though, mainly because Hodes is one of the only musicians to give a solid contribution to the written material of jazz, but also because “Feather’s Lament” is a rare example of a song written for a jazz critic.

The only other piece by a jazz musician dedicated to a critic I can think of is also not mentioned in Gennari’s book:  Lennie Tristano’s “Coolin’ Off with Ulanov.”

But then Tristano isn’t mentioned much in Blowin’ Hot and Cool, either.  Gennari did interview Barry Ulanov at length and declares that Ulanov "was a major U.S. intellectual of the twentieth century." That’s not my opinion, but Gennari’s chapter  “Hearing the ‘Noisy Lostness’” is stunning:  It’s a careful parsing of the first full-length books on jazz in the late 40’s and early 50’s, including Ulanov’s A History of Jazz in America (the same book that criticizes Dizzy Gillespie).  It seems that Ulanov wanted to erase  the consideration of race from jazz, an idea possibly insulting to those who had to overcome a racist society to make their music heard.  Certainly Ulanov's argument that

Until some of the later Ellington, until Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, there has been little if anything in jazz that could be called profound.

is insulting.

Looking over all this material (including the Destination: Out! post), I begin to sense that a simple argument could be made about Ulanov:  that he hated Art Hodes because Hodes tried to sound black and loved Tristano because Tristano was inarguably white.  This is too reductionist, but if there is not some negative All In the Mix present in Ulanov’s writing I will eat a Lennie Tristano CD.