From the Top of the Hill # 28: April 29, 1948

This is the 28th installment of John D MacDonald’s 1947-48 newspaper column From the Top of the Hill, published in the Clinton Courier, when the MacDonalds were living in that upstate New York town. This is perhaps the longest of his entries, a column on a single subject: a review of a jazz concert performed in Clinton. I know little of jazz, and JDM seems to go out of his way to disguise the musicians in the band, but this seems to have been a performance by one of pianist's Art Hode’s various ensembles of the era.

My copy of this column was poorly photographed and there are several words missing toward the end.

Concert Notes:

Went to the Jazz concert in the gym on the Hill last Saturday night. These concert notes may sound a shade grim, so we'll preface them by saying that we felt as though we got a fair return on the buck eighty expended for a ticket.

As a second preface, we don't claim to be an expert. We have collected jazz records for a few years and we have spent a few evenings drifting along 52nd street.

The group was a little sad. And a little phoney. We have a deep aversion to drummers who wear funny hats and scream at the people like crazy. Funny hats and screaming humor belong with the name bands for use when the crowd seems jaded with dancing.

Jazz, at its very best, should be a pretty serious operation. It is our only form of music which has not been borrowed from other nations and other eras.

The hat business might have been excusable if, during the rest of the time he had carried a solid rhythm beat on his drums. But his backing-up was shaky at best, and when the other musicians, with obvious reluctance, gave him some room for self-expression, he was more concerned with noise than rhythm. In particularly poor taste was his fading in with a cow bell in a piano number. The only reasonably acceptable thing he did was the heavy beat that went along with Parenti's clarinet solo job which was so reminiscent of the Krupa-Goodman duet in "Sing, Sing, Sing."

Drum should have. been Baby Dodds, or better yet, Big Sid Catlett.

Parenti is technically, a very accomplished musician. A.shade too accomplished for jazz at its best. In other words, he seems to become so infatuated with very involved variations on his theme that he unfortunately misses the greater impact that less elusive variations would have.

Der Max is, of course, a fine, raw, earthy horn, but there seemed to a shade of condensation
in his selection of the maximum number of large, raw blasts at the expense of some of the softer and more controlled numbers he has successfully waxed.

The trombone -- despite a definite uncertainty of tone, came the closest to hitting the spirit of the thing, though the slow portions of his long solo were painful.

Old James P. made us feel bad. Age slows up everybody. The obvious result of it with James P. is a blurring and running together of the notes, particularly noticeable in his rendition of “Snowy Morning Blues.” Our record of that, cut some twelve years ago, has a crystal clarity sadly lacking in his performance the other night. Hodes displayed remarkably strange taste in playing the same number in his own fashion.

As to Arthur Hodes, he seems to have technical ability without creative ability. Particularly unpleasant was his "showmanship" in jouncing up and down and trying to beat a hole in the platform with his foot. His "Yancey Special" was almost a note for note duplicate of the Meade Lux rendition of the same one—but Meade Lux does it better.

Errol Gardner, Meade Lux, Albert Amnions and Johnny Guarnieri all have more of that indefinable creative ability.

The selection of group numbers was good, but inventiveness seemed to be oddly inhibited.

We looked around in the audience and saw many people who, we are sure, came more out of curiosity than out of any knowledge or appreciation of jazz.

We wish to inform those people that what they heard was a pale and artificial imitation of jazz. Individually, not more than two of the men who performed could be fitted into a top rank jazz combo. That could be raised to a possible three if James P. were younger.

A lot of guff is being written these days about jazz. We don't want to add to the torrent but we would like to make clear the major distinction between jazz and classical music. In classical music the notes are already scored, and the quality of the musicians must show in his rendition and phrasing of those scored notes. Classical music is, on the whole, variations on one or more themes. In jazz, the theme is there, and the listener has the only opportunity that exists in the musical arts to hear actual composition of music at the moment of composition. Under the right circumstances and in the proper mood, it can become not only pretty stuff, but intellectually stimulating.

The mood wasn't right the other night. Good jazz is something you catch when it happens to be there. It can't be planned. Six men on a platform in a gym can't make jazz. Not good jazz. And good jazz, inventive jazz, is no longer played these days in Dixieland style. It happens with numbers like "Sunny Side of the Street" or "Summertime" or "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Maybe tonight, somewhere in the country, maybe in some small Chicago spot where the lights are dim and the tables are scarred, the waiters are sullen, there is a small group playing a [...] tune, passing the melody back and forth.

Maybe one of those musicians, under the stress of his own personal problems, will take a break and put into music what he can't put into words. If he's unhappy, it will be blues If he's happy, his variations will [...] and inventive and bubbling with life.

At any rate, his sincerity will [...] the rest of the group, and if he tires, they will pick up the song and do things with it that can't be repeated.

The people in that small spot will hear jazz, and its excellence will be limited only by the technical ability of the participants. I have seen musicians, sitting [...] laugh until they wept over some gay and inspited improvisation of a soloist.

Jazz isn't a man with a funny hat.

Jazz isn't the result of [...]

Jazz is a man with a horn saying something about himself and about the world he lives in. [...] the wandering minstrel of [...]