The stars and Joey D.

For jazz purists like me, it is not easy to get that excited about the newer crop of jazz musicians coming up these days.  Too woke, too preachy, and too damn serious about playing music that has been done much better and with far more spontaneity. Jazz has been domesticated now, and there are scores of Berklee trained musicians who play uninteresting, self-indulgent and scholastic sounding jazz.  There won’t be another Miles, Monk or Trane ever again.  All three of these gentleman were more about sound and vision more than technique, although they had plenty of that also.  Miles was an overconfident 19 year old kid when he started with Bird who fought his way through the middle register.  Trane had to learn how to play the sax all over again with 16 hour practice days, and Monk’s style was somewhere between a stride pianist and someone from the planet Venus.

 Heroin addiction raged through the jazz world and killed off dozens of musicians before they had even reached their prime.  The list, too long to mention everyone which killed or crippled musicians included Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, Hampton Hawes, Bud Powell, Jackie Mclean, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Clark, Stan Getz, Philly Jo Jones, Red Rodney, Paul Chambers, Charlie Parker, and the list goes on.  Heroin was cool before it was crippling and before it sent great musicians to jail, the psych ward or to the grave.  Using heroin was stupid, useless, and destroyed a musical revolution that should have lasted 100 years—and instead lasted 20.  Miles Davis and his young generation of survivors carried on to create fusion which kept the music on life support for another 10 years or so before it virtually disappeared from the radio, the clubs, and finally went to where all great ideas go to die:  the university. 

Now it’s forced.  A well-off, college educated brat with a curated afro demanding rights he already has—playing scales from a Jamey Abersold theory book that he bought from the college book store.  It isn’t the same.  It’s a combination of store bought theory, $150 an hour lessons, and feigned outrage that is supposed to stand in for spontaneity and true creativity. 

As a 22 year old, a friend and I interviewed Tony Williams who knew that the run was already at its end.  It was a cold January in an empty Jazz Showcase in Chicago and the world’s greatest drummer lamented about what the jazz world had become.  “All Joe has down there are pictures of dead guys on the walls,” he lamented referring to Joe Segal, now also deceased.  “I’m still here, and he’s still living in the past.” 

Tony tried.  He was one of the architects of fusion as a teenager.  Witnesses on the scene described him as a second bandleader in the classic Miles Davis Quintet, which featured Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter.  Miles did everything he could to keep Tony in the band and keep him interested.  But, ultimately it wasn’t enough.  He went off to form the Tony Williams Lifetime with newcomer John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young.  Their first album, Emergency was the birth of fusion, and jazz had a second, brief Renaissance with the emergence of Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and hundreds of garage fusion bands, like the one I had in high school.  We kept at it for awhile until we all finally had to and get jobs, and until we realized that we’d probably rather listen to Ben Webster than Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House.

The appearance of Wynton Marsalis and his Brooks Brothers brigade was the nail in the coffin. Jazz went off to Lincoln Center to be exiled somewhere near the Museum of Natural History on New York’s upper West Side.  Miles died, Wayne and Herbie got old, and McLaughlin got tired of playing electric guitar.  There was not even a reunion tour for the Mahavishnu Orchestra.  The survivors of jazz’s golden age who got out of jail or kicked heroin picked up where they had left off for a few more years.  Frank Morgan made some beautiful albums in his last few years.  Sonny Rollins had some wonderful nights, and Dexter Gordon even made a great movie about his friend Bud Powell.  But for the most part, Bird, Miles, Trane, Monk, Billie Holiday, Duke and the Count had gone off to live with the immortals like Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the “long-hairs” and musical revolutionaries of their day.

For me, going to see the old performers was bittersweet. Angry Pharoah Sanders now playing Coltrane ballads on a warm night at the new Jazz Showcase in Chicago, the fiery McCoy Tyner back to playing lyrically with his trio, and years later, a much older Azar Lawrence recovering from his years of addiction playing to a curious crowd at the Catalina Club in Los Angeles.  All of these were memorable moments. 

But for me, no one captured the excitement of the original jazz sound like the late great Joey DeFrancesco.  Here was a young guy who had the edge of a Philadelphia construction worker, the sound of his hero Jimmy Smith, the passion of Bird, and was a protege like Mozart.  Joey could do anything.  He loved the organ and in my opinion, Hammond should be sending his family royalty checks every month.  He played the Hammond the way it was supposed to sound.  But that wasn’t all.  He played beautiful jazz trumpet, tenor sax, and sang like Bobby Darin.  But it was Joey’s infectious joy that brought everyone in the club back to the days when jazz was still edgy.  Walking into the club when Joey was playing was like walking into the Five Spot to hear Monk, or Birdland in the 50’s.  He brought that wherever he went.  It didn’t matter who he was playing with that night.  With his own band, with Pat Martino, with McLaughlin and Elvin Jones, it was like getting in a Time Machine.  He loved what he did and played over 200 nights a year.  Whenever I could go to hear an older Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, or Herbie Hancock, I went out of reverence and respect.  But when I went to hear Joey, I knew I was going to hear something absolutely infectious, young sounding and new. 

On a circuit of business trips, I was able to see Joey in New York, Los Angeles, and finally back in Chicago all within the space of few weeks.   During the final Chicago show, I stayed through both sets. Finally,  it was 1 am and I had a trial to prepare for in the morning.  I thought I had stayed as long as I possibly could. But, guilt, duty and a crazy judge made me slowly try to sneak up out of my chair and head toward the exit.  As I got up and walked back, Joey signaled to the band and stopped the music.  He looked at me and said, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”  The club burst out into laughter.   When I lamely said that I had a hearing in the morning he told me to “sit my ass back down.”  That was joey.  I stayed until the bitter end, he signed a CD for little daughter and the hearing went just fine the next morning.  Jazz was not some kind of curated bullshit with Joey.  It was life, the same way it had been with all the greats.  And that’s why when he passed way too young at the age of 51 years old, an era of truly lived jazz was coming to a close. 

It will not come back again in my lifetime.  What happened in New Orleans, Kansas City, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 40’s 50’s and 60’s was every bit as earth shaking as what happened in Vienna at the close of the 18^th century.  For a brief time, like a comet whizzing through the sky,  these imperfect beings were the vessels of near perfect divine inspiration — God’s ability to say great things through human frailty.  Not everyone gets to live through a time like this, and I am grateful that I was able to experience at least a moment of it.  But this was lightning in a bottle and all the music scholars, and fake books and jazz critics will not bring it back.  Only a few of us can smile and say we were there.