/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/MUSIC-US: Does Jazz Have a Sense of Humour?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 7 1999 (IPS) - The title of jazz pianist Horace Silver’s new album makes an argument that listeners may find puzzling: ‘Jazz Has a Sense of Humour.’

The 71-year-old Silver – who has already recorded some of the wittiest compositions in the jazz song books, including ‘Filthy McNasty’ and ‘The Jody Grind’ – clearly wants to prove that jazz is fun.

Still, he could face an uphill battle to convince to US audiences who, in recent years, either have rejected acoustic jazz in favour of the funkier “smooth jazz” dance music currently played on the radio or treated it as a modern variation of classical music.

Some jazz musicians have led the way to making jazz seem as stiff and formal as European classical music, with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis – director of the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra – playing a major role in bringing jazz to the concert halls.

Ironically, jazz music hasn’t hit the US pop charts in 11 years, since Bobby McFerrin’s a capella composition ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ – aided by McFerrin’s bizarre vocal effects and a video showing him clowning around with Robin Williams – topped the listings in the industry’s bible ‘Billboard.’

With jazz in danger of being seen as stuffy by young audiences, it comes as a relief that Silver has come up with nine new compositions with such titles as ‘Ah-Ma-Tell’ and ‘I Love Annie’s Big Fat Fanny.’

Not only does ‘Jazz Has a Sense of Humour’ – produced on the Verve label – boast several stomping, upbeat tunes with funny titles, it allows listeners to sing along – despite the lack of actual singing on the record.

Silver has included a lyric sheet, with words he composed, that offers a witty accompaniment to the instrumental music played by his quintet.

The lyrics to ‘Gloria,’ for example, follow the twisting pattern of Ryan Kisor’s trumpet playing while they send a plea of love to a woman named Gloria, “whether you’re in Queens or in Astoria.”

Silver offers comparably whimsical lyrics to honour of Annie’s big ‘rear end’, as well as a three-song suite dedicated to women of various body types, called respectively ‘Too Much Mama,’ ‘Not Enough Mama’ and ‘Just Right Mama.’

If the rather overdone focus on the female body seems a tad out of date for the 1990s, Silver makes it clear that the album is a throwback to an earlier era of loose, funny jazz.

The pianist dedicated the album to ‘Fats’ Waller, the brilliant composer who mixed humour with pathos on such songs as ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ and ‘What Did I Do (To Be So Black and Blue).’

The loving care with which Silver prepares his album – from the appended lyrics to the cartoonish depiction of the quintet on the cover – belies the seriousness of the effort underway to make jazz seem less… well, less serious.

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s brother, tried last year to shake up the stiff image of modern jazz musicians by putting out an album, ‘Buckshot LaFonque’ (on Sony) that combined rap, dance music and some whimsical jazz playing.

Cornetist Don Byron has tried to liven up his compositions by combining jazz playfully with Yiddish klezmer music and performing the songs of Raymond Scott, who wrote much of the music for the old Warner Brothers cartoons that featured Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Even Wynton Marsalis, after years of projecting the somber, tuxedoed image of the serious jazz composer, has lightened up a little for his recent series of Sony albums, called ‘Swinging into the 21st Century.’

The latest of those albums, ‘Big Train,’ owes a lot to the charging, propulsive train-based tunes written by big band leader Duke Ellington, such as ‘Happy-Go-Lucky Local’ and the ever- popular ‘Take the A Train.’

Marsalis’s band stomp their way through tunes designed to suggest the bustle of cafe cars and high-speed rails – with fast- moving horns and shuffling beats updating the sound of the Ellington-era train songs.

If Wynton Marsalis – who won a special Pulitzer Prize for his excruciatingly long, somber slavery suite ‘Blood on the Cross’ – is trying to inject some more fun into his music, the tide must be turning.

Maybe ‘Jazz Has a Sense of Humour’ might sound less like an argument in a few years, and more like a statement of fact.