Joe Jackson: On Your Radio

Joe Jackson's 2000 album Night and Day II

Happy birthday to Joe Jackson, born David Ian Jackson, who celebrates No. 57 today — hopefully with a drink and a smoke, if he wants one.

No matter how you may feel about “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”, or Jackson’s many swings or changes in style, give thanks to Jackson for this: he helped a whole new generation get acquainted with Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway and their genre with his 1981 Jumping Jive album. Jackson’s brief tribute on the back was almost as good as the music:

When my dad was my age, jazz was not respectable. It played in whorehouses not Carnegie Hall. These classics from jump, jive and swing are all from the 1940s . . . our main inspiration, Louis Jordan, the king of jukeboxes, who influenced so many but is acknowledged by so few. Like us he didn’t aim at purists or even jazz fans — just anyone who wanted to listen and enjoy. Reap this righteous riff.

There’s been much to reap in Jackson’s career. The album title Night and Day is taken from a Cole Porter song; his current project is a tribute to Duke Ellington, and his other albums have fallen everywhere on the eclectic scale, in parts witty, sarcastic, angry and consistently unpredictable.

“I’ve always been pretty diverse,” Jackson tells Michael Hill on his website, joejackson.com. “It you go back and listen to the first album, you might find that it’s pretty eclectic. I think that artists, especially new ones, get slotted into one movement or genre or another. People were so anxious to put me in a certain category that they didn’t notice how eclectic Look Sharp! was, so they acted surprised a bit later. It’s kind of ironic.”

Many of the pictures of Jackson on his website have him looking sharp, with a cigarette in hand. In fact, there’s a separate header for Smoking; the campaigns against it in public are apparently his biggest peeve. He left New York, reportedly to live in Germany, in part because of it.

From a 2003 op-ed piece Jackson wrote for The New York Times:  ”New York used to have an edge — that sense that something thrilling can happen at any moment and that anyone, not just rich people and tourists, can be a part of it. Now even the bohemians are turning sanctimonious . . . the smoking ban is the last straw, the thing that has me packing my bags in utter
disgust.”

Leaving New York? Say it ain’t so Joe.

Sources: Joejackson.com, billboard.com, wikipedia.org

Jackie McLean: Right now

Jackie McLean: Bluesnik

Remembering alto saxophonist Jackie McLean on the anniversary of his death five years ago at the age of 74.

McLean grew up in Harlem in a musical neighborhood — Sonny Rollins was close in age and home — and his work was a constant in the early 1960s. From 1959-67 he produced almost 20 albums for Blue Note, and few complained that his volume was affecting the quality.

McLean’s output, was in part, because like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and others,  he had lost his cabaret  card, which entitled him to perform in New York. Jazz.com said McLean, befriended by Charlie Parker, was warned by Parker to avoid drugs, “even as he asked to borrow his horn so he could pawn it to buy a fix.” But McLean served six months in jail during the height of his production, in 1964, although he reportedly beat his addiction when he got out.

McLean became a teacher of music at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School, where today the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz is named for him.

“McLean’s playing was once described as hurt, lonely and, as a result, angry,” wrote Ira Gitler in the liner notes to 1961′s Bluesnik album. “This was true of an earlier Jackie. Today he is still very much a hard swinger but the anger has abated to a large degree. He has matured in many ways and this is reflected in his music.”

Bobby Short: You Do Something To Me

Remembering Bobby Short on the day after the anniversary of  his death at age 80 in 2005.

Short was famous for calling himself a saloon singer, which made him sound like the guy you wanted to go to Karaoke Monday with. Hardly.

His home bar was the Cafe Carlyle at The Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — we shudder to ask what the drinks cost, let alone the rooms.

But the best bargain there was Short, who performed standards on the rocks — heavy on the Cole Porter — for more than 35 years for New York’s elite. Of course, you could avoid the cover or two-drink minimums and elbow-rubbing by buying an album.

From Enid Nemy’s New York Times obit on Short (link below): “Over the years, Mr. Short transcended the role of cabaret entertainer to become a New York institution and a symbol of civilized Manhattan culture.”

 

New York Times on the death of Bobby Short