America's real music.

AMERICA'S REAL MUSIC

I HAVE BEEN listening with lingeringpleasure to two recordings of the music of William Grant Still--"one of our greatest American composers,' Leopold Stokowski said of him. There is an element of indignation in that pleasure because Still has been elbowed aside by shallower talents such as those of Aaron Copland, who tried but never captured the American idiom. In his great outpouring of music--some two hundred compositions in every category --Still expressed the sweep and melody of this country, the pounding heart of jazz, the surging human protest of the blues, and the attenuated sensibility of popular song.

There is a rich and dramatic simplicityto Still's music, a rejoicing and a searching, and a transcendentally quiet voice--expressed without the hubba-hubba of modernism or the pretensions of atonality. He could write a Concerto for Clarinet for the Artie Shaw band and the Sunday Symphony, which I have been otically contemplating. This symphony--excellently performed by Carlton Woods and the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (201 N. East Avenue, Fayetteville, Ark. 72701)--and his ballet Lenox Avenue (Legend Records, P.O. Box 1941, Glendale Calif. 91209), with Still conducting --demonstrate the debt owed him by George Gershwin's larger and smaller works, and they sing to us more pertinently and beautifully.

Jazz, of course, is the apotheosis ofthe American voice--or was until the raucous cultural degradation of the 1960s. And the most artistically conscious and formed expression of jazz was Duke Ellington's. He was in the jazz jargon a "piano player'--but the jazz orchestra was his real instrument. Though he gave rein to his superb soloists--Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart, Johnny Hodges, and others--his recordings were integrated compositions. He imposed his genius as composer and arranger on everything he did and on the musicians who played with him.

I remember, in the days when hewas occasionally recording with a small combo drawn from the full orchestra, how he would walk into the studio with several themes he had jotted down on the back of an envelope on his way down from Sugar Hill. He huddled with the group, noodled the themes on the piano, huddled again-- and they ran through it once. Ellington would give some more directions, and they recorded. The product was always Ellingtonian to the core. There were times when, like Homer, he nodded, but he never blundered. And it is important always to remember that this or that recording, however arresting, was but a part of his entire oeuvre, part of an endless poem in jazz.

An important part of that poem canbe heard in four albums (eight LPs) issued by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Ellington's home town --Duke Ellington 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941. Here you have a compendium of the inexhaustible Ellington melody --with addenda from Billy Strayhorn, the effete arranger who so thoroughly absorbed the Ellington style, and from some of his sidemen including the valve trombonist Juan Tizol. And here you have the incomparable Ellington beat that ranged from the 4/4, 6/8/, and 6/4 rhythms of jazz to his own translation of the more complex African configurations. It is a cornucopia of Ellingtonian jazz and one that belongs in every collection.

From the Smithsonian Institution,there is also a series of recordings evoking a past era of musical comedy --another distinctive American contribution to the world's store of music. The song of the Paris boite and the London music hall had its own zing and spirit. The American musical comedy drew from the pot au feu of Tin Pan Alley, and in the hands of the Cole Porters, the Harold Arlens, the George Gershwins, and the Irving Berlins --to name but a few--molded its own genre--witty, sentimental, jumping, and lyrical.

Instead of recasting such musicals asthe Gershwin Lady, Be Good, the Porter Let's Face It, Red, Hot, and Blue, and Leave It to Me, and the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz The Bandwagon in today's style, the Smithsonian Institution searched out old shellacs of the stars of these shows made at the time and linked them together in what we now call "original cast' recordings. So you can hear Fred and Adele Astaire, with Gershwin at the piano; the lung-busting Ethel Merman; and others of the original casts singing the tunes that still make the heart quicken and the foot tap.

Lest the fans of the late and greatBenny Goodman feel that I have slighted him, let me call to their attention an extraordinary recording, Benny and Sid "Roll 'Em' (MARLOR Productions, P.O. Box 156, Hicksville, N.Y. 11812, an adjunct of the Merritt Record Society). The studio recordings of the Goodman band captured its drive and power, dominated by Goodman's solos, but compressed into a Procrustean three-minute span. Roll 'Em is the Goodman band "live,' when it could spread out and other soloists could make their voices heard. The air shots in this album were recorded when the band had the tremendous lift of Sidney Catlett, perhaps the greatest drummer in the annals of jazz. The ex-Ellingtonian Cootie Williams officiated in the trumpet section. This is the Goodman we heard when we crowded around the bandstand--and the recording is one of the finest in his catalogue.

Another jazz recording I can recommendwith no reservations is Porgy and Bess Revisited (DRG-Disques Swing). Produced by George T. Simon, the veteran jazz critic and regisseur, it substitutes for the voices of the Gershwin opera Cootie Williams's clean open horn, Rex Stewart's innovative attack, Hilton Jefferson's elegant alto, and Lawrence Brown's warm trombone. (All four of these musicians are Ellington alumni.) Pinky Williams, whom I had never heard before, offers a finely phrased tenor sax. Each soloist represents a character in the Gershwin work, and together they give the score a new dimension.

The original cast of Porgy and Bessgave us operatic voices--Lawrence Tibbett and Helen Jepson. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, working together, delivered the opera to jazz. This recording and its fine instrumentalists set it in the context of the jazz and blues tradition, from which Gershwin drew his inspiration.