Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (2 page)

If you listen you will hear that Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bunny Berigan, all those fellas, though they were great individually, they played as a group completely different . . . When they played for us, we sang and we gave them certain little breaks and things we wanted them to do back of us that made them sound completely different on our records than they did on anybody else's.

Jack Kapp, always apprehensive about the commercial potential of the Sisters' work, often clashed with Connie about the eccentric treatment of the material. After he moved the group to his new label, American Decca, in 1935, he was able to exert more control, especially over the tracks Connie recorded as a solo artist. Her vocals, while never less than lovely, started to lose their drive and the arrangements became more conventional. A year later, Martha and Vet retired to tend to their new husbands and families, leaving Connie, who had married their manager, to continue on her own. Although Connie's career bubbled along nicely up through the war years, she was never to be quite the innovator she was when she sang with her sisters. After the breakup, the Boswell-worshipping Andrews Sisters, employing a more accessible version of their basic harmony style, stepped into the vacuum and went on to great commercial
glory. But the Jazz Age was over. The great swing bands (with a few exceptions) collapsed and the era of the celebrity soloist had begun.

Connie, now Connee (don't ask), obliged to share the stage with entertainers like Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Doris Day—folks who could walk and dance and strut in front of movie cameras—couldn't compete. When she performed with her sisters, Connie had usually been seated next to Martha on the piano bench with Vet standing close behind: three belles in the parlor made a nice picture. Alone, Connie struggled to make up for her disability with cybernetic help: special chairs or braces with wheels worn under her flowing skirts. But by the late forties, her star had grown dimmer. It was fine for Louis Armstrong to stand under the lights sweating bullets and waving that handkerchief around, but a white woman, no matter how good she sounded, needed to be standing up behind the mic, projecting confidence, looking good.

After the invention of the long-playing disc reinvigorated the record business in the fifties, Connie had a last hurrah with a few well-produced jazz and pop LPs. Her final recording, in 1962, was a rockabilly tune she wrote herself: “You Ain't Got Nothin'.” Her range had dropped, but Connie was more than comfortable singing over the boogie bass and twanging guitar, sounding a bit like a toned-down Wanda Jackson or Brenda Lee. At fifty-five, more so than any of her contemporaries, she was still a rhythm gal through and through.

One wonders what trajectory Connie's life might have followed if not for the complex challenges presented by her disability. On the other hand, the connection between Connie's
childhood misfortunes and her early work might stand in support of Edmund Wilson's theory of “the wound and the bow.” Wilson suggests that the themes of an artist's work represent a healing reenactment of some primal injury—in this case, a literal, physical injury. Confronted with a piece of material—a popular song—Connie's instinct was to pull it apart, reorganize its parts and reshape it into something richer than the original. Like the painter Frida Kahlo, born in the same year, Connie was able to exploit her physical calamity in the formation of her art using similar means: irony, startling juxtaposition of events, even surrealism. Fortunately for Connie, she was able to rely on Martha and Vet, who, from childhood, were enlisted as both her caretakers and her willing conspirators.

Of course, the first time you hear these dynamic sides from the beginning of the last century, none of this is immediately apparent. Whatever suffering might have contributed to the Boswells' artistry has been transformed by some alchemy of the human spirit into pure joy. From the downbeat, we're transported to Jazz Age New Orleans: we hear the music that was in the streets, in the churches, in the improvisations of the piano professors of Storyville, and the laughter of three teenage girls for whom, in the words of W. S. Gilbert's three little maids from school, “life is a joke that's just begun.”

In the late fifties and early sixties, Henry Mancini's music was omnipresent: on TV, in films and featured in select elevators all over the world. For many, his music, along with that of the popular Dave Brubeck Quartet, served as an introduction to the sound of modern jazz.

I
must have been about eight years old when my father, like so many other second-generation American dads, decided to get his family the hell out of the city and make a run at upward mobility in the suburbs. After a couple of years and a few false starts, we finally settled into a ranch-style home nestled among hundreds of its near-identical brothers in Kendall Park, New Jersey, a typical housing development circa 1957. The development was not very developed. I was not happy.

Sawdust still hung in the air. To walk out of the sliding glass doors onto the slab of concrete that was the patio and stare across an ocean of mud at one's doppelganger neighbors was, well, awesome. My parents, gazing out the window of the kitchen of the future, delighted in the open space, the gently curving streets and the streamlined look of the cream Olds Dynamic 88 all cozy in its carport. But for me, a subterranean in
gestation with a real nasty case of otherness, it was a prison. I'd been framed and sentenced to a long stretch at hard labor in Squaresville.

The days were filled with whatever a fifth grader's days are filled with. In the evening, after wolfing down a few servings of fish sticks, I'd fling myself onto the couch in the family room. My dad would sit at the card table doing take-home work on his yellow accounting pad. My mother would be in the kitchen eliminating microscopic particles of food from the counters. My baby sister, Susan, would be flinging wads of Play-Doh at the wall. Of course, the TV would be on. Monday nights at nine, we watched
Peter Gunn
.

Beatsters! Brothers in the subculture of the Early Resigned! Reminisce with me: after a suspenseful, highly stylized teaser, we'd thrill to the driving boogie ostinato on bass, doubled in the lowest octaves of the piano and tripled by a raunchy surf guitar, the same bar repeated throughout, never changing. The drummer's on auto-cook. Close-voiced brass plays the angular, blues-based theme. On the screen we see the title animation, a bogus abstract expressionist canvas with cryptic, splattery forms pulsing in the foreground. Even then we may have known it was jive, but who cared? The titles, action-painted on top of all this, told us the show was created by Blake Edwards and that the music was by Henry Mancini.

During the fifties there had been a number of TV shows that exploited the combination of film noir and jazz-based music, such as
Naked City
and
Richard Diamond
and
M Squad
. But 1958's
Peter Gunn
was the noirest of them all. Edwards's update of the Chandleresque detective story, with its tense visual style,
demanded a suitably chilled-out sound track, and Mancini, who had scored Orson Welles's
Touch of Evil
that same year, seemed to understand what this show was all about: style, and nothing much else in particular. “The
Miami Vice
of its time,” a friend of mine remarked. Craig Stevens as Gunn would cruise around a narcotized and vulgarly luxurious Los Angeles like Cary Grant on Miltown, doing his job of detection and occasionally alighting at Mother's, a nightclub where his main squeeze, Edie, worked as a jazz singer. (The slow make-out scenes between Gunn and Edie, played by Lola Albright, seemed not to belong in the family room, and it was no cinch trying to conceal my erotic dithers from my parents.) Every so often, he'd check in with his pal Lieutenant Jacoby, the good cop. But Gunn may as well have been drifting through a landscape of boomerangs and parallelograms, so little did the plots matter. What counted was the sense that these people had been around the block a few times, had found a way to live amid the stultifying sleaziness of the modern world, keeping their emotions under control except for occasional spasms of sex and violence.

Of course, these weren't authentic hipsters, Mailer's White Negroes or Kerouac's Beats. Gunn, Edie and Jacoby were supposed to be more like pallies of Sinatra or James Bond, streetwise swingers: they were hip, but they could operate in the straight world with an existential efficiency. And yet, so strong was the pull toward an alternate way of life that, at least to a hyperaesthetic ten-year-old, the show's whole gestalt made sense. It spoke to my condition. I could identify with Gunn's outsider stance and admire his improvised lifestyle without
venturing outside the perimeter of comfort and convenience my parents had provided. To the contrary, Edwards's camera eye seemed to take a carnal interest in the luxe and leisure objects of the period, focusing on Scandinavian furniture, potted palms, light wood paneling and sleek shark-finned convertibles. It was, in fact, all the same stuff my parents adored, but darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger. Sort of like seeing a smiling Pan Am pilot climb out of his 707 with a copy of
La Nausée
sticking out of his back pocket.

Mancini didn't have to look far to find the appropriate sound to enhance Edwards's vision of anomie deluxe. At the time, West Coast jazz (essentially, white bop) was being offered to college kids as part of the same package that included the Beats, open-toed sandals and psychoanalysis. The white bopper playing a subdued parlor jazz was an easier sell than his black counterpart. Sure, the image spoke, the crew-cut cool-schoolers may be, like the black boppers, wigged out, self-destructive hopheads (something you, the middle class, are fascinated by), but they're also safely Caucasian and get to spend a lot of time at Hermosa Beach.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of very talented players on the coast and Mancini was canny enough to bring them into the studio to record the
Gunn
scores. Future film score titan John Williams was the piano player. The studio band also included trumpeter Pete Candoli, brothers Ted and Dick Nash (reeds and trombone), guitarist Bob Bain, drummer Jack Sperling and vibraphonist Larry Bunker. The idiom he used was largely out of Gil Evans and other progressive arrangers plus the odd shot of rhythm and blues. He utilized the unconventional, spare
instrumentation associated with the cool school: French horns, vibraphone, electric guitar and—Mancini's specialty—a very active flute section, including both alto flute and the rarely used bass flute. Instruments were often individually miked to bring out the detail. For small groups, Mancini hijacked the elegant “locked hands” voicing style associated with pianists Milt Buckner and George Shearing. There was a lot of empty space. It was real cool.

Mancini's albums of music from the
Peter Gunn
series and the spin-off show,
Mr. Lucky
, sold in the zillions, and I was one of the proud consumers. The tunes had titles like “Dreamsville” and “A Profound Gass.” The music inspired me to learn more about jazz and the extramusical artifacts of the jazz life. I listened to late-night jazz jocks broadcasting out of Manhattan and got a subscription to
Down Beat
, which had lots of live-action photos of the top players. I tried to get through a few Kerouac novels.

Out of these fragments of hip and hype I constructed in my mind a kind of Disneyland of Cool. I could imagine musicians cruising up and down Central Avenue in cartoon Studebakers and finally assembling in a large sound studio. Folding chairs, music stands. The cats are sitting in a semicircle around a couple of those enormous RCA microphones on boom stands, some in two-tone shirts with roll collars, others in Hawaiian gear and bop glasses. Horns are slipped out of canvas gig bags. There's a potted palm in the corner. Hank Mancini walks in, not the tanned, carefully coiffed entertainer of later years, but the introspective young professional as pictured on his late-fifties album covers. Everybody's smoking Pall Malls or some other powerful
nonfilter cigarettes. Hank hands out the parts. When they run down the chart, a thick membrane of sound flows forth and hovers in the room. It sounds incredibly plush. Behind the glass, the engineers at the console are digging it. Maybe a few smokin' chicks in black tights fall by. And so on.

•   •   •

T
he next time I saw Henry Mancini's name was in the credit roll of
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, also directed by our man Blake Edwards. I was thirteen and ready for love. When the venal waif Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) got out of that cab on Fifth Avenue in a black dress and pearls in the early morning, I wanted to sip her through a straw.

Whenever I mention this picture to someone around my age, a strange, tragic smile flits across his or her face as if in remembrance of an old lover. Even those who dismiss the film as a piece of typical Hollywood fluff that took the sting out of Capote's original story, blah, blah, are betrayed by a wetness in the eyes, a heaving chest and an occasional shudder of bliss/pain. Obviously, some part of the nervous system wants to acknowledge the film's impact.

Edwards's special interest in marginality in an expensive setting made him a good choice for this urban romance, but it was his huckleberry friend Hank who really came through. We may have OD'd on “Moon River” long ago, but, as played on the harmonica during that opening scene, it still does the job. The harmonica, an instrument associated with children, stands in for Holly's rural origins (innocence) and contrasts with the rich orchestration and what you're seeing on the screen (Tiffany's, Givenchy shades, sophistication). It's a great effect, much
imitated since. Later on, Hepburn sits on the fire escape and sings “Moon River” while accompanying herself on the guitar. She's wearing pedal pushers and a sweatshirt. In Capote's novel, she sings, more appropriately, a mournful country ballad, but why quibble with perfection?

As in
Peter Gunn
, the city is presented as a grid of luxe through which the outsider characters, Holly and Paul, drift. To score the scenes in which they goof around town, Mancini used a mixed chorus singing in a skidoo-be-doo scat style similar to that of the Modernaires or the Mel-Tones. This was a little twee for my taste. By 1961 I was starting to wise up about jazz, and I felt that Hank, by exploiting this blanched-out idiom from the previous decade, had exposed himself as a bit of a moldy fig. Nevertheless, it enhanced the concept of a carefree, womblike Manhattan in which the bohemian ruled with a magical, childlike omnipotence. In high school I would have given anything to preserve that sanctified state, to rescue Holly from herself (from growing up, being corrupted), to goof around an enchanted Manhattan with some wild thing forever, scat singers always on call to back us up.

Eventually, my quest for relevance and authenticity (plus a not unsound instinct as to where the most desirable girls were gathering) propelled me into a phase where even the greatest jazz—Ellington, Miles, Mingus, Monk—seemed slick and sexually coy, and I turned to blues and soul music and Bob Dylan. I started reading about pop art and Timothy Leary's experiments at Harvard. I went to a lot of Brit movies of the kitchen-sink school. The language of hip was changing.

In his own way Blake Edwards was sensitive to this shift in
consciousness. Super-suave Peter Gunn had evolved into Inspector Clouseau, who tries to stay cool but finds the world just too opposed to the notion. The luxe is still there but the alienation is played for laughs. The expensive objects (custom pool cues, cigarette lighters, etc.) literally attack Clouseau. When Edwards began to sabotage his own hero, it should have been a tip-off as to what was coming. Egos were cracking. Self-image and sexual identity got hazy around the edges. When Clouseau runs across a cool jazz combo in
A Shot in the Dark
, they're gigging in a nudist colony and they're in their birthday suits. The old, heavily defended hipster has literally been stripped naked. As for the music in the Pink Panther films, it has become an extravagant parody of coolness—it's funny because it's too spooky, too cool to be believed.

By the time I left suburbia to go off to college in 1965, Mancini seemed a quaint enthusiasm. If I thought about him at all, he would have seemed, at best, a popularizer of jazz, a dependable Hollywood professional. I'm sure some guys in my dorm would have seen him as an insidious agent of the “culture industry” that was devouring America's native art form and packaging it for mass consumption. Although I didn't think in those terms, by the late sixties Hank had metamorphosed, certainly in my mind, into an incredible square. His popular tunes from films, his recordings and pops concert appearances had turned him into a Grammy-laden institution of American entertainment. The concept of hip had exploded into the culture in a new form, and Mancini (and mainstream jazz in general) was definitely not part of it, despite all those boogaloo beats that started creeping into his scores. For a while, Mancini
and the younger contender Burt Bacharach (who arguably was to soul music what Mancini was to jazz) seemed to be engaged in a series of bossa nova wars (Bacharach won at least one round with the Manciniesque “The Look of Love,” sung by Dusty Springfield in the Peter Sellers film
Casino Royale
). Occasionally I'd see a photo of Mancini in those days, looking amiably affluent in a Hatari bush jacket with epaulets, fashionably long sideburns, a Rodeo Drive smile and a very expensive watch: a pleasant, cheerful-looking California person. Somewhere in there he had a TV show,
The Mancini Generation
. Yow.

In the irony-saturated eighties, though, New Wavers and punk bands from a generation even more tube-irradiated than mine transmuted the
Peter Gunn
theme into a kind of No Wave national anthem. Bands like the Lounge Lizards played “fake jazz” on purpose and, even now, the downtown art-rock crowd still can't seem to get enough of Hank. There's an orchestra in Paraguay that plays his stuff on instruments made from garbage.