It’s an archetypal jazz shot on the cover of the Observer Magazine of 15 February 1987, a grainy Thelonius Monk, one of the great originals, wreathed in smoke and lost in music (‘Player Kings and all that Jazz’).
Russell Davies’s celebration of jazz argued that it had been making something of a comeback (especially in the form of the saxist Courtney Pine). He tried to answer the simple but very slippery question: ‘What is jazz?’ His answer being: ‘Jazz today is almost anything you want it to be.’
Jazz has always had something of an image problem, but then a problem for who? ‘Let’s admit straight away,’ wrote Davies, ‘that to most people it is bunches of greying, potbellied men squalling away in your local pub, sinking all the beer you can buy them and having, in the end, a better time than you.’
But most of the history of jazz was brutal, as Davies succinctly relayed. ‘King Oliver, the cornetist and band leader who taught Louis Armstrong, died as a pool-hall janitor in Savannah. Charlie ‘Big’ Green, Bessie Smith’s favourite accompanist on trombone, froze to death on a doorstep in Harlem. Bessie herself, the Empress of the Blues, had an arm torn off in a car crash and died before the proper hospital treatment could save her.’
‘The last few jazz craftsmen’ from the 20s alive in 1987, wrote Davies, were Doc Cheatham, the trumpeter, who ‘still hits fat, clean, high notes and holds his place in the most athletic trumpet-sections’ and Benny Waters, 85, who ‘attacks any saxophone he can get his hands on with impossible gusto’.
Tellingly, each of the six jazz enthusiasts – including Django Bates and Ronnie Scott – who chose their top 10 jazz records, picked a different John Coltrane album, the one artist they all agreed on. ‘Here’s what most jazz people are in it for – the pleasure of improvisation,’ concluded Davies. ‘Making it up as you go along.’ A bit like… life.
