Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Ben Webster" by Ira Sadoff (©1992 by Ira Sadoff).

He's almost as wide as he is tall. His forehead is broad as an anvil. He glides onto the stage absentmindedly, as if he were on the way to somewhere else. He wears a worn-to-shine brown double-breasted suit and a porkpie hat. He doesn't know we're out there, any of the ten of us, in a small Amsterdam café in 1973. He may not know blacks and whites can use the same bathroom everywhere now, that the Vietnam War is winding down, that people may want to hear his music again. He was chased here a decade ago, by racial prejudice, by the lack of work, by television and rock and roll, by free jazz. He's relic of jazz history.

He snaps his fingers and nods to the rhythm section. They're out of tune, they don't play together, they play figures and chord changes from the fifties, they're a little too loud, and worst of all, they're bored. He's done these same tunes night after night and they want to play something more modern, more dissonant.

He growls at them and keeps snapping his fingers until they pick up the beat. Then he lift up the saxophone, opens his eyes as if for the first time, and moves to the edge of the stage, where a Dutch girl is drinking coffee and talking with her boyfriend. He moves the sax in her direction; he serenades her. He plays "Prelude to a Kiss," a ballad he learned with Ellington band forty years before. It makes you want to wince, until he's eight notes into the melody. Then you find you're hypnotized by the pure beauty of his instrument, by the remarkable voice, by the wordless story the melody tells. By the unrelenting melancholy, the history of the familiar tune played as if you've never heard it before. This is Ben Webster, two months before he dies on September 9, 1973. He's the musician who can always move you, who's relentless, who knows the secret of the melody. Who, like many of our artists, dies alone and impoverished and completely unappreciated.

Jazz is an expression of the history of a people, because every musician must understand its history before being able to play. But rather than exalting the individual imagination, rather than exalting the perverse notion that complexity and eccentricity are themselves virtues, that design and pure intellect prove the greatness of the art, jazz depends upon improvisation and community. A familiar tune is given an interpretation. The individual experience of the artist intersects with the community. Call and response, originated in West Africa, lets artists interact with each other, respond to each other’s ideas. They can break in on one another, they can cut each other up, they alter the whole tone and rhythm of a piece.

When I listened to the music of the music of Ben Webster, though, I forget all the intellectual justifications for jazz; those rules simply don't apply. Webster reduces me to pure feeling, to mood and attitude. I don't care what tune he plays and I don't often care who's playing with him. I can't claim to hear notes I have never heard before; I don't hear configurations, inventions of melody I've never imagined. Instead I hear a voice. A human voice, A timbre, an imagination, a way of playing that comprehends the nuance, the suggestion of phrase. His tone is thick and reedy, throaty, almost as full of air as note. Our understanding requires patience. He might play a series of quarter notes and then suddenly linger on the penultimate or final note of a phrase as if to say, "Look at what’s inside this note." Sometime the note will bleed onto the next phrase, the next chord change. But always Webster's signature—the raspy sound and the deliberation of phrase—gives a ballad the texture of what jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk would call "the inflated tear."

Webster moves me by the sheer force of personality, I see the torchy ballads in small, dimly lit cafés. I imagine a life that's full of hurtful memories. And I can see a lonely finger holding back his rage. The outsider who knows that love is the only possible salvation, but salvation is only something to long for. You only have to listen to his renditions of "Where Are You?" or "When Your Lover Has Gone," to follow the quest and be consoled by the experience. And though his tone darkens over his forty-year career, though he chooses gruffness over grace, the tunes change only in minor ways. He might cross out a note, a phrase, stretch or compress it, and although the change is not essential. Webster's greatest gift as an artist is his ability to inhabit the tone of a tune each time he gets up on the stand.