"Crazy" for jazz and country

Wednesday night I caught a preview screening of “Crazy,” a film that seems to have been micro-targeted at my own small but proud demographic – those obsessed with guitars, the golden age of Nashville and the fuzzy, fascinating border between country music and jazz. And if you’re into  tragic romance, it’s got something for you too. It’s a biopic about Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland, believed by many to be the best guitarist to ever play in the studios of Music City. The film, written and directed by Rick Bieber, has won several film festival awards and opens nationally in a couple of weeks. 

Garland was a star session player who came up in hillbilly music but who discovered and mastered jazz, often to the bewilderment and, I’m sure, envy of his Nashville peers. While the film is chiefly about fidelity, passion, music and madness, and while it's not perfect in its pacing and editing, it offers probably the most realistic portrait of an instrumentalist’s life I’ve ever seen on film. We see how Garland kept his session logs, his disputes over his role as a session arranger and a lingering, almost erotic sequence of Garland caring for his guitars. There are even scenes of him practicing, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in a music movie before because I’m sure Hollywood execs would declare that boring and cut it out of a studio film. In fact, watching Garland, played intensely by Waylon Payne, go over scales and arpeggios spoke volumes about who he was and how he got where he did, while giving the film room to breathe and us a chance to reflect on his turmoil. The director is apparently a guitar player, and it showed.

(I should note that the movie takes major dramatic liberties with the Garland story, but I found a great batch of biographical info about Hank HERE.)

It was also extraordinary to see a filmmaker tackle the potent musical territory between country and jazz, because one of the coolest parts of Nashville’s history is the degree to which the A-Team guys played jazz in Printer’s Alley in their off hours and how a few special session players like Garland made jazz albums for major labels.

This comes along after a week when I found myself thinking a lot about the mysterious bonds between jazz and country, specifically its most jazz-like offshoot, bluegrass music. It began about a week ago when Roger Brown, president of Berklee College of Music in Boston, gave the keynote speech at the annual World of Bluegrass convention here in Nashville. Berklee has graduated some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians over the years, but more recently, the school has become a haven for instrumentalists reared on bluegrass but who want to take that music into more improvised and adventuresome territory. My friends Casey Driessen and Chris Pandolfi are among the graduates, but there’s a large contingent at the school today, some of whom played at IBMA as the much-buzzed-about Boys from Boston.

Brown really hit me where I live when he built his speech around the historic, musical and cosmic parallels between bluegrass and jazz, specifically be-bop. He was in territory I wrote about last year in profiling saxophonist Bill Evans and his Soulgrass project. I quote Brown at some length, because he pushed the argument into some interesting places:

 Aside from sharing virtually the same birthday, each was created by a small, readily identifiable group of founders, unlike, say the blues, whose origins are more murky. And interestingly, several of those men were born within a 60 miles radius: Earl Scruggs born in Shelby, North Carolina; Doc Watson in Deep Gap, North Carolina; Thelonius Monk in Rocky Mount, North Carolina; John Coltrane from Hamlet, North Carolina; and Dizzy Gillespie from Cheraw, South Carolina.
 
These creators all experienced a rapid shift from a rural, agrarian life to big towns and cities and a commercial economy that challenged many of the values and mores of their communities.
 
Be-bop and bluegrass were each rooted in a strong musical tradition, but broke with those traditions.  Each was characterized by blazing tempos, virtuosic soloing and a song structure that used standards known to all which promoted jamming and the easy mixing of band members with its resulting cross-pollination.
 
Each tradition had an intriguing balance of collaboration and competition. Soloists pushed each other to unprecedented heights but shared ideas and a common love for the music.
 
The musicians in each genre sustained enough success over their careers to remain active and engaged, but not so much commercial success that they were overwhelmed by it as has happened so often in rock music.
 
I have found no parallel to the practice of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys challenging local baseball teams to games before their gigs in the various towns they visited. Though I do know that Charlie Parker loved country songs for the stories they told and that Dizzy Gillespie told a young Jean Luc Ponty that if he wanted to learn jazz on the violin, he should first study bluegrass because bluegrass fiddlers had developed some serious technique that could be applied to jazz.
 
And both bluegrass and be-bop led to the creation of new technical standards on key instruments: in be-bop, the saxophone emerged as the transcendent tool of improvisation. In bluegrass, the banjo was redefined and elevated. Ironically, be-bop, a form dominated by African-American musicians put an obscure and little used German instrument, the saxophone, at its core, while bluegrass, dominated by European-American musicians, did so with the banjo, originally an African instrument.

This is the kind of hook we can use to not just get people more deeply interested in music, but to get people more attuned to their shared history by using music as the vehicle. Brown’s ecumenical view of music was inspiring, and I suspect that in the new wave of Berklee hotshots we’re going to see some  major new ideas about American music emerge.