Things have this funny way of finding you sometimes.
Check this: St. James Infirmary by Charlie Shavers
This version of “St. James Infirmary” is from a recording labeled “At A Famous Jazz Party: 1958,” credited to Charlie Shavers and Coleman Hawkins. You can buy the record; it’s issued on the Jazz Factory label, but it’s basically a recording from a jam session at a home in New Jersey.
Jam session. Huh? Musicians getting together just to play and listen to each other; to show off a little, to learn… to cut and be cut. This musical dialogue made the music a living, breathing entity subject to the whims of the players and the mood of the moment. It forced musician and audience to engage in real time, to converse, to respond. Very intangible, this music; played once (from where?) and gone, vanished into the air and the memories of those who happen to be there.
Thank god the tape recorder was running at Art Ford’s in Newark in 1958 to capture this version of St. James Infirmary. It is stunning music. “Gut-bucket” doesn’t come close to describing the grit and earth and fire in this performance. Shavers’ vocal is pure blue, a wrenching and intense top-of-the-range baring of the soul full of wracked vocal-cords (yet pitch-perfect – he’s a horn-player afterall, a musician of high order!) and trumpet interjections. He name-checks drummer Sonny Greer (“she’ll never find another mother-man like Sonny Greer and me”), who is the other star of this performance, playing malleted tom-toms and cymbals and balancing and counter-commenting and instigating at every dynamic shift from whisper-quiet to full-on New Orleans brass rage. Sonny was Duke Ellington’s drummer in the 30s and 40s, a master orchestrator and, in the tradition of the best musicians, a terrific “of-the-moment” improviser. All the while, an active and engaged and enthusiastic audience sings along and shouts their approval.
I think this performance could go a long way toward dispelling some myths about jazz as cerebral music, and certainly about “perfection” as the high goal of a recording or performance. This is as intense, as emotion-packed, as passionate as any music before or since. It is not intellectual or detached. It is not ironic (not in the modern way). Nor is the song (which has been recorded by tons of people, from Louis Armstrong to Lou Rawls to the White Stripes) particularly biographical or personal. Yet, the performance is transporting, placing the listener in the midst of a band singing and playing compelling music surrounded by an awed, encouraging and appreciative audience. It’s fucking magical.
Sometimes when I think about all the music available online (including some of my own) that only exists in digital code as mp3s or on someone’s iTunes playlist, I worry about the intangibility of it. Does not being able to hold an artifact in your hand – a cd, a record (of an event, as Ani DiFranco said) - make it less meaningful, less real? I worry that consuming music mostly individually through ear buds or as ring tones on cell phones or background noise at restaurants and clothing stores (“life-style acoutrement” – now that’s something you can put a price on!) devalues the art somehow, divorces musician and audience, especially when there are fewer and fewer opportunities to hear real live music. I worry about the loss of the collectivist spirit among musicians and listeners that produces magic music like this ”St. James Infirmary.”
But things are as they are and I’m not trying to pedal nostalgia. It’s awesome that through modern technology I can upload this song and share it with you online. It’s awesome that the tape machine was running to capture it in 1958 and that someone at Jazz Factory took the time and expense to press it on cd and release it in the 2000s, even though the audience for it is miniscule. It’s awesome luck that I happened to check this record out of the library and hear the song at all. Things have this funny way of finding you sometimes…