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.Among the other bountiful joys are Louis and Bing in  Blueberry Hill and Lazy Bones ; Bing, Louis and Jack Teagarden in  Gone Fishin  ; and Bing andElla exulting in the New Orleans tailgating anthem  That s A-Plenty.At the core of all these performances is Crosby.Reading a May 2, 2004, col-umn in the Washington Times, I unexpectedly came upon a tribute to Crosbytitled  Singer of a Century that got to the heart of the abiding pleasure of hissinging.The writer was economist, historian and controversialist Thomas Sowell,not previously known by me, anyway as a music critic:  Part of the greatnessof his art [was] that it looked like it wasn t art.He didn t make a fuss about it, but Bing and Guests Swing on the Air 93he made history with it.It was a little like the way Joe DiMaggio played center-field, making it look easy even when it was superb.I had never met Bing Crosby before the interview in 1976, and I was initiallysomewhat awed; but he was as natural and unaffected as his singing.He did sur-prise me at one point.We were talking about performers who took strong publicpolitical positions, a practice that has increased since then.Crosby frowned. I never thought it was proper, he said,  for a performer touse his influence to get anyone to vote one way or another.He was considered to be a conservative, but he had not leapt on anyone spolitical bandwagon.However, he did tell me that he had been very much againstthe war in Vietnam.That was the first I d heard of it, I said.He frowned again. I didn t know what to do about it, Crosby said. So Ididn t say anything.As I was leaving, I asked if there was anything he d wanted to do that he hadn tyet accomplished.He smiled. No, I really have accomplished just everything Iwanted to.It s been a good life, pleasing people over so many years.He still does, all the way through Swingin with Bing.And though it was solong ago when I first heard him (I was about seven), I can still hear and be movedby  When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.This page intentionally left blankPa rt Si xThe Life Force of the MusicThis page intentionally left blank31 The Joyous Power of Black Gospel MusicMany years ago, as an announcer at a Boston radio station, WMEX, I becameimmersed in multiculturalism.There were regular Italian, Swedish, countrymusic and Jewish hours the last featuring renowned cantors who, I told CharlesMingus at the time, were the Jewish version of deeply resilient blues singers.Saturday nights were a celebration, in one of our studios, of live black gospelmusic, with performers from churches in the Boston area.The disciplined, oftenvirtuosic fervor of this witnessing has often regenerated me from then on.Icollected gospel recordings; and one Sunday morning, during a Newport JazzFestival, hearing Mahalia Jackson in a church in town, made this nonbelieverable to imagine the rewards if I could ever make that leap into faith.Thomas Dorsey, the celebrated gospel composer and impresario who alsoplayed blues piano, said of Mahalia Jackson:  She enjoyed her religion that wasthe key, the core of her singing. He had been her coach.A stunning CD, Gospel Music (Hyena Records, 2006) is a bonanza of that joy-ous, pulsating power, exemplified by a range of classic black gospel soul stirrers:among them, the Swan Silvertones, the Harmonizing Four, the Staple Singers,the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, the Reverend James Cleveland and ofcourse Mahalia Jackson.For years, searching in second-hand record stores, I particularly lookedfor what David Stowe, a historian of American culture (How Sweet the Sound,Harvard University Press, 2004), describes as  the communal experience, inan urban setting,  of the antebellum  hush harbor, where a  caller would evokeresponses among participants as co-worshippers rather than as a subservientflock responding to an authoritative leader. In the rising climaxes of  Get RightChurch and  Be Decided to Die in this set, James Cleveland and his congrega-tion communally leap out of these grooves.The other performers in Gospel Music are also in the tradition of  callers whoare reverberatingly skilled, as Mr.Stowe notes, in  inspiring a response withoutdictating it, eliciting and evoking through example rather than through prescrip-tion. Being moved out of my chair by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet s  GoWhere I Send Thee, I was brought back to years ago, hearing such compellingsounds on a street in Harlem that led me into a Daddy Grace assembly where Ialmost became part of the congregation.This glorious revival of mainstays of the gospel circuit, mostly in the 1950sand 1960s who worked many nights a year in churches and small auditoriumsaround the country is the lasting work of Joel Dorn and Lee Friedlander.Mr.9798 The Life Force of the MusicDorn, a radio veteran, has also produced scores of albums, from Max Roach andCharles Mingus to Roberta Flack and Lou Rawls.Mr.Friedlander, the world-renowned photographer, had a retrospective of his work, including famous por-traits of jazz players, at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2006.These two gospel music enthusiasts listened to 1,500 recorded performances,selecting the eighteen in this collection.Mr.Dorn, who has composed a goodmany notable liner notes, chose only this sparse comment for  Gospel Music : If there s one thing this album doesn t need, it s any words of explanation.Thismusic comes from the epicenter of the core of what Black American Music isabout.When you listen to Gospel Music, I guarantee you that without evenknowing it s doing it, your brain will write its own liner notes.That s how power-ful this music is.The only thing this album needs is your ears and your heart.Nonetheless, I asked Mr.Dorn for more background [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]