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Thoughts inspired by Thelonius Monk with John Coltrane, the straightforwardly-titled album that came out of a six-month collaboration between the two at the Five Spot in 1957.

New York City in the fifties—damn. Or maybe I should say the Village in the fifties. I wonder if the folkies and the jazz buffs overlapped at all, or how much. Not a hell of a lot as far as I know. Of course, neither group had much use for rock and roll. But this rocker likes his small-group jazz, as long as there are no strings on the record. Rock and roll was seen as a greater and more ominous scandal by white parents, cops and whomever, even though the dreaded specter of race mixing was just as much of a presence in jazz. A greater scandal? I suppose that's down to rock and roll's appeal to high-school kids, as distinct from the college-aged, and the “wild rhythms” of it, the anarchic and Dionysian appeal to the sexed body. Not to mention the volume. All of which, I guess, were seen as adding up to a greater danger than even the marijuana and heroin sometimes found in jazz scenes. Despite the nightclub-bred notion that jazz had something to do with cocktails, and rock's later association with grass and acid, I've thought for a long time that there is on the one hand an affinity of jazz and marijuana because both are cerebral, and on the other hand a similar relation between rock and roll and alcohol, as both are in tune with the physical and the corporeal. I'm talking about rock and roll, not necessarily the later rock with its psychedelic excursions.

Not that white nineteen-fifties parents had any articulate or informed sense of any of this, but they must have sensed that something was up with those “wild rhythms.” (And, truth be told, there was an element of real danger from the leather-jacket-and-switchblade subset of youth culture, the look of which was modeled on Presley's, or maybe that was the other way around.) Even though fifties rock and roll seems so innocent in retrospect. Check out American Hot Wax; it's on YouTube.

AlanCliffe 6 Jan 26
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