Jazz in Beachtown Bohemia

Train an ear, open a mind, cement a mood

Of all the knowledge I acquired in college, there is only one course that still occupies a tender real estate in my brain next to poems by e.e. cummings and how to pound a sake bomb. This knowledge didn’t contribute to the requirements of my major, and has never proved relevant in my career. No, the purpose of Jazz History 101 was, simply, to add profound richness to my life.

I thought I knew what jazz was when I enrolled as a chubby-cheeked frosh in a two-quarter series offered through the Music Department called Jazz History. It was taught by an elderly lecturer named Grover Sales. Sales, the former publicist (from it’s inception) of the Monterey Jazz Festival and a published jazz historian, asked us on our first day of class: “who is your favorite jazz musician?” I held up my hand, the California-raised daughter of native New Yorkers, and said confidently, “Bobby Short.” Sales snapped back at me, “Bobby Short isn’t a jazzman, child. He is a cabaret singer!” And with that fateful start, face flushed with humiliation in a lecture hall full of music majors, I humbly recalibrated my own understanding of jazz music and learned how to really, truly listen to music. In the course of the next six months, a world opened up to me via my ears.

As Sales had designed the course, Fall quarter of Jazz History covered “Ragtime to Bebop” and then Winter quarter addressed “Bebop to the Present.” Sales was a tall, imposing white-haired figure with a strident way of both walking and speaking that we all found intimidating. “I play the phonograph,” he announced acerbically. “I do not play an instrument!” And with that he ran us through the history of America — of race relations, of human migration — all through jazz, much of which he had witnessed himself in the front row at big band shows with Count Basie and Duke Ellington or at skirted tables in small clubs, just feet away from Billie Holiday. Sales taught us that jazz was “our country’s classical music” and we felt his religious gravitas waft out the room as we exited the lecture hall. When playing a song for us during a lecture, Sales would close his eyes, tilt his chin upward and exclaim loudly: “It’s got to SWING, kids!” and he’d tap his toe to the music -- almost convulsively, in rapture. As his pupils, we learned how to discern differences between takes of the same song by the same musician. Our ears learned to hear what he meant by “swing.” Our homework involved listening to cassettes from The Smithsonian Collection. And for midterms and finals, we were tested in a most unusual way: Sales would simply play a tune, and we would be expected to write a dense five-page essay on the musician, instruments, song title and year of recording, and then elaborate on the piece’s context and historical significance. Nobody ever got an A. And we kind of didn’t care because what we really got out of it was a whole new world of music to be in love with.

Those of us who endured Jazz History with Mr. Sales found ourselves members of an exclusive club. We knew this eccentric, persuasive man who had witnessed music history first hand. I found myself drawn to other Jazz History classmates who could share my enthusiasm for this new language. Out on a Saturday night, we would find each other in a beer-soaked corner of a fraternity party and just to discuss the weird glory of Sun Ra.

The sign of an exceptional educational experience is when you find yourself impacted by it decades later. Sales’ jazz curriculum has made more sense to me as I age. For example, two years after jazz history, while attending a study abroad program at Oxford, I found myself compulsively rewinding my yellow waterproof Walkman to get to the same song from my Jazz History Smithsonian cassette. The song I was addicted to was Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins (1939). Rewind, play, rewind, play. It was winter in England, and I had just fallen in love for the first time with a boy from the program. I remember departing for a weekend study trip to Belgium with a girlfriend and being overcome with my first bout of lovesickness in the spartan bunkbed of a hostel in Brussels. Only Coleman Hawkins could reflect back to me in earphones and make sense of the ache in my chest. The poignancy of Coleman’s song matched my mood in his minimalist, scattered phrasing. Coleman played the song with the helplessness of falling hard.

Despite this survey course under my belt, and half a lifetime of acute jazz obsessions, I still have only scratched the surface of jazz. As is often the case, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing: in my twenties I was once seated next to a genuine jazz aficionado at a dinner in San Francisco. I remember talking about Dizzy, Coltrane, Mingus. “How rich,” I marveled silently to myself, “that decades after Grover Sales, I can connect with a stranger about the magic of jazz!” Then the aficionado asked me, “What do you think of Ornette Coleman?” Perhaps it was the wine or perhaps I just wanted to keep the ball rolling, but I replied, “Oh I just love her!” The conversation ended there: Ornette Coleman was one of the great saxophonists of the 1960s and the founder of the “free jazz” movement — and decidedly male. Embarassing party foul aside, I guarantee that if I had listened to an Ornette Coleman tune, I’d definitely be able to tell you if he swung.

The soundtrack to the Beachtown Bohemia in my mind is jazz. It’s not The Beach Boys’ harmonies, the dark energy of The Doors, the blues-rock of Fleetwood Mac, or the angular lyrical brilliance of The Dead Kennedys. No, when I think of empty beaches and palms outside of dive bars and boats clanking against one another in the harbor, I think of West Coast Jazz: a genre often categorized as an offshoot of the “Cool Jazz” movement that emerged as a more sedate response to Bebop. Bob Rusch, the American jazz critic and record producer, explains the niche:

The West coast sound perhaps didn't have the gravitas that the East coast had, but, after all, these were Californians enjoying the sun and the surf and the extent that celebrity offered itself through the studio work that the entertainment industry was offering. So I think, you know, you think of California as sun and surf, you think of New York City as cement and grit, and the music somewhat reflected that. One better than the other? Depends what you want.

We have our fair share of cement and grit in Beachtown Bohemia too , but it is tempered by the climate, the landscape, and the slower pace we abide by. We are the west coast slow-mo culturati — we know our tempeh noodles and have read our Ram Dass and Kerouac and argued with East Coasters about the proper way to wear your Levi’s (button-fly and commando.) We are similarly relaxed about our jazz music, I’d suggest. I waxed poetic in this post about the vibraphonist of Warmth that played outside the Cooper House in the downtown Santa Cruz of my childhood. The Cooper House in the 1980s is likely responsible for planting the seed of my association between Beachtown Bohemia and loose, optimistic, spare west coast jazz groups. West Coast Jazz feels like our soundtrack — our culture’s mood, ethos, and breeziness.

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