Jazz pour tous! (1959-1969)

Jean-Marie Peterken and Nicolas Dor present Jazz pour Tous!

The wonders of European TV archives never cease. Besides the more recent footage which is being rescued weekly from the vaults of Spanish TV (see here), we have now a bunch of programmes from RTB (Belgian public broadcaster) show Jazz por tous!, "Jazz for everyone!", which was broadcast for ten years from 1959. The show had actually started as a radio programme by Belgian aficionados Nicolas Dor (correspondent for American rag Record Changer covering Belgium, France, and the Netherlands)  and Jean-Marie Peterken, and it had a spin-off in the short-lived festival in Comblain-la-Tour, where Cannonball Adderley recorded his LP Cannonball in Europe in 1962.

Image and sound: Webster Hall, 1956

One satisfaction of researching jazz photography—for it is a lot of fun—is the rare occasion when the images can be married to sounds. The book The Sound I Saw (Phaidon Press, 2011) by Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) includes a beautiful collection of black and white images, many of jazz musicians, with no credit whatsoever. Checking faces, names and discographies like this one, there are two photographs which can be pinned down, taken at the magnificent Webster Hall, RCA's regular studio in NYC at the time. These:

Tony Scott and orchestra, Webster Hall, NYC,
Friday, December 14, 1956

Left to right: Frank Foster, Danny Bank (with back to the camera), Frank Wess, Sahib Shihab,
Gigi Gryce, Tony Scott; same date and location.

That stumbling feeling

Ah, rhythm! Possibly the most primitive element of music. It's there even if you don't want to: just listen to your heartbeat and your breathing. Anyone can relate to it, even if they cannot produce it consciously. It's in some of the most memorable moments in the history of music, from the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, to Fats Domino "I'm Walkin'", Steve Reich's "Clapping Music", or what Art Blakey does on Thelonious Monk's original "Straight, No Chaser".

Rhythm may also be considered the unifying feature for a lot of contemporary music (so much so that in Denmark they have a "Rhythmic Music Conservatory" encompassing exactly that). In jazz it's such a central element that I wouldn't know where to begin.

There's a small feature that appears frequently, though, which is the playing "in three" over a four-beat rhythm. Sounds complicated? You just have to check out what this early Brad Mehldau trio does here from 0:25 onwards, and you'll get it immediately