January 30th is Roy Eldridge Day. Eldridge was a major innovator in jazz trumpet, and his concept shows how jazz developed. He was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, an industrial city with an important jazz history, into a middle-class / upper-middle-class African-American family, and he was the key figure in the development of jazz trumpet between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He died at 78 in 1989.
Notoriously competitive, and ferocious on his chosen instrument, Eldridge was nicknamed by Ellington’s saxophonist Otto Hardwick (pronounced with a long O sound)— “Little Jazz” because of the juxtaposition of his ferocity and size. Because he was a major Swing Era figure, who nonetheless was a stylistic precursor to BeBop, Eldridge is sometimes thought of as a transitional figure between stylistic eras (not unlike the transition between Romanticism and Modernism in poetry); however, he was his own thing.
Eldridge was a child prodigy, beginning as a six year-old on drums (who buys a six year old a set of drums?) and though he dropped out of high school, practiced trumpet as a teenager between eight and nine hours a day, and was playing professionally from 16. He moved to New York in 1930 and played in many Harlem dance bands. His rhythmic power and virtuosity in the upper register of the trumpet made him a star. In the 1930s he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and recorded, with the tenor saxophone specialist Chu Berry “Christopher Columbus”
He made some important recordings in 1935 with Billie Holiday and the pianist Teddy Wilson such as “Miss Brown to You”, also a glorious example of Holiday at her peak powers or “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”.
In April 1941, though he received many offers from white big bands, Eldridge joined Gene Krupa’s Orchestra and made some recordings with the vocalist Anita O’Day. They can be seen in a short film known as a “soundie” singing their infectious, novelty duet, “Let Me Off Uptown,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8yaW6BluwY) perhaps their most well-known effort.
Although he was the featured soloist in these big bands, the racial segregation in the apartheid South created many terrible racial incidents that affected him. Artie Shaw, for example, said: “Droves of people would ask him for his autograph at the end of the night, but later, on the bus, he wouldn't be able to get off and buy a hamburger with the guys in the band.”
After Krupa was arrested for marijuana possession in 1943, Eldridge tried, albeit unsuccessfully to form his own big band where he recorded “Heckler’s Hop” which shows how he influenced the development of BeBop. In the post-war years he joined Norman Granz’s tours of the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, toured France with Benny Goodman, and led a band at Birdland in New York City.
In 1960 he joined the Jazz Artist’s Guild, a group that briefly existed in Newport, Rhode Island, and was formed by the business and musical partners Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and they recorded “Mysterious Blues” with the Newport Jazz Rebels. In the 1970s he performed regularly at Jimmy Ryan’s club on West 54th Street, but after a heart attack in 1980, he stopped played altogether.
Roy Eldridge’s competitiveness and sticktoitiveness made him more than just a precursor to Dizzy Gillespie, and the revolution known as BeBop; he was an effective transmitter of his own style and personality during a the Swing Era, the time when jazz music was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States.
In terms of poetry, the question of how to get one’s own voice across, particularly when emotional intensity and technical skill are valued, is especially anxiety-producing. In other words, how can you be more like yourself, and less like everybody else? Maybe some close listening to this music can steer us in the right direction.
Starting tonight at midnight and continuing all day tomorrow, Jan. 30th, for 24 hrs. it's the Roy Eldridge birthday broadcast on WKCR.
Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015)
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