Things on the West End

Like any technocrat of modern proportions, I sit in my office, listening to West End Blues on the computer, while chatting with my best friend from thousands of miles away. The first thing she says is "ah, you're listening to West End Blues" and she goes on to say "that is the best trumpet solo ever written." I agree with her, it is pretty spectacular. Also I wonder how much of our appreciation for Jazz comes from a romance for the fathers who never loved us the way we wanted them to.

Our Fathers come from Jazz era times, (but don't we all?) both dropped out of mainstream culture and because they pursued a mixed lifestyle, or to lift from Jarret, a "saturna" or gumbo of sorts, they often hung onto certain things while letting go of others.
I suspect that Jazz was the thing that connected my fathers generation to the voice of what came before and the improvisation that their lives were to soon become.

But to return to the subject of the West End, this song is all about the trumpet. It has a voice. The two pieces evoke specific and distinct uses of that voice. Armstrong uses his voice in what we call now "old timey" rhythm. But that does it little justice. It evokes his own voice. It evokes him. It is both metonym and whole. There is meaning in the silent spaces in between his phrases, and his humming provides a thread for us to follow. So much is said without words here. His trumpet is poetic. It is neither overstated nor diminishing.

The Payton piece is swing time, it is rhythm and it is big band. It is more modern, more playful and less plaintive. It is full. The trumpet swings from branches of sound and bounces off walls. It is louder and more pronounced. It is also homage like. It takes a standard, a jazz icon and turns it up a notch. It is in honor of Armstrong's sadness. It enters into conversation with Armstrong. (and of course all of this could be wrong if Payton came first, but I suspect that I am right in my chronology). But the significant difference is the trumpet here, Payton's is loud and mouthy and sharp, it knows how handsome it is. It is having fun playing. Armstrong's plays him through it's body.

As I get off the phone, I can't help but think of my father again, and myself. How now all my fathers records are Jazz. How he no longer listens to folk music, though he remembers it well. It is both a return and a divergence, and it contains some of that lonesome trumpet, signaling both an end and a beginning, the West End perhaps.