Warm Jazz In Dark Rooms

Most inappropriately for this weekend, Boston Jazz has nearly forgotten the Tiger Rag. It has passed beyond the traditional stage of Benny Goodman and Arty Shaw, discarded Old Dixie, and is approaching the cooler, intellectual cock-tail jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz. The Princeton cats may be disappointed.

Local jazz is now a warm jazz, played in warm, dark nightclubs. It is drunk with more expensive beer (or scotch) and is inhaled with longer cigarettes than ever before.

In the steady jazz clubs in Boston, each band-leader has his own name for the music he plays. At the Downbeat, Jay Mugliori calls it "contemporary"; at the Five O' Clock Club, Miles Davis plays "modern", and in The Stable, Varty Haroutunian says it's "progressive." But all play in Boston's warm style. Essentially it is a cross between the hot emotionalism of bebop and swing, and the intellectual coolness of the West Coast.

Boston Jazz Tunes begin with a theme, setting a chord pattern which underlies the melodic line. Then the soloists take off, basing their improvisations on this pattern while piano, drums and bass create the rhythmic tension.

Although "warm" is the dominant style in Boston, there are still one or two hot and cool clubs for the distraught squares who cannot dig this improvisational music. Even these, however, now show the effects of contemporary influences.

The staunchest of these non-conformists is the Savoy Cafe, long the stronghold of solid, two-beat Dixie. It presently features a stomping group which plays its own version of old-fashioned tuba jazz. This nightspot, perhaps the hottest in town, still allows customers enough light to read on its table cards that it has no cover or minimum.

The Savoy's current attraction, Leroy Parkins and his Excalibur Band, is typical of a straight-Dixie policy which is only slightly modern.

One diverse club is plush Storyville, which frequently features such performers as Dave Brubeck and "Wild Bill" Davison (appearing next week). Its range of transient musicians (which has also included ballad-singer Josh White) and the club's usual minimum puts Storyville in its own special class, although its present show is very similar musically to Boston's new rhythm form.

Two of the nation's high-ranking jazz artists, J. J. Johnson and Trombonist Kai Winding, presently head the slightly cool program in Storyville's luxurious blackout shelter.

Two additional stragglers in this list of irregular jazz spots are the Hi-Hat, once a leader in bigtime jazz in Boston, and Mahogany Hall, home of the Dixieland Dukes, a noisy but happy sextet.

The Hi-Hat has recently forsaken good jazz for southern fried chicken and employs such showpieces as songstress Jerry Southern and occasional rhythm and blues bands (with semi-jazz overtones) like the currently featured group of Herbie Lee.

The Hi-Hat is good place to start a twenty-month appreciation tour of Boston Jazz spots, but no place for the real fly hipster (expert) who knows that "to have a ball" means simply to enjoy oneself inordinately.

Mahogany Hall, reminiscent of the New Orleans "barrelhouses" where they poured liquor from barrels, is strictly a weekend stop. Its usual attraction, the Dukes of Dixie, often described as a "great big bundle of noise", offer the Chicago type of jam session in a room filled with plenty of smoke and customers trying to prove they are not freshmen.

If a traditional lover of classical music plans to try a real appreciation of Boston Jazz, this is one tour plan he might follow for visiting the solid jazz homes in Town;

The first night out, the seven-week-old Downbeat is probably the best place to start. Although its warm music is so progressively esoteric to the novice as its competitors'. This club employs two singers, one an old-time blues artist, to break the monotony of the confusing jazz.

After this initiation, the student can approach The Stable, formerly the Jazz Workshop. The band here, more intergrated after six years of playing together, provides a true progressive atmosphere while belting out improvisations which the leader, saxaphonist Varty Haroutunian, admits can get "real crazy when everyone starts winging."

It is important to realize at these beginning sessions that jazz must be heard with an active mind as compared to the ususal passive intellect which absorbs popular and semi-classical music. This, too, is the main theory behind tape recording in a nightclub or a symphony hall. The jazz artist supposedly emits a personal feeling with his playing; this is picked up by the enthusiastic audience which sends back its own feeling to the musician who, thus encouraged, will perform better.

One of the final stages for the new-comer who has weathered the Stable and the Downbeat is the Five O' Clock Club, a purple-dark oblong room rebounding with modern jazz compositions. Although depending entirely on the interest a beginner shows in this local appreciation tour it may normally take several months before a college student brought up on two-beat Dixie, begins to feel the real "warmth" of Boston Jazz