Who Says Jazz Doesn't Sell?

The first time you look at them, squeezed into the tight inches of page 12 columns (hey, that's not a bad financing rate...) the prices look staggering. Looked at some of the bold-case, H6 closing bids still posted over at Ebay, with all those zeroes lined up like the digits in a final box score, and the numbers become even more impressive.

I'm speaking, of course, of Guernsey's massive jazz auction, the gavel on which fell -- appropriately enough -- at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater this past Sunday and Monday (02/20 - 02/21). 430 lots, consisting of artifacts pulled out of attics, from under beds, from garages and basements by those family members who somehow survived living with those great musicians who dedicated themselves to the "jazz life". We're talking articles of clothing, musical instruments, letters, manuscripts, signed photographs, personal effects, and, yes, private recordings -- a whole stack of them released (not in the record industry sense of the word) by Chan Parker.

Bird's "primary" 1950's ax went for $225,000. John Coltrane's original, hand-written arrangement for "A Love Supreme" -- who knew that his original vision for this piece was that of the "classic quartet" augmented by a five-man percussion section? -- 3 sheets of ink-stained and penciled-in paper, sold for $164,000. A notebook that Thelonious Monk kept as a student at Manhattan's not-for-dummies Stuyvesant High School in the early 1930's? $65,000. Never mind that there is nothing of musical significance contained in this notebook, just pages of Monk's practicing penmanship (which is pretty incredible, actually; quite flamboyant) and thoughts on assigned themes such as "Stinking City" and "Everyone Should Read Good Newspapers". An epic (32 page) biographical letter from Louis Armstrong to his manager, Oscar Cohen, written on the backside of Pop's (in)famous Swiss Kriss advertisement, fetched a cool quarter-grand. Also available for purchase: Benny Goodman's tuxedo; Bird's pocket-watch; Coltrane's contract with Prestige records; Tadd Dameron lead sheets, including one for "Lady Bird"; original paintings by Miles; a Gerry Mulligan houndstooth jacket; Eric Dolphy's alto sax; and God knows what else. Too much.

When I first heard about this auction several weeks ago, my initial thoughts were hand-wringing ones. I thought about Dan Morgenstern at Rutgers' Institute of Jazz Studies and of the music and entertainment curators at both the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, about meager acquisitions budgets (though LC thinks nothing of paying tens of millions of dollars for early maps), and how there was no way this stuff was going to end up where it "belonged". In museums, research centers, cultural institutions. I work in the library "sciences", and have some experience with archival collections. And while the field may still attract those possessed of a great if rather stoic passion to organize and classify all the world's knowledge, it has always and will always require those experts and specialists who are of the same type -- only more genteel and ruthless -- as those manic shoppers who stampede through sale outlets and toy stores if they know some prized commodity can be found there. We can institutionalize the amassing impulse all we want, put a nice -- at least impersonal -- bureaucratic face on the desire to have, have, have, but there's no way that this is a rehabilitation of that condition.

Consider that Guernsey's has already taken high-resolution digital photographs of all the items that were put on the block this past weekend. How else were they able to put together their print catalog (still available for $36 USD, or $50 USD elsewhere in the world) and post those fabulous images to Ebay? I don't know what the copyright situation with this stuff, whether it was retained by the families, or whether part of the agreement was that this material, though offered up to the private sector, has been entered into the public domain. Whatever; Guernsey's has effectively digitized this complete collection, and they have vowed to make archival quality reproductions of all 2 dimensional items from this auction -- those letters, manuscripts, scores, etc. that are of most informational value to researchers -- available to anyone who asks for them. And as Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter, points out, before we did not even know these things existed. Now we do, and we have a record of where they've gone. This stuff was brought together only to be dispersed, whether to corporations competing for prestige and funding (it takes money to make money) or to individuals, who, as it turns out, might share some fellowship because they share similar interests. And Guerney's has even pledged some of the auctions proceeds to music education and jazz foundations -- even if "jazz is dead", some of this money is being set aside for the future.

I suppose what I am saying is that this auction has caused me to make a little peace with the free market. Of course, it is easy to be sympathetic to some idea, especially an abstract one, when it arrives with full and unexpected force in your life and showers favor on you or those with whom you feel some communion. Many of these families simply needed the cash. Let the big dogs eat each other over these scraps and bones. Let greed like some foul but sweeping wind clear the path for them, I say. As for the consequences of what they do, I see these in a largely personal light. T.S. Monk (III) is, like Sue Mingus or Dookie Coleman, by no means an uncontroversial figure, but as he is one of the last living connections we have to his T.S. Monk (II) as someone other than a piano player, humorist, and composer, some of whose most enduring works aren't jocose as much as they seem often to be having a secret laugh on the laughing listener, I cannot help but feel some sympathy for him. And I cannot imagine what commingled pride, sorrow, anxiety, regret, memory, immediacy, who knows what else, may have enveloped him as he sat there watching his father's life laid bare for thousands in the form of disconnected odds and ends.

Something still bothers me, though. If these families did not want to keep this stuff, then who could possibly want it? Wanting to divest oneself of reminders, that I can comprehend. And I'm not speaking here of desiring or needing access to primary sources and realia because inspection of them is a necessary step in gaining insight into the history made by the musicians whose things these were. Appreciation, deep understanding, has no truck with ownership. The investigative journalist wants to know what is in "those files", but no way on earth to they want to be discovered holding them. The real scholar publishes his or her "findings", talks endlessly about what he or she knows and how he or she came to know it? And how can he or she argue the finer points of this learning unless they promulgate it, give it away to colleagues so that they can give it back? What I am instead talking about is acquisitiveness, and not merely an avaricious pursuit of things but an appetite for experiences, one so insatiable that it is touched by no awareness of how jaded its palate has become.

Don't get me wrong. I can browse those Ebay pages and the magnitude of the allure that these objects possess is far from invisible to me. It is an allure photographs not only capture but also sharpen. It is an allure that arrives with the power of hallucination. Looking over Satchmo's cables to Joe Glaser, I can hear the voice dictating them, raspy, colorful, taking its time and hardly carrying about the per-letter financial constraints of the telegram. The angle at which Dizzy bent his trumpet; it is not just like needle on a gauge pointing to his mood. It is an impersonation of his essential emotional character. These are not simply personal effects and ephemera, I know. They are, through language and via use -- visible as a patina -- connected directly to minds that aren't exactly gone, but are less here than they used to be. Angry minds, sullen minds, junked-out minds, brilliant minds, healthy minds, obsessive minds, Black minds, great minds. What motivates someone to grab at pieces of the collective past in the hopes of assembling them into some singular past? I suppose from some collectors it is simply a natural progression. Once you have exhausted all the recordings, in all formats, and all the Downbeats and Jazz Monthlys, there is more intimate game afoot. I don't think collectors want to invade the lives of those whom they admire in some simplistic, "le me be you" fashion, though. For one thing, there is still a lot of mediation involved. Sure, what has once "his" may now be "mine", but the authenticity of the what as well as its provenance must still be certified, notarized, sealed with a hologram sticker that cannot be counterfeited. For another thing, I think the issues are much more selfish than that. Collection, recollection... maybe collecting is but a symptom of a pathological nostalgia. For many listeners, jazz is American optimism. Good times. Good company. Singing out. Sloe gin fizzes, dance halls, honest sweating toil, cosmopolitanism. The blues is for the moonstruck rube, the cuckolded strong-man, and the penniless illiterate poet. Jazz makes of the blues a restorative (don't ask me how; its pure alchemy). But this is a happiness that never really was. It was always willed, and even those musicians whom a perceptive writer such as Richard Sudhalter feels expressed this feeling to the nines in their playing, such as Bobby Hackett, always let you see, if only for a second, the grimace behind the smile. How else could Hackett work so well with the Paul Klee of jazz, Pee Wee Russell, whose depth of feeling is melancholic in the most magnanimous and vibrant possible way, whose every phrase is a polyphony? Can the adventure of finding and purchasing displace the pleasure of encountering, or being opened entirely to something new? I think it can, and I think the two can be quite easily conflated. The opportunity to own something that belonged to Charlie Parker, or Trane, of Stan Getz -- it is also an opportunity to recapture a more youthful excitement. Perhaps what one felt when one first heard those men play.

But such excitement turns one's own past into a vicarious experience. (That may be inexorable anyway.) And at what price vicariousness? And how would buyer's remorse feel -- "well, it looked good in the dressing room mirror at Bloomingdale's / there on the showroom floor..." -- when you've blown hundreds of thousands of dollars? And, if money is "no object", as we like to say, what sort of presence do these old saxophones and postcards and clothes have once they've been exchanged for, and thus measured in, units that of themselves have no innate significance? When you know the financial cost, what becomes of the investment that the original owners made in the thing? Not only the attraction of these things but also chiefly their consequence is due exactly to their presence, to their aura. In that they can evoke and provoke. By placing such artifacts in a museum, sure, we are saving them. But, in so doing, we also install them in circumstances that communicate to us how they are suspended outside of notions of "property" and, somehow, perceptibility. The urge to touch or hold museum objects, when it arises, is a common and acute one. But it is typically frustrated or beaten down. Its function, in fact, is to be resisted and turned into an unusual form of longing. We are supposed to be left aware of the fact that all possession is momentary, if not fleeting. To touch one of those things would be like dipping one's hand into a terrifying clear and cold stream. Nothing abhorrent about it, but you can expect that it would hurt as much as it would refresh. The grasp has no business lingering there, and, in truth, that rapid flow excludes all seizing.

Ah, but here is the key. The men and women to whom we assign ownership to these masterpieces of their conceiving and maquettes of their person, this was surely how those men and women experienced their contact with these objects that were so important to them. The way the Olivetti, Underwood or Royal is more than a tool to a writer. The way that artists use brushes without really being conscious of them as such, but aware of them as themselves working ideas and of them as fine and chiseled and slick ideas of line, shape and color at work. Certainly this contact was not maintained always and forever, but if did occur at one time and lasted for a time. They managed to tame that thrill that here was something that was, at a fundamental level, emphatically not theirs. They could control it perhaps better than anyone else, but, even so, it could and was taken away from them for long periods of time. They learned to live within that rhythm of course. They resigned themselves to the idea that these things were not theirs to sport with simply as they wished. The music those jazz artists made may not have been wrought or bled or called out of these things, as if the music were some property of thing that could be extracted and the thing then discarded. Still, by some accounting, these things are just like the music itself. The music does not belong to anyone, yet it does not belong to everyone, either. It has no real custodian or guardian. To know of the music, to hear it active in the world: that's free. But to understand it and follow where it has led and where it leads... well, in that case, one had better be prepared to forfeit something.

~ Joe Milazzo