By John Brummett
“What we play is life.” —Louis Armstrong
I thought I knew Bill Clinton, but then I came across a cable channel rerun on which the ever-evolving British rocker, the acclaimed musical guru Elvis Costello, was interviewing him.
Clinton is a jazz guy. I had not known that, which is to say I hardly knew him at all.
I had him down as pop and folk. I figured he swayed with Hillary to Joan Baez in the anti-war days, then settled into the kind of banal radio music that led him to embarrass himself by embracing Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow” as his campaign theme song.
But now I know this: Bill wasn’t merely blowing the sax for the school band in the ‘50s and ‘60s and waiting for the sock hop Saturday night. He was into Stan Getz and John Coltrane. That’s like drinking fine vintages while all the other kids are guzzling Boone’s Farm.
His mom took him to a club in New Orleans to hear Al Hirt, and Clinton, too young to get in, personally persuaded Hirt to authorize his entry.
Musical aptitude and musical interest are telling in a metaphorical and more broadly defining way. So, actually, this makes sense.
Jazz is about improvising, spontaneity, riffing and connecting in the moment with the other players and the audience.
Clinton tells Costello he knew he needed to go into politics rather than music because he could never have been great on the sax. He knew the greatness in music came between the notes, in the pauses, the cadence, the self-styling, and that he didn’t have what it took.
But he surely had it in politics.
He tells Costello that he prefers to speak from a broad outline so that he can be free to ad-lib, to improvise, to react to and connect with what he picks up from the audience — a smile, a nod, a brightened eye, an arched eyebrow.
That’s jazz.
All of that is to get around to this: Costello talks on this program about Clinton’s natural advantage in hailing from a state famous for producing extraordinary musicians. You have Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Al Green, Glen Campbell, Jimmy Driftwood and countless others.
I wrote about this in a recent article for the magazine Talk Business Quarterly. I was trying to make the case that people instinctively long for outlets of expression and that, in a state with a poor heritage like ours, music became the most readily accessible.
That was through gospel music from the churches, in blues music from the flatland, in country music from the hills and in Saturday night traveling minstrel shows.
With tomorrow being Father’s Day, I think of this: My late daddy, from a poor tenant dirt farming family in Southwest Arkansas, played harmonica by ear and with a vigorously gyrating leg and stomping foot. In letters home to his sister from World War II, he told of sitting around playing on Okinawa after the securing of the island and how the other Marines would gather around to listen to what he called his “hillbilly music.”
A poor private grunt from Arkansas, fresh from the front lines and a rain-soaked foxhole, armed only with a rifle and a harmonica, could get people to listen to him, darnit. With music.
Tonight I’ll venture to the Wildwood Center for the Performing Arts for a concert of mostly “roots music,” meaning authentic American music, by Levon Helm of Turkey Scratch, Ark., and his 12-piece band.
Helm, the drummer, vocalist and inspirational creative force for the famous Dylan-backing group called The Band, is being honored in this the second year of Wildwood’s “Native Sons and Daughters Artist’s Tribute.”
Last year, to get it started, they remembered Brinkley’s Louis Jordan, who merely created rhythm and blues, or at least the blend, which became rock ‘n’ roll.
There are plenty of Arkansas musicians to honor in this series, and Bill Clinton has been given plenty of awards. But they probably ought to invite him down for this event one of these years.
Maybe he’d bring Elvis Costello, who could play the songs of Arkansawyers while Bill held forth extemporaneously on them. That’d be two famous musicians in a rare duet.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
