Four Jazz Lives

III. Herbie Nichols

Herbie Nichols TH ERE I S A Ie I N D of culpability in the discovery of dead artists in that it seems almost criminal, certainly exploitative, even within the approved limits of capitalism, that the benefits of a man's work accrue to those who ignored him during his life. Certainly the Van Goghs, the Cezannes, and the Gorkys, after their deaths, hold no debts to those critics who fattened their reputations on their posthumous discoveries or to the merchants who fattened their wallets on after-the-fact accreditation. If an artist. in reproducing his own images, is able to instill them with enough life to be vital outside of his time, then a special value is created at his death because these life-images can never be created again. In this tradition, the artist must find satisfaction in his artifact , even if he receives neither remuneration nor recognition duringhis lifetime. The painter or poet has the advantage over the classical composer in that his work is physically the reproduction of itself, and therefore as permanent as any physical property: [ 154 ] Four Jazz Lives Once written or painted, it will exist despite both the artist and his audience. But even classical composers who have complained about never hearing their work performed have a system of notation that assures them that their work will exist in the abstract even after their death. That the frustrated Mozart never achieved the appointments that his genius should have commanded did not prevent the survival ofhis work. Webern's work became an important influence on composers born many years after his death even though he himselfnever heard most ofit performed. The jazz musician has a different and more serious predicament . His work is the cultivation of the accidental. He cannot leave his work on paper, and any permanence he aspires to can take place only through the recording of his performance. He is both actor and playwright, composer, conductor, and featured soloist. If he is not employed, or if he is employed only under poor circumstances, then he does not create; and if he never has the security of a steady group that stays together at least long enough to learn his book (he composes for the men as much as for the hom, and they learn from the wild implementation of his book by improvising from it before a sympathetic audience), then his musical sensitivity and sensibility cannot evolve. The route of his work is through immediate communication with his audience ; no paper, canvas, or written score is there to serve as intermediate agent. Again we must point to the history of jazz as a workingman 's music, in that the job itself is the opportunity for its expression. Amonth as the house pianist in a whorehouse, a band's tour of all the beer jOints in the backwoods of Alabama , or two weeks' work in a New York bar cannot be approached in the same way as even the most modest concert hall, even ifthe results have equal value. The job is not where Herbie Nichols [ 155 ] the jazz artist goes to earn the means of exploring his craft further; it is the place where his craft is applied; and that was the destruction of pianist and composer Herbie Nichols. For if the products of an artist's life work are to be the sum of his life, then Herbie Nichols, a jazz musician who seldom worked where he could play his own music and who has no records in the current catalogue, may be said not to have lived at all. Herbie Nichols never had a year in his life when he came anywhere near supporting himself by playing either his own lyric and personal, but highly modern, jazz, or any of the sterile forms that club owners and bandleaders required him to play. In his last years, the most regular job that Herbie had in New York was at the Riviera, at that time a kind of clean hole in the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, which featured a revivalist Dixieland band led by an obscure and inept drummer named Al Bandini. The Riviera, which no longer has a live-music policy, was known in the Fifties as a place where competent amateurs could sit in. It was then a hangout for Ivy League types, and on weekends, when they were out of school, they would...