the chatter
A note from the age of ‘jass’
A century ago, in the winter of 1918, jazz was being born in New Orleans and legends were taking shape, musical legends that would eventually conquer the world. Great figures of the future were happily submerged in the radical new sounds that echoed everything from blues to gospel hymns.
Louis Armstrong, in his autobiography, wrote that as a child he lived on the same street as “the famous Funky Butt Hall, where I first heard Buddy Bolden play.” Funky Butt Hall was a jazz club that used the premises of a church. On Saturday night, Bolden – famous for his wild improvisations on cornet – kept working all night, finally finishing up sometime after dawn so the church chairs could be repositioned for Sunday services.
Bolden had been felled by schizophrenia, complicated by alcoholism, in 1907, when Armstrong was six years old. He died in 1931 in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, his grave unmarked, his cornet stilled forever. Never recorded, he became instead a useful subject for fiction writers and other myth-builders, notably Michael Ondaatje, who made Bolden a character in his novel Coming Through Slaughter.
Not everyone was happy about the new music. In 1918, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, then as now the leading local daily, ran an editorial headed Jass and Jassism. (That was a common spelling until the double-Z version won out.) This new music, said the Times-Picayune, represented “a low streak in man’s tastes,” not yet civilized. New Orleans was becoming the first North American city to recreate on its own a totally new cultural expression. But it would be years before the city understood that, and even longer for it to realize that this miracle was mainly the work of the black population.
Those who have studied jazz history will find themselves right at home in Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, King Zeno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Perdido and Rampart, two street names that came alive in the titles of tunes, show up. Buddy Bolden’s reputation is cited. Someone mentions the Colored Waifs home, which was where Armstrong was given his first horn. Sidney Story, a city alderman, wrote legislation that limited prostitution to one section of town; in his honour it went into local history as Storyville. That was for whites, so a black Storyville also developed.
When Rich’s narrative begins, New Orleans is afflicted by a serial murderer, nicknamed the Axman by the newspapers. A black cornet player and part-time thief, Isadore Zeno, renames himself King Zeno.
Meanwhile, the just-concluded First World War hangs over Det. William Bastrop of the New Orleans Police. Back home after duty in France, he’s a hero whose name gets applauded at baseball games. But he considers himself a fraud: when his dugout was hit by a German shell, killing many fellow soldiers, Bastrop hurried away rather than help the others. Bastrop decides he must solve the ax murder case to redeem himself. And then he might finally be able to speak truthfully to his wife when she asks about his experience in the trenches.
In 1918, black people in New Orleans find themselves living in fear of rabid racists, who can be counted on to riot when they believe they have detected the presence of the Axman. Another criminal element, the Mafia, plays a role in the story, too. It is said that the Mafia has now disappeared, but clearly it lingers, still able to corrupt the city council to obtain lucrative construction contracts. One such agreement involves Lake Pontchartrain, renowned by jazz fans as a place where resorts hired good bands.
Rich, who lives in New Orleans, has given his city yet another reason for local celebration. And he delivers one short, sharp and accurate statement of jazz criticism: “It did not improve the old forms. It destroyed them.”
Five nights a week without fail, at precisely 7:30, Monday through Friday, my mother tunes into CBC to watch the latest instalment of Coronation Street. She’s scarcely missed an episode since we moved here from England more than a quarter- century ago – and long before that, living in South Yorkshire, she followed the series and its mercurial exploits from her childhood in the early 1970s until the day our family went abroad.
This nightly ritual is her enduring link to the homeland. “It’s an emotional connection for me,” she tells me. “So many of the characters have grown up with me. Child actors return as adults – the same people. I have literally grown old with them.”
People unfamiliar with Coronation Street tend to at least be dimly aware of its history and importance. It looms over post-war English pop culture with unparalleled influence: it isn’t so much a fixture of the national consciousness as the definitive fixture, the load-bearing pillar of the popular imagination.
It is well-known that Coronation Street is the longestrunning soap opera in the history of television, on the air near- ceaselessly since tion Street has been available for English ex- patriots and spiritual Britons in Canada now for more than 50 years. What’s more, it has been wildly successful. According to the CBC, nearly 800,000 Canadians tune in to Coronation Street every evening in prime- time. It’s the top performer in the country in its time slot, and the CBC’s most- watched show online. A staggering 8.5 million of us, the CBC claims, watched the show in prime time over the last year. Canada dearly loves its Corrie, strange as that may seem.
Of course, the connection is not exactly random. We’re a commonwealth country: there’s always been a certain natural cultural affinity between Canada and Great Britain, and our national identity is bound up in the motherland’s rather inextricably. Besides which there are simply a great many Canadians of an English background or heritage: 20% of households in this country regard themselves as British, according to Statistics Canada, and the exodus of Britons seeking prosperity in this country over the course of the 20th century means an enormous number of families have meaningful ties to shocking affairs. The show is shot – first on film, long on video, at last in glossy HD – like a commercial for toothpaste, and has about as much formal panache as the average home movie.
The drama is ( at least for this Corrie skeptic) a kind of theatrical wallpaper: one sustained pattern of movement and dialogue, so monotonous it blends into the background. Characters confront one another in clangorous disputes, or embrace in fits of unlikely passion, or else meet at the local pub to discuss the events of the week that may or may not concern them. Coronation Street today, in other words, is fundamentally identical to Coronation Street circa 1998, or 1985, or for that matter, 1960.
For many years Coronation Street was a mainstay of mid- afternoons here, aired six months behind the U.K.. ( Well does my mother remember having to phone her mum to hear the news about forthcoming shockers and months- out plot lines.) But sometime over the last decade the CBC elected to skip a chunk of story in an effort to leap ahead and catch up, and today, synchronous with England at last, the show airs in prime time: it’s been elevated