John Hammond was responsible for discovering Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. As a producer, writer, critic, and board member of the NAACP, he was credited as a major force in integrating the music business. An early inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, John Hammond was one of the most important figures in 20th century popular music.

Born in 1910, Hammond was the fifth child of a wealthy New York family. From an early age, he showed a great interest in music. At age four he began studying the piano, only to switch to the violin at age eight. In his early teens he explored Harlem—listening to radio and live performances of black musicians. In 1927 he heard Bessie Smith sing at the Alhambra Theater. It was the peak of her career, and the performance would remain an influence on Hammond the rest of his life.

The next year Hammond entered Yale University, where he studied the violin and later the viola. He made frequent trips into New York and wrote regularly for trade magazines. Though a serious musician, his greatest talent would be in listening to, not playing, music. Eventually he dropped out of school for a career in the music industry—visiting England and becoming the U.S. correspondent for MELODY MAKER. Returning to the states, Hammond self-funded the recording of pianist Garland Wilson. The songs sold thousands of copies and brought Hammond, at age twenty, his first success as a record producer.

On his twenty-first birthday, Hammond moved to Greenwich Village, where he engaged in the bohemian life and leftist subculture. Though privileged since birth, Hammond recognized the gross injustice of the time and began working for an integrated music world. He was the funder and DJ for one of the first regular live jazz programs, and wrote regularly about the racial divide. His main concern, however, was jazz, and throughout the 1930s he was responsible for both integrating the musicians and expanding the audience.

Among the earliest musicians to work with Hammond were Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, and Benny Goodman. When they began working together, Goodman’s band was completely white, and with the help of Hammond and great musicians like Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, the color barrier began to fade. It was around this time that Hammond saw a young Billie Holiday perform. She was seventeen and Hammond thought she was one of the greatest singers he had ever heard. He began to write about her, and to introduce her to other musicians, including Teddy Wilson and Benny Goodman. Towards the end of the 1930s, Hammond organized the “Spirituals to Swing” concert, which brought much black music into the white spotlight for the first time.

Soon after “Spirituals to Swing,” Hammond invested in the first integrated night club, Cafe Society. The 1940s, however, were a time of great personal distress during which he lost a son and was divorced. He spent much of his time in Europe concentrating on classical music. It was not until the late 1950s that he became active in the industry again. It was then that he found an eighteen year-old singer with gospel roots and a powerful voice. He said she was the greatest singer since Billie Holiday, and it wouldn’t be long before the rest of the world felt the same way about Aretha Franklin.

Working for Columbia records, Hammond found in the political singers of the 1950s and 1960s a vibrancy similar to that of the jazz musicians thirty years earlier. He signed Pete Seeger, and found a young folk singer among the crowds of Greenwich Village named Bob Dylan. His early recordings of Dylan included “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Important for the simplicity of their production, they attest to Hammond’s versatile skill and ability to bring out the best in a wide range of talent. In 1975, Hammond retired from Columbia, though he continued to scout for talent for many years. By the time of his death in 1987, the popular music industry had grown to be a more integrated and politically responsible community, and much of this progress was due to the talent and commitment of John Hammond.

I want the full hyphen: folk-rock-country-jazz-classical, so finally when you get all the hyphens in, maybe they’ll drop them all, and get down to just some American music.
-Joni Mitchell

Although she is clearly a child of the great American popular tradition, there is no more serious artist on the contemporary scene than the composer-poet, Joni Mitchell. Her work, like that of Duke Ellington and Stevie Wonder, transcends the limits imposed by the terms “popular” and “serious.” Furthermore, her music-poetry is a remarkable example of the ever-present potential of ancient unity.

In Mitchell’s music, sophistication of melodic design, intertwined with word, rhythm, harmony, meaning, idea, tension, and release, function at the highest level of creativity. With the appearance of her first album, Joni Mitchell (1967), her impact was immediate. This was music hard to categorize: “popular,” yes; “folk,” yes; but it was more: There was a lean and haunting classicism in these songs. The melodies-graceful, elegant, strikingly original-were sung to gentle, carefully controlled guitar accompaniments, whose integrated role in the final result were not unlike the “simple” genius of the piano accompaniments to Schubert’s songs (Lied der Mignon, for example). All of this finely wrought musical craft supported dreamlike, romantic poems, almost childlike in their innocence. It was as if some ancient Anglo-Celtic singer in a modern guise had appeared on the twentieth-century American scene.

The innocence would not last. The remarkable and profound stylistic changes that Joni Mitchell has gone through are, in a real and poetic sense, a reliving of the journey of Western culture from the idealism of the classical-romantic tradition into the “darkness of our Modern age”. Joni Mitchell, whose original artistic vision rested squarely within that classic idealism found, as others have, a totally new energy in the Modern age that has nothing to do with either classicism or romanticism. Many poets, painters, writers, and composers have expressed a sense of alienation and discontinuity with an idealized past, while at the same time longing for it.

From Song to a Seagull to Hejira
Joni Mitchell’s first album Song to a Seagull was evidence of a musical style still connected to classical ideals of beauty. But even in this “perfect” musical-poetic world, the road to a more “dangerous” realm was hinted at in songs like the title track Song to a Seagull. Romanticism lay the groundwork for the image of a personal quest for the infinite-the abandonment of restraints in order that the truth of the world might be known and captured in life and art. What happens when you pursue that idealized quest across the modern landscape? That is just what Joni Mitchell does later in her career with her album Hejira.

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-postcard-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

-from the song Amelia, in the Hejira album

No simple description can do justice to a multilayered work of art. All we can do is to hint briefly at the richness of the music through two of the central pieces in the cycle, Amelia and Hejira (the title song). Amelia refers to none other than Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot-explorer who died in 1937. In the song-poem, she and Joni merge in a surrealist, mythical vision of flight. The music creates a hypnotic, “floating” background that never reaches home. At first listening, it seems to have a key center, until you try to sing it. Then you realize that she, in fact, moves it back and forth between two keys without ever settling into one. The effect of this harmonic design, coupled with the slow, gently swaying rhythms, seem to “open up into the sky.” Superimposed upon the basic structure are whining, “cool,” electric sounds, often dissonant, that haunt the musical background. The musical elements support a carefully balanced poetical structure. In each verse of six lines, the harmonic and rhythmic tension reach a maximum level in the third line, which causes the following three lines to come gently tumbling out in perfect acoustic symmetry.

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
(fifth verse)

For the willing listener, Amelia evokes a totally contemporary experience of time, prompted and shaped by flight over the vast expanse of the modern world – a source of both confusion and revelation. This journey is clearly symbolic of Joni Mitchell’s personal journey. Just as the harmony never comes home, neither does the song offer any resolution other than the refrain: “Amelia, it was just a false alarm.”

The title song, Hejira, is certainly one of the Mitchell’s greatest song-poems. The music is subdued, cool. As Schubert might have suggested a brook running through the Viennese countryside in a piano accompaniment, the background of Hejira suggests the whirring of the modern age. Within this nonidealized musical environment, we are moved from the petty to the universal and back again.

It is difficult to categorize the musical style of Hejira. All of Joni’s previous explorations come together in a unified stylistic fabric. Joni Mitchell, like our age, is stylistically restless. As evidence, her next adventure was a collaboration with the great jazz artist, Charles Mingus (Mingus, 1979), an exploration into jazz that represented an entirely new direction for the artist.

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Considered one of the greatest jazz composers of all time, Duke Ellington had an enormous impact on the popular music of the late 20th century. Among his more than two thousand songs are such hits as “In A Sentimental Mood,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good,” and “I’m Beginning To See The Light.” For almost fifty years he toured the world as a band leader and piano player. Today his recordings remain among the most popular jazz of the big-band era.

Born in Washington D.C. in 1899, Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as “Duke,” began playing piano as a child. His mother, who also played the piano, oversaw his education, and by the time he was seventeen he began playing professionally. Making his name as a piano player in Washington, Ellington started to compose his own music. In 1923 he moved to New York, and the following year formed his own band, the Washingtonians. By 1927, Ellington’s band had found a small base of fans and secured an engagement at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. This proved to be a major turning point in Ellington’s career, providing him with access to larger audiences through radio and recordings.

In 1931 Ellington left the Cotton Club and began a series of extended tours that would continue for the rest of his life. For Ellington, the big band was not simply made up of five reeds, four trumpets, three trombones, drums, a bass, and a piano; it was made up of individuals. Where other composers had concerned themselves with creating a sound that unified the many instruments into one voice, Ellington believed in letting the dissonant voices of each musician play against each other. He wrote music that capitalized on the particular style and skills of his soloists. For this and many other reasons, his soloists often stayed with him for extended periods. Among the best members of his band were Jimmy Blanton, Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, and Harry Carney (who was in the band for nearly every one of its forty-seven years).

In 1939, Billy Strayhorn joined the band as an arranger, composer, and sometimes pianist. The two worked well together, continuing in the tradition that Ellington had built. Strayhorn’s contribution to Ellington’s achievements at the time were significant, and even some of their most popular tunes (such as “Take The A Train”) were written by Strayhorn. Though not as well known as much of Ellington’s other work, pieces such as “Jack the Bear,” “Ko-ko,” and “Cotton Tail” (done between 1939 and 1942), had a profound influence on much of the jazz composition and performance that followed. Though Ellington continued to compose and perform regularly throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the public demand for big-band music had faded. It was not until 1956, with a triumphant performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, that Ellington re-emerged as an important voice in contemporary music.

For most of his time as a composer and bandleader, Ellington underplayed his role as a pianist. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he began performing with a number of the other great musicians and composers of the time, making albums that included DUKE ELLINGTON AND JOHN COLTRANE (1962), MONEY JUNGLE (1962, with Max Roach and Charles Mingus), and DUKE ELLINGTON MEETS COLEMAN HAWKINS. Among the younger generations, Ellington was both a symbol of the traditional modes of jazz music and the finest example of how to transcend those modes. The beauty and energy of earlier pieces such as “Mood Indigo” remained alive in even the final years of his life. In May of 1974, Ellington died of lung cancer in New York City. In his more than fifty years as a professional musician, Ellington had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, awarded a doctor of music degree from Yale University, given the Medal of Freedom, and, most importantly, built the foundations from which much of the best American music consequently grew.

by Turk Pipkin

He is an American icon; his voice as comforting as the American landscape, his songs as familiar as the color of the sky, his face as worn as the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps that’s why Dan Rather suggested, “We should add his face to the cliffs of Mt. Rushmore and be done with it.”

He’s recorded 250 albums, written 2,500 songs, and for half a century played countless concerts across America and around the world. He’s been instrumental in shaping both country and pop music, yet his appeal crosses all social and economic lines. Sometimes he’s called an outlaw, though from Farm Aid to the aftermath of September 11, from the resurrection of a burned-out courthouse in his own hometown to fanning the flame of the Olympics, it is Willie Nelson who brings us together.

Perhaps Emmylou Harris said it best: “If America could sing with one voice, it would be Willie’s.”

At age 69, the red-headed kid from the Lone Star State still sings strong and clear. Born in Abbott, Texas, in 1933, Willie Hugh Nelson was raised by grandparents with a keen appreciation for music. By age seven, Willie was already writing songs, playing them on guitar with his sister Bobbie on piano, and picking up musical influences from the gospel and devotional music of Texas churches to the blues and Latino songs he heard from fellow workers in the fields. Graduating from talent shows and local bands, he moved to Fort Worth where he perfected his chops with a double shift — country music DJ by day, honkytonk singer by night.

Those self-styled “Hungry Years” took him on to Seattle, and finally to Nashville. And if you ask him today why he sold the rights to his own timeless songs like “Family Bible” and “Nightlife” for paltry sums like fifty dollars, Willie shrugs and replies, “At the time, I needed fifty dollars!”

After joining Ray Price’s band, The Cherokee Cowboys, in 1961, Willie’s fortunes began to change. That same year, Faron Young, Billy Walker and Patsy Cline had hit records with Willie’s songs, “Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and the unforgettable, “Crazy.”

Forming his own band, Willie had a string of minor hits that stretched throughout the sixties. But Nashville wasn’t ready for the jazzy phrasing and nasal tones of his straight-from-the heart singing style, so Willie packed up and came home to Texas. Moving to Austin in 1972, he somehow managed to unite crew-cut rednecks with long-haired hippies in a common appreciation of his blend of country, rock, folk and jazz.

It all came together like yesterday’s wine with the 1975 release of RED HEADED STRANGER, a concept album which told the story of an Old West preacher and his fall from grace. On that album was Willie’s version of Roy Acuff’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” The rest was history.

Defying the restrictive confines of Nashville music, Willie and his pal Waylon Jennings became the leaders of a group of renegade musicians known as The Outlaws. Anthems like “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and “Luchenbach, Texas” brought a huge audience to their music. Always eager to do more, Willie teamed with producer Booker T. Jones and released a collection of pop standards entitled “Stardust,” which went straight up the charts, eventually selling over four million copies.

Acting roles followed in 1979 with a small part in Robert Redford’s THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, followed by the starring role in “Honeysuckle Rose,” which also featured a new Willie ditty called “On the Road Again.” Starring roles followed in BARBAROSA, RED-HEADED STRANGER, SONGWRITER and a dozen more.

Throughout the 1980s, the hits also kept coming, many of them in a long string of memorable duets –”Pancho and Lefty” with Merle Haggard and “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” with Latin pop star Julio Iglesias. Teaming with old pals Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson to form the Highwaymen, Willie charted three more albums and continued to burn up the highways of America.

In 1985, he was a co-founder of Farm Aid, a string of annual concerts to benefit America’s family farmers. His name was kept even more in the headlines, though, by his battles with the IRS, who declared his finances a mess and handed him a bill for $16.7 million in back taxes. Unfazed, Willie toured virtually non-stop and dedicated the profits of a new double CD entitled WHO’LL BUY MY MEMORIES? By 1993, the Feds had been paid in full.

In the past decade, his star has only risen higher. High profile albums like Across the Borderline, Spirit, Teatro and The Great Divide have been sandwiched between numerous smaller releases– like Milk Cow Blues and an endearing kids’ album entitled, The Rainbow Connection.

Through it all, Willie’s business and creative philosophy has been almost the opposite of the rest of the record industry. Conventional wisdom says to dole out your songs in doses, record one album every couple of years, and not get overexposed. By contrast, Willie’s almost-lifelong philosophy has been to record as much and as often as he has songs, and to play as many concerts a year as he can get to.

“If you don’t use your voice, you lose it,” Willie explains. “Besides, while I’ve still got the time, I want to play with as many of the musicians that I love as possible.”

Today, the crowd at a Willie concert generally encompasses several generations of music fans, from youngsters to great-grandparents, with a healthy dose of that all-important record-buying crowd in their teens and twenties. Kicking off with “Whiskey River,” Willie sails through twenty hits in a little over an hour. At the point most performers would be calling it a night, Willie generally switches from “Trigger” — his well-worn Martin acoustic guitar — to a black Fender Stratocaster. The crowd goes wild as he smokes through a bluesey “Nightlife” and the sublime “Angel Flying to Close to the Ground.” One type of music slides into another, the A-plus catalog of American musical styles with hints of swing, jazz, big band, and rhythm and blues. In his unique singing style, Willie’s voice is constantly phrasing behind the beat as he trades licks with his band of thirty years.

After the encores, interviews and autographs, it’s the wee hours of the morning as the bus pulls out for another city several hundred miles down the road, or maybe for a stop in Austin at Willie’s home, an 800-acre complex comprised of golf course, recording studio, cypress log cabin and his very own western-movie town called Luck, Texas.

“If you ain’t here,” Willie is fond of saying, “You’re out of Luck.”

Tireless at play as he is at work, when he’s at home Willie’s likely to record a few tracks and play anywhere from 18 – 54 holes of golf a day.

“A million pesos a hole,” he likes to say. “Double on birdies.”

With effortless abandon, he waltzes through his life, a whirlwind of energy surrounding a deep-rooted center of total calm, a cowboy-Zen philosophy which is summed up in his song title, “Still is Still Moving.”

Besides, whenever he sits down, some fool will ask if he’s ever going to retire.

“All I do is play music and golf,” he replies, his blue eyes shining like wrinkled sapphires. “Which one do you want me to give up?”