Paris Correspondent
B
ack when she little known, writing for DownBeat served McPartland well, publicizing her career while also offering a vehicle for her insights and opinions about the music. Many of the pieces excerpted here are classics, particularly the one about Mary Lou Williams, later included in McPartland’s collection, Ma ri an McPartland’s Jazz World: All In Good Time (University of Illinois Press). Though she says writing does not come as easily to her as playing the piano, McPartland is a superb prose stylist with a succinct, smart style and a knack for finding the right words. “I went to a good school,” she said, “and my father criticized anything I ever wrote. Anytime I had to write thank you letters, he always had to see what I wrote. You couldn’t cross anything out. It had to be perfect. And if he didn’t like the way I said certain things, I had to rewrite them.” A manuscript copy of her first piece for DownBeat, a review of the Paris Jazz Festival of May 1949, reveals that little rewriting— or editing—was needed. McPartland’s late husband, Jimmy McPartland, the cornetist and Chicago jazz pioneer, was playing the festival, so Marian, who tagged along, thought she “should make a contribution.” Living in Chicago at the time, Marian approached editor Ned Williams—“a very fatherly guy,” she recalled—and proposed a review of the festival. Today, of course, DownBeat wouldn’t allow a writer to review her spouse. But back then, conflict of interest rules apparently were a little looser.
Crowds Jam Paris Jazz Festival By Marian McPartland July 1, 1949 PARIS—Backstage at the Salle Pleyel, an excited crowd shuffled back and forth. Musicians were warming up, stage technicians barked last minute directions, critics and kibitzers conversed excitedly and craned their necks as, 15 minutes late, a French emcee sidled in front of the curtain and announced, “Le Festival Internationale de Jazz est ouvert.” For a whole week the 25,000-capacity auditorium was jammed. Devotees of New Orleans music rubbed shoulders with bop disciples. When, on opening night, the first notes of Vic Lewis’ bop-styled, 15-piece British band were heard, purists in the audience booed and hissed. And, when Carlo Krahmer’s Dixie band held the stage, the progressive element loudly registered disapproval. But when Tadd Dameron’s quintet, with Miles Davis, trumpet; James Moody, tenor; Bass Speiler, bass; and Kenny Clarke, drums, was announced, the entire audience settled to hear, if not always to understand, some of the most controversial music of the day. Bespectacled, goateed Parisians nodded bereted heads sagely at each exciting harmonic change, screaming and whistling their approval of every soloist. ... Jimmy McPartland, with a French group ambiguously called the New Sound Chicagoans, brought down the house with his driving choruses on “China Boy” and “Singing The Blues,” the latter dedicated to Bix. ... Bringing the boppers to the edges of their seats was the Charlie Parker quintet, with Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Al Haig, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; and Max Roach, drums. … The band had a tremendous beat, and Parker, displaying his prodigious technique and originality of ideas, wove in and out of the rhythmic patterns laid down by Roach to the accompaniment of ecstatic cries of “Formidable!” from the fanatics.
66 DOWNBEAT July 2009
75th Anniversary Collector’s Issue
