101 Things To Do Before You Graduate Living In History ... - Alumni

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work & play 12 scene: Summer 2010 Passion for the Climb My Boogie Stop Shuffle By Michael Coyle, Professor of English “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” — Google this quotation and you’ll find it attributed to any of a dozen people ranging from Thelonious Monk to Lou Reed, from Martin Mull to Elvis Costello to Frank Zappa. Doubtless there’s a story to be told about how this quip turned into the stuff of urban legend. But most everyone who has ever thrilled to a favorite song knows the force of it. I sure do. I’ve been writing about — or trying to write about — music since I was in college, driven by the sheer futility of it, but also by that deeply human need to communicate what is beyond words. Hegel believed that music is the art of arts precisely because it is beyond language, and any number of philosophers and aestheticians after him have tried to explain its power with arguments about how music bypasses the rational mind and works directly on the soul. I don’t know. I can only say that anytime I’m moved by music, I feel in the presence of something much bigger than me. There are analogous moments in the other arts, including the one I’m trained to teach, Andrew Daddio but nowhere else do attempts to express what I’m feeling more seem only inadequate translations. In high school, I did what musicbesotted teenagers usually do — played in garage bands. Needless to say, those efforts also felt like translations (though they were better than the poems I was writing). Eventually I made my way into college radio, and discovered in its mix of discussion and transmission new possibilities of community. To “translate” means to convey; radio affords one opportunity to do that. It’s not just the occasional call from a listener who likes something I’m spinning — it has also been the company of other DJs. Every semester I meet new WRCU DJs whose passion for music rivals my own. I’m lucky. But getting involved at first took a little pressure from Professor of English Emeritus Bob Blackmore, who, with the glittering eye of some Ancient Mariner, called me to task. It was Bob who negotiated my first being asked by the WRCU board to serve as station adviser, and I’ll always be grateful for that. For about 15 years, about once a week, I was a regular visitor in Bob’s den, enjoying late-into-the-night conversations over growing stacks of LPs. He himself was still doing shows back then, and in retrospect, I realize that the ongoing contests we’d get into (I’d play something on my show, to which he’d respond the next night on his, challenging me to “top that”) amounted to a sustained graduate seminar, conducted with the deftest of touches. Bob, too, was always looking for connections with the music. I called my first WRCU show R&Be-bop. I was then, as now, seeking music that busted genres as well as expectations. My theme song was Big Joe Turner’s 1959 “Switchin’ in the Kitchen,” and I’d play things like Jimmy’s Liggins’s 1947 jump blues cover of Charlie Parker’s be-bop masterpiece, “Now’s the Time.” But after Bob’s passing, it was time to pick up the torch. I couldn’t replace Bob, but I could carry on in my own way. So I conceived a new show, calling it after (and choosing as my new theme song) the Mills Blue Rhythm Band’s 1933 swingfest, “A Jazz Martini.” As a good cocktail mixes and balances ingredients and spirits, so this show drew on everything from 1920s Hot Jazz to the contemporary avant-garde. Two years ago, however, my life changed completely: the legendary (at least to jazz record geeks like me) “Slim,” of Cadence Records, left her job to start a new life with me here in Hamilton. Let me make it fast with one more thing and say that she is still working with Cadence; I wouldn’t sabotage my favorite record label! With Slim in town, I quickly found myself in new weekly radio contests — with her throwing down challenges every bit as hard as Blackmore’s. This situation lasted three semesters before it dawned on us that we’d have more fun doing one show together. And so, the name of my show changed once again, becoming Slim and Him, with a new theme song: Mingus’s 1959 recording, “Boogie Stop Shuffle.” Now there’s a dance! Radio remains my regular, but not sole, means of trying to share the joy: music is important to my course, “The Jazz Age”; I write academic articles about jazz and pop history; I’m developing a book about cover songs; I offer jazz lectures for Core 152; and I continue to review jazz books and records for Cadence magazine. Sometimes I think I come close to producing language that’s just about adequate, but most of the time, I finish a piece simply resolving to do better next time. I’ve learned that that’s the whole Faustian point. As F. Scott wrote: it eluded me then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow I’ll run faster, stretch out my arms farther… And one fine morning — 8 Read more essays from our Passion for the Climb series, or see how you can submit your own essay, at www.colgate.edu/scene/pfcessays
A JAZZ LEGACY On December 12, 1940, the wildly popular jazz musician Duke Ellington and his band performed on the stage of Colgate Memorial Chapel to a standing-roomonly crowd — the 13th event in that year’s Concert and Lecture Series. Colgate student and future English professor Bob Blackmore ’41, a jazz musician himself, was in the audience that day. He was one of the top three student trombonists in the country, once invited to play as a guest performer with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. He also helped to form the student band “The Maroon Raiders.” After graduating, while stationed in Florida during WWII, he haunted jazz dives and nightclubs exploring the roots of jazz, and in the 1950s, he started amassing a collection of record albums. Returning to Colgate to teach English in 1960, Blackmore spent the rest of his career on the faculty. From 1961 to 2001, he also shared his passion for jazz through his weekly Monday-night WRCU jazz show, “Your Monday Date With Jazz.” Most of the records he spun came from the thousands and thousands of albums in his personal collection, which eventually became one of the largest and most complete jazz collections in the country. Before he passed away in 2002, Blackmore donated his massive collection to Colgate. It has taken nine years to catalog it — donations from his family and former students helped to finance the herculean task. Today, the Blackmore Jazz Archive of about 17,000 LPs is housed in Case-Geyer Library and is accessible to the public for listening by appointment. The library’s Robert Blackmore Alcove houses display cases telling Blackmore’s story and features a listening station and space for exhibitions out of the collection. The first exhibition, up through December 2010, highlights that momentous Ellington concert and some of the artist’s colorful album covers. New exhibitions will be mounted each year, according to English professor Michael Coyle, curator of the collection, with plans for them to occasionally tie into the curriculum, such as his course The Jazz Age. J AZZ Page 13 is the showplace 13 for Colgate tradition, history, and school spirit.
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