Just finished reading Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges by Con Chapman (Oxford University Press).
It left me with the impression, as do all the best biographies, that I have spent time in the company of the subject. This is some achievement given that Hodges gave very little away, his face while he spun those ineffable creamy solos from his alto sax as immobile and enigmatic as that of an Easter Island statue; and a man in the very few interviews in which he participated, neither given to candour nor introspection. What sources are available, however, Chapman has gleaned like a prospector panning for gold. The book is scholarly and thorough, the presentation and organisation of the facts and material sympathetic to its subject.
The biography is organized largely chronologically. Chapman draws the musician’s early history and family background very effectively. While the political aspects of Hodges’s story are not particularly emphasized in this study, the casual, careless nature of the paperwork surrounding his birth, upbringing – down to the accuracy and order of his forenames and whether his surname ended in an ‘s’ or not – speaks to the, at best, indifference of the authorities to his heritage. Like many young black men of his age, music was the way for Hodges to aspire, threatening to steal a particularly beautiful soprano saxophone upon which his attention had fallen if his mother did not buy it for him.
Equally evocative is the way in which Chapman also draws the musical milieu of the jazz age in New York as the young man goes to the big city, ‘scuffling; in search of useful employment. While bracketing the story of Hodges’s life in a largely linear and chronological fashion, the biography also comprises a number of ‘side trips’, largely self-contained essays on subjects as diverse as Women and Children, Food and Drink.
One particular chapter on His Tone is both instructive and important. Chapman has certainly done his homework. The book is researched meticulously and the writer’s scrupulous approach is evident in the close observation he has brought even to watching videos of the artist at work in order to explain the various positioning of the mouthpiece Hodges employed in order to achieve his varying effects.
And it is that tone which is the essence of Hodges’s place in the pantheon of great musicians, as instantly recognizable and inimitable as the deft stroke of a charcoal pencil in the hand of Picasso, a true master; an artist. The modernists make fleeting appearances in the Hodges story. One chapter is entitled The Coming of Bird though between Johnny’s collaboration with Parker in the Norman Granz jam sessions in the early fifties and his series of albums on the Verve label in the late fifties following his return to the Ellington fold, the younger man had perished. Coltrane has a walk on part in Hodges’s life also (see photograph), being Coltrane’s employer during Hodges’s brief flirtation with early rhythm and blues and his solo career as bandleader. Throughout all the twists and turns of modernism, Hodges sailed on serenely, his essential style unchanged.
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| Johnny Hodges with Shorty Baker and John Coltrane |
Like that of his own main employer. What of Hodges’s return to Ellington in the mid-fifties? Occasionally, as Chapman catalogues Ellington’s successes post- Newport and the albums that followed immediately in its wake, for instance, Hodges is in danger of dissolving like Disprin in his own story. As he felt once again the gravitational pull of Ellington’s orbit, that, I suppose, is the point, however. How did Hodges feel about Paul Gonsalves effectively stealing the thunder with his incendiary tenor solo at Newport? Or having to return to the Ellington Orchestra at all following the soul destroying accumulations of the business end of the music business when he fronted his own units? We will never know. In his exhaustive research, Con Chapman has found much that is interesting in what Hodges had to say about the ‘external’, practical reasons for his return to Ellington. Hodges argues that he could have settled for a lucrative career as a session musician but, rather, he chose to return to Duke’s aggregation. We must allow Johnny that little conceit, given such an option may have been difficult in that he was not the most facile sight-reader, a necessary condition for such studio work.
Hodges knew his own worth and despite – perhaps because of – the hardships of life on the road, he kept his own counsel and stood by his own standards. In defining and defending his artistry, he was uncompromising in what sort of music he would and would not play. In the penultimate chapter of the book entitled The Blues, Chapman makes an incisive assessment of what this phrase means in terms of popular music and how it was understood by Johnny Hodges. The great gift of Con Chapman’s book is to remind us that as an artist, Hodges was rooted, via the music of his great mentor Sidney Bechet forever faithfully and uncompromisingly in the blues. This was the yardstick against which he invariably measured the worth of any music upon which he was called to essay. His tenacious hold on the form, Chapman tells us, ensured that Ellington’s music itself, too, remained ‘earthed’.
Last December, I attended Coventry Cathedral for a screening of a Sacred Concert telecast filmed there fifty-two years earlier and unseen since. At one point in the broadcast, Harry Carney is soloing when suddenly, unnecessarily and yet knowingly, Johnny Hodges leans conspicuously into shot to tidy the sheets on his music stand. It is almost as if, in his impish fashion, Hodges is intruding just to remind us that he is still there. Con Chapman’s excellent biography does just the same, rendering Hodges present for us again.
