Oleo — Phineas Newborn, Jr.
#365Songs: January 16
I’m starting this story about a song without a song. I had a song, but I surfed my #365Songs archives and realized I’d already written about it. It was a good fucking choice, too. You’re welcome.
But I won’t do it again. Words were better then. They came more easily.
Shhh. Don’t spook them.
But that’s ridiculous, an absurdist flight of fancy, that language skitters under the sofa alongside my cat’s fuzzy blue worm when the lights come on.
Ridiculous. From the Latin ridiculus, meaning laughable, funny or absurd. Over the years its usage has waffled between the comically absurd or the scandalously absurd.
At last I’ve found my muse — language itself.
In Act II, Scene II of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Stephano and Trincolo mock the drunken and subservient Caliban as a “most rediculous Monster.” Comic and pitiful, worthy of contempt and laughter. By the 18th century, usage of the word had reached its zenith and softened into its more contemporary meaning — amusingly absurd. In the Harry Potter universe, the spell Riddikulus turns the frightening Boggarts into something funny, neutering its ability to incite fear.
But sandwiched in the middle of all of this is the brief and wonderful moment when the 1950s jazz culture coopted the term to mean something totally unique and perfectly excellent. Sometime last year I came across the following passage in Whitney Balliett’s Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz (1954–2001). It comes from a Balliett interview with Count Basie in which the author asks after the origin of Basie’s singular style. I remember it distinctly because, at first, I took Basie’s use of “ridiculous” to mean something less than commendatory.
“Of course, I’ve always listened to the pianists who play a whole lot of notes. Like Tatum, who was impossible. If he’d stayed up nine years playing, I’d have stayed up nine years to listen to him. Oscar Peterson is kind of ridiculous, too, and so is Phineas Newborn. But for me, simplicity has always seemed right.”
Oscar Peterson? Ridiculous? Ridiculous, indeed. And who was this Phineas Newborn cat? How could the great Count say something negative about Oscar Peterson? None of it made sense. To settle my concerns, I queued up one of Phineas Newborn, Jr.’s most popular albums, A World of Piano! (1962), and settled into my chair.
At only the 1:29 mark of “Cheryl” I recognized Basie’s meaning. I should have recognized it all along. He wasn’t subtly slagging Peterson and Newborn; he was paying them the ultimate compliment. (I would learn later that it was Count Basie that actually discovered Phineas.) His “ridiculous” meant superhuman. Titans of their calling. Operating on a talent level that even Count Basie couldn’t quite comprehend. Not because he wasn’t also “ridiculous” at his own thing — but because from these pianists coursed waves of intricate keystrokes. The second half of “Manteca” is a jazz pianist rolling downhill, careening or rocks and limbs and samba rhythms, ever faster, ever more impertinent to gravity.
And then I heard “Oleo.” I had to find a clip of Phineas Newborn playing it. I am not a religious man, but I do consider myself spiritual — and there’s no other explanation for how I felt watching him play the piano.
Count Basie was right. Phineas Newborn was “ridiculous.”
Connection to jazz isn’t conscious. There’s no lyrical hook or clinical appreciation. It grooves or it doesn’t. It moves you or it doesn’t. My favorite jazz musicians transcend space and time; by that I mean a single track is a moment, an album an experience. I felt this immediately with Phineas Newborn, Jr.
Controlled chaos balanced by technical wizardry. I don’t know if I’ve heard a jazz pianist with a greater mastery of his instrument — at any tempo. Listen to “Oleo” followed immediately by “All the Things You Are” from his debut Here is Phineas (1956). Those that have written about Newborn cite his rapid-fire parallel improvisation as the source of his greatness, a skill requiring “intense ambidexterity.” I can barely snap my fingers at the same time.
Like many of his contemporaries, Phineas Newborn’s story doesn’t end happily. His most vocal critics called him “too technical,” a bit of slander that deeply affected him. (Imagine publishing that as criticism.) Confrontations with his record label led to a handful of nervous breakdowns. Stays at mental institutions and hand injuries derailed his recording career by the mid-1960s. Newborn became destitute, living on his mother’s couch, anywhere that would have him. He attempted a comeback later in the 1970s, but his small return to notoriety didn’t improve his dire financial situation. Phineas Newborn, Jr. died a pauper, impoverished and without fanfare.
Now that’s ridiculous.
But for the music we still have. The chance to change his fate one new jazz listener at a time. The chance for a measure of redemption.
“If I had to choose the best all-around pianist of anyone who’s followed me chronologically, unequivocally … I would say Phineas Newborn, Jr.”
— Oscar Peterson
My version of meditation is putting Bill Evans or Miles Davis or Art Blakey — or now Phineas Newborn, Jr. — on the turntable, records I know inside and out, letting them spin. I lie down on the floor and anticipate, surrender, visualizing something beyond the room, the blank page in front of me, seeking a spiritual connection to that place of inspiration, that realm that exists beyond the place of words, beyond language.
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
