A Hopeless Situation
_ Bob Hope, Benny Carter and the Slow Death of Craftsmanship. _
by Shelton Hull
August, 2003
Bob Hope (1903-2003) was a comedian, which meant a lot more when he got started in the business than it does now. The difference lies in the elaborate machinery of media, created and refined in part to better exploit the talents of Hope’s generation, which included such diverse figures as newscaster David Brinkley, the musician Benny Carter, the music critic Harold Schonburg and the politician Strom Thurmond, all of whom died within a month of each other. It doesn’t matter that their literal connections were tangential at best, because in death they stand out together as prime examples of American culture at its peak, well-prior to its present accelerated breakdown.
It’s a given that there will never be another Bob Hope, just as there will never be a truly worthy successor to any of the men and women who have come to be the standard-bearers of various entertainment industries; but we never stop to think about exactly why this is so. It’s not just that Hope and his ilk were so naturally good, but that they existed in a climate that, for all its flaws (this period included two World Wars and the Depression), still allowed them to actually work at their craft long enough to master it.
Born in Britain but naturalized American at 17, Hope’s style was forged under very specific conditions. Entertaining was not his first line of work; he plucked chickens, sold things door-to-door and even spent time as an amateur boxer, which may be where he first picked up on the delicate balance between victory and defeat on the public stage. He was not born into showbiz like Milton Berle, Buddy Rich or the Marx Brothers. He was not given a spot because he knew the right people or because his appeal had been tested in focus-groups and vetted by the relevant authorities; all that came much later, when his fundamental value to the country was a matter of fact.
Bob Hope’s life was a blatant example of what seems to have gone away when the Greatest Generation began its long, slow decline. Classic American craftsmanship is dying off across the board, and that’s just part of the reason why our economy hovers just on the edge of disaster, like Shelly Berman telling mafia jokes in Las Vegas or W. pimping “yellowcake” based on “darned good” intelligence. The man’s entire career– the jokes alone ran to about 89,000 pages– was based on his ability to tell a joke and make it stick, which is a deceptively simple operation. Men have destroyed themselves trying to master this art, but mastery of anything is no longer a goal that the average person strives for. That is the salient point that underscores the bulk of recent American history, and explains why it went so wrong so fast.
If you think I’m being overly dramatic, name one actor, singer, comedian or whatever that would step into Baghdad right now and tell jokes about how they could all die at any moment. Bob Hope would do it. He was a man with balls the size of Daisy Cutters. Like he told a USO audience in Vietnam, “You know, some people say that because I come out to these things, I must be pro-war. Well, I’ll tell you something: I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve been to all the wars, and there’s nobody that’s more anti-war than I am.” Maybe he was lying, but if so I couldn’t tell, because his timing was perfect.
Just as the quality of American industry and culture was put on full display after the events of December 7, 1941, it may take another world war for us to finally realize what the frauds of “free trade” and “deregulation” have wrought on the population. The country has lost jobs in the manufacturing sector for 34 straight months, on top of over half a million such jobs lost (or rather, given away) in the period between NAFTA and 9/11. With these jobs go vital experience in the most fundamental aspects of our national interest. And for what? To prop up carpetbaggers and foreign nationals, to destroy the very qualities that made this country the hip destination for those who’ve wanted a better life for 100 years? If Bob Hope had run his career the way the fronts for various interest groups run the United States, he would have been among the many of his peers who were sloughed out of the business with any of the new media that were born after him: Vaudeville, radio, film, television. Even the Internet, where one can go to www.bobhope.com and read jokes about FDR.
Bob Hope outlasted 11 Presidents of the United States; he might have outlasted one more if he’d lived another 18 months. President Bush, who typically ignores reporters while going to or from his sky-chariot, made a rare runway statement to mark Hope’s passing, and even he appeared to recognize what we had lost. Hope’s vital years as a performer were long past him, but every time they brought him out to accept an award, it was like looking at 1945 and all the hope we had back then. Men like Clinton and Gingrich, whose lives are all about the destruction of Tradition, were still made to genuflect, to pay homage, to pander in hopes that Hope’s rub would deflect the heat from whatever awful decision they’d most recently made– and that’s as close as either man will ever get to the greatness their egos thirst for.
MSNBC broke the news of Hope’s death, and the others followed within half an hour. Of course, they all had their video packages ready, their solemn music, their “Bob Hope: 1903-?” graphics updated, and every version of “Thanks for the Memory” he’d ever done cued up and ready to overlap. On July 28 the medium that Hope helped build from scratch coasted all day on, as opposed to in, his memory. That makes perfect sense, because “true heads” who understand what his loss really means in the broader view were plenty happy to just turn those TVs off, anyway. Many seminal figures of television’s golden age (a time that didn’t really start to tarnish until the late-1970s) have died in recent years, and the pain grows more acute incrementally, because the people who took their place aren’t good for a damn thing except hype and bullshit. That’s not Bob Hope’s fault. It’s everyone else’s. RIP.
**
“The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me,” said Duke Ellington in 1943, and the problem persists as I write Carter’s obituary 60 years later. His last big run began on Pablo Records in 1976, as he approached 70; it ended peacefully at Cedars-Sinai Hospital on July 12, 2003, at the age of 96. His was the latest in a tragic procession, tragic less for they who lived long, full lives than for we, the people of America. There was once a time when giants walked the Earth, and they were known as such, but now they are falling so fast a full listing would require all this space for names alone, and the mortals who’ve sprung up in their wake are not up to the standard– most of them, anyway.
“Benny Carter was one of the greatest musicians, composers, and people I have ever known. I was proud to be his friend,” said Marian McPartland, who recorded at least twice with Carter in a friendship that lasted over a half-century, predating not only her NPR show “Piano Jazz,” but also the invention of television. Benny Carter was the kind of man who would duet with a worker the likes of McPartland, live on the air, and hold his own well enough that you can buy the results online right now.
His mother taught him piano, as mothers used to do. His first chosen instrument was the trumpet; it didn’t take, so he got a C-melody saxophone, an instrument whose master, Frankie Trumbauer, took his secrets to the grave. Carter matured as a trailblazing altoist who doubled on trumpet, composed on piano and recorded on trombone and clarinet. One suspects he might have learned to beat-match if he’d lived long enough. American know-how.
At one time or another, Benny Carter employed Chu Berry, Sid Catlett, Kenny Clarke, Miles Davis, Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, JJ Johnson, Art Pepper, Oscar Peterson, Max Roach, Ben Webster and Teddy Wilson. His arrangements were used by such as Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Count Basie, Ray Charles, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, Quincy Jones, Gene Krupa, Peggy Lee, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Carmen McRae, Glenn Miller, Lou Rawls, Mel Torme and Sarah Vaughn. Those wishing to dig the recorded output of Benny Carter have at least 84 different CDs to choose from, with minor overlaps.
“Everybody that knows who he is calls him ‘King’,” said Louis Armstrong. “He is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be,” said Wynton Marsalis in presenting him with a Kennedy Center Honor in 1996. Carter also received honorary doctorates from Princeton, Rutgers, Harvard and the New England Conservatory of Music– the honorific as landmark, impossibly late but well-timed for a new generation whose rediscovery of the great masters helped Carter and (some of) his peers rest easy in the final stretch.
Drummer and Florida jazz DJ Bob Bednar came up in the Philadelphia jazz scene of the 1950s; he was of a generation whose only direct experience with Carter came through his work for Verve Records and Jazz At The Philharmonic. “Having matured musically under Bird’s wingspan, Benny Carter (and Johnny Hodges) had next to no impact upon my direction in jazz. The realization of his greatness eluded me for years, and it’s only be recently that I fully understand the rich rewards his music offers.” Hindsight, always 20/20.
I will not pretend to be a Benny Carter mark. He was not my favorite jazz musician, nor even my favorite alto saxophonist, despite his having virtually invented it as a vehicle for improvisation. It’s not that I disliked him or his music in any way; it’s just that I liked many others much more. I always understood, however, that my lukewarm attitude toward Benny Carter was proof-positive of his enduring influence, because I did not live in his world. I live in the world that he helped create, and as such I count myself among the millions who should now take a moment of silence in his memory.
His was a generation of stylists born in a country that had no use for them; their children lived to see Armstrong and Ellington and Gillespie used as Cold War propaganda tools. Why? Because they were needed. He toured under Norman Granz’ Jazz At The Philharmonic, forcing into being some of this country’s very first integrated audiences. Speaking of integration, 1935 saw Carter leading a mixed orchestra through the Netherlands, months before Mildred Bailey introduced Benny Goodman to Teddy Wilson.
My favorite Carter stuff– the trio with Gene Krupa and Teddy Napoleon from JATP, the sessions from Art Tatum’s Group Masterpieces, the Jam Session with Charlie Parker and Johnny Hodges- was recorded in the 1950s. By that point the US had finally and briefly warmed somewhat to the music that he could once only play for good money and the guarantee of relative safety in Europe. That death by old age could evoke genuine shock among people who should by now be incapable of shock is a testament to the man’s perceived permanence. It could serve as a lesson to our modern, “no-future” generation of musicians that immortality is not a flesh-and-blood concern.
Benny Carter first recorded when Hoover was President, and had earned his “King of Jazz” moniker by the end of FDR’s first term; the album Elegy In Blue (MusicMasters) won his second Grammy in 1995. Such longevity is unlikely to be seen again in the music business, due to external environmental factors alone. But I sometimes wonder if perhaps our culture isn’t due to come back full-circle, if “classical values” may not return once the consequences of what we’ve done to ourselves can no longer be ignored. When and if that happens, we can be sure that an as-yet unborn generation will return to the music of our departed masters; and those masters, of whom Benny Carter was but one, will smile down from that great bandstand in the sky. RIP.
