Concerts without Culture

Manhattan's worldlywise, bee-busy Museum of Modern Art has a plushy, subterranean auditorium where, between series of movie classics, its customers have heard Mexican music, Brazilian music, movie music, Parisian music (by Darius Milhaud). Last week Museumgoers heard something even more tittupy: the first of six "Coffee Concerts" whose artists will range from an angel-winged, guitar-playing Negro bishop to a squeeze of Spanish bagpipers.

The Coffee Concerts were brewed by a member of the Museum's music committee: Louise Crane, wide-eyed, 27-year-old onetime Vassar student, daughter of Massachusetts' late, rich, paper-manufacturing Governor Winthrop Murray Crane. Miss Crane dislikes the "tortured looks" of symphony audiences. She likes jazz but hates it in nightclubs. So she roamed Harlem hunting unusual talent, and severely warned culture seekers to stay away from the results.

On her first program, Salon Swing, Miss Crane put an obscure pianist, a vocal quintet, a small hot band--Negroes all. The pianist, light-fingered Kentuckian Herman Chittison, won fame in Europe during the past decade, leading bands and swinging Chopin and Schubert at the. keyboard. It took Louise Crane seven months to track him down in Manhattan. The five vocalists chose an appalling name for their collective debut: the Sophistichords. But they deftly turned English and European songs inside out, kidded the pants off the clown's teary air from Pagliacci. The band of the evening, John Kirby's, had not been hard to find. Plain people know it--in Manhattan's Cafe Society and on CBS's Duffy's Tavern--as one of the best of the small ones.

Coffee-colored, dead-pan John Kirby, once a trombonist and tuba player, now slaps and bows the bull fiddle. He, too, swings the classics, in his own delicate, sophisticated arrangements and those of his black, impish trumpeter, Charlie Shavers. Kirby's clarinetist is an oldtimer: goggle-eyed Buster Bailey, who looks half of his 39 years. The band--filled out by Pianist Billy Kyle, Drummer O'Neil Spencer, Alto Saxophonist Russell Procope (rhymes with "no soap")--has been unchanged for nearly three years, a phenomenon in the trade. But Kirby was lately separated from the sweet singer he discovered and married, Maxine Sullivan.

Future Coffee Concerts include: an oratorio version of the chichi-melodious Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera, Four Saints in Three Acts; Spanish music (with the bagpipers); voodoo dancers and Brazilian Soprano Elsie Houston; a "Jubilee" of gospel-singing Negro quartets (some with three or five members) and the guitar-playing bishop. The bishop, the Rev. Utah Smith, wears paper wings, lately inspired Composer-Critic Thomson to write: "As a stimulator of choric transports he incites the faithful to movements and behavior not very different from those of any true jitterbug. Myself, I found it distinctly pleasant to hear good swing work and to observe its effects in surroundings imbued with Protestant Christianity rather than among the alcoholic stupidities and more somber diabolisms of the nightclub world."

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