Goodbye to All That

Some went away in pursuit of music, but others were just looking for an old man's security or a young man's kicks. Some went because life at home was some how thankless, and others left when racial grief overwhelmed them, or when the need for narcotics became too great a torment to bear in the watchful U.S. All went to Europe, and there, for all their mixed ambitions and talents and woes, most have found what they were looking for. As a result, a hundred or so American jazzmen are now residents of Europe, and the Continent is swinging as Manhattan has not since 52nd Street closed down. Rome's Funny. The highly cerebral European jazz audience haunts imitation American nightclubs with such names as "The Blue Note" in Paris and Berlin, "The Hot Club" in Munich, "The Whiskey Club" in Madrid, and "The Club Montmartre" in Copenhagen. There they listen to the expatriates playing the kind of abstract and inward jazz that club owners are quick to grouse about in New York. European enthusiasm has spawned some odd combos (a blind Spaniard, two Dutch brothers and a Californian), but since the American is always the soloist, it also creates a heady atmosphere for the expatriates. Says a German jazz critic: "Europeans deify American jazzmen. They pray to them." In such rare air, down-home musicians behave like visiting professors: Fats Waller-style Pianist Joe Turner now sings discreetly in nine languages, and New Orleans-style Clarinetist Albert Nicholas spends his Sundays reading from a translation of the uplifting Chinese classic, Chin P'ing Mei. But for most, life in Europe is not so much happy or rewarding as it is painless. Their fate is precisely what might have been predicted for cultural exiles who were generally more eager to say goodbye to the U.S. than bonjour to Europe. Even among those who have lingered in Europe for years, the thought of staying for good is often a melancholy one. The pay is seldom higher than $20 nightly, and for most, there are too few good nights' work to sustain life as a cultural hero. Though many Negroes vow they will never return home ("Who wants to live in a country where they sick dogs on you?" says Blues Singer "Champion" Jack Dupree), white jazzmen in Europe find themselves on the underside of a strong inverse race prejudice--the European conviction that only Negroes can play jazz. "Negroes look more authentic," says a jazz scholar. And beyond that, some of the biggest cities remain remarkably square by Storyville standards. "Rome's a funny town," says a bearded hipster pianist from Michigan City, Ind. "Nobody knows where to get marijuana." Three of the Best. Paris, though, is a junkie's paradise, and with six simon-pure jazz clubs, it is also the most hospitable to American emigres. Last week in Paris, The Blue Note had Trumpeter Chet Baker and Pianists Kenny Drew and Bud Powell all on the same bill; the Club St. Germain had Drummer Kenny Clarke, and Joe Turner was at his accustomed spot in the Calvados Bar. Having grown up on a strict diet of Sidney Bechet (who died in Paris in 1959 just short of canonization by the masses), Paris has also cultivated a fondness for downriver jazz. Blues Singers Curtis Jones, Memphis Slim, and Dupree all play Paris, having been rescued from neglect in New York and Chicago four years ago by two French enthusiasts. Though some expatriate jazzmen never had a career worth saving at home, some have abandoned highly successful lives in America in favor of life abroad. Among the 20 or so excellent jazz musicians in Europe today are three of the best anywhere. They are the most missed of all the expatriates, and their lives away from home are as different as their reasons for leaving: > TRUMPETER CHET BAKER, 33, Says: "I left America because I had a medical problem--drugs. Europeans treat drug addicts as sick persons, not criminals, and I'm not going back home until I'm sure I'm all right." Baker's remark rings strangely: the Italians locked him up for 16 months, then kicked him out of the country, and since then he has received similarly chilly greetings in Germany, Switzerland and England. A few years ago, Baker could easily have become a romantic hero of modern jazz. He plays with a mystic, "golden horn" lyricism, and he looks and acts enough like the late James Dean to have inherited a vast following of movie-house rebels. But now all that is behind him--he has been away too long. Early last year, he was about to nail the lid on his career with a Dino de Laurentiis film called The Chet Baker Story, but as his luck would have it, the project was dropped: there was not enough material in a life so young and lost. > DRUMMER KENNY CLARKE, 49, was One of bebop's frontiersmen, and when he left for Europe in 1956, he was generally considered the best drummer around. He conceals his reasons for leaving behind a smile of wellbeing, and of all the Americans in Europe, Clarke is by far the most successful. He has a pavilion outside Paris (where he spends his Sundays gardening), a taste for rose d'Anjou, a Dutch wife and an English car, and next fall he will take up a post as Musiklehrer at the Folkwangschule in Essen, where he will teach a course in something like philosophy of drumming. He tours everywhere and vacations on the Cote d'Azur. "Why not stay here?" he says. "I earn a good living--a very good living." > PIANIST BUD POWELL, 38, is unquestionably the most important jazz musician in Europe, and he is universally considered the best of the bebop pianists. He left New York in 1959, briefly emerging from the fog that had kept him close to mental hospitals since 1947. In Paris, he is distant, silent and alone. He scarcely talks to anyone except to murmur the two-line litany that describes his bleak fate. "Do you like me?" he will ask, and if the answer is yes, he says, "Then buy me a cognac." At The Blue Note, he sits slumped over the piano, ear cocked down to the keys, and he plays like a man trying to recall how he used to sound. Now and then, with a cry of "Bebop!" he spins into a rush of the crashing, dissonant chords that distinguish his style, but some nights he scarcely plays at all. Powell's days as a creative musician seem over now, but he is still a masterful pianist. Duke Ellington, who recorded an hour of his playing for Reprise Records early this year, says Powell is playing as well now as he did years ago when he made the series of Verve and Blue Note recordings that became a guide to a whole generation of jazz pianists. He will tour Sweden and Denmark this summer and come to New York in the fall for the first time in nearly five years. "I think he feels his music more deeply now," says his wife Buttercup. "His phrasing is different. When he plays Autumn in New York, you can actually hear the subway in the first chords."

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