Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA06465 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sun, 18 Feb 2001 15:11:38 GMT User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 10:08:39 -0500 Subject: A Tale of a Meme: ³Arabian Song From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: charles Keil <chas128@earthlink.net>, Bruce Jackson <bjackson@acsu.buffalo.edu>, Dave Marsh <marsh6@home.com>, David Bloom <dbloom@erols.com>, Howard Bloom <HowlBloom@aol.com>, Howard Olah-Reiken <olahreiken@ieee.org>, <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>, Alan Nadel <nadela@rpi.edu>, Allan Elkowitz Allan Elkowitz <elkowitz@alumni.caltech.edu>, Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@haywire.csuhayward.edu> Message-ID: <B6B54FA5.766C%bbenzon@mindspring.com> Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
I though you folks would get a kick out of this, a story about a tune most
of you know in one form or another. This is a draft of the opening section
of the final chapter of my book on music.
Bill B
**************
In 1922 Louis Armstrong left his native New Olreans to join his mentor, Joe
³King² Oliver in Chicago. In 1924 he left Chicago to play with Fletcher
Henderson, who led the hottest band in New York. He returned to Chicago a
year later and, upon his return, went into the recording studio with a
pick-up band to make the first in a series of five dozen recordings over the
next three years. These recordings have become known as the Hot Fives and
Sevens and are among the most important and remarkable in jazz history. A
number of them were transcribed and available in sheet music form shortly
after the records appeared.[ ]
The last recording in this series was made on December 12th, 1928 with Earl
Hines on piano, Don Redman on clarinet and alto sax, Zutty Singleton on
drums, Fred Robinson on trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet and alto sax,
and Mancy Carr on banjo. They recorded ³Tight Like This,² which was a
musical reply to ³Itıs Tight Like That² cut by McKinneyıs Cotton Pickers a
few weeks earlier. Don Redmon, a college-educated musician who had played
and arranged for Fletcher Henderson along with Armstrong, was now music
director for McKinney. He served as arranger on this date.[ ]
The tune is slow, in a minor key, and very dramatic. Armstrong doubles-up
on the time in his soloa practice that was to become routine with the
emergence of bebop in the 1940s. Armstrong lays out in the fifteenth and
sixteenth bars of his solo and some wise guy in the bandprobably Redman or
Hinessays, in a falsetto voice, ³oh itıs tight like that Louie.² At this
point Armstrong inserts a certain two-bar lick that he then repeats two bars
later in a slightly more elaborate and rapid form. This particular lick is
one of Armstrongıs signature licks, and shows up in other solos as well,
such as his standard routine on ³Dinah.²
When I first heard that lick I recognized it as the first part of a
childrenıs song about the girls in France being without underpants. The tune
also turns up in cartoons where it typically accompanies a snake-charmer.
Where did Armstrong learn this lick? Animated cartoons didnıt exist in
Armstrongıs childhood. My childhood was a half-century after his and in a
different part of America, western Pennsylvania as opposed to New Orleans.
Iıve made some inquiries by phone and through the internet and found out a
few things. In the first place, others remembered this tune from their
childhoods and it is still in circulation. Eric Johnson told me that his
daughters remember these lyrics (they couldnıt remember any more):
All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,
And the way they shake is enough to kill a snake.
Karen Stober tells me it was sung by two children facing one another and
clapping hands to the lyrics, which she reported as:
On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.
Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969! [whatever year it is].
The locale has changed, but we still have a snake being killed. I found
another somewhat fuller version on the web where the dance was characterized
as a ³hookie-kookie dance² and that triggered my own memory, so that I now
believe the version I knew as a child included a hoochie-coochie dance.[ ]
However interesting this may be, it doesnıt tell us where Armstrong got his
lick. The fact that it is still in circulation among children suggests that
it is relatively long-lived. That gives some weight to the speculation that
it may have been in New Orleans childrenıs culture during Armstrongıs
childhood. The song, however, is surely older than that.
It turns out, as Jeane Pocius informed me, that this melody appears in
Arbanıs Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet as one of ³Sixty-eight
Duets for Two Cornets,² which follows ³150 Classic and Popular Melodies.² [
] Our tune is number 13 and is called ³Arabian Song.² Arban, or Arbanıs as
it is known among trumpeters, is the prototypical method book for ³legit²
trumpet and cornet training. Jean-Baptist Arban was a cornet virtuoso,
composer, conductor and teacher on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory. He
first published his Grande méthode complète pour cornet à pistons et de
saxhorn in 1864.[ ] I have no idea whether or not Armstrong studied from
Arbanıshe doesnıt appear to have been able to read music at that time,
though he acquired that skill later in his careerbut the presence of this
particular melody therein puts it firmly in a wide-spread print-mediated
cornet/trumpet culture that predates Armstrong by half a century. [ ]
We donıt know much about Armstrongıs early training. He got his first cornet
while working for the Karnofsky family and, apparently, was self-taught at
that point.[ ] Later on he served a term at the Colored Waifıs Home where he
received some instruction from Peter Davis, about whom we know very little.[
] However, by that time New Orleans had had a long and varied musical
history, one that included a symphony orchestra, an opera company and
numerous brass bands. There must have been cornetists who played from and
taught Arban. Davis may have been one of them, or been taught by one of
them. It is thus possible that Armstong learned it from Davis.
But where did Arban get the tune? For he did not compose it. While half of
his method book consisted of technical exercises, the other half consisted
of complete tunes and compositions, from the very simplest to complex
virtuoso display pieces. Thatıs where we find our tune. Most of these
melodies comprise what was, for all practical purposes, a European Songbook...
While some of them were by recognized masters of the European high art
traditionMozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bellini, von Weber, Haydenmany of
them were just tunes, attributed to no one. Our ³Arabian Tune² is one of
those.
When we consider that kind of lyrics this tune has attracted, itıs use in
cartoons to accompany snake charming, and itıs title, it seems to be a
musical icon of the Mysterious Orient, which had fascinated European peoples
at least since the Crusades. It is the only tune in that collection that is
identified with the Orient, but other tunes have national or ethnic
identification. Thus we find a ³German Song² and a ³Neapolitan song,² a
³Swiss Song,² a ³French Air,² an ³Italian Air,² a ³Russian Hymn,² and an
³Austrian Hymn,² not to mention ³Blue Bells of Scotland² and ³Yankee
Doodle.² In compiling his collection of melodies Arban clearly wanted to
present music from all the civilized nations he could think of. It is thus
in the interests of a rather truncated ethnic inclusiveness that he included
an ³Arabian Song,² or, more likely the one-and-only ³Arabian Song² he knew.
This song may have entered the European meme pool five years before Arban
found it, or 50 or 500 years before that. Maybe it actually is a Middle
Eastern song, or a mutation of one, that made its way to Europe over North
Africa and through Moorish Spain or came back from one of the Crusades. We
donıt know. For all practical purposes we can consider it to be as old and
widely dispersed as dirt.
And it still persists, albeit in the childrenıs repertoire, a which tends
to be, as Bruno Nettl as observed, rather conservative. The popular songs of
Armstrongıs childhood have all but disappeared. We would not recognize them
today. The childrenıs repertoire is more enduring.
And, since Armstrong, like all of us, was a child before he was a man, it is
not surprising that music that he learned as child should turn up in the
music he made as an adult. Note, however, that the fragment takes slightly
different form each time Armstrong uses it. Armstrong transformed it to meet
the specific requirements of the current performance. If we think of that
melodic fragment as a meme, the cultural equivalent of a gene, then
Armstrongıs uses would be mutations and his use of only part of the melody,
not the complete melody, would seem to be a kind of memetic recombination.
But what is that fragement being recombined with?
To some extent, it was being combined with other licks, the musicians
called. But the are memes to us. Some of these memes may have been from the
same pool that floated the ³Arabian Song² across the Atlantic from Europe.
Others may have been indigenous to the United States, perhaps even local to
New Orleans or Chicago. Jazz culture is full of these little fragments,
generally called licks or riffs, and they can come from any place.
However Armstrongıs use of that one meme, in that particular way, is
special. He is quoting that meme and he expects us to recognize it as such.
This is a common practive among jazz musicians, a form of musical play, of
cultural signifyinı, to use Henry Louis Gatesı term.[ ] That fact that
Armstrong quotes this particular meme twice in one solowhich is not a
standard practicesuggests heıs being emphatic about it. ³Thatıs right, you
heard it, that kidıs song. And to show you I meant it, Iım gonnaı give it to
yaı again.²[ ]
Dizzy Gillespie was fond of inserting a fragment of the ³Habanera² from
³Carmen² into his ³A Night in Tunisia.² Dexter Gorden was fond of the open
phrasing of ³Mona Lisa.²[ ] Lee Morgan recorded an improvisation in which
he quoted Ziggy Elman licks from Elmanıs famous solo on ³And the Angles
Sing.²[ ] Morgan is too young to have Elman perform and so must have learned
those licks from a recording.
That is a theme which runs through jazz biographies, hearing jazz on record
or on the radio, becoming intrigued, inspired, and learning from these
secondary sources. In some ways these secondary sources may have been as
important in jazzıs evolution as direct person-to-person transmission.[ ]
Eldridge learned from Armstrong recordings, Gillespie from Eldridge
recordings, and so forth.
Thus the jazz culture is, in part, a huge pool of memes which musicians call
on in their performances. Thus memes are held in a large body of recordings
made for corporate profit and are reassembled by the musicians during live
performance. Musicians may also have licks that are unique to them, licks
they use here and there, anywhere, but which are never adopted by other
musicians. These licks may well make it to a recording and so become
potentially available to other musicians. Finally, some bits of sound are
simply bits that ³lay well² on a particular instrument, passages well suited
to lips, fingers, and lungs. As such, they will show up constantly.[ ]
When jazz musicians perform, they thus call on various intersecting pools of
material which they then assemble into a performance. While there are some
solo performances in jazz, mostly piano, but occasionally other instruments,
jazz is primarily a collaborative art. Musicians interact with one another
to shape the current performance. What happens in the moment is
spontaneous, but we must remember that that spontaneity draws on a large
body of well-practiced licks and routines.
And the greatness of an individual musician, such as Armstrong, is a
function, both of his power to forge compelling performances from the ³raw²
memes, and of the existence of that meme pool. Armstong may have been ahead
of his fellows back in the 1920s, but he couldnıt have been very far ahead
of them, otherwise they could not have performed together. Beyond this,
without a large population of music-lovers familiar with the same meme pool,
Armstrongıs recordings would have had little effect. By the time Armstrong
went to Chicago there was a large population of people who had been
listening and dancing to rags and blues and show tunes and fox trots and
Charlestons and marches, all with a hot pulse and raggy rhythms. Armstrongıs
improvisations gave them new wild pleasure and their collective joy made him
great.
Copyright 2001 İ by William L. Benzon. All Rights Reserved.
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