Passing the Late Night Jazz TV Torch (?)

Jazz on TV is, of course, a non-starter. Programs like "The Sound of Jazz," "Frankly Jazz,""The Subject is Jazz" and events like Clifford Brown on the Soupy Sales show are to Millennials as Medicine Shows are to seniors.

The last redoubts for jazz were the "hip" talk shows and jazz hasn't had a good track record even there since Johnny Carson retired. The passing of trumpeter Clark Terry, a stalwart of the Tonight Show Orchestra was a symbolic marker of the end of a 60-year relationship between big band jazz and television.               

       

         Clark Terry

Jon Batiste

Jon Batiste will be the bandleader as Stephen Colbert takes over for David Letterman on the Late Show. This represents a return, of sorts, to late night bandleaders with a jazz background. What are his chances? Let's look at the history and the landscape:

Post-Carson, Jay Leno tried to keep one foot in the Tonight Show's jazz past, while bridging to the present with Branford Marsalis, leading to an often uneasy three years. Marsalis was followed by Kevin Eubanks, a better fit who had a fifteen-year tenure. Although Eubanks had jazz chops, he weighed in as a more natural rock guy and his personality jibed better with the format than Marsalis'.

Conan O'Brien's band-Max Weinberg and company-was a hybrid, with a fair amount of swing. Was too much jazz one of the elements that pushed Conan off network TV and onto cable?

David Letterman was a pop/rock/country guy and never cared much for jazz (Knowing Carson was a pretty staunch jazz fan, if Dave really wanted that gig, he shoulda feigned interest). Letterman's band, led by Paul Shaffer, went the funk-jazz route that began to dominate late night TV. Actually it was the Saturday Night Live band that led the way-Howard Shore, with Lenny Pickett's Tower of Power sound on tenor sax. Shaffer was a member of that SNL band, as was Seth Meyers current bandleader Fred Armisen. Cleto Escobeto, Kimmel's bandleader is also out of that tradition. 

Jimmy Fallon's band The Roots, is much more in the contemporary black music vein. While it's true that Jon Batiste and The Roots both bring a black sensibility, it's pretty different. The Roots are Philadelphia and Batiste is New Orleans. The Roots busked on the street, but with bucket drums and rapping. Jon Batiste has an advanced music degree and his family has a long N.O. jazz pedigree. 

Batiste is solid for the Second Line and loves to move into the crowd and stir things up. As far as late night talk show audience participation goes, social media is now where that is supposed to happen (R.I.P. 'Stump The Band'). It's hard to think that the Second Line idea will mix easily in this high-price, high-stakes, timed-to-the-second context. Going into the audience knowing you have exactly 4'33" to get people dancing in the aisle, back onstage and back in their seats might tend to undermine spontaneity. After all, this is valuable time we're talking about.

Well, as we jazz types find ourselves saying more and more often: "maybe a little exposure will help." Can't hurt, right?

[ADDENDUM: I didn't see the whole show, but I did see this clip of "Everyday People," which they performed with a number of guest musicians. Very, very nice job. A few musicians went briefly into the audience, while most stayed onstage; a compromise, but the energy was great and the whole thing didn't drag on, as these multi-star performances usually do.]

The Colbert Report

So, Stephen Colbert is taking over for David Letterman. Colbert is a fine actor, comedian, interviewer-even a good song and dance man, I'm told. And it's those talents that will be on display as star of "Late Night." His choice as successor to Letterman does not portend tectonic changes at media megalith CBS, which airs the program. His slyly transgressive persona will be persona non grata.

Can anyone believe that CBS will adapt it's basic economic structure to accommodate Colbert's shtick as a left-liberal masquerading as a right wing wingnut? Will they happily sacrifice a broad swath of their demographic, as the good natured political ribbing that has dominated the show-with resounding financial success-goes right in the dumper and the character Colbert played on Comedy Central is given free range to acerbically dissect the foibles of the American power structure? Rather than the usual fawning treatment, will the cavalcade of Hollywood guests (whose movies are produced and distributed by the same company that owns CBS) now be in for the kind of ironic diss served up on the Colbert Report?

Sure, it could happen. If the sponsors of the Late Show decide they'll be happy to pay the same rates for a smaller and smaller but hipper and hipper audience. I'd be surprised. More likely, they will shave down Colbert's canines and reduce his bitter irony to a wholesome pap. Not too quickly, though. No doubt the network, the sponsors and producers will devise a strategy to woo Colbert's old viewers while reassuring the mainstream audience by slowly mutating Colbert from his current complex persona into something with the ring of the renegade, as has been perfected by the ad industry to sell jeans.  

Colbert might change the multi-billion dollar culture of late night TV; and Chris Christie might get a job as a tolltaker on the George Washington bridge, but I'm afraid my money's on Proctor and Gamble, Mercedez Benz and Sheldon Adelstein. There's just too much money at stake. Meanwhile, good luck, Colbert, we love you, er we love your persona, we think we love you, but we hope that what we love is really you [voice trails off to infinite recursion]...

The Late Night TV Big Band Litmus Test

The attention that used to be paid to jazz on such programs as "The Sound of Jazz," "Frankly Jazz,""The Subject is Jazz," "Playboy After Dark" and events like Clifford Brown on Soupy Sales show, jazz musicians "What's My Line," etc. petered out decades ago.

The late night big band managed to hang around a lot longer, but the recent passing of trumpeter Snooky Young, seen in the photo above and in this video with the Tonight Show Orchestra-struck me as the mortality marker for the 60-year relationship between big band jazz and television.

No longer will cameras spend valuable time scanning the band to show us the likes of Snooky, Clark Terry, Conte Condoli, Jack Sheldon, Ray Brown... And, apart from being able to see these musicians in the flesh, my guess is that it was also a boost to jazz record consumers, as a stable group of jazz musicians did not have to go on the road and could spend time in the recording studio. 

  Late night television carried over the radio idea that big bands were de riguer for variety shows. Late night was America's best well-known dirty-little-secret and the Tonight Show led the pack. While still riddled with taboos (a sketch wherein a WC was taken for a church was censored, leading to Jack Paar's walkout), sponsors were willing to pair jazz music with hosts who had vaguely "hip" credentials: Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Al "Jazzbo" Collins (no hip creds except his name), Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson (In his early days, Carson had a fair whiff of disreputableness).

Merv Griffin (a big band singer himself) often guest-hosted, then got his own show and his big band was the West Coast version of the Tonight Show's until Carson moved out there in 1972. Big band vocalists Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore also had successful variety shows.

No doubt sponsors and producers thought that having a large band onstage gave the show some "klass," but, well, it did. It represented sophistication and a grown-up's hedge, if you will, against the onslaught of rock and roll. It also meant that any kind of a musical guest could be booked-tuba to musical saw-as solid accompaniment would always be there. This did lead to some very cheesy rock/jazz hybrids, but we won't go there.

I'm not saying that an anti-jazz stance became a litmus test for late night host survival. However:

David Letterman never cared much for jazz. His band (Paul Shaffer) and that of Saturday Night Live (Howard Shore, but it was really Lenny Pickett's Tower of Power sound on tenor sax) led the new musical way. Letterman may have been too far ahead of the curve, though, as Carson was a pretty staunch jazz fan and chose not to dub Letterman his successor. Dave shoulda feigned interest.

Jay Leno did and kept the big band thing going for a little while, Then, with Branford Marsalis, oversaw the band's mutation into the standard form funk-jazz that started to rule late night TV.

Conan O'Brien's band-Max Weinberg and company-was a hybrid, with a fair amount of swing; perhaps too much jazz in there for Conan to stay on a major network.

Now, who else ya got: Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson. They might stick around awhile-no jazz.

I'll take a cup of Laphroaig then, for Auld Lang Syne.