'Housewives Selecting Cantaloupes'

Consider the power of the homely metaphor: “The celebrated fickleness indulged in by admirers of the arts, most of whom resemble housewives selecting cantaloupes, reaches epic proportions among jazz audiences.” Fashion – what’s “in,” what we’re certain won’t inspire snorts of derisive laughter -- almost always trumps taste. How many would choose to read Alexander Pope rather than the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning poet? (I can’t remember who that was either.) But Whitney Balliett is being kind. Most shoppers for cantaloupes at least apply the sniff-and-thump test when gauging ripeness. The sentence above is how Balliett begins his 1961 profile of Johnny Hodges, the longtime alto saxophonist in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. 

There’s a surplus of alto players among my favorite musicians, besides Hodges: Paul Desmond, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Cannonball Adderley, Lee Konitz and Benny Carter. Balliett cites as an example of jazz-listener fickleness, the previously unthinkable eclipse of Hodges:

 

“Unlike many other swing musicians, Hodges was toppled by a double whammy. He suffered, along with his colleagues, from the rise of bebop, but he also suffered because the leader of that movement, Charlie Parker, played the same instrument. When Parker died, in 1955, Hodges had become an out-of-fashion leader of a small semi-rock-and-roll group.”

 

Balliett describes Hodges as a “lyric poet,” one who “function[s] closest to the heart of the music.” To use a once favorable, long since denigrated word, much of Hodges’ playing was “sweet.” (Listen to his version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower.”) He was a master of the yearning ballad who sometimes came perilously close to schmaltz. Balliett addresses Hodges’ appeal to the emotions:

 

“Hodges’ bent toward sweetness did not emerge until the mid-thirties, when he began recording, with Ellington, a series of slow ballad solos. On such occasions, which he still indulges in, Hodges employs a tone that seems to be draped over the notes like a lap robe. Hodges does little improvising in these ballads. Instead, he issues languorous statements of the melody and long glissandi topped by an almost unctuous vibrato. Hodges’ Edgar Guest strain is generally well concealed, though, and it is nowhere in sight when he plays the blues, which have long provided his basic materials.”

 

Listeners familiar with Hodges will nod their heads. Balliett perfectly conveys the tightrope Hodges walked between the heart-piercing and the “unctuous,” and the Edgar Guest reference for the reader is gravy -- priceless, exact and funny. Listen to him perform “All of Me” by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons, and Strayhorn’s “Isfahan.”

 

Hodges was born on this date, July 25, in 1907, in Cambridge, Ma., and died in New York City on May 11, 1970, at age sixty-two.

 

[Balliett’s Hodges profile is collected in Dinosaurs in the Morning: 41 Pieces on Jazz (1962).]