'Eight-Bar Vamp-Till-Ready Introduction'

When a friend told me he was reading Coriolanus for the first time, I joined him. It was not among my favorite plays when I was young, for reasons I no longer remember. Of no other play have I so radically revised my judgment. I’m taken with William Hazlitt’s assessment: “Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections [on the Revolution in France], or Paine’s Rights of Man.” With Julius Caesar, it is Shakespeare’s most discerning study of power and politics. 

Today I read Shakespeare for abject pleasure. I’m with Nabokov’s poet John Shade in Pale Fire, who  says: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote asks “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" and Shade replies: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”

 

Among the pleasures this time is learning or relearning unfamiliar words. Take vamp. In Act III, Scene 1, Coriolanus says: “You wish / To vamp a body with a dangerous physick, / That’s sure of death without.” This usage is puzzling. As a noun, I know it to mean a dangerously seductive woman. And then there’s jazz: “A simple section like a riff,” according to the lexicon at A Passion for Jazz, “designed to be repeated as often as necessary, especially one at the beginning of a tune.” I think of the obvious examples: Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and Miles Davis’ “So What.”

 

The OED gives many definitions including one that’s musical, but with no reference to jazz and with citations dating from no later than the nineteenth century: “To improvise or extemporize (an accompaniment, tune, etc.).” No mention of the common usage, as verb and noun, among jazz musicians -- a repeated figure that, in layman’s language, sets the groove for the performance. Dr. Johnson’s definition has nothing to do overtly with music: “To piece an old thing with some new part.”

 

This is where it gets complicated. Vamp in Coriolanus, according to centuries of editors and scholars, may be a misreading for jump, imp or even purge. I’m no musicologist but I vote for vamp. Here’s the late Terry Teachout in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (2013) describing a recording of “Old Man Blues” (1930): “After an eight-bar vamp-till-ready introduction, it  gets under way not with the customary full-band theme statement but with an improvised duet by Tricky Sam Nanton and Barney Bigard, followed by an even more startling change of key.”

 

[I can’t resist: Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (Kiss Me, Kate): “If she says your behavior is heinous,/Kick her right in the Coriolanus.”]