Read Freely
What do J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, Mark Twain’s , John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, and The Diary of Anne Frank have in common? These five books, long recognized as classics, are among the titles most often banned by school boards and libraries throughout the United States.
Many other books join the inglorious five. Among them are George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, which dare suggest that human freedom matters more than the bloody functioning of the state, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Add to them Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which depicts a World War II in which the Nazis aren’t the only ones to commit atrocities, and John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, in which a young man grappling to understand his emergent sexuality ponders whether his attraction is to men and not women. Classics all, and dangerous to the touch.
Schools and libraries aren’t the only battlegrounds. Not long ago, a so-called liberal coalition urged a boycott of all books published by Random House, which brought out Bret Easton Ellis’ —trashy book, to be sure, that revels in violence against women.
The First Amendment has had its share of enemies ever since the Founding Fathers set quill to paper. In the past, those foes of free speech have been more or less ignored, and the life of the mind has gone on. But times are changing. We are living in an age in which it is becoming increasingly impossible to express anything potentially offensive to anyone; it’s a sanitized brave new world.
In the wake of the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy, the aptly named Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression conducted a nationwide survey with results that should alarm any writer, publisher, bookseller or citizen. In it, 25 percent of the 1,500 adults polled agreed that the First Amendment should protect their speech, but not the expressions of others, especially in the arts or media. A full 60 percent maintained that the government should enjoy the power to censor works of art.
Matters are getting worse. According to People for the American Way, a prominent civil liberties group, the incidence of book banning in public libraries and schools is on the rise. This banning is being effected by liberals and conservatives alike, eager to purge the shelves of any books that do not further their own agendas. In one strange recent case, for instance, two self-styled witches in Concord, Calif., petitioned both the school board and local booksellers to demand that the Grimm’s tale “Hansel and Gretel” be banished from the shelves. The story, of course, paints a negative portrayal of witches.
Our embattled literature and the First Amendment that protects it deserve celebration. Sept. 23-29 has been declared Banned Books Week by the American Library Association. Its observation affords concerned citizens a chance to do something substantial: to support librarians who dare defy so-called community standards by allowing open access to such books as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, to demand that elected officials stand by the Constitution they have sworn to uphold.
For once, only tyrants would lose.
Through the years, music writers have repeatedly touched upon Stephane Grappelli’s rare standing in the history of jazz. Not only was he among the music’s first successful violinists, they say; more than 60 years later, he’s still among jazz’s only violinists. When critic Whitney Balliet, in a New Yorker article, ranked Grappelli and Venuti as the two best performers on the instrument, he added, “All of which might seem akin to hailing the world’s two finest unicyclists...adapting the violin at all to jazz is a rare feat.”
Historians propose a few reasons for this. Some say the violin has long been identified with the stuffier elements of high society, that it’s not, as one critic put it, “considered to have swinging qualities.” Some say it lacks the range of horns and the percussive punch of the piano or guitar. Some say it was dealt a deathblow by the rise of big band music: It couldn’t compete with the aural force of a brass section the way a clarinet or trumpet or human voice could, and it never regained stature once smaller combos came back in favor. One writer even advanced the notion that, because Grappelli and Venuti and such early peers as Eddie South and Stuff Smith were so outstanding, others since have been too intimidated or outclassed to follow. (This is a preposterous idea, of course. If it were true, how to explain the abundance of horrible guitarists and drummers who have followed the outstanding pioneers who preceded them?)
Besides, Grappelli and the early jazz violinists were enormously influential on several generations of musicians who picked up the same instrument. Only this inspiration took place outside the jazz sphere. Down South, where the instrument is known as the decidedly unstuffy fiddle, the lithe, swinging, aggressive style pioneered by Grappelli, Venuti and South went on to influence some of the greatest and most important country musicians of all time.
The 78 rpm acetates Grappelli recorded with famed guitarist Django Reinhardt in the 1930s became celebrated in America, and it wasn’t only Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong who embraced the “hot jazz” that the three-guitar, bass and fiddle band created. In the Southwest, Bob Wills, who had already been awed by the stateside fiddle-guitar band of Venuti and Eddie Lang, was among those enthused by what he heard from Grappelli and Reinhardt’s music, which combined percussive string rhythms with vibrantly swinging solos on violin and guitar.
From there, nearly every major swing fiddler to follow would cite Grappelli’s influence, from Johnny Gimble to Vassar Clements to Buddy Spicher to Mark O’Connor. Clements recorded a Grammy-nominated album with the Frenchman. O’Connor, who spent valuable time as a Grappelli sideman in the early 1980s, spoke of Grappelli’s important influence when making Heroes, his tribute album to violin and fiddle masters. When he set out to make the record, Grappelli was the first violinist he contacted. “I sort of made him the impetus of the project because he was my biggest violin hero,” O’Connor told writer Ed Morris in 1993. “The concept couldn’t hold water for me if I couldn’t get Stephane. If he wasn’t on it, it would have been too much of a compromise for me, and I would have scrapped the whole project.”
Grappelli’s ongoing collaborations with David Grisman represent another sphere of musical persuasion. Two 1979 albums, Stephane Grappelli and David Grisman Live and Hot Dawg, rank with the hardest-swinging, most spirited albums to come out of the progressive acoustic music movement. Even though Grappelli is an immensely intelligent and structured player, he nearly always injects a joyous aplomb that reminds listeners and collaborators of the ecstatic possibilities of improvised music. He can play with romantic lyricism, and he can bounce with nimble flamboyance, especially in live settings. He has a knack for forcing collaborators who intellectualize the music to move back into their soul and their soles.
Grappelli’s impact reaches far beyond his country collaborations, of course. That this gay, urbane Frenchman wound up inspiring roughneck rural Texans and longhaired Californian hippies is only part of his phenomenal story. At age 87, he’s certainly the only musician headlining American and European concert halls who started out providing live musical support to silent movies more than 70 years ago.
His most famous partner will forever be Reinhardt, whom he met in 1931 and with whom he first found fame. Reinhardt was a gypsy who lost the use of two fingers on his left hand following a fire in a caravan when he was 18. Illiterate and self-taught, he came up with an unorthodox style of fingering strings that, combined with an amazingly developed sense of musicality and swing, made for an extraordinary and unduplicable sound. The two were part of a hotel dance orchestra when Grappelli stepped backstage one day to find Django mimicking licks he’d picked up from American jazz records. Grappelli, who himself had discovered jazz a few years earlier, started jamming with the guitarist between orchestra performances. Bassist (and orchestra leader) Louis Vola joined in the fun, as did two other guitarists, including Django’s brother Joseph. A French jazz critic and concert promoter overheard them one day and convinced them to play their music in a Paris club. With that, the famed Quintet of the Hot Club of France was born. Six decades later, it’s still the only important jazz combo to emerge from Europe—as well as one of the most lauded jazz groups of all time.
The quintet stayed together until Grappelli, a Jew, took exile in London during World War II. His partnership with Reinhardt had been fraught with problems because of the guitarist’s tendency to disappear without warning, but they had persevered until the war, then reunited on occasion until Reinhardt’s death from brain hemorrhaging in 1953.
Grappelli has issued an enormous body of memorable and distinctive work since those days. He worked throughout the ’50s and ’60s—including a lengthy stint at the Paris Hilton and an ongoing partnership with pianist George Shearing—but it wasn’t until the early ’70s that he regained some of his earlier renown. American guitarist Barney Kessel sought him out for two collaborative albums in 1969. He toured British folk clubs in 1972, gaining media attention that attracted musicians and record companies. Paul Simon used him for a duet on “Hobo’s Blues” on his ’72 solo album.
More importantly, it was about this time that Grappelli started recording with American jazz musicians. His classic ’70s groupings included work with the rhythm section of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, and recordings with Oscar Peterson, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Hank Jones and Joe Pass. He also began a series of compositions with classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin (who had his solos transcribed for him before the recording sessions).
More recently, Grappelli connected with pianist McCoy Tyner in 1990 for a stunning album, One on One, as well as a live album recorded in France. In addition, a 1992 live album with bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and guitarists Philip Catherine and Marc Fosset proved that Grappelli has maintained his great intonation, melodic beauty and joyful exuberance well into his 80s.
As someone who’s seen Grappelli several times live—from a Great American Music Hall show in San Francisco in 1976 to a Napa Valley concert in the early 1980s to an unforgettable late-’80s appearance in an intimate Chicago club—the most striking thing about him is how inseparable his smile and his glowing spirit are from the music he makes. When Grappelli bounds into an improvised solo, never has the joy that comes from making music been more clearly expressed.
Stephane Grappelli performs Sept. 22 in Langford Auditorium.
