Newsletter
Spring
2001 Volume XXX, No. 2
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TributesRemembering
Mark Tucker ReviewsModern
Music |
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Remembering Mark Tucker
I met Mark during my first year of graduate school at the University of Michigan. He had finished his doctorate there a few months before I arrived, and cast a long shadow: students seemed awed by him and faculty struggled for superlatives when describing his work in their classes. As a somewhat insecure entering student, I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. When I heard Mark’s brilliant paper on Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” at the 1986 AMS meeting in Cleveland, I found out, and his dissertation on Ellington (later revised and published as Ellington: The Early Years) remained in my study carrel for years—an inspiring testament to what was possible in my discipline. Though we shared a shyness and reserve, he became a kind and generous friend, and perhaps no one supported me more as my own professional career unfolded. I regret now that I didn’t seek him out more, especially during the several years we both lived in New York; he had a way of firing my imagination with a soft, seemingly off-hand remark. But I’m comforted in knowing his unique and creative voice will continue to speak through a rich written legacy. Whether Mark was contributing to scholarly books or journals, or to the more casual forum of this Newsletter, his prose was highly personal in the best sense of that word: though the scholarship was impeccable, and the arguments deftly shaped, the reader never lost the direct link to the sensitive musician at the helm. On 2 February 2001 a moving memorial service for Mark was held at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan. For many of us, the sadness of the occasion was tempered by the delight at seeing old friends, some of whom would not entered our lives had we not had the fortune of knowing Mark. Between musical tributes from pianists Neely Bruce, Harris Simon, and Bruce Barth, friends, colleagues and family shared reminiscences. The selections included below give a varied and heartfelt portrait of this remarkable man. —Jeff Taylor My Oldest FriendI was seven and Mark six when we met for the first time at Hyde Park Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was younger than the rest of us in second grade but seemed older—more serious, indrawn. An air of melancholy, like that of a doomed Puritan in a Hawthorne tale, surrounded him even then. (Throughout his life it never really lifted except when he would sit down at the piano and play or sing. Performing seemed to let Mark overcome, however briefly, his unnatural shyness.) But we liked each other. It turned out he lived two doors down and for the next three years we saw each other almost every day. We sang in the church choir, and during the summer our families would picnic together on Friday and Saturday nights at one of Cincinnati’s emerald array of public parks, some of them designed, like New York’s, by Frederick Law Olmsted. Whatever intellectual curiosity I had at that age, which wasn’t much, I picked up from Mark. He also had a highly precocious moral sense, an innate kindness, qualities I was much slower to emulate. One memory from those years: My grandmother, who had devoted her life to missionary work all over India, lived with us in Cincinnati. To me she was the old woman who, because she ate her curry so slowly, delayed my getting up from the dinner table every evening to go out and play. But Mark was fascinated by her story. He would come over not to visit me but to listen to her talk about India. She taught him to write his name in Hindi and to make Indian food, and he in turn made her feel treasured and important. It took me another twenty years to realize how unusual my grandmother was, something Mark realized at seven. I think his wonderful first book, the collaboration on the autobiography of the musician Garvin Bushell, comes from that same kind of empathy for people whose lives, in terms of typical American experience, were quietly strange and different. He lived such a life himself. Many books are still to be written analyzing why so many generations of white middle-class Americans and Europeans, and now Asians, throughout the twentieth century, took so much mental and emotional and spiritual nourishment from black American popular music, especially jazz and blues. We didn’t grow up with those sounds. Mark and I discovered jazz on our own, without much encouragement from parents or teachers but with lots of reinforcement from each other. Music of all kinds formed the bond for our friendship for thirty years. I still write about jazz on occasion as a journalist, while Mark became one of its foremost scholars and transcribers, as well as a pianist with deep knowledge of its vast repertoire. His books on Ellington, his unfinished writings on Monk, and his brave attempt to define the long, fractious history of “Jazz” itself in the revised Grove Dictionary of Music will be read well into this new century. His father, brother, wife, and two children miss him beyond words and, as someone who admired him most of my life, I share their grief. He was my oldest friend. —Richard B. Woodward Mentoring Mark: Notes from a CorrespondenceAnn Arbor, January 14, 1980 I’ve rewritten parts of this paper, incorporating most of your stylistic suggestions . . . I agree that the “there is” construction is a bit flabby . . . Nevertheless . . . [and the student then explains why that construction has survived in the rewrite.] May 9, 1980 I have a few comments about the form and procedure of the seminar. I hope you don’t mind my offering suggestions—just some personal reactions to the course. [A page of tactful criticisms follows.] March 4, 1981 [After founding the Society for the Promotion of American
Music (SPAM), as a University of Michigan student organization]: Just because I’m gung ho about a lot of American music doesn’t mean I get a kick out of dumping on Massenet, Monteverdi, or any other European [composer] . . . I hope in SPAM we’ve been careful not to fall prey to . . . cultural chauvinism. June 8, 1981 Now that the soreness has gone from my arms [after a long session of splitting firewood] and the mosquito welts have gone down a bit . . . I’d like to write and tell you how much I enjoyed last weekend at your cabin in the pines. August 16, 1981 Been playing with and working on arrangements for Misbehavin’ [a female vocal jazz trio], all the while getting more fascinated by so-called “swing” music (i.e., 1930s dance band & small group variety), marveling at how difficult it is to play well. As in so many other types of [such] music, the surface simplicity or economy of means bely the subtleties involved in producing the sounds, making it flow and sound so effortless...This isn’t to say I can sound like Teddy Wilson or Billy Kyle or Jess Stacy, but I’m listening to these guys and trying to learn. August 22, 1982 [From Tolman Pond, New Hampshire] It’s grey and a bit cool and . . . the trees are already beginning to turn. The chill in the air tells of fall, too. I suppose it didn’t help much to look in the mirror . . . and note that there’s even less hair on my head than I imagined. . . People always used to tell me I was “old beyond my years.” I suppose I took pride in this, and now maybe early baldness is one of this sin’s wages. September 14, 1983 [To his dissertation advisor] What interests me most right now about this subject are the specific...forces that shaped Ellington’s early career...the achievement-oriented elementary and secondary schools; the music in theatres; community bands and orchestras; the activity in the world of black concert...music in D.C.; segregation in Washington and black pride; Ellington’s strong, close-knit family...I don’t want to write about what makes Ellington great, at least right now—I’d like to understand what makes Ellington Ellington.... And finally, from a note received in October 1981: I was saddened to hear of your father’s death. At least he is beyond the pain and suffering now, for which one can be thankful even while mourning the loss. Let the memory of the man fortify your spirit and lift up your heart. —Rich Crawford Eloquence at ColumbiaI knew Mark at Michigan, where he stood out as an exceptionally sweet and talented graduate student when I was a young assistant professor, so that when he appeared a few years later on our short list at Columbia I knew right away that he was the one we wanted. Even though the search that brought him to us was in much earlier music, and some of our senior colleagues had to be convinced that jazz was a worthy subject of scholarship, the case was so clear: Mark’s effortless musicianship informed every word he uttered and every note he played. As a teacher he had that rare quality of sounding at once relaxed and riveting. I heard one student stop in simple wonderment when he tried to describe Mark’s teaching; it was clear he was groping for the word that would sum up what had been an amazingly rich experience. He finally said, haltingly: “he was just... so... ELOQUENT!” Naturally, Mark won the only teaching award the university gave to junior faculty. At Columbia, Mark was a beacon of radiant calm and friendliness; talking to him always made me feel like I was coming home. Graduate students were bowled over by his warmth and mentorship. Sensing a perennial need in the curriculum, he inaugurated a course in writing about music which is still talked about. Words mattered to him; he believed in the handwritten letter, and he recommended the books that most engaged him (a stunner was A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor). After Mark got tenure at Columbia in 1995, he was honored to become the first recipient of the Edwin H. Case Chair in Jazz and American Music. At last all the efforts he had made to establish jazz at the university were not regarded suspiciously as mere ploys to get tenure, but recognized as innovations. When Mark spoke about Thelonious Monk at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia last April, he had so clearly moved to a new level of achievement—where thinking, being, speaking, and playing were completely all of a piece, all just brilliant poetry—that the audience was left gasping. My young ethnomusicology colleague Aaron Fox, who had heard me and Bob O’Meally and others talking about Mark for months and months, came up to me after Mark’s talk and said, kind of reverently: “You’re right. He’s the real thing.” In 1931, Duke Ellington wrote: “The music of my race is something which is going to live, something which posterity will honor in a higher sense than merely that of the music of the ballroom today.” And Mark’s own music is going to live: in Carol, the love of his life, in his beautiful children, in his family and friends, in his students, in his audiences, in his readers. I never stopped missing Mark when he and Carol left New York in 1997. I never will. —Elaine Sisman Making a DifferenceI first met Mark when I was an undergraduate at Columbia. I stepped into his jazz history course, and life began to change for me. I remember the stories he told about Bessie Smith that day, and of course he often brought the music alive through his own performances. We always looked forward to the moments when he made the piano sing, sometimes channeling Monk, sometimes Ellington, sometimes Morton. Mark treated each figure with respect, even as he attempted to demystify the music-making process. He was opinionated, but it was rare that he let personal prejudices interfere with his attempts to understand a musical situation. Music was something people created by thinking and working hard, by practicing, by experimenting—it didn’t come out of thin air. While I often refer to Mark’s publications, what stood out in his teaching—and what remains with me today—was his attention to inequality in America, as it has been played out in terms of class, gender and race. His commitment to black music was the most obvious sign of how he cared (both about the music and about the unique conditions encountered by African American musicians). So, as he urged me to craft the most evocative prose to describe a musical moment, Mark’s comments also encouraged work that demonstrated social and political engagement. I will hold on to what Mark’s example gave to me: how to live with grace under pressure, to have faith in the face of adversity, and to act, write, and teach with consideration for others—with such deep concern for one’s fellow travelers. I’ll always appreciate what he taught me about music and its many resonances in our lives. And alongside that, I can call on what his example taught me about how I’d like to live, and about the enormous potential we all have to make a difference in this world. —Charles Garrett Mark’s HumorI’ll touch on a single aspect of Mark: his humor. It was not the thigh-slapping, haw-haw sort but an undercurrent that surfaced quietly in his writing. Mark liked to quote with devilish pleasure something humorous he’d found in print—as in Folio (July 1871): We don’t like Peter Phillips, the Singing Pilgrim. …He filters all his hymns through his nose, and has an unpleasant way of repeating the last line of each verse. …The effect of “His bowels melt with love” was not pretty when sung thus: “His bowels melt with love, his bow-wow-wow-wow-wow-wowels melt with love.” I used to have the Virginia Diner send cans of its peanuts as gifts to friends. Toward Christmas 1997, not long after Carol and Mark arrived in Williamsburg, I got a letter from him, exulting: I made a pilgrimage yesterday. To the Diner. To The Diner. To The Virginia Diner in Wakefield, about a 45-minute trip by car and ferry. …It was a brilliant sunny day, the kind of day when you just want to jump in your jalopy and burn up fossil fuel as you meander down the blue highways of southeastern Virginia. [Then Mark penned a map of his route, with the legend “Scale: ¼" = 5-7 miles”]. Now you’re oriented, yes? Inside The Diner, all was cozy and comforting. A flat-picky arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” came over the Muzak system—you expected Tammy and George? No, this was no roadside greasy spoon. …So what did I order? I went with a cup of coffee and a warm slice of the Diner’s “World Famous Peanut Pie.” How was it? Superb, delicious, and odd…hearty and filling, good for at least 5,000 calories, I reckon. …Afterwards I passed a billboard that said “EAT VIRGINIA PEANUTS” and also, “Near this sign is the spot where the first peanuts were grown in America.” (By Native Americans? I wondered. How did they know?) Where do peanuts come from, anyway—Africa, China, Babylon? The next spring (April 1998), after a visit of mine to Williamsburg and the Tucker/Oja ménage, a letter from Mark began this way: Just after you left I developed a bad head cold. So you timed your visit well.…Yesterday I felt up to doing very little. I did read, with pleasure, almost all of [James Hynes’s book] Publish and Perish. Just the thing for a sniffly scholar. …I’ve always remembered C. S. Lewis’s description of his ultimate fantasy—to be slightly sick and holed up in a sunlit room in a tower over the sea, reading some medieval epic or other. Well, this ain’t no seaside tower, but sitting in a rocking chair on the screened porch, overlooking the green canopy of trees in the back woods, and reading about academic skullduggery comes pretty close to ideal. Mark reported son Wynn’s inquiring, a few days after an overnight stay of mine: “How’s that friend of yours?” “What friend?” “The one whose name begins with Y.” From then on, Mark began his letters with either “Dear Yley” or Dear “Y”—occasionally “Hy Y.” … Bye, Mark. —H. Wiley Hitchcock Deep in the KeysI met Mark Tucker about twelve years ago, during my first days as a faculty member at Columbia University. My friend Arnold Rampersad, the literary biographer, had told me to seek him out as a kindred spirit. And Mark was a kindred spirit, a quiet, immeasurably gifted man. He was one whom surely his hero Duke Ellington would have given the highest of accolades: Mark Tucker was a person beyond category. Where do we find gifts like Mark’s clustered together in a single human being? Drivingly energetic intellectual and writer whose three books are standard reading for those who would understand Ellington and the world of early jazz; favorite teacher—one whose students tell you, years later, something that Professor Tucker first made clear to them; rock-steady piano player who played “deep in the keys,” as he said of Ellington and Thelonious Monk. In a faculty study group with scholars and musicians and public intellectuals, Mark was the only member who belonged to all three groups. What stands out for me in Mark’s work is the passion, the soulfulness. I remember Mark speaking quietly to an intensely interested group of children at the Harlem School of the Arts. I remember Mark at a conference in North Carolina, playing a section of Ellington’s Queen’s Suite and surprising everybody by singing an old song, from Duke’s mother’s era, that he had detected in the piece’s deep structure. I recall one of Mark’s first Ellington essays, arguing for the richness of the black D.C. cultural scene and for Ellington as a composer who celebrated that scene by creating works that were as big and as ambitious as a European symphony but which remained true to the alleyways and showplaces and blue-light dancehalls and churches Duke had known as a boy in Washington. And I recall a Monk lecture Mark delivered at Columbia University last spring—one of the most brilliant academic performances I have ever seen—exploring Monk’s “radical anti-virtuosic” approach to the piano and his proclivity for playing “deep in the keys.” He was an impassioned professional, a generous man who often followed up conversations with a letter (who else writes such letters anymore?). Sometimes he would surprise me with a special recording coming in the mail, something he made as he reflected on something we had been saying. This is professional colleagueship to an Ellingtonian power! Professionalism for Mark was a form of undying love. He was a quiet, shy man who sometimes would surprise you with a hug or with a smile that would light up a room. He was a giant of a scholar and warrior in the battle to establish a superior form of jazz scholarship. He was a moving artist, and a true friend. At a conference last year in Lisbon, the marvelous Ellington singer Alice Babs played a tape of herself singing a beautiful tribute to Ellington called “Thanks for Everything”—sung to the tune of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom.” No one, not even Mark, could keep his eyes from glistening. That’s what I want to say to this lovely man, as deeply in the keys as I can put it: Mark, thanks for working with such love and loving us so well. Thanks for everything. —Bob O’Meally |
Over the past few months I
imagine many of us who knew Mark Tucker have felt the sudden urge to pick up
the phone, draft a note, or send a quick e-mail, followed by an acute pang of
loss. This happened to me a few weeks ago when I played Ellington’s recording
of “The Single Petal of A Rose” for a jazz history seminar. After an intense
silence, one of my students, deeply moved, exclaimed: “that’s the most
beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” Since it was Mark who first led me to
appreciate the wonders of Ellington’s solo piano artistry, particularly
through his own eloquent performances, I was saddened I couldn’t share that
moment with him.