Dangerous jazz
MUSIC CORNER
By Robert Feuer
With the Russ¬
ian River
Jazz Festival
coming up, Sept. 9
and 10 on Johnson’s
Beach in Guemeville,
it seemed like a good
time to pay a visit
to Pat Nolan, who
was a member of the
festival’s executive
board in the 1980s.
Nolan currently
has a show on
Guernevilie’s KGGV, 95.1 FM, called
“Dangerous Jazz.” His writings have been
published in numerous magazines and
anthologies, and he has 14 books of poetry.
Between these ventures he has managed
rock and roll bands, tended bar, and worked
for the California Department of Forestry
for 20 years.
In the early days of Rolling Stone magazine,
he lived in a loft near the office in downtown
San Francisco, and wrote reviews of rock
and roll records for the magazine. In 1975,
Nolan was on KPFA with “Calling All Poets,”
a show on which telephone callers could read
their poetry on the air.
Now he lives in Monte Rio, where he
agreed to be interviewed on a late afternoon
in July. Nolan was relaxing at his home of 30
years, sprawled out on the deck, an icy drink
in hand. The sun peered through the trees,
dappling his bamboo fence.
When asked about his current radio gig,
he said, “I love it. KGGV is a great addition
to the community, helping to bring together
diverse elements.”
On “Dangerous Jazz,” Saturday nights
at 9 p.m. he focuses on “the three M’s of
modem jazz — Mingus, Miles and Monk, and
the giants of the saxophone, John Coltrane
and Charlie Parker,” he said. His goal with
the show is to “have a good time and expand
the dialogue about the music.”
Nolan also has a monthly show Sunday
evenings with Peter Andrews, during
which they discuss books they are reading.
Listeners are encouraged to call up and do
likewise.
, Speaking of the Jazz Festival, Nolan said
he prefers Sunday’s lineup, mainly because
of the presence of Etta James who, he said,
always wanted to be a jazz singer. James has
been a dominant force among female blues
and rhythm and blues singers for many years
and has headlined the Russian River Blues
Festival several times.
Some of her performances during the
1990s were explorations of jazz stylings. In
1994 she released a record, “Mystery Lady,”
on which she covered the ballads of Billie
Holiday, one of her idols. For this venture-
she was backed by a jazz rhythm section led
by a piano and three horns.
Nolan also mentioned bassist Stanley
Clarke,
со
-founder with Chick Corea of
the seminal jazz-fusion group, Return to
Forever. Clarke’s pairing with keyboardist
George Duke, also on Sunday, will rely
heavily on funk and R and
В
sounds.
“What I like about jazz,” Nolan went on to
say, “is that it’s challenging to the listener’s
intellect. There’s some very subtle stuff going
on there. It’s an artistic statement.”
According to Nolan, jazz these days
is “invisible.” It is still “dangerous,”
musically subversive, as it was in the 40s
and 50s, when it was a threat to the big
band sounds. Getting a record made was
difficult and jazz artists weren’t getting
any airplay at all.
Musicians who played behind such popular
figures as Count Basie and Duke Ellington
were getting together to jam on their own,
in three or four-man ensembles. They were
trying to make a statement as artists, not
just entertain people.
Most of the jazz around now he refers to
as pop jazz, commercial, background music
suitable for elevators.
On his KGGV show he plays the music
that’s harder to find on the air, and reads
poetry and spoken word, from people like
Jack Kerouac and Lord Buckley. Nolan
wants to intertwine the two art forms,
a throwback to the 1950s when, “there
was an adhesion between poets and jazz
players. They ran in the same circles. Poets
wanted to do with words what musicians
were doing with music.” ■
