Primarily an
appreciation, this essay seeks as well to provide a personal context for the
reception of Word Jazz. I have
consulted neither secondary sources nor histories of radio but mention only
what survives in my own memory. I have
been listening to the albums again, which is surely the best way to get a fix
on any artist.
Works of art vary in the extent to which
they exploit the specific resources of their genre. Some films, for example, are particularly cinematic with extensive use of montage [1] while others feature camera work
less prominently. Some poetic lyrics
foreground sound effects and emotional power; others may sound more prosy or
conversational and offer a more cerebral appeal. An artist’s attentiveness to the qualities
most characteristic of the medium, of course, plays no necessary part in
evaluation which depends not on the artist’s goals, but on how well those ends
are achieved.
Radio’s day as a
major form of entertainment has already come and gone, though for more than a
generation its programming, specific shows for the most part (not just a format
the listener might turn on and off at any time) vied with films for people’s
attention. Many radio performers deployed
substantial skills equally useful on stage or in print. Humphrey Bogart appeared (with Greer Garson)
in the Lux Radio Theatre version of The African Queen and Dylan Thomas
read for BBC radio just as he did with a live audience. The airwaves were simply a means of
transmission for news reporters reading from wire services, while announcers
played recorded music, often remaining inconspicuous as many classical hosts do
today.
With the arrival
of rock and roll, radio disk jockeys gained new influence and Wolfman Jack and
Casey Kasem became celebrities for their spirited and distinctive patter,
largely improvised. A few radio personalities created shows
in which any individual iteration was less significant than the pattern created by the whole, often including considerable
repetition. Outstanding among these was
Franklin McCormack whose All Night Showcase on WGN included music,
poetry [2], and talk. Another
Midwesterner, Jean Shepherd, working for a series of stations (ultimately WOR in
New York), read poetry [3], and told stories, some of which continue to be
rebroadcast. Marshall McLuhan noted his
originality, commenting that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a
new kind of novel that he writes nightly." [4]
Ken Nordine’s art
was specific to radio. He exploited the possibilities
of the medium in his Word Jazz broadcasts on WBEZ for over forty years, while
collections on LPs have been a cult favorite for years. Nordine had developed an altogether
idiosyncratic form which he perfected throughout his career. He delivered his monologues in his
extraordinary rich voice which, apart from his art, served him well in making a
good living doing voice-overs and narrations in advertisements and movie
trailers. One need scarcely even know
what he is saying, his sound alone carries such beauty, authority, and
conviction. He was a master at tone and timing,
and his musical backgrounds were basically jazz with a willingness to stray
into sounds rarely heard before, often provided by the Fred Katz Group
[5]. The narrations may be funny in the
metaphysical style of Piet Hein’s Grooks or spooky and quasi-metaphysical
like Rod Serling at the start of The Twilight Zone. Poignance might turn in a moment to
irony. Nordine was unpredictable. He became a favorite of the friends of
cannabis well before the advent of the Firesign Theatre.
My first experience was when I was perhaps
fourteen years old and a friend a few years older, a student at Antioch (which
I understood then to rank with Reed as the hippest campuses in America), offered
to play me a record he had just purchased: Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz. “This one is something else,” he said. “We
have to turn out the lights first.” And
in the semi-darkness as his parents shuffled by outside I heard something that
struck me as really new. It wasn’t a
series of short stories or stand-up comedy or poetry exactly. It utilized jazz music and the sort of sound
effects used on radio dramas and, most impressively, a voice that seized one’s
attention and would not let go.
Few others have
utilized the medium of radio more effectively.
Depending on suggestion as they do, his routines would be less compelling
if visual images were included. Like situation
comedies on television, the impact of one individual broadcast depends more on
the listener’s familiarity with the conventions of his program in general than
on characteristics unique to a single iteration. His relation to radio drama, many of which
were still being produced when Word Jazz debuted, is dialectic: the
“realer-than-real” sound effects, each creaking door or splash of water perfect
and distinct, resembled those on Johnny Dollar or Inner Sanctum,
but his tales were far less predictable than those highly conventionalized
programs. He was hip and existential
when those qualities were all but unavailable on mass media.
Nordine occupies
the liminal space between poetry and prose, the popular and the hermetic, the
absurd and the profound. Listening to a
single track of Word Jazz is enough to make some listeners cue up the
next while others determine to waste no more time. In contrast to Del Close and John Brent’s How
to Speak Hip (1961) (which I did find amusing) or – Lord help us! – Maynard Krebs (who first
appeared on The Dobie Gillis Show in 1959) (whom I did not), Nordine
operated, like Lenny Bruce, from within the counter-culture. He was assuredly a cousin to the Theater of
the Absurd and an ancestor to the cerebral comedy of George Carlin and Steven
Wright.
Those who do not
know his work are advised to turn out the lights, lie back in bed, and follow the
timeless advice of Gus Cannon in 1929, seconded by the Rooftop Singers in 1962,
“Daddy, let your mind roll on.” Even public
radio today is dominated by talk and news and music with virtually no poetry or
drama and little attention to the specific potential of the medium. Nordine was one of a kind. He seems to have come from nowhere and to have left no imitators.
1. Mamoulian is an
example of a popular studio director in whose work montage in the manner
described by Eisenstein in Film Form and Film Sense figures
prominently.
2. In 1936 MacCormack
hosted one of the very few broadcast poetry shows with the title Poetic
Melodies.
3. He was
particularly fond of Robert Service.
4. In Understanding
Media, “Radio: the Tribal Drum,” p. 148.
McLuhan goes on to say “It is his idea that, just as Montaigne was the
first to use the page to show his reactions to the new world of printed books,
he is the first to use radio as an essay and novel form for recording our
common awareness of a totally new world of universal human participation in all
human events, private or collective.”
5. Chico Hamilton
played drums under an assumed name.
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