Jazz: Man With a Brain

At the Monterey Jazz Festival in California last week, Composer-Saxophonist John Handy and his quartet launched into their opening number. Crash. A microphone toppled over. Handy tried to recover with a spiraling solo, but just as he built to a climax, the roar of a Boeing 727 jet drowned him out. Handy pressed on, but then the reed in his alto sax went sour, grounding the high-register flights that he plays so well. Undaunted, he introduced Blues for a High Strung Guitar—but wait, where was the guitar player? Unstrung backstage, as it happened, where he had to dash to repair a snapped string.

It was enough to make the most seasoned performers pack up their axes, but the Handymen—Guitarist Gerry Hahn, Violinist Mike White, Drummer Terry Clarke and Bassist Don Thompson—rallied with some surprises of their own. Turning to Handy’s Scheme No. I, they erupted in a dreamy and delirious atonal free-for-all, creating a great whirl of sound, like a radio with the dial spinning at peak volume. Handy, looking like a Chinese Pope in his foot-high brocade hat, sketched high looping solos that trembled and fluttered. When it was over, the sellout crowd of 7,000 turned on a standing ovation that would have drowned out that 727.

Fearsome Roar. It has been many long and cheerless months since jazz buffs last heard a performer as fresh and as talented as Handy. He arrives at a time when jazz’s discontented Young Turks have disdainfully turned away from their audiences and gone off to explore the way-out, or, as more often happens, the way-in of their own psyches. At 33, Handy is the most reassuring evidence yet that a middle ground persists between more or less conventional modern jazz and the avantgarde.

Handy’s discipline derives from his classical training at San Francisco State College, where he is a few credits shy of a master’s degree in music education. When he first unlimbered on the jazz circuit in 1958, he was a timid conformist, but a nine-month tour with Charlie Mingus’ combo changed that. Midway in a number, the burly, quick-tempered Mingus would peer fearsomely from behind his bass and roar, “Go on, go on, blow something!” Recalls Handy: “I was too scared not to play something startling.”

Meaningful Traces. Handy refined his style playing classically oriented jazz with small symphony orchestras on the West Coast, studied modern classical composers such as Prokofiev and Stravinsky. He has become so skilled in instrumental techniques and music theory that many jazzmen goto him for instruction. “Handy,” says Mingus, “is a musician with a brain.”

With his reputation burgeoning, Handy has now become the subject of the jazz aficionados’ favorite diversion: endless treatises delving into his musical roots. The pedants find meaningful traces of Bartok and Shostakovich, of rhythm and blues and bebop, of African rhythms and Indian ragas, of Saxophonist Benny Carter (in the upper register) and of Clarinetist George Baquet (in the trills). John Handy hears differently. “More and more,” says he, “I sound like John Handy.”