Jazz: The Third Thing

Little Herbie Solomon was, every body said, a square. While the other saxophone players at Brooklyn’s Abra ham Lincoln High School were trying to imitate the new bebop style of Charlie (“Bird”) Parker. Herbie was still practicing to old Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips records. You’re not with it, Herbie, they said, and refused to let him play with the school’s dance band.

But Herbie endured, eventually changed his name and instrument, and, as Jazz Flutist Herbie Mann, has be come at 34 one of the most successful jazzmen in the business. This week he was voted the top musician in his field for the eighth consecutive year in the Down Beat magazine readers’ poll. But, to the inner circle of jazz aficionados, Herbie is still not with it. Mainly, says Mann, “because I’ve committed the cardinal sin of being successful.”

Languid Afternoons. With a canny eye on the box office, Mann has attracted a devoted following from “the lay and fringe public” with a unique amalgam of jazz and ethnic music. Last week, in Manhattan’s cavernous Village Gate, the Herbie Mann Septet was serving up one of its typical jazzpotpourris: gently infectious bossa nova, thumping Afro-Cuban, variations on a North African tribal chant, a Middle Eastern treatment of the theme from Fiddler on the Roof, a brooding interpretation of a classical piano piece writ ten in 1888 by French Composer Erik Satie. Mann also introduced a new gimmick: he played a flute improvisation against a tape recording of eerily exotic, centuries-old gagaku music, played by the royal musicians of Japan’s imperi al court, a memento picked up when Mann played with the gagaku musicians during a tour of Japan three months ago.

Mann’s flute is a sparrow in the treetops, lightly flitting and chirping above a heavy, sensuous beat laid down by the rhythm section On alto flute, the mood is more softly introspective, evoking languid afternoons by the sea. The music is easy on the ears, mildly diverting in its melodic simplicity and ease of ap proach. Mann plays with eyes closed, standing disjointedly and undulating as if to entwine himself around the microphone, conscious that “some chicks just come to see me move. They’re stone-deaf freaks, but I’m not knocking it.” He doesn’t knock anything, in fact, that might lure people into a nightclub. Last year, to add a little “carnival excitement,” he hired two Afro-Cuban dancers who cavorted about the stage showering the audience with confetti. Such tactics, scorned by jazz purists, bring Mann a $50,000 yearly income.

Mann scored his breakthrough when he discovered that the gentle flute, an upstaged squeak in the company of flashy trumpets and saxophones, could best flex its personality against a background of drums. Mann formed an Afro-Jazz Sextet and embarked in 1959 on a highly successful four-month tour of 17 African countries.

Boom-Boom. Back in the U.S. the combo’s “ethnic jazz” gained a wide audience. But in the mounting din of his drummers Mann found himself becoming “a sideman in my own group” and he fled to Brazil. He came back playing a new music that helped touch off the bossa-nova craze in the U.S.

“One reason jazz is not salable,” says Mann, “is because the musicians and audiences stopped enjoying themselves. People used to swing and be happy in a club Now they must come out emotionally destroyed. We play simple, enjoyable music. My audience doesn’t know it’s supposed to be something they shouldn’t like. It’s not jazz and it’s not authentic ethnic; it’s a crossbreed, a third thing.”

Confident that he has now achieved his life’s ambition-“to be to the flute what Benny Goodman is to the clarinet”—Mann is looking for new worlds of music to translate into the third thing. “At the moment,” he says, “I’m very interested in American Indian music. There’s more to it than just boom-boom, boom-boom, you know. The possibilities are endless.”