- JAZZ IS NOT BULLSHIT At least not according to Frank Boyd in The Holler Sessions.
Somehow, after all these decades, jazz is still polarizing. It has its evangelists—though the people on the front lines of spreading that gospel, FM jazz radio DJs, tend to be anodyne, sleepy personalities without much fire in their bellies—as well as its belittlers. The haters talk about jazz as alienating and pretentious, the musical equivalent of a blowhard who loves the sound of his own voice. I know one eligible New York bachelorette who says that when she goes home with a man, his chances of getting laid are severely compromised if he puts on a jazz record. To her, jazz is a character flaw.
That attitude, according to the radio-show host in The Holler Sessions at On the Boards—a solo performance in which actor Frank Boyd plays a volcanically enthusiastic jazz DJ in the middle of his show—is a mark of America failing itself. In one segment of a workshop production I saw, he reads through USA Today with Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges's "Basin Street Blues" backing him up. Flipping through the paper disgusts him: "The Dow is down... Sports, who cares?... There's nothing here!" He backs the song up to the 5:50-minute mark, the beginning of Harry "Sweets" Edison's tender and exuberant trumpet solo.
"This should be our national anthem!" he exclaims in the spaces between horn lines, as Edison is taking breaths. "Fuck this Francis Scott Key bullshit! This is us! It feels like us! This should be playing before every ball game! We should all learn the chord progressions in kindergarten! Everybody can plunk along on something!" Then he puts a towel over his head and leans back in his chair, overwhelmed.
That sound, to him, is what's happening in America…
