Four

[Thor]

unable to separate the genius in his music from the turmoil of his personality

That seems so odd to me. Certainly the two are inextricably linked, as they are for so many others.

Monkey, there are two things that are probably worth understanding about it. The first is that this sort of modern "Coldplay stole my song" lawsuit almost never would have happened back then; it would have been settled between the artists, or by the labels, or in extreme cases by brutes hired by the managers or labels, etc. So unless you were very closely plugged into the scene, you wouldn't even hear about most of the conflicts or resolutions. We have a very different conception of how things should be resolved these days.

The second is that for music coming out of the blues tradition, and for music that is essentially one of cooperative development, the very notion of "thievery" doesn't really come into play until it's very blatant. Everyone's quoting and riffing off of each other, studio and live acts are a game of musical chairs (and closing off future opportunities by ramping up hostilities isn't always wise), and it's not always completely clear that moment X from a given song had its genesis with one person...even when antecedents couldn't be found, which they very often could. For many -- I wouldn't be confident enough to say all -- the issue was less thievery than credit; "I don't care if you steal the song, but don't claim it was all your idea." And for some, even that formulation wouldn't occur; they'd just assume it was yet another instance of the session or band leader taking credit, which happened a lot.

I'm not really excusing it, mind you, I'm just explaining how it's not useful to think about it in modern terms.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Thor:

Monkey, there are two things that are probably worth understanding about it. The first is that this sort of modern "Coldplay stole my song" lawsuit almost never would have happened back then; it would have been settled between the artists, or by the labels, or in extreme cases by brutes hired by the managers or labels, etc. So unless you were very closely plugged into the scene, you wouldn't even hear about most of the conflicts or resolutions. We have a very different conception of how things should be resolved these days.

A couple of amplifications on this.

1. It may not have happened much in the realm of jazz because there wasn't really much money in it, but law students studying copyright read lots of cases penned by Judge Learned Hand (yes, that was his name) about whether one song writer stole another's material. People like Irving Berlin were getting sued all the time.

2. There was an unwritten rule in jazz that if a bandmember wrote a song, the leader was able to take credit for it (hence, Miles's stealing of the Bill Evans material). (Again in the older days, it often didn't mean a whole lot because most jazz was so unpopular in those days that there wasn't much in royalty involved.) So if you look back in time, for example, you'll see that Duke Ellington used to be listed as the sole composer of "Caravan." That became popular enough, and I guess Ellington had enough of his own great songs, that today the credits go to his trombonist Juan Tizol, Ellington, and Irving Mills (the publisher), jointly. AFAIK, Tizol wrote it all on his own (as he did "Perdido" -- speaking of which, catch this great Sarah Vaughan rendition from 1955:

.)

 

[Thor]

Judge Learned Hand (yes, that was his name)

The jokes just write themselves, don't they?

As I'm sure you know, I wasn't arguing that copyright claims didn't exist back then, only that they were problematic in jazz for a variety of reasons (and even more problematic on the subject of blues, even if white musicians had been inclined to give credit, which they sometimes weren't).

2. There was an unwritten rule in jazz that if a bandmember wrote a song, the leader was able to take credit for it

Exactly. It's almost like I wrote "they'd just assume it was yet another instance of the session or band leader taking credit, which happened a lot" in the post you're quoting.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Thor:

Judge Learned Hand (yes, that was his name)

The jokes just write themselves, don't they?

He's often considered the greatest jurist not to have been appointed to the Supreme Court. He had a brother, who also was a distinguished jurist, named Augustus Hand.

 

[Eden Mylunsch]

Ahhhh, so many fun issues to address here!

A couple of points:

1. No musical style magically occurs overnight. Early modal experiments began in the mid-bop era, just as early bop reared its head in the mid-to-late days of swing. Harmolodics came out of the modal period and Mingus came from Mars (or maybe it was Watts).

2. Publishing for jazz, country, blues, and race music (R&B) was pretty fucked up until BMI came along and "popular music" was found to be a good revenue source. The leaders on a record date usually had a publishing arrangement for the songs on their albums and even though they were invariably getting screwed over by the publishers, at least some money went to whoever was listed as the composer. A sideman rarely had their own publishing deals, so often the leader would claim composer's credit for a tune. WTF, it wasn't like it was classical music or a Top-40 radio song or anything that would actually make money, right? Besides, in pop music, it was common to give deejays a little taste of the songwriting royalties to induce them to push a new record. Alan Freed was a great radio personality, but did he really co-write "Maybeline" with Chuck Berry? And label owner/publisher Morris Levy was so mobbed up that the character of "Herman 'Hesh' Rabkin in "The Sopranos" was a very thinly-veiled Levy, taking advantage of R&B performers signed to his label.

3. Even with the blues, there are subtleties that can be argued by lawyers and musicologists that will tie two songs together for purposes of creative lawsuits. Pull out the Ouija board and channel George Harrison and ask him if he consciously stole "My Sweet Lord" from "He's So Fine". I was once deposed as an expert in the Huey Lewis lawsuit against Ray Parker Jr for alleged similarities between "I Want a New Drug" and "Ghostbusters". Yes, they're the same song (but with different lyrics) but I found about a dozen other songs that predated the Lewis ditty that might have also inspired Parker Jr's composition (IIRC, it was wisely settled out of court, as it was a no-win situation for anyone other than the attorneys and the PR people).

4. There are various organizations and foundations extant that specialize in winning back publishing rights that were taken from the composers through unsavory business dealings (usually exacerbated by ignorance of the business by the composers). While they are rarely able to obtain retroactive judgments brings boatloads of money to the abused parties, at least the songs are credited properly and future royalty payments go to the composers or their heirs.

-Eden (it's a lot easier to just play for fun, rather than try to earn a living from it)

 

[Thor]

Thanks, Eden.

Regarding #4, the difficulty always seemed to be that proving invention was very, very, very hard in a genre that didn't have a lot of obvious points of invention and variation to those not deeply immersed in the music...which category included pretty much everyone who the musicians needed to defend their rights. The white musicians who borrowed or stole the stuff later on made it easier to fight, usually, by lifting the songs intact -- music and lyrics -- but even then, as you say, getting country-born, still largely oppressed, and more than occasionally illiterate blues musicians all lawyered up wasn't the easist process, even when someone could be found who wasn't more willing to assist in screwing them out of their royalties than in helping them. And since the publisher and the label were going to do that anyway, eventually, the benefits -- other than the simple act of putting the correct name between the parentheses -- weren't always clear, or worth the effort.

Still, it's nice to have the credits appropriately applied, even if it doesn't mean as much now as it would have when the musicians in question were still alive.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Thor:
Still, it's nice to have the credits appropriately applied, even if it doesn't mean as much now as it would have when the musicians in question were still alive.

Sing it for Solomon Linda!

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

2. There was an unwritten rule in jazz that if a bandmember wrote a song, the leader was able to take credit for it (hence, Miles's stealing of the Bill Evans material).

In that sense, it resembles the historical European (and Japanese) academic science models, in which "Herr Professor" supervises a cadre of underlings, themselves independent researchers (often with their own underlings), all of whose discoveries have Herr Professor's name appended to them, usually as the corresponding author. A certain, now-deceased Nobel laureate in our department operated a lab along similar lines until his death.

Speaking of Nobels, the Chemistry Nobel to Victor Grignard in 1912 was noteworthy in part because Grignard was the graduate student who made the discovery, one of the new if not only times that the graduate student received the credit for the discovery with a Nobel.

Mark Lipton

 

[Claude Kolm]

In addition to the "Blue Haze" recording, Miles recorded "Four" as part of the marathon Prestige session just before he went over to Columbia, but it wasn't relased until 1959 on the "Workin'" album.