Jazz certainly loves its autumn leaves, going by its taste in standards. And its plaintive, twilight horns can sound like so many gusts of wind, denuding a belt of trees and sending us home for pumpkin pie. If you’re at all like me, one of your deeper, quieter pleasures of each year is striding through the early portion of an October night, tang of smoke in the air, darkness having descended, and entering the jazz club for a rousingly contemplative set. Feels a lot different than it does in summer, doesn’t it? Feels apropos, like cider down the gullet as a child on an apple-picking field trip, or the first slice into orange construction paper when you’re helping your kid whip up her fall decorations.
To children, jazz music can just sound scary, deliciously so; to adults, it’s more complicated. Horns have a knack for suggesting funerals, of course, but since many of us have probably never been to a funeral with horns doing their thing, the association doesn’t hit as close to the bone of our personal experiences. Still, have you ever noticed how the right bluesy, wailing horn section sounds perfectly spook-engineered to aid a ghost in cutting a rug? My vision of a desired future includes a house by the sea, guests arriving for a Halloween party, nothing but jazz on the stereo, and friends inquiring, “Why, who is that? What a wonderfully sinister song!”
Chances are excellent that the following pieces would be on that macabre dream playlist: 10 jazzy ingredients—we can call them songs—for adding spice to your Halloween witches’ kettle, loosening up your graveyard dance party, and tricking out your mausoleum sound system.
Keeper of the crypt, rattle the jazzy bones!
Listen to a Spotify playlist featuring most of the tracks listed in this JazzTimes 10:
4. Fletcher Henderson: “Ghost of the Blues” (1924 Emerson single; appears on Fletcher Henderson & His Orchestra 1924 Vol. 1, Classics, 1996)
Can a musical idiom have a ghost? Well, let’s look at it this way: A person not dead can have a ghost and that ghost is called a fetch, and fetch is not that far from Fletch, so yes, I’m going to say that a man named Fletcher Henderson can let loose a ghost upon a genre. Or maybe more like press a ghost into service on behalf of a genre. This is subtle, an advancing rhythm approaching in waves; rolling up the beach, rolling back down the beach, but rolling up a little further the next time, laying claim to our terra firma foundation insidiously. Henderson had urbanity—not necessarily a quality we associate with Halloween, but city streets have their somber moods too, as Edward Hopper and many film-noir directors knew. Halloween jazz noir to quicken the pulse of a ghost. And they thought they were in the clear.
