The history of jazz is full of musicians, both reliable and inventive, who don’t become stars.  Drummer George Wettling is one of the most neglected, although he had a recording career that lasted more than thirty years, finding him alongside Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman, Milt Hinton, Wild Bill Davison, Coleman Hawkins, Wingy Manone, Frank Teschmacher, Joe Thomas, Herman Chittison, Bobby Hackett and a hundred other first-rank players. 

Here’s a film clip of Wettling, playing ROYAL GARDEN BLUES in an all-star Condon group (minus Eddie, who was recovering at the time), featuring Davison, Ed Hall, Cutty Cutshall, Willie the Lion Smith, and Al Hall. 

The cameraman was fascinated by the front line, so we get to see Wettling only intermittently, but we certainly hear his pushing accompaniment, although his playing is anything but overbearing.  Wettling’s style focused on his snare drum, and his rolls and accents, his rimshots and commentary, are drawn from the drummers he heard in Chicago and the Midwest in the Twenties: Baby Dodds and Zutty Singleton.  But the style is fluid, not a relentless two-beat, and Wettling continually changes his accents and volume while pushing the band along exuberantly, playing differently behind the full ensemble, behind the Lion, with Hall, propelling the end of Hall’s chorus and playing tag with the emphatic Wild Bill.  Wettling doesn’t demand the listener’s attention by volume or pyrotechnics.  Rather, his drums seem to say, “Listen to us.“  And when we finally get a chance to focus purely on Wettling, in his brief exchanges with Al Hall, it is over too soon — but we can admire his conciseness (not an extra stroke or beat, nothing wasted or superfluous) and his swinging embrace of pure time – he never speeds up or slows down, or loses the thread of the music.  And although his four-bar break is simple, it is a Wettling trademark: how much percussive variety and energy he could put into sixteen beats! 

It’s odd that in jazz, where drummers become stars, Wettling didn’t get his share of attention and adulation.  Musicians knew him and hired him — Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy McPartland, Miff Mole, Billy Butterfield, Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, and he was a first-call studio and recording drummer.  But Wettling didn’t want to lead bands; I sense that he was happy to let someone else handle the audiences, the payroll, the clubowner: he wanted to play, and play he did.  I also suspect that being associated for so long with Eddie Condon, someone with a strong personality, made have put Wettling in the shadows . . . although Condon said once that all he needed for a romping band was Wettling.  And the magnificent drumming that lifts Berigan’s Victor recording of I CAN’T GET STARTED is Wettling’s; hear him, as well, on perhaps seventy-five percent of the Commodore Records classics.

But he’s not well-known these days, which is a pity.  Hear him on the Commodores, on the Doctor Jazz broadcasts, on the Condon Town Hall concerts, on the magnificent Fifties dates Condon did for Columbia.  Put all your preconceptions about formulaic “Dixieland drumming” aside and listen to Wettling — fluid, energetic, responsive, fully engaged and lively.

Here’s that rare thing — three minutes of Wettling solo in the middle Fifties, titled IT AIN’T THE HUMIDITY (IT’S THE BEAT).  No fireworks, no crashing ”technique.”  Timeless and hot, the drums singing their own melodies.  

Should you ever encounter Hal Smith, Kevin Dorn, Jeff Hamilton, Chris Tyle, or Nick Ward — ask them, “What do you think of George Wettling?”  And stand back!

I’ve been listening to Wettling for forty years now — he’s on many of my favorite records!  But what made me write this post was a little anecdote I just heard.  A musician I know, now in his seventies, told me that his older brother had been in the audience for Louis Armstrong’s 1947 Town Hall concert, where the drummers were Sidney Catlett and Wettling.  When it was time for Wettling to play, the musician’s brother (seated in the balcony) saw Catlett come upstairs and take a seat — the better to delight in what Wettling was doing and how beautiful it sounded in the hall. 

If it was good enough for Sidney Catlett and Eddie Condon, it should be good enough for all of us!

In this job market, who hasn’t considered padding their resume? But resume padding can come back to haunt you as Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyk) discovers in the classic Christmas comedy of errors Christmas In Connecticut.

One moment Elizabeth Lane is at the top of her profession writing an enormously popular feature for the magazine Smart Housekeeping, the next she facing the prospect of unemployment all because her boss thinks she is a wonderful cook who has a husband, a farm, and a baby in Connecticut.  But Elizabeth Lane, America’s favorite homemaker, is really a single, New York career woman who can’t cook, doesn’t have a baby, and lives in a small apartment that doesn’t even have a window box. What she does have is a newly purchased mink coat, a true friend in her “Uncle” Felix (S.Z. Sakall), and a boring architect, would-be fiancé John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner) who keeps proposing despite her numerous rejections. But all that is about to change.

Who could have anticipated all the trouble and excitement that would enter Elizabeth’s orderly life when a nurse in a faraway naval hospital thinks that if her sailor hero fiancé could only spend Christmas with America’s favorite homemaker he will stop dragging his feet and set the date for their wedding? Unable to talk her overpowering boss, publishing giant Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), out of sending her a sailor for Christmas, Elizabeth embarks on an elaborate, last-minute charade to protect her magazine editor and give this war hero his picture-perfect Christmas in Connecticut.

This charade, however, is not without cost. Elizabeth is finally persuaded to accept John Sloan and marry him on Christmas Eve at his farm in Connecticut. All that is needed to complete the illusion of domestic bliss is a borrowed baby, but when the handsome sailor, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), lands on Elizabeth’s Connecticut doorstep—suddenly the prospect of marrying the stable but dull John Sloan is the last thing on Elizabeth’s mind. How does a girl win the man of her dreams when he thinks she’s married to another man? To find out, I suggest you spend your Christmas in Connecticut.

Random Facts:

Christmas in Connecticut

· In 1944 when Christmas in Connecticut was filmed, Barbara Stanwyck was so successful that she was the highest-paid woman in the United States.

· Stanwyck was a four-time Academy Award nominee but she didn’t take home Oscar until 1982 when she was given an Honorary Award.

· Sydney Greenstreet, who plays the indomitable publisher Alexander Yardley in Christmas in Connecticut, also appears in the films Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.

· Budapest-born actor S.Z. Sakall who plays Felix Bassenak in Christmas in Connecticut was also known as S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall.

· Christmas in Connecticut was remade for television in 1991 starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, and Tony Curtis, it was directed by Arnold Schwarzenagger.

· The movie set used to depict John Sloan’s country home in Christmas in Connecticut is the same set that was used in the 1938 comedy Bringing up Baby.

Christmas in Connecticut Party Plan

My fellow Starlet and I love this movie and have been known to watch it at all times of the year, but there are all sorts of fun ways you can tie this movie into your holiday party or as a special dinner-and-movie event.

· Flippin’ flapjacks. The menus Elizabeth Lane writes in her magazine feature are elaborate and gourmet, but it is flipping a single flapjack that nearly gets her caught. Take a page out of the movie and invite your friends over for a pancake and pajamas party before you watch Christmas in Connecticut. As host, you can provide the pancake batter, have your friends pitch in and bring their favorite toppings like strawberries, peaches, and whipped cream, then get cozy and watch Elizabeth Lane work her magic in the kitchen.

· Old fashioned Christmas. Christmas in Connecticut was released by Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. in 1945 when World War II was just concluding. Get your viewing party into the spirit of the time with music from the 1940s like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Research menus and recipes from that era—maybe even find out what one of Elizabeth Lane’s recipes would cost. Mix up some retro cocktails.

· “The things a girl will do for a mink coat!” Elizabeth Lane has promised herself a mink coat all her life and, feeling confident in the success of her feature, she buys herself one. Have your guests arrive for your viewing party wearing fur or faux fur coats just like Elizabeth Lane.

Pancake Recipe

Introduced to the market in 1931, by 1945 when Elizabeth Lane is flipping her first flapjack Bisquick was a staple in American homes. Uncle Felix, true gourmet that he is, might have turned his nose up at using a mix, but for novice and busy cooks Bisquick was a handy convenience food. In keeping with that spirit, here is the pancake recipe from Betty Crocker’s Bisquick Cookbook.

Ingredients

2 cups Original Bisquick

1 cup milk

2 eggs

1. Heat griddle or skillet; grease if necessary.
2. Stir all ingredients until blended. Pour batter by a little less than ¼ cupfuls onto hot griddle.
3. Cook until edges are dry. Turn; cook until golden brown.

5 servings (three 4-inch pancakes each)

My title comes from a Jelly Roll Morton record from his great Victor period — but it’s a close approximation of the phrase that came into my mind when I watched and heard this great small band from the recent San Diego Dixieland Jazz Festival, with these November 27, 2009 video clips coming to us through the apparently inexhaustible generosity of Rae Ann Berry.

The band?  Led by the melifluous clarinetist Tim Laughlin, it features pianist Chris Dawson, recently celebrated in this blog, drummer Hal Smith, cornetist Connie Jones, trombonist Alan Adams, guitarist Katie Cavera, and bassist Marty Eggers — a nice mixture of Californians and New Orleanians, stirred and hot.

Here they are on WANG WANG BLUES.  Catch Hal’s press rolls behind the opening ensemble, Tim’s melodic fluidity that hints at Noone by way of Davern, his beautiful tone; Connie’s mixture of gruffness and Bixian nimbleness; that rhythm section, with Chris light yet rocking, Marty and Katie fervent, Hal remembering all the things one can do with a hi-hat cymbal and its stem; Katie’s neat chorded solo.  And then the ensemble choruses, starting calmly and getting Hot.  There are rough edges here (it seems to have started the set) but I love it in an old-fashioned way:

Fats Waller’s KEEPIN’ OUT OF MISCHIEF NOW follows, situated midway between Dixieland conventions and the Vanguard recording featuring Vic Dickenson and Ruby Braff.  Connie’s earnest vocal is a treat, and the ghosts of Wild Bill Davison and Teddy Wilson, apparently unlikely partners, share the stage in perfect harmony, before Marty’s melodic solo and the easily-rocking final ensemble:

Connie and Alan left the stage for a splendid quintet version of DOWN BY THE OLD MILL STREAM, which allows us to hear and see the uplifting work of Chris Dawson, his treble lines sparkling but never upstaging Tim.  Katie’s chordal solo reminds me of Carmen Mastren’s playing on the 1940 Bechet-Spanier session, and that’s high praise.  And this performance suggests some of the lilting playing of a Goodman – Wilson Thirties airshot without copying any of those patented licks:

More to come!

Louis Armstrong as Bottom and Maxine Sullivan as Titania in the ill-fated 1939 Broadway show Swingin' the Dream.

The history of jazz has many fascinating footnotes, but few as intriguing as an event which took place 70 years ago, and which has been glossed over in most of the biographies and autobiographies of those involved.

The event was the opening of a unique musical – a jazz version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – at the end of November 1939. It starred jazz’s most important innovator, Louis Armstrong, as Bottom, and the vocalist Maxine Sullivan, who was enjoying popular success with her swing versions of Loch Lomond and other folk songs, as Titania.

Entitled Swingin’ the Dream, the show boasted musical supervision by clarinet king Benny Goodman, whose septet was one of three bands playing in the production, and it had scenery based on Walt Disney cartoons (with Disney’s permission).

If the name of the show is familiar, it’s probably because its only legacy – and the only reason it is ever mentioned in sleeve notes and books – was the classic ballad, and jazz favourite, Darn That Dream, written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange. Reference books, the internet, and record notes yield little information about Swingin’ the Dream, and nothing comprehensive appears to have been written about it – undoubtedly because it was a huge flop, running only 13 performances.

There is some photographic evidence of the eccentricity of the whole affair, however. The superb 1987 documentary profile of Maxine Sullivan, Love to be in Love, showed two still photographs of Sullivan and Armstrong kitted out in togas and hamming it up for the camera. But neither is as amusing as the one that is included in the booklet of the Chronological Classics Louis Armstrong CD – of the trumpeter in ass attire.

Swingin’ the Dream had a predominantly black cast which, in addition to Armstrong and Sullivan, included Butterfly McQueen – who was about to find fame as the hysterical maid Prissy in Gone With the Wind, released in mid-December of that year – as Puck, and Dorothy Dandridge as a pixie.

Jimmy Van Heusen’s score borrowed themes from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the rehearsal pianist was no less important a jazz figure than the stride pianist James P Johnson. While Benny Goodman’s group was positioned in a box on one side of the stage, Don Voorhees conducted the pit band, and the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra, a hot Chicago band which boasted such talent as guitarist Eddie Condon, clarinettist Pee Wee Russell and saxophonist Bud Freeman, was stationed in a box on the opposite side from Goodman’s outfit.

The project, the brainwave of a European producer called Erik Charell, was clearly viewed with much cynicism by many of the musicians involved – even before it opened. Eddie Condon, in his autobiography We Called it Music, devotes only half a page to the show which he portrays as an enormous waste of talent. It had, he says, ”a cast large enough to found a small city” and was a complete shambles. By opening night, the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra’s involvement had been cut to two numbers, leaving time for the musicians to go for a drink.

Condon says: ”I got into the white uniform I was forced to wear and went across the street to Dillon’s bar. By then I knew we were swinging a flop; it was the first time I had ever worn white to a funeral.” The reviews confirmed what Condon and his colleagues had suspected (Billboard described the show as ”an orgy of wasted talent”) and the band – convinced that they would soon be out of work – began scouting for other work.

Condon’s Scrapbook of Jazz includes a telegram, dated December 4, which he sent to a friend in Chicago. It says: ”Swingin’ the Dream not going over. Goodman leaves next week and although we are contracted until December 29 we could leave any time too.” However, before the Summa Cum Lauders could jump ship, it sank – without a trace. Having grossed a measly $12,000 in its first week, Swingin’ the Dream swung to a halt on December 9, leaving little in the way of evidence that it had ever existed…

Sunday night at The Ear Inn, the performances that moved me the most were three love songs — interspersed with up-tempo romps on I NEVER KNEW, LINGER AWHILE, WAY DOWN YONDER IN NEW ORLEANS, and THERE’LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE. 

The EarRegulars were Jon-Erik Kellso, trumpet and moral guidance; Mark Lopeman, tenor sax and clarinet; Chris Flory, guitar, Joel Forbes, bass.  Not to downplay the fervor of anyone in the quartet, I would hand the palm to Lopeman, whose muscular, tender improvisations hark back to Lester but look forward to Lopeman.  

For some bands, the first song of the first set is a shakedown cruise, a tentative warm-up of muscles both physical and emotional.  But not this quartet, who had everything magically in place from the first notes of SOMEDAY, SWEETHEART.

A grammatical digression: I prefer the title as written above, which seems a hopeful entreaty.  “Someday, sweetheart, we’ll . . . (fill in the blank).”  SOMEDAY SWEETHEART is ambiguous.  Someday you’ll be my sweetheart? 

The melody is sweet, but the song’s lyrics are accusatory: a precursor to SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE SORRY.  And since Louis part-dreamed of the melody of GOODNIGHT, ANGEL, it is possible he dreamed of the emotional aura of SOMEDAY, SWEETHEART: ”you will be sorry / for what you’ve done / to my poor heart”?  The subconscious is wonderfully mysterious.

The EarRegulars take this pretty, ancient Morton-inspired song at what I think of as the Venuti-Lang All-Stars tempo: a sweet-natured jog.  Not too slow, not too fast:

Then, someone suggested EMBRACEABLE YOU, usually taken at a rhapsodic-operatic tempo.  Here, it’s slightly more animated, as if some embracing was actually on the menu (Charlie Parker tempo?) and it made space for an absolutely eloquent melodic improvisation by Lopeman:

Finally, there was ON THE ALAMO, which some people think a cousin to THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS, but it’s actually a sweet 1922 song about love-longing.  The lyrics are nineteenth-century, as the singer waits at the garden gate for the Love Object to return, although Jon-Erik and Chris both had the Benny Goodman Sextet in mind:

The fact that these sessions are getting informally recorded for posterity by me, Stanley, and Jim makes me happy.  This is timeless music, even with the occasionally blurry focus and odd angle, the crash of dishes and the shouts of “I need a Bailey on the rocks!”  It’s a privilege — and that’s no cliche — to share it here.  But that no record company executives come to The Ear Inn is sad and strange.  The floating lyricism everyone displays here is irreplaceable.  Embraceable, too.  Till next week!

Click on the picture to hear Kenny playing 'Travellin' All Alone'

I was delighted to see Kenny Davern’s album, The Hot Trio, amongst a list of the top one hundred jazz albums in last week’s Sunday Telegraph.  As I’ve pointed out before on this blog (see the limitations of list-making) I am not a huge fan of lists but I agree whole-heartedly with Martin Gayford’s description of Kenny Davern as the finest jazz clarinettist of the late twentieth century.

The heyday of the jazz clarinet was back in the late thirties and forties when Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were huge stars.  With the ascendancy of bebop after the war, saxophones and trumpets become dominant and the clarinet became increasingly unfashionable.

But that didn’t deter Kenny Davern who was steeped in the history of jazz and was a great admirer amongst others of Pee Wee Russell and Irving Fazola.  I was fortunate enough to meet Kenny on two ocassions.  In the best traditions of jazz, he was a larger than life figure, a man of acerbic wit.  He took the time and trouble to write down for me the names of some of his favourite players and the records that I should check out.  He was delighted when I told him that I had a copy of his Hot Trio album and he took out from his pocket a photograph of the pianist on the record – Dick Wellstood – who was a life-long friend.

I remember one unfortunate punter requesting Moonglow, a tune that is synonymous with Benny Goodman.  Kenny played it but not before he made the point that he’d never aspired to play like Benny Goodman.  What he wanted was to sound like Kenny Davern – that is the challenge for every musician to find his or her own distinctive voice.

It was a challenge to which Kenny Davern was more than equal.  The jazz trumpeter, Warren Vaché, speaking shortly after Davern’s death a couple of years ago said, ”You could pick Kenny out on a record after two or three notes —like a hot knife going through butter.  His playing was edgy and cutting and virile and, at the same time, passionate and tender…”

If you’re not familiar with Kenny Davern’s music and you’d like to hear more, in addition to The Hot Trio, I’d also recommend Summit Reunion which he made in 1990 with Bob Wilber but any record upon which you see his name comes with a guarantee of enjoyment.

Between 1953 and 1957, John Hammond supervised a series of record dates for the Vanguard label.  I first heard one of those records — the second volume of the THE VIC DICKENSON SHOWCASE — at my local library in the late Sixties, and fell in love. 

The Vanguard sessions featured Ruby Braff, Shad Collins, Buck Clayton, Joe Newman, Emmett Berry, Pat Jenkins, Doug Mettome, Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, Benny Green, Urbie Green, Lawrence Brown, Henderson Chambers, Ed Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Jimmy Buffington, Coleman Hawkins, Buddy Tate, Rudy Powell, Earle Warren, Lucky Thompson, Frank Wess, Pete Brown, Paul Quinichette, Mel Powell, Sir Charles Thompson, Jimmy Jones, Hank Jones, Sammy Price, Ellis Larkins, Nat Pierce, Steve Jordan, Skeeter Best, Kenny Burrell, Oscar Pettiford, Walter Page, Aaron Bell, Jo Jones, Bobby Donaldson, Jimmy Crawford, Jimmy Rushing, and others.

The list of artists above would be one answer to the question, “What made these sessions special?” but we all know of recordings with glorious personnel that don’t quite come together as art — perhaps there’s too little or too much arranging, or the recorded sound is not quite right, or one musician (a thudding drummer, an over-amplified bassist) throws everything off. 

The Vanguard sessions benefited immensely from Hammond’s imagination.  Although I have been severe about Hammond — as someone who interfered with musicians for whom he was offering support — and required that his preferences be taken seriously or else (strong-willed artists like Louis, Duke, and Frank Newton fought with or ran away from John).  Hammond may have been “difficult” and more, but his taste in jazz was impeccable.  And broad — the list above goes back to Sammy Price, Walter Page, and forward to Kenny Burrell and Benny Green. 

Later on, what I see as Hammond’s desire for strong flavors and novelty led him to champion Dylan and Springsteen, but I suspect that those choices were also in part because he could not endure watching others make “discoveries.”  Had it been possible to continue making records like the Vanguards eternally, I believe Hammond might have done so.   

Although Mainstream jazz was still part of the American cultural landscape in the early Fifties, and the artists Hammond loved were recording for labels large and small — from Verve, Columbia, Decca, all the way down to Urania and Period — he felt strongly about players both strong and subtle, musicians who had fewer opportunities to record sessions on their own.  At one point, Hammond and George Wein seemed to be in a friendly struggle to champion Ruby Braff, and I think Hammond was the most fervent advocate Vic Dickenson, Sir Charles Thompson, and Mel Powell ever had.  Other record producers, such as the astute George Avakian at Columbia, would record Jimmy Rushing, but who else was eager to record Pete Brown, Shad Collins, or Henderson Chambers?  No one but Hammond. 

And he arranged musicians in novel — but not self-consciously so — combinations.  For THE VIC DICKENSON SHOWCASE, it did not take a leap of faith to put Braff, Vic, and Ed Hall together in the studio, for they had played together at Boston’s Savoy Cafe in 1949.  And to encourage them to stretch out for leisurely versions of ”Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “Jeepers Creepers,” and “Russian Lullaby” was something that other record producers — notably Norman Granz — had been doing to capitalize on the longer playing time of the new recording format.  But after that rather formal beginning, Hammond began to be more playful.  The second SHOWCASE featured Shad Collins, the masterful and idiosyncratic ex-Basie trumpeter, in the lead, with Braff joining in as a guest star on two tracks. 

Now, some of the finest jazz recordings were made in adverse circumstances (I think of the cramped Brunswick and Decca studios of the Thirties).  And marvelous music can be captured in less-than-ideal sound: consider Jerry Newman’s irreplaceable uptown recordings.  But the sound of the studio has a good deal to do with the eventual result.  Victor had, at one point, a converted church in Camden, New Jersey; Columbia had Liederkrantz Hall and its 30th Street Studios.  Hammond had a Masonic Temple on Clermont Avenue in Brooklyn, New York — with a thirty-five foot ceiling, wood floors, and beautiful natural resonance. 

The Vanguard label, formed by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon, had devoted itself to beautiful-sounding classical recordings; Hammond had written a piece about the terrible sound of current jazz recordings, and the Solomons asked him if he would like to produce sessions for them.  Always eager for an opportunity to showcase musicians he loved, without interference, Hammond began by featuring Vic Dickenson, whose sound may never have been as beautifully captured as it was on the Vanguards. 

Striving for an entirely natural sound, the Vanguards were recorded with one microphone hanging from the ceiling.  The players in the Masonic Temple did not know what the future would hold — musicians isolated behind baffles, listening to their colleagues through headphones — but having one microphone would have been reminiscent of the great sessions of the Thirties and Forties.  And musicians often become tense at recording sessions, no matter how professional or experienced they are — having a minimum of engineering-interference can only have added to the relaxed atmosphere in the room. 

The one drawback of the Masonic Temple was that loud drumming was a problem: I assume the sound ricocheted around the room.  So for most of these sessions, either Jo Jones or Bobby Donaldson played wire brushes or the hi-hat cymbal, with wonderful results.  (On the second Vic SHOWCASE, Jo’s rimshots explode like artillery fire on RUNNIN’ WILD, most happily, and Jo also was able to record his lengthy CARAVAN solo, so perhaps the difficulty was taken care of early.)  On THE NAT PIERCE BANDSTAND — a session recently reissued on Fresh Sound – you can hear the lovely, translucent sound Freddie Green, Walter Page, and Jo Jones made, their notes forming three-dimensional sculpture on BLUES YET? and STOMP IT OFF. 

(Something for the eyes.  I am not sure what contemporary art directors would make of this cover, including Vic’s socks, and the stuffed animals, but I treasure it, even though there is a lion playing a concertina.)

What accounted for the beauty of these recordings might be beyond definition.  Were the musicians so happy to be left alone that they played better than ever?  Was it the magisterial beat and presence of Walter Page on many sessions?  Was it Hammond’s insistence on unamplified rhythm guitar?  Whatever it was, I hear these musicians reach into those mystical spaces inside themselves with irreplaceable results.  On these recordings, there is none of the reaching-for-a-climax audible on many records.  Nowhere is this more apparent than on the sessions featuring Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins.  Braff had heard Larkins play duets with Ella Fitzgerald for Decca (reissued on CD as PURE ELLA) and told Hammond that he, too, wanted to play with Larkins.  Larkins’ steady, calm carpet of sounds balances Braff’s tendency towards self-dramatization, especially on several Bing Crosby songs — PLEASE and I’VE GOT A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS. 

Ruby and Ellis were reunited several times in the next decades, for Hank O’Neal’s Chiaroscuro label and twice for Arbors, as well as onstage at a Braff-organized tribute to Billie Holiday, but they never sounded so poignantly wonderful as on the Vanguards. 

Hammond may have gotten his greatest pleasure from the Basie band of the late Thirties, especially the small-group sessions, so he attempted to give the Vanguards the same floating swing, using pianists Thompson and Pierce, who understood what Basie had done without copying it note for note.  For THE JO JONES SPECIAL, Hammond even managed to reunite the original “All-American Rhythm Section” for two versions of “Shoe Shine Boy.”  Thompson — still with us at 91 — recorded with Walter Page, Freddie Green, and Jo Jones for an imperishable quartet session.  If you asked me to define what swing is, I might offer their ”Swingtime in the Rockies” as compact, enthralling evidence. 

Hammond was also justifiably enthusiastic about pianist Mel Powell — someone immediately identifiable in a few bars, his style merging Waller, Tatum, astonishing technique, sophisticated harmonies, and an irrepressible swing – and encouraged him to record in trios with Braff, with Paul Quinichette, with Clayton and Ed Hall, among others.  One priceless yet too brief performance is Powell’s WHEN DID YOU LEAVE HEAVEN? with French hornist Jimmy Buffington in the lead — a spectral imagining of the Benny Goodman Trio. 

The last Vanguards were recorded in 1957, beautiful sessions featuring Buck Clayton and Jimmy Rushing.  I don’t know what made the series conclude.  Did the recordings not sell well?  Vanguard turned to the burgeoning folk movement shortly after.  Or was it that Hammond had embarked on this project for a minimal salary and no royalties and, even given his early patrician background, had to make a living?  But these are my idea of what jazz recordings should sound like, for their musicality and the naturalness of their sound.

I would like to be able to end this paean to the Vanguards by announcing a new Mosaic box set containing all of them.  But I can’t.  And it seems as if forces have always made these recordings difficult to obtain in their original state.  Originally, they were issued on ten-inch long-playing records (the format that record companies thought 78 rpm record buyers, or their furniture, would adapt to most easily).  But they made the transition to the standard twelve-inch format easily.  The original Vanguard records didn’t stay in print for long in their original format.  I paid twenty-five dollars, then a great deal of money, for a vinyl copy of BUCK MEETS RUBY from the now-departed Dayton’s Records on Twelfth Street in Manhattan.  In the Seventies, several of the artists with bigger names, Clayton, Jo Jones, and Vic, had their sessions reissued in America on two-lp colletions called THE ESSENTIAL.  And the original vinyl sessions were reissued on UK issues for a few minutes in that decade. 

When compact discs replaced vinyl, no one had any emotional allegiance to the Vanguards, although they were available in their original formats (at high prices) in Japan.  The Vanguard catalogue was bought by the Welk Music Group (the corporate embodiment of Champagne Music).  in 1999, thirteen compact discs emerged: three by Braff, two by “the Basie Bunch,” two by Mel Powell, two by Jimmy Rushing, one by Sir Charles, one by Vic.  On the back cover of the CDs, the credits read: “Compilation produced by Steve Buckingham” and “Musical consultant and notes by Samuel Charters.”  I don’t know either of them personally, and I assume that their choices were controlled by the time a compact disc allows, but the results are sometimes inexplicable.  The sound of the original sessions comes through clearly but sessions are scrambled and incomplete, except for the Braff-Larkins material, which they properly saw as untouchable.  And rightly so.  The Vanguard recordings are glorious.  And they deserve better presentation than they’ve received.

P.S.  Researching this post, I went to the usual sources — Amazon and eBay — and there’s no balm for the weary or the deprived.  On eBay, a vinyl BUCK MEETS RUBY is selling for five times as much.  That may be my twenty-five dollars, adjusted for inflation, but it still seems exorbitant. 

On eBay I also saw the most recent evidence of the corruption, if not The Decline, of the West.  Feast your eyes on this CD cover:

Can you imagine Jimmy Rushing’s reaction — beyond the grave — on learning that his reputation rested on his being an influence on Jamie Cullum, Norah Jones, and Harry Connick, Jr.?  I can’t.  The Marketing Department has been at work!  But I’d put up with such foolishness if I could have the Vanguards back again.

Although I have tried to hear all the recordings Teddy Wilson ever made over more than half a century, the man himself was harder to find.  True, I did hear him in person several times at Newport Jazz Festival concerts in New York City, once at the Highlights in Jazz concert series, at The New School (alongside Claude Hopkins, Dill Jones, and Eubie Blake!), and once at a shopping mall, Roosevelt Field, where, in the winter of 1971, he was one of four or so jazz performers who had hour-long gigs among the shoppers.  (I recall that one other group was Roy Eldridge, an organist whose name I can’t recall, and the recently departed Eddie Locke; another was Joe Farrell, Wilbur Little, and Elvin Jones.  My friend Stu Zimny was there, too, and might have driven the car as well.)  Wilson brought with him the veteran bassist Al Lucas and drummer Gary Mure, son of the guitarist Billy Mure — if I remember correctly.  In his perfformance, Wilson did what had, by that time, become an “act”: his Benny Goodman medley, his Gershwin medley, his Fats Waller medley, his Count Basie medley — glistening but routine.  

I was a terribly earnest jazz-mad college student; one of my most precious records was the 1956 PRES AND TEDDY, reuniting Lester Young, Teddy, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones.  After the concert was over, I stood by the piano, waiting patiently until some of the fans and hand-shakers had dispersed (perhaps some of them were telling how much they remembered Teddy’s work with the Benny Goodman Trio in 1935).  I shyly came up to Wilson, told him how much I admired his work and how much I loved this recording and would he sign it for me (all in one breath), and he gave me the faintest hint of a polite smile, said, “Thank you very much,” signed his name neatly and handed the record back to me.  And that was it.  

The photograph at the top of the page — with Teddy, Lester, and Jo — comes from that session, I believe. 

In retrospect, Teddy’s reticence makes a good deal of sense.  Playing music for shoppers can’t have been good for the psyche: Wilson logically would want to have collected his fee and gone home.  And he was perfectly polite: I just had the sense that talking to fans was alien, that I had unwittingly attempted to breach his privacy, the door had opened a crack and had closed quickly and decisively. 

I was reminded of this experience today in my small expedition to the New York State Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. 

As someone whose fact-chasing predates the internet — I like doing research in libraries.  I’ve spent a good deal of my life in the stacks, or in Special Collections, or in handling one-of-a-kind documents (while protective librarians usually come up behind me and hiss that I am NOT to put my elbow on the page). 

Which brngs us back to Teddy Wilson.  Years ago, I found a 10″ lp on the Jolly roger label in a second-hand store (price four dollars) of his solo performances of songs I had never heard before — among them WHEN YOU AND I WERE YOUNG, MAGGIE — which I bought, clutching my treasure until the moment I could put it on the phonograph.  The solos were new to me, and they were splendid, including a version of I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS which had a sweet little descending figure in the bass after the first statement of the title phrase. 

Eventually I learned that these 1938-39 performances were part of a business enterprise called THE TEDDY WILSON SCHOOL FOR PIANISTS.  I don’t think Wilson was terribly ambitious, but he was looking for ways to capitalize on the fame and recognition his work with Goodman and Holiday had brought him in the second half of the Thirties.  And someone (was it Wilson?) suggested that he could set up a correspondence course for the young men and women who wanted to play in the Wilson manner.  Leo Feist and other music publishers had tried to capitalize on this by selling music books of Waller, Tatum, James P., and other pianists’ transcribed solos — how accurate the transcriptions were is always open to dispute.  Wilson’s “school” was different in one crucial aspect: at the end of his Brunswick sessions, he would record one or two solos, which would be pressed as 78 records with the SCHOOL label and sold through the mail, as well as transcriptions of what had been played.  Theoretically, the student could follow along — hearing the record and reading the score — to know exactly what Wilson was doing. 

In his oral history, TEDDY WILSON TALKS JAZZ, Wilson recalled this about the experience (an excerpt I found at www.doctorjazz.co.uk., a thrilling site for anyone interested in piano jazz and jazz arcana of the highest order):

I have done quite a bit of private teaching in my life, too, and the young people I’ve had as pupils have always been between sixteen and twenty years of age. At one time I had my own school in New York, “The Teddy Wilson School for Pianists,” from 1936 to 1939, with three excellent partners, and we turned out some very good students. J. Lawrence Cook was my chief assistant there and he was great on the theoretical side of the jazz piano and shaped the printed courses we had, containing sheet music of my improvisations on popular melodies. They proved very successful in teaching by mail. However, I had to give it up in the end because costs just kept soaring. Advertising and copyright payments were heavy items, especially as the latter were always for very popular songs. The other partners in my school were Eve Ross and Teddy Cassola. Their contribution rounded out the work done by the [sic] Cook and me. My having to be away traveling and performing so much of time led some to believe I only “fronted” the school. Not so. I was completely involved. [TW 110-111]

I have never seen an original SCHOOL 78, although a vinyl issue on one of Jerry Valburn’s collectors’ labels — probably Meritt — collected all the issued and alternate takes from this series, and I have it — a prize!  And later the SCHOOL recordings were issued chronologically on the Classics and Neatwork CDs.  (The Commodore Music Shop was involved in this project as well, so I think that the music was first “officially” reissued on the first Mosaic Commodore box set.

But ever since I’ve had a computer, I’ve been checking Google for the scores themselves.  I am a sub-amateur pianist, but I harbor the hope that if I had a Wilson score in front of me, something placid, not TIGER RAG, then perhaps I could spend a winter working my way through thirty-two bars.  (I have the “Teddy Wilson” music books from the Thirties and Forties, but don’t trust them.)

Nothing emerged in cyberspace until a year or so ago, when I found that the Performing Arts Library (in the Lincoln Center complex) had an entry for the scores.  It seems that an American composer-pianist-arranger named Brainerd Kremer left his papers to the library, and in one of the boxes he had a set of the Wilson School scores. 

I filed this information away in the back of my mind until today, when I found myself with several hours of free time twenty blocks north of Lincoln Center, and set out, a brave researcher in search of the jazz Grail. 

The quest required a series of small perseverances on my part, taking me from one floor of the library to the other.  I hadn’t had a New York Public Library card for nearly fifteen years, so I had to reapply for one (simple and pleasant), had to log onto their system and find my way (reasonably simple), had to explain myself to the reference librarian (easy and quite pleasant) and then take my slip of paper to the third-floor Special Collections print department, hand it in, and wait for my number — 24 — to be displayed on the indicator above.  They were both busy and understaffed, so the ten minutes I had been told it would take turned out to be more like thirty-five, but then 24 was visible and I approached the desk.  The pleasant young woman had nothing in her hands but a piece of paper, always a bad sign, and she politely told me that they could not find what I was asking for, but that I should give them my name, phone, and email, and they would call me in a week if they found it. 

I hope they do, even if I have to buy a pad of music staff paper and start copying (for nothing so simple as photocopying happens without labyrinthine restrictions in most Special Collections) but I’m not optimistic.  Do any of my readers have a copy of the Wilson scores they wouldn’t mind lending me?  Or any good suggestions?  I need to learn how to play I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS as Teddy did.  I know this.  And I would hate to think that the elusive Mr. Wilson had eluded me after death in the library, too.

Fonte: “lasicilia.it“

Giuseppe Attardi
Quanto è lunga la strada che da Catania porta ai vertici delle classifiche di mezzo mondo? Lunga, lunghissima. Lo sa bene Mario Ranno, in arte Biondi, in omaggio al nome d’arte del padre Stefano, anche lui cantante. «Mi ha trasmesso la passione per il blues e il soul degli anni Sessanta – ricorda – Vinse il festival della canzone siciliana, un suo pezzo è diventato la canzone ufficiale di Catania. Anche mia nonna cantava, alla Eiar. Mi imboccava con pappe e canzoni anni Cinquanta: Benny Goodman, Fred Buscaglione». Poi la gavetta nei pianobar, come apripista al “Tout Va” di Taormina per Fred Bongusto o Ray Charles: «E’ stata una grande fatica fisica, ogni sera scaricavamo gli strumenti e l’amplificazione, facevamo tutto dall’inizio alla fine. E ancora oggi, ai miei concerti, mi presento molto prima di tutti, seguo il montaggio, attacco le spie… Al “Tout Va” ho imparato il reale valore delle cose, anche quelle considerate marginali. Quell’esperienza mi ha insegnato tanto: avevo 17 anni, l’età in cui assorbi tutto come una spugna».

Mario Biondi ascoltava Al Jarreau, Isaac Hayes, Lou Rawls, Bill Withers, Michael McDonald, e modellava una voce alla Barry White, già da allora, molto prima che un dj della Bbc trasmettesse This is what you are trasformandolo in un tormentone jazz e che il cd Handful of soul e il successivo Live raccogliessero tre dischi di platino con oltre 300.000 copie vendute in tutto il mondo. Adesso, a cinque anni dall’esordio discografico, torna con un nuovo album, If, e 15 brani, 11 inediti e 4 cover, che partono da una già considerevole base di partenza di 70.000 copie vendute in prevendita, equivalente a un primo disco di platino. «Che è importante per uno che non è diventato miliardario come Michael Bublè, ma che rischia di rimetterci tutto», tiene a sottolineare. Già, perché la voce nera di Sicilia ha voluto salvaguardare la sua indipendenza, non ha ceduto al richiamo delle Major ed ha accettato l’invito di Renato Zero di far parte della nuova etichetta “Tattica”. «Dopo il successo, c’era la fila di produttori, arrangiatori, manager alla mia porta. Mi cassiarai – ride – Entrai in confusione. Renato Zero mi ha convinto a contare solo sul mio istinto. Così ho chiamato i musicisti con cui volevo suonare, da Jacqués Morelenbaum al violoncello a Michael Baker, batterista di Whitney Houston, e poi Sonny Thompson, bassista di Prince, e Giovanni Baglioni. Ho scelto io gli arrangiatori, le canzoni, tutto».
Il risultato è davvero eccellente: una festa di suoni, mood, swing, dinamica, fiati, orchestrazioni. Un respiro sonoro internazionale, che spazia dal nu-soul al jazz, dalle ballads al r’n'b, dal funk a Bacharach (autore di Something that was beautiful) ai ritmi sudamericani, fino ai richiami africani e a una versione scanzonata ed esotica di E se domani di Carlo Alberto Rossi, tradotta in I know it’s over: «Prima di registrarla – racconta – ho ascoltato tutte le versioni esistenti di questa canzone, ed erano tutte lente, strappalacrime, io ho voluto mettere un po’ di allegria con un po’ di Caraibi e di rock-steady, come fece il musicista hawaiano Israel Kamakawiwo con Over the rainbow».
In inglese tutte le canzoni, fatta eccezione per la conclusiva Bon de doer, in portoghese. Eppure Biondi non disdegna l’italiano, come accaduto nei duetti con Amalia Grè, Ornella Vanoni e Zero (sarà, invece, in inglese il cammeo registrato per il nuovo disco di Claudio Baglioni). «No, nessun tipo di preclusione, sono orgoglioso di essere italiano – precisa – Non ho alcuna remora a cantare in italiano, ma questo disco è la continuazione del discorso cominciato con Handful of Soul». In inglese sarà anche il cammeo registrato per il nuovo disco di Claudio Baglioni, mentre all’orizzonte si profila un duetto con Chaka Khan «che per me è un mito». Nel cassetto, però, l’artista conserva anche tanti brani in italiano «e non è detto che prima o poi non li tiri fuori, magari per darli a qualche giovane promessa del nostro Paese».
Biondi non nasconde l’obiettivo di mirare al mercato internazionale, dove è ormai molto popolare: «In Giappone, a parte il fatto d’incontrare catanesi di Tokio, è stato sorprendente sentire il pubblico fare il verso “sha-la-la-la” a This is what you are. In America sono molto incuriositi da un bianco italiano che fa musica nera. Anche in Europa le risposte sono ottime: in Francia la gente mi fermava, stupita per questo genere poco italiano, e mi diceva: “Ma come, non eravate il Paese della Pausini e di Ramazzotti? Adesso vi siete messi a fare i raffinati?”».
Una soddisfazione per Mario Biondi, 38 anni, sei figli, autodidatta. Come l’e-mail che gli arriva mentre parliamo al telefono. Il mittente è Bacharach, ha appena ascoltato il disco: «Mi dice che non vede l’ora di farlo conoscere ad alcuni suoi amici importanti, perché ci fa una “bella comparsa”», traduce in siciliano Mario Biondi. If esce domani in Italia, tour tra marzo e aprile.

 It’s another grim day following a night of rain. The sky is gray and threatening but the temperatures are climbing, so it’s as warm and humid as dog’s breath. Wet leaves blow down from the trees and plaster themselves on the lawns and sidewalks. Still, I managed to get out for a walk between showers and returned home only minutes before a new deluge. Here’s what I heard on the iPod shuffle.

 (1) Walter Becker. “Hard Up Case” from 11 Tracks of Whack. A song from Becker’s first solo album, an overlooked gem. Had Donald Fagen been singing the vocals it could have been one of the best Steely Dan albums ever. Becker’s vocals aren’t bad, but they are a bit of an acquired taste. Definitely an album worth checking out. I waited a while before I bought it, and then scored it cheap in a cutout bin in D.C. I got more than my money’s worth. Becker’s follow-up, Circus Money, is also excellent.

(2) Hoodoo Gurus. “Death Ship,” from Stoneage Romeos. I got a review copy of Stoneage Romeos when I was editing a now-forgotten rock magazine in Boston. That must have been back in 1983 or ’84, and I fell hard for it. It was great guitar-oriented pop, with stick-in-your-head melodies, some edginess, and a lot of humor. The band included Larry Storch (F Troop) and Arnold Ziffel (the pig from Green Acres) among the personages to whom they dedicated the album, and the title comes from a Three Stooges short. Obviously not a band that was taking themselves too seriously. I saw them on that tour when they played a place called The Channel, a big, sprawling warren of bars and side rooms in South Boston. (Either the dBs or the Replacements opened.) The Hoodoos put on a great show, even though, as I learned later, they played with borrowed instruments because theirs had been stolen from their van a night or two previously. A couple years later, after I moved to Washington, I got to interview the Hoodoos in the somewhat shabby Hotel Harrington, also home to a bar called The Pink Elephant Lounge. I was impressed when guitarist Brad Shepherd returned to the room after doing his laundry and dumped out a trash bag that seemed to contain nothing but paisley shirts.

 (3) Donald Fagen. “New Frontier,” from The Nightfly. Fagen’s solo album was the first record I ever reviewed for publication. I wrote about it for the Maine music paper Sweet Potato just after I returned East the fall after I graduated from college in California. I didn’t get paid for the review but I got the album for free, which was payment enough.

 (4) Garbage, “The World is Not Enough,” from The Best of Bond. I paid for half of The Best of Bond CD, splitting the cost with my son, who must have been all of seven at the time. We were both Bond aficionados. The first Bond film we all watched together as a family was You Only Live Twice, which I figured was a good place to start because it contained enough gadgets and spectacle to keep the young minds interested. It worked, especially for Sam. I still get emotional whenever I hear the great string arrangements that kick off Nancy Sinatra’s performance of the theme song. Garbage is no Nancy, but this is one of the better songs from the more recent Bond movies. The movie itself is nothing to write home about, though.

 (5) Stevie Wonder. “Joy Inside My Tears” from Songs in the Key of Life. It must have been 1977 when a local radio station awarded my friend Bob the opportunity to do a “record run” at the Sonnet and Song. That meant he had a minute or two to go through the record store and grab as many records as he could. In the days leading up the big event everyone in school advised Bob about what he should grab. I think all the coaching just confused him, because he didn’t snag that many albums, certainly not as many as previous record run winners had scored. He gave me a bunch—or sold them to me, I can’t remember—and I went to various department stores around town and exchanged them for albums I wanted. Anyway, I noticed that before the record run, the owners of Sonnet and Song had taken all the copies of Songs in the Key of Life and hidden them away. I guess they didn’t want Bob getting any copies of that mammoth three-records-plus-bonus-disc set for free. At some point I bought the vinyl version (when my daughter was born my wife and I used “Isn’t She Lovely” for our answering machine message), but I recently found the CD version in the library and burned it. Stevie used to be Godlike, the kind of artist who appeared on the cover of Time magazine when he released an album. He doesn’t have that stature anymore, but who does?

 (6) Belly. “Feed the Tree,” from Stolar Tracks Volume 2. I first heard this song on Maryland’s WHFS back when that station was still great. I was driving down Connecticut Avenue in D.C. at the time. The song’s from Belly’s debut album, Star. I bought the CD, but I loaded this on my iPod from a great collection I ordered sometime around 1993 from Stolichnaya Vodka for some nominal charge to cover shipping. Stolar Tracks Volume 2 was a superb collection with songs from Eleventh Dream Day, Dinosaur, Jr., School of Fish, Pure, the Pooh Sticks, and a bunch of other bands who have faded into obscurity. The song by Eleventh Dream Day, “After This Time Is Gone,” turned me into a fan, even though I had already seen them live, when they opened for the Meat Puppets at a show I caught in Chicago. The Pure song, “Blast,” is also a classic.

 (7) Louis Armstrong. “S.O.L. Blues.” Shortly after getting my first CD player (a gift from my brother—I was a stubborn CD holdout because I resented the way the record companies were shoving them down our throats with the obviously false claim that they would last “forever”) I bought a cheap Laserlight collection of early Louis Armstrong stuff, recorded with the Hot 5 and Hot 7. As a former trumpet player myself, I felt I had to have some Armstrong. Man, that cat could blow!

 (8) Hoodoo Gurus. “Good Times,” from Blow Your Cool. The Hoodoos again! This time they’re helped by members of the Bangles, who used to be great, before that “Walk Like an Egyptian” crap. I saw them once in Boston and I swear Susanna Hoffs was batting her eyes at me. I bet all the guys in the audience through that. I remember buying Blow Your Cool in DC and heading off to a friend’s house to listen to it. We played side one and then he decreed that everyone else in the room would get to play the side of an album before it was my turn again. I was pissed. It’s not the Hoodoos best, but it has a few great tracks, especially “What’s My Scene?”

 (9) Stevie Wonder. “All in Love is Fair,” from Innervisions. Stevie again! This turned out to be a great song to hear on a gray, dreary day with the leaves falling all around. The guy had a great set of pipes.

(10) Henry Mancini. “Pink Panther Theme” from some Best of Mancini disc I got from the library. We used to play this song in my high school dance band. The sheet music had the best tempo direction I’ve ever seen: “Groovy mysterioso.” If I ever form a lounge band that’s what I’ll call it. We’ll play strange, David Lynchian cocktail jazz. I used to have the soundtrack album to The Return of the Pink Panther, still my favorite movie of the series. I remember when it came out in 1975 I was reading a Time magazine review of the movie out loud to my parents and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get through it. And that was just a review! I think it was the description of the blind man and his “minkey” that got me. Peter Sellers was a genius. Several years ago I watched this movie with my kids and young Sam was choking with laughter when Clouseau fights with Cato. Good times. Don’t even mention the Steve Martin travesties.

 (11) Frank Sinatra. “I Get a Kick out of You,” from Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass. I could go on for a long time about Frank. Some day I will. This is from one of his more overlooked albums, a Reprise release that was arranged and conducted by Neil Hefti. That’s another high school dance band connection—we used to play Hefti’s song “L’il Darlin’,” but at a funereal pace. It was neither groovy nor mysterioso. The Swingin’ Brass album, though, swings with a vengeance and Frank sounds great. You know it must swing hard because they had to drop the“g” from “swinging” in the title. (Why was Hefti hoarding all those gs?) Hefti, who did a lot of arranging for Count Basie, died recently. He also composed the theme song for TV’s Batman. He belongs in some Pop Culture Hall of Fame.

 (12) Al Stewart. “Palace of Versailles.” This song was originally from Time Passages, but I got this version from a live 1976 concert that I found on the web. There’s a skip in this song on my vinyl copy of Time Passages–I guess you could say that’s kind of a time passage itself.  Weird. Strangely enough, just before I set out on this morning’s walk WXPN played an Al Stewart song, “Sleepwalking,” from his most recent album. I had never heard it before, but it sounded pretty good. My love for Al Stewart betrays the geek side of my musical tastes. At some point today I might throw my vinyl copy of Modern Times on the turntable and give it a whirl. Maybe Past, Present and Future too.

 (13) Sinead O’Connor. “You Do Something to Me,” from Red, Hot and Blue. I’ve added a few songs to the iPod from this Cole Porter tribute album, which was recorded to raise money for AIDs research. Sinead does a pretty good version of this Porter tune. She’s a little breathy, perhaps, but not bad. I like to think she’s singing it to the Pope.

 (14) Benny Goodman Quartet. “The Blues in Your Flat” from The Legendary Small Groups. The first swing music I listened to, back in high school, was Glenn Miller. When I read books about the swing era, though, writers usually disparaged Miller and said that Benny Goodman was better, which made me resent Goodman for a while. The only Goodman we had in the house was my uncle’s LP of music from The Benny Goodman story (Steve Allen played Goodman) . It had the live Carnegie Hall version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” on it, and I played that cut over and over, mainly for the Harry James trumpet solo. (I got to see James perform a concert in Augusta, Maine, in 1977 and still have an autographed ticket stub. The concert, a “cabaret dance,” cost a whopping three bucks. At the intermission James, whom I remember as a somewhat morose old man, sat at a table in front of the stage and quietly signed autographs.)  I eventually came to realize that, yes, Goodman was better than Miller. These small group recordings are terrific.

My Harry James ticket.

 All in all, not a bad set list.  There’s nothing particularly new on it, I realize, but you can’t have everything. Because, as Steven Wright asked, where would you put it? Certainly not on an 8 gigabyte iPod.

1941 – “Clarinet a la King” was recorded by Benny Goodman and his orchestra.
1962 – Steveland Morris Judkins, later known as Little Stevie Wonder, at the age of 12 recorded his first single. The song was “Thank you for Loving Me All the Way.”
1965 – “Turn! Turn! Turn!” was released by the Byrds.
1997 – The musical “Triumph of Love” opened at the Royale Theatre.

Dave Brubeck’s 1959 album Time Out is one of the landmark recordings in jazz history. For that reason alone, the 50^th anniversary of its release merits celebration. But, on a larger scale, Time Out represents a major development within American culture, one that was crucial to inducing the seismic shifts to occur in our country during the tumultuous 1960s that followed. While it is likely that such shifts would have occurred anyway, with or without Brubeck’s contributions, a strong case can be made that his group, and its most important work, helped accelerate progress on several fronts, advancing the cause of racial harmony while opening the door for later musical innovations.

It is further worth noting that Brubeck’s achievements represent, to a surprising degree, a triumph of conservative values: faith, family, hard work and self-reliance. His ideological compass has always remained pointed toward the California ranchlands of his youth—the kind of environment that was later famously embraced by President Reagan, who fully understood the symbolic value of his years of public brush-clearing and horse-riding. Reagan’s retreats to the ranch implied a desire to escape the Beltway’s rarefied air and reorient himself to the pioneer spirit which drove America’s development in its first century of existence. The simple beauty of such areas communicates an austere dignity that would surely impart perspective on the serious issues all Presidents must grapple with, and so it is make perfect sense that men as different in personality as George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt would embrace them.

For most of his early life—from childhood, through his years in the US Army and as a music student at Oberlin College—Brubeck existed firmly within the Tradition. Had he not caught the jazz bug early on, he might have ended up as a concert pianist working with symphony orchestras, or a composer of string quartets. He did eventually do a lot of work in these areas, but it was the worldwide acclaim earned as a jazzman that gave him the freedom to expand his musical horizons. Indeed, if his legacy could be summed up in one word, despite all his formalistic trappings, it would be “freedom”.

This legacy of freedom is being celebrated by Columbia Records, which recently reissued Time Out in a special three-disc package, on occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the album’s original release. Suffice to say that, if you have never heard this music, then you owe yourself the pleasure of doing so; likewise, people for whom this music is old hat will still find value in its enhanced sound quality and the wealth of bonus material, including photos, performance footage and eight songs recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival between 1961-64. The highlight is an interactive tutorial in which Brubeck, now 89 years old, talks viewers through the melodies as he plays them.

The point of Time Out was to break out of the creative restrictions imposed on the jazz musician by strict adherence to the steady 4/4 beat that had characterized jazz since it first emerged from turn-of-century New Orleans. For the first 30 years of recorded jazz, that beat was maintained by the bass drum, replicating its role in the standard marching band, whose cadences and instrumentation were the basis of jazz early bands. Drummers of the 1940s New York scene, led by Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, shifted the burden of time-keeping from bass drum to the ride cymbal, which opened up the sound and set the standard for what modern jazz would sound like. (The upright bass, adapted from symphonic orchestras, evolved to replace the tuba as a rhythm instrument early on, and typically reinforced the 4/4 beat; its time-keeping role expanded in modern jazz, as the drummers went further beyond the beat, leaving its reiteration to the bassist.) By the early 1950s, all instrumentalists had unprecedented creative freedom in jazz, and the race to find the next great innovation was as competitive as the Space Race.

The introduction of long-playing (LP) records in 1948 quadrupled the amount of time available on an individual record, opened up song structures and brought a vaster range of material to the marketplace. Traditional American musical forms—jazz, blues, gospel, folk—predominated; rock was growing commercially, but did not become a creative force to rival the others until 1964.

The singer Ian Svenonius noted years back that the largest jazz groups are only a quarter the size of symphony orchestras, which are roughly 100 people; Swing Era bands could be half that size, while modern jazz groups of the ‘40s and beyond are usually between three and six people. Today, many artists do huge business as solo acts. Prince, for example, played all 27 instruments on his debut album and for years only used his bands for performances. Computers allow many pop singers and rappers to make albums without using any actual instruments at all.

Traditional European and early American music is labeled with the catch-all term of “classical” largely because of our nation’s record stores. It doesn’t seem to rankle so badly as certain artists who reject the idea of “jazz” as an organizational concept, maybe because the LP ensured that such music would remain in circulation as the country went more toward smaller (and logistically cheaper) groups. Most Americans today would know nothing of classical music if not for LPs and their CD reissues, particularly of the versions recorded in the 1950s and ‘60s. Likewise, although one can see top-notch jazz music anywhere in the world most nights, the closest that most jazz fans can usually get to experiencing serious big-band stuff is CD, or the occasional festival.

Brubeck, who studied with Darius Milhaud at Oberlin, did the industry a favor by wearing his classical affinities on his cuff-linked sleeve. His grounding in that tradition was the impetus to bust out of the 4/4. Max Roach had recorded an entire album, Jazz In ¾ Time, in 1957, and several songs on Time Out are rooted in ¾, as well as the standard 4/4. “Three to Get Ready” is in 3/4 and 4/4. “Kathy’s Waltz” starts in 4/4, then goes into 3/8, while “Blue Rondo ala Turk” starts in 9/8, with Desmond’s solo in 4/4.

Other tracks switch-up the rhythms more explicitly. “Everybody’s Jumpin’” and “Pick Up Sticks” are in 6/4. “Take Five” stays in 5/4 over its five-plus minutes, with Morello’s drum solo the definitive explication of that beat. “Strange Meadowlark” opens with a Brubeck solo running over two minutes with no set time whatsoever—a nod, perhaps, to the nascent free-jazz scene, or to Lennie Tristano, whose solo recordings “Spontaneous Combustion”, “Requiem” and “Turkish Mambo” anticipated much of this.

Take Five has no shortage of highlights, staring with “Take Five”, which is simply one of the greatest songs ever recorded. A masterpiece of dramatic tension, it was an instant classic when released as a single, becoming the first million-seller in jazz history; the album itself would soon follow. To this day, media references “Take Five” to invoke feelings of class and sophistication; it was famously used to launch Infiniti automobiles in America, with cool narration by British actor Jonathan Pryce.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet functioned as a unified whole, working together 16 years, yet each member has distinguished himself as a master of his own instrument. Bassist Eugene Wright is easily overlooked, as he played with little flash and almost no solos, but a close listen reveals how crucial his work was. He kept the group’s forward-reaching sound rooted in the fundamentals, which he learned from the best in hot spots like Kansas City and his native Chicago. Together, Wright and drummer Joe Morello comprised one of the all-time greatest rhythmic tandems, easily ranking up there with such towering twins as Walter Page and Jo Jones (Count Basie); Jimmy Blanton and Sonny Greer (Duke Ellington); Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones (Miles) Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones (Coltrane); Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins (Coleman); Mingus and Dannie Richmond; Scott Lafaro and Paul Motian (Bill Evans).

Naturally, a record built around rhythmic complexity puts special pressure on the drummer, and Morello attained legend status with his work on Time Out. His brush-work on “Everybody’s Jumpin’” anchors a brilliant piece that holds up just fine against its adjacents. “Take Five” is one of the rare examples of a major pop hit built around a drum solo; the other notable case would be “Sing Sing Sing”, an epochal Swing Era anthem by Benny Goodman (and a star-making vehicle for drummer Gene Krupa), recorded in 1937. Like Desmond’s earlier on the same track, musicians and students know their solos better than some know their best friends.

As for the leader himself, Brubeck’s playing is spare but efficient, each note pressed for maximum resonance. His solo on “Kathy’s Waltz” is strictly old-school, with hints of Ragtime, while those on “Three to Get Ready” and “Everybody’s Jumpin’” sound downright modernistic, with overt references to future label-mate Monk.

Ultimately, the real star of the album is alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (1924-1977), a fellow Californian whose musical partnership with Brubeck lasted over 30 years. His sound, which typically enters after a few bars’ introduction by Brubeck, dominates the quartet’s output. Desmond is often dismissed by purists for a coolness of tone that can sometimes border on the antiseptic, but the quiet intensity of his playing can be lost on ears trained to listen for strain, sweat and other signifiers of serious effect. If Desmond’s style sounds effortless, it is only because of rigorous practice. After his death, the author of “Take Five” left his split of royalties to the American Red Cross, which receives annual royalties in the low six figures.

1959 was a year of explosive growth in jazz, and Time Out was just one of at least three major events that year. Columbia also issued Miles Davis’ seminal Kind of Blue, which marked the emergence of a new approach to harmony based on modal scales; this gave the soloist—Davis himself, most notably, as well as collaborator Bill Evans—access to unprecedented emotional range, a major factor in the current perception of jazz as a “romantic” music. Due to the constant reissues over the decades, the prevalence of bootlegging and the pervasiveness of digital downloading, it may be impossible to determine which of these is, in fact, the most successful jazz album of all time; yet both helped shift the business model firmly toward the LP, which had only been around for about a decade at that point.

John Coltrane, who spent five years in Davis’ group, played on Kind of Blue, but his sideman work was soon eclipsed by the Atlantic Records release Giant Steps. After years of rigorous experimentation, 1959 saw the emergence of Coltrane’s mature sound, and he would go on to be, arguably, the last true giant of jazz music, a figure whose very name still inspires devotion that borders on the religious, over 40 years after his death. On the surface, it would be impossible to find two more different men, in terms of tone, technique and temperament, than Coltrane and Paul Desmond—but at the intersection of their styles, as heard on these three albums, one hears the future.

1959 also included major works by Ornette Coleman, who along with Coltrane helped bring Free Jazz to fruition, and Charles Mingus, who recorded three brilliant albums for Atlantic that year. Max Roach had already been first to record pianoless groups, and among the first to openly lobby for civil rights through his music; and Thelonious Monk, whose rhythmic and harmonic innovations made him, in essence, the father of modern jazz. The fact that all these men, with volatile personalities and deep-set musical tastes, all gave respect to Brubeck speaks to his chops and credibility.

Brubeck is rightfully lionized by the left for his role in helping to shape a world defined by JFK’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. In generational terms, the Baby Boomers’ collective self-definition is rooted in the 1960s, for better and for worse, and jazz artists like Brubeck, Coltrane and Davis are thus regarded almost as highly as the rock bands that would ultimately dominate the American music scene.

 The primary beneficiary of the commercial growth of jazz music was the African-American community, which got its first taste of the free market and was soon able to alter the widespread perceptions of the white majority, and ultimately obliterate many vestiges of racial prejudice in this country. Jazz was the wedge that forced integration; as more and more of the top draws—Goodman, Krupa, Artie Shaw—integrated, and others insisted on playing for integrated audiences, bigotry took a backseat to box-office. By the time of Time Out, integrated bands weren’t exactly commonplace in the US, but they were hardly unusual. Norman Granz’ “Jazz At the Philharmonic”, for example, toured the country with all-stars of all races.

The other major beneficiary of jazz music’s global presence was the United States government, which quickly recognized the value of a uniquely American cultural export. Brubeck, who served briefly under Patton in the Army, would become a front-line soldier in a war of ideas, spreading his vision of musical and personal freedom around the world, often directly in collaboration with the State Department.

The arrival of Louis Armstrong in Europe in 1927 basically introduced jazz to the world; a handful of devoted critics and musicians had imported stacks of jazz records from New York for distribution in London and Paris. By the time Duke Ellington’s band made the same trip, in 1932, jazz had become its own cottage industry, with magazine and radio shows catering to the market, as well as the first generation of European jazz musicians. For the first time, America had a cultural product to compete with Europe, and in this realm we remained well ahead.

The assault on jazz by totalitarian regimes—first the Nazis, then the Soviet Union—only enhanced its appeal to youth across Europe, many of whom risked death to continue playing such music. By this point, the old world had produced its own masters like guitarist Django Reinhardt, while American musicians like Benny Carter and Sidney Bechet had emigrated (not unlike the Japanese who brought judo to the west). World War II brought hundreds of current and future jazzmen into Europe and Asia, either as combat troops or in some musical capacity. The music of the war years deserves its own category in the lineage, but by decade’s end American jazz had become the new music of choice not only throughout Europe, but also in Japan.

Like rock and rap, which came along later, jazz began as an indigenous form of expression within the minority community, then “crossed-over” to become the primary vehicle of white rebellion—a means of drawing cultural lines between generations. Jazz was viciously attacked by the mainstream in the 1920s and ‘30s; such criticisms read now as time-capsule pieces of hyperbolic calumny. By the 1950s, the US State Department saw fit to give jazz its ultimate stamp of legitimacy by backing some leading musicians on international tours conceived as propaganda for post-war America. It was a textbook example of how “soft power” worked in the nascent Cold War.

Penny Von Eschen’s excellent 2002 book Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press) offers a definitive look at the program, organized in 1955 by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and US Rep Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), whose district encompassed the epicenter of modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie’s second great big band took the first trip in March 1956, covering parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. According to the program’s website: “In 1956, 1960 and 1961, Louis Armstrong [toured] Ghana (then the British Gold Coast), Congo, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and the United Arab Republic. In 1963, 1970 and 1972, Duke Ellington toured the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”

These musicians and others—including Carter, Coleman, Davis, Goodman, Mingus, Charlie Byrd, Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, Sarah Vaughn and Randy Weston—traveled to the far corners of the musical world before the program ended in 1978. Many such areas were suspicious of western interests, and sometimes openly hostile. George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, was enlisted for logistical support. Brubeck was, of course, a major attraction.

In 1958, his quartet toured Sweden, Turkey, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Brubeck’s gigs in Poland that year, repeated in 1970, are considered key moments in the spreading of jazz into the Soviet Bloc. Cadres devoted to “improvised music” began sprouting in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland and Hungary soon after, while at least one major group (the Ganelin Trio) made great jazz in Russia itself. He and Armstrong later collaborated on The Real Ambassadors, a musical and recording based on their experiences, in 1961-62.

The musicians and artists in Eastern Europe (with support from sympathetic parties in the west) drove the engine of progress away from Communism and became totems in the way Charlie Parker was for the Beatniks, or Coltrane was for the Black Power movement. Their records were being smuggled into the West long before the Iron Curtain finally fell, at which point those scenes exploded into the creative powerhouses they are today. When Brubeck and other older jazzmen appear in Europe today, they are held to a similar status as their own native masters.

Japan got its introduction to jazz from occupying American soldiers, and has never lost its taste. As domestic sales of jazz records slumped hard in the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Japanese (typically) provided a vital commercial lifeline, helping to keep it vital long enough for the resurgence driven by CD technology. CDs, of course, were invented by the Japanese, while companies like JVC, Polygram and especially Sony bought up all the major jazz catalogs (Verve, Mercury, Blue Note/Capitol, Columbia) to be reissued in their new format. Every American who values their native culture owes a debt of thanks to those Japanese who rescued all that music from likely extinction.

Leading the way among the reissues that began flooding the market, well past the point of cultural saturation, were Columbia’s valedictorians from the class on ’59, Kind of Blue and Time Out, each of which has been re-released in increasingly completist form at least a half-dozen times (including box sets), while their lead singles, “So What” and “Take Five” have become standards. Both retain almost all of its original freshness and potency, despite three generations of innovation that followed its release. In the case of Time Out, time itself has only burnished the luster of an album dismissed by many top critics upon its release; very few would bother to raise any objection now.

sdh666@hotmail.com

October 9, 2009

Billie Holiday archive, Christie’s (New York), $30,000

In June 1939, Marilyn “Marly” Moore, an aspiring teenage singer living in California, wrote to the jazz singer Billie Holiday for advice; 70 years on, a group of 30 letters that Holiday wrote to Moore from Harlem formed part of a June 24 sale.

“This life is a little tricky,” wrote Holiday in one letter, “but you being a white and if you got something to offer you might not have it so bad,” though she warned Moore against coming to New York unless she had money and was able to take care of herself. “New York…is a tough spot if you ain’t got the jack. Ha Ha.”

Holiday’s big break came when the impresario John Hammond heard her perform in a Harlem club in 1933 and arranged for her to make a number of well-known recordings with the Benny Goodman Band. Holiday told Moore, “John Hammond and Benny Goodman is the right people for you. John discovered me and he fine and a Blue Blood…If he likes your work he will make you a big person.” Then she added, “I know what it is to long to be a Big Star.”

In another letter, she reported on a concert she gave at the Modern Art Theater, remarking, “those society people knowck me out because they aint supposed to like swing.”

When Moore sent Holiday a demonstration recording, she wrote back, “My mother played your record for John Hammond and he told her you didn’t keep good time,” but then in more encouraging mode, Holiday wrote, “but I am sure you will make the grade.” Elsewhere she urged Marilyn to “practice up on your timing; that is the main thing in music and with your face and voice you will be a killer.”

This was the largest group of Holiday letters yet to come onto the market.

I read this story with mixed emotions. 

The photograph of Billie, happy, youthful, healthy, well-fed, is thrilling.  Her grin is contagious, and the woman depicted here isn’t the gaunt Madonna of suffering we see in her last images.  And to see her amidst what is obviously an Eddie Condon jam session, with Bud Freeman, Hot Lips Page, and Zutty Singleton, is another pleasure.  (The debate over whether the location — a New York hotel ballroom — is the St. Regis or the Park Lane might rage on forever.  And is it a Charles Peterson photograph?) 

Any reason to celebrate Lady Day is fine.  And the letters are obviously a treasure.  But their fate is less cheery.  They weren’t made available to any of Holiday’s biographers, as far as I know.  Will they be made available to scholars in this century? 

I also know the law: the words on the page belong to Holiday’s estate; the letters belong to Moore and her descendants (one of whom is the estimable guitarist Joe Cohn, because Marilyn Moore was married to Al Cohn).  But I wonder if Billie ever earned $30,000 a year.  That figure says a great deal about the way artists are deprived in life, and someone else makes money from their fame after they are dead.

Thanks to Will Friedwald for uncovering this: see http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue/200909/auction-2.phtml.

Hoy que estoy medio resfriado, me apetece escuchar un poco de Jazz de la mano de Benny Goodman, en este caso, tocando Memories of You, una preciosa y tranquila melodía.

Hoy, música.

Dicen que Johann Sebastian Bach es un compositor perfecto, por eso, el maestro del contrapunto, se convierte una vez tras otra en la musa de los más variados estilos y compositores que nos va dando la historia… no puedo dejar de imaginarme la imagen de un alucinado compositor barroco, sumergido en el paisaje abrumadoramente urbano de la ciudad del Jazz…

Last night was a time of nostaglic moments.  I spent some time rummaging through youtube looking over some videos, then I happily keyed in “Sha Na Na”!  It was such a blast to watch some of those videos which I had seen when I was merely a few years old!  Then I came across one of my favourite songs, Venus by Frankie Avalon.  It is such a soothing song!

And I also searched for my “music first love” for swing music from the big band era.  And this is Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra.  I first heard it in the movie, Swing Kids.  Catchy catchy tune, although I can’t swing for nuts myself.  But boy, do I love the music!!!

And here’s another one from the great Glenn Miller!  In the Mood!  Gotta love that tune!  Gotta love that beat!  Gotta love that music!!

1.  Don’t you just love music?!?  I love music!  Thank you God for creating music!!

2.  I, me and myself, the 3 of us, ran a meeting this morning for some senior management at my workplace.  I am just thankful that it went by smoothly without much of a hitch!

3.  This evening, my youngest daugther snuck up behind me and stretched out both her arms to me.  It was a simple gesture, but it meant plenty.  I just carried her and walked about the house for awhile, and it was pleasant

The writer’s true love: even the 5 Ls – laughter, language, learning, literature and lunch – step aside:

Dinah Shore: “Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)“

A centennial YouTube tribute to Ben Webster by “JazzVideoGuy” is a commendable idea — but its accompanying prose reads:

“Ben is without question one of the music’s immortals.  He did not originate a style or spearhead a period of radical change; but his magnetic tenor saxophone playing moved listeners as deeply as the work of any other artist on his or any other instrument.”

Intriguing that jazz listeners should have to rationalize, even apologize for what some perceive as a weakness.  Must we continue to champion ”originality” and ”innovation” as prime virtues? 

Frankly, having someone ”spearhead a period of radical change” sounds dangerous, unfriendly.  I have to wonder what the jazz chroniclers thought was so wrong with any period of jazz that “radical change” was needed to rescue it from its artistic limitations.  One hears Roy Eldridge or Johnny Hodges in 1944.  Had their styles so calcified as to need all this spearheading?  I think not.  But the historians present it as if they were detritus waiting idly to be swept aside by the radical whiskbrooms of The New Thing.   

This, I suspect, comes from our advertising-driven desire for the New, our impatience with anything that looks Old.  Milk spoils; art doesn’t.

And to the championing of “originality”: let us propose that the “originals” of jazz were (I will pick five): Louis, Duke, Bird, Monk, Coltrane.  None of them, for a moment, pretended that they had come from nowhere, that they had created themselves.  Behind them stood Joe Oliver, James P. Johnson, Will Marion Cook, Lester Young, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins . . . and so on.  The musicians know that they are all branches on a growing tree; the historians who wish to set one School against another, to make good press, to sell CDs, create artificial distinctions.

What did we ever do without low-res iPhone snaps?

Those of us who got to see Waylon Flowers and his ineffable puppet Madame will always recall one of their greatest lines: ” Sylvia Miles would attend the opening of an envelope.” In a Manhattan autumn, the opening of many envelopes with nice, stiff invitations or tickets in them, is followed by many an opening gala.

My first opening of the new season was at the Dicapo Opera, in its surprisingly elegant church basement. No peeling concrete floors or piano-destroying dampness here. This is, after all, an upper-East Side church basement. It was the premiere of a new chamber version of Tobias Picker’s opera Emmeline . After a reputedly grand production at Santa Fe (which I did not see), it was good to have a chance to absorb it in intimate circumstances in a very creditable performance.

Next, on the way to the Metropolitan Opera opening night, there was a Steinway Hall event for Sony Masterworks to launch a remarkable project in which very, very advanced physics are called into play to recreate piano performances by Rachmaninoff — on a piano he may have played in his day. The climax of an already pretty exciting hour came when Joshua Bell showed up to play a duet from his own new release — with “Rachmaninoff” at the piano. The keys moved; the sound was glorious; but we saw only the violinist, since the pianist breathed his last in Beverly Hills in 1943. It was a little spooky and plenty thrilling.

Then, a half-hour later, came the Met opening, which has been sufficiently discussed in the world media, goodness knows. My own experience was to enjoy the performance at the time, allowing myself to wait until later for most of the inevitable critical reflections. That way, the negative perceptions didn’t spoil a brilliant evening. I’ve been able to read all the pros and cons (and to enter into many discussions of the production) without the bitterness that many seem to feel on both sides of the argument. After all, you don’t go to an opening night at the Met to be unhappy.

Though I wasn’t at opening night of the New York Philharmonic, I did hear the dress rehearsal that morning. Having known quite of a lot the work of Magnus Lindberg in the past, I was nevertheless astonished at his ability to capture just what was needed for the festive opening of a new season — and of the new régime of Alan Gilbert — in his premiere that opened the program. I have since heard it again in a subscription concert, and my admiration only increases, as does my conviction that the Philharmonic has made a very good choice in committing so much important work to Lindberg for this crucial season. In another piece of outside-the-box programming, we heard the oft-heard Renée Fleming as I’ve never heard her before in Messiaen’s luminous Poèms pour Mi, and subsequent performances this past week of Charles Ives masterpieces continue to encourage one about the Philharmonic’s immediate future.

Because of another obligation, I had to miss the first night of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, but I did get to the gala — and very lively it was — that opened the New York Film Festival in the same hall a few nights later. As always, it was a thrill to be seeing a new film, with its director and stars present. Really good food, too, which seems to be a dependable feature of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s shindigs (he said, feigning habituation after only two experiences of their galas).

The next night brought the opening of the recommended series Yale in New York, when the School of Music, under the shepherding of David Shifrin gave a stupendous concert at Zankel Hall in honor of Benny Goodman’s centenary. It was made up of classical works with which The King of Swing was closely associated (and which were mostly commissioned by him). While it was all eminently worth hearing, the pièce de résistance, inevitably, was the Copland Clarinet Concerto, played without a conductor by an orchestra from the Music School, with Shifrin himself as the soloist. Sheer beauty.

Then last night, at the other extreme of scale from the large concert halls, there was the opening concert of the Helicon Foundation’s new season. Since the closing of Albert Fuller’s magnificent salon upon his death, these remarkable sessions have been moved to an ample drawing-room just off Fifth Avenue. My grateful recollection of a delicious Vienna-saturated evening moves me to recommend this membership-based organization for those who like intimate music-making at the highest level.

So many openings; so many pleasures to anticipate. It’ll be nice not to have to dress up quite that much all the time, though — and it’s off to my first fall visit to Le Poisson Rouge tonight.

Título:  The Building of The Panama Canal in Historic Photographs

Autor:  Ulrich Keller

Editorial:  Dover

Los comienzos del siglo XX fueron asombrosos.  Y el final del XIX.  Algunos se maravillan de los prodigios actuales de las nuevas tecnologías.  Echen un ojo a lo que hicieron los visionarios de entonces.

Mientras el hombre se debatía entre la vida y la muerte para abrirse camino en Panamá, nacieron los que a la postre abrirían una brecha profunda en la historia de la Música.

Hace 100 años llegaron de visita tres genios que colaborarían en la revolución del Jazz:   Ben Webster, Lester Young y Benny Goodman. Sin ellos, la música del siglo XX hubiera sido otra.

Mientras tanto, un buen grupo de osados ingenieros luchaban por abrirse camino en la vida, y en la naturaleza.  Lo que para el equipo Francés dirigido por Lesseps fue un rotundo fracaso, fundamentalmente económico, el empeño Americano permitiría a la postre convertir en éxito empresarial.  Y Lesseps venía precedido por el Canal de Suez.

También en aquella época, algunos como Goodman luchaban por salir de la pobreza.  Nacido en los barros bajos de Chicago, logro que la fuerza del viento madera soplara en su niñez para salir a flote del profundo estrato social en que vivía.  Aún no tocaba su clarinete cuando el Canal de Panamá era inaugurado.

Canal de Panamá

Pero el Canal de Panamá se llevó por delante más de 22.000 vidas humanas.  Fue la estrategia americana la que finalmente produjos sus frutos:  Una lucha sin cuartel contra el portador de la fiebre amarilla, el mosquito que tuvo en jaque a la expedición francesa en sus años de pesadilla;  un excelente sistema de transporte ferroviario construido ad hoc para la evacuación de escombros y finalmente, una idea acertada de cómo construir el canal, mediante  exclusas escalonadas a lo largo del recorrido.

Podemos imaginar la opulenta travesía de algún crucero de lujo cruzando el Canal a principios del siglo XX, repleto de turistas curiosos.  Probablemente alguna Big Band inspirada en la música de los maestros del Jazz amenizaría las noches de mar.

Es una suerte que compañías como Iberia, que cubren con regularidad el camino a Panamá, se hayan acordado en este año de Centenario de los maestros Webster, Young y Goodman.

No pierdan ocasión de viajar a Panamá, contemplar el prodigio de la obra, y escuchar a los grandes del Jazz en el Canal musical de Iberia.