At the risk of turning JAZZ LIVES into a blog wholly devoted to jazz “paper ephemera,” I have to make sure my readers see this — again on eBay.  The heading is “AMAZING COLLECTION OF JAZZ BAND MUSICIANS AUTOGRAPHS,” and this, for once, is correct — 290 autographs, with pictures and clippings: a Swing Era dream scrapbook with so many famous (and lesser-known) signatures that I was astonished.  How about Irving Fazola, Vic Dickenson, “Joe Jones,” Stan Kenton, members of every band you can think of?  I just hope the purchaser doesn’t lock it away in a dark room forever. 

The link (to see the collection below made visible through generous enlargement of the images) is http://cgi.ebay.com/AMAZING-COLLECTION-of-JAZZ-BAND-MUSICIANS-AUTOGRAPHS_W0QQitemZ180422145256QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item2a01ff74e8.  AMAZING it is. 

And its source?  Here’s what the eBay seller says (slightly edited, and with some spelling corrections):

This is by far the largest collection of vintage original Jazz autographs to have been offered on Ebay. The collection has over 290 autographs from various Jazz musicians, singers, actors, actresses etc. The collection came from an estate in Massachusetts. The man (Nick Kirikos) who collected these autographs was a Jazz musician and composer himself. He was a Jazz trumpet player in the 1930’s & 40’s. He obtained all of these autographs himself and can be seen in a photo (included) with Gene Krupa. He put them in a photo album as shown along with some loose signatures as well. Every important artist in Jazz history is in this book. There are some multiple signatures from different artists. The collection also has some actors and actresses signatures along with letters from Joan Valerie & Mari Grey. Here is a list of some of the names we can make out:

Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Marion Hutton, Ella Fitzgerald, Ziggy Elman, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Ray Eberle, Clyde Hurley, Bob Crosby, Dizay Gillespie, Bob Haggart, Eddie Miller, Gil Rodin, John Best, Jimmy Lunceford, Joe Kearns, Joe Sullivan, Irving Fazola, Warren Smith, Jimmy Crawford, Earl Caruthers, Chris Griffin, Bruce Squires, Toots Mondello, Hymie Shertzer, Mickey McMickle, Billy Butterfield, Ted Buckner, Austin Brown, Billie Smith, Russell Boles, Sy Oliver, Eddie Durham, Elmer Crumbley, Paul Webster, Al Norris, Moses Allen, Jimmy Young, Eddie Tompkins, Joe Thomas, Gerald Wilson, Herb Tompkins, Bob Eberly, Helen O’Connell, Jimmy Dorsey, Milt Yaner, Corky Cornelius, Roy Cameron, Al Sherman, Count Basie, Dave Matthews, Al Killian, Jimmy Blake, Mal Hallett, Clark Yocum, Andy Anderson, Midge Williams, Joe Garland, Lee Blair, Sidney Catlett, Gigi Bohn, Teddy Wilson, Pete Clark, Earl Hines, Al Casey, Floyd Brady, Jimmy Campbell, J. C. Heard, Harry Rodgers, Dominick Buono, Rudy Powell, Janet Gilbert, Gus Devito, Monte Green, Cozy Cole, Louis Bellson, Al Sears, Robert Scott, Lynn Gardner, Woody Kessler, Pee Wee Hunt, Richard Gilbert, Ted Toll, Paul Rendarvis, Harry Carr, Charles Atlas, Peggy Mann, Cab Calloway, Chu Berry, Frank Carlson, Woody Herman, Joan Valerie, The Andrew Sisters, The Four Ink Spots, Shady Nelson, Mary Lou Williams, Andy Kirk, Frankie Masters, Sonny Greer, Fletcher Henderson, George Hall, Phyllis Myles, Terry Allen, Ray Nance, Ida James, Teddy Grace, Dolly Dawn, and many many more.  

Matchbook Cover

In my post Neon Signs/Modern Times, I analyzed a vintage postcard of Ste-Catherine Street, and one of the enlarged details showed a neon sign shaped like a  top hat and cane. This turned out to be the famous Top Hat Cafe – a well-known 1940s/50s hotspot from Montreal’s nightclub scene. The Top Hat and the Bellevue Casino were two of the nightclubs that my parents frequented as a young couple. My parents loved Big Band style jazz (they were avid dancers) and my father loved Lili St. Cyr (which is not fodder for this blog!) so the post WWII years were great for them.

Today I’m sharing a vintage matchbook cover from the Top Hat Cafe, and an excerpt from Collet Tracey’s article Montreal: Its Role in the Beginnings of Modernism in Canada, describing how Montreal came to be known as Canada’s city of sin (whereas our “rival” was Toronto the Good!)

“….. In addition to these more sordid details, prohibition was in place in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s so leading gangsters, such as Al Capone, frequented Montreal. Even though it was illegal to drink alcoholic beverages in public places in Canada, Montreal boasted at least fifteen major nightclubs and twenty-five or more smaller lounges, all of which served liquor along with flamboyant floor shows. Most of these establishments were located on or near Montreal’s main strip, St. Catherine Street, and they included the Venetian Gardens, the Pagoda, the Jardin de Danse, the Palais de Danse, the Brass Rail on Drummond Street, and the Frolics on St. Lawrence Main.

During the 1940s new owners replaced the old names with the Latin Quarter, the Esquire, the Maroon Club, the Samovar, the Copacabana, the Top Hat, the Tic Toc, and the Normandie Roof. Big Band and Dixieland Jazz came first to Montreal where it was in full swing by the 1940s, and could be danced to at the Palais d’Or, the Verdun Pavilian, the Black Sheep Room at Ruby Foo’s, the Bellevue Casino, and Dagwood’s. It was at the Chez Maurice Danceland, however, above Dinty Moore’s restaurant on St. Catherine Street, that the great big bands played, including Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Cab Calloway and Stan Kenton.

In Westmount, at Victoria Hall, Johnny Holmes and his orchestra played on Saturday nights, attracting large crowds and beginning the careers of such legendary musicians as trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and pianist and trumpeter Oscar Peterson, who grew up in St. Henri, and attended Montreal High School. The most famous of all the clubs, however, was the El Morocco, which was where Lili St. Cyr most often performed…..”

Note: In coming months I’ll also be sharing paper ephemera from the Bellevue Casino (post WWII).

***

Related Posts:

Vintage Postcards of Quebec including Montreal’s St.Catherine St.

Vintage Thursdays

I used to be a big basketball fan, and I even played basketball in college (of course, I went to a girl’s school).  I remember when the Clippers played in Buffalo and were called the Braves, and when the Kings played in Kansas City and, decimated by injuries, had Ernie Grunfeld carefully walking the ball up the court for them in a memorable playoff run.  I even remember a bit of the old ABA, and just this evening caught a few funny minutes of “Semi-Pro,” which captures that flavor and style pretty well.  The title comes from that movie, the motivating quote player-coach-owner Jackie Moon uses for his franchise, the Flint Tropics.  Flint Tropics . . .

So, everybody love everybody out there, please.  I’m layin’ this out for you, people, because Matt Rubin at Twenty Dollars hates big band music (h/t Darcy James Argue).  Now Matt can hate all he wants, it’s nothing I would argue with.  It’s the reasoning, the apologies for the hating that I want to tackle.  Rubin explains this all with a quasi-manifesto, a straw-man, a false dichotomy between ego-subverting precision and ego-celebrating improvisation, centered around a big-band with some commercial success, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band.  Like him or not, and I frankly have never heard him, Goodwin can in no way objectively represent Jazz Big Band music, the genre has too much history and variety.  And hating big band music while loving jazz is self-defeating, because jazz could not exist without the big band.

What on earth is wrong with precision?  Precision is just as worthy a goal for an ensemble as chaos, and is generally a more musically effective one.  The great, swinging bands of the 1930’s were incredibly precise, a dozen musicians or more could not swing without it.  The precision of the horns arrayed on top of the fluid anticipation or laying back of a rhythm section is what makes Ellington, Basie, Goodman and Artie Shaw so physically propulsive.  The ensemble attack and articulation has to work together or else it just sounds incoherent.  What does not have to be precise is color, and it is the variety of personal color, and the space to paint it all in, that makes Ellington a marvel, and I disagree on matters of fact with how Rubin describes the Ellington band – it was not a band assembled from great, ego-based soloists, it was a band assembled from great musical personalities, not all of whom were great soloists, or who we even given much space to solo.  Ellington was a great craftsman who emphasized his players strengths and hid their weaknesses.  When Lester Young was in the Basie band, he was the star soloist, was given a lot of room, and that band played with the precision of a machine, and you cannot keep from tapping your foot when you hear them.

Rubin discusses the Miles Davis/Gil Evans records as exemplars of what he means, and those are great records.  My favorite is “Porgy and Bess,” which is brilliant and beautiful, but it has a real flaw in it that, though brief, is always upsetting to the ear and experience, which is the imprecision of the ensemble on  ‘Gone.’    Rubin also sees this music as pointing the way to a set of rules that will save big band music.  He describes Evans’ technique as contrapuntal and writes “jazz composers must focus on counterpoint.”  Well, only if they want to.  Evans did not write counterpoint, he wrote polyphony, and even that not consistently.  This is an important distinction; jazz is originally a polyphonic music.  In Dixieland style, their are many voices playing at once, and a melody line can be passed around, doubled, commented on, answered, mocked.  It’s fluid and horizontal, but it doesn’t pass as counterpoint, it doesn’t have the precision (yes, precision)  that is inherent in counterpoint and it doesn’t develop harmonies the way counterpoint does.  That’s fine.  But Rubin wants counterpoint as a harmonic method.  If a composer chooses that path, fine for them, but there’s plenty of ways to develop harmony and polyphony in jazz, all of them valid.  It’s the results that matter.

Jazz harmony developed sophistication in the Be-Bop era, where polyphony was left to the old farts and harmony became vertical.  Big band music became less popular, but didn’t die.  There was a great Be-Bop big band after all, Dizzy Gillespie’s, and other important bands and leaders, including Gerry Mulligan’s and Stan Kenton’s.  Kenton’s ‘City of Glass’ record is a completely different and fruitful argument about how to write for that ensemble.  The big band has been essential in jazz pedagogy and also a way for talented musicians to actually get gigs and gain some professional experience.  And composers still write for it.  Rubin argues, also, that composers must write for soloists and individuals, and that not doing so is some offense against the essential ego of the musicians, and that by serving the composer and band-leader “indoctrinates” young musicians into  . . .  I’m not sure what, exactly.  The pleasures and challenges of playing in an ensemble, of creating a sound together, of leaning to listen to others more than yourself?  Big band jazz is music, not re-education camp.

There is more music being made than just that of Gordon Goodwin, and what I hear makes this hatred irrelevant; it escapes both Rubin’s diagnosis and remedy.  There is Dave Holland’s group, which is funky, powerful, capable of great precision, counterpoint and just enough chaos for balance; Matthis Ruegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra which is old and new simultaneously, updating Jelly Roll Morton, Verdi and Satie into the post-Ornette world, and of course the exceptional music of Argue, which is polyphonic in a way that is much closer to Lutoslawski than King Oliver and absolutely shows both the trees and forest in a truly epansive way forward for big band music.  I urge Rubin to see that forest too.  There’s a lot of good music being made out there beyond what he finds so objectionable, and the cure he proscribes has no meaning if the patient isn’t sick.

http://www.trombone-usa.com/

Jiggs Whigham is a lifetime member and general advisor to the International Trombone Association, British Trombone Society and the German Trombone Society. He is a lifetime member of the International Trombone  Association.

Recorded in 1997, Nice ‘n’ Easy finds Carl Fontana joining forces with another veteran trombonist: Jiggs Whigham. Together, Fontana and Whigham form a two-trombone front line, and they have a solid rhythm section that consists of pianist Stefan Karlsson, bassist Tom Warrington, and drummer Ed Soph. These days, two-trombone attacks are a rarity, and anyone who has a high opinion of the sessions that trombonists J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding co-led in the ’60s knows how regrettable that is. So, when two skilled trombone veterans like Fontana and Whigham get together, it is a happy event!

(Jiggs and Carl are for me the most all-round trombonists ever!, webmaster Rene Laanen) http://www.trombone-usa.com/

JIGGS BOOKS AND CD’S AVAILABLE @ MUSICPARTS UK/WRIGHT GREAVES MUSIC 23, STAMFORD PARK ROAD,ALTRINCHAM WA15 9EL 0161 929 6949

AS A SPECIAL SERVICE TO OUR CUSTOMERS,WE CAN ARRANGE FOR YOU TO HAVE YOUR COPY OF JIGGS BOOK OR CD “SIGNED” BY THE MAN HIMSELF.

OWN THE  King 2102L Jiggs Whigham Trombone hand chosen by Jiggs with a signed certificate:

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THIS BLOG–COMING SOON–”JIGGS AND JOHN KEMBER “CLINIC AND GIG @ THE CINNAMON CLUB BOWDON       http://www.thecinnamonclub.net/

The password to the speakeasy is “Infernal Machines,” you’ll be able to use it very soon. That’s the title of the premier release from Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a contemporary jazz big band which as good as you’ll find. This is as fine a big band recording as I’ve ever heard, and it is as fascinating, satisfying and accomplished as Gil Evans’ seminal “Out of the Cool” from 1961, and while we must wait to see what it may bear in influence, it powerfully renews the idea and the ideals of progressive big band music, making what seems an old-fashioned ensemble very much of the moment.

Argue calls The Secret Society a “steampunk big band,” and the idea is clear and ironic even though it doesn’t translate directly into the music. While to me steampunk is an aesthetic of imaginary nostalgia, the false memory of a time that never came and how it was imagined during a time lost to our own experiences, it also makes sense as a simultaneous preservation and updating of something old-fashioned. I say this is ironic because anyone who seriously listens to jazz knows that the big band is only as old-fashioned as you make it. Certainly the repertory big band exists to preserve a legacy, but the large jazz ensemble has been an exceptional laboratory for the development of jazz ideas since even before “The Birth of the Cool,” and continues to be an important training ground for young musicians. The big bands of Evans and Stan Kenton and their peers were the primary place for the attempt to marry jazz and Western classical music, the so-called “Third Stream” movement. Listening to this body of musical history again, I find the results both compelling and strange. “Third Stream” didn’t really bear children, but it did leave us with “Sketches of Spain” and “City of Glass,” among the most notable recordings, music which is not really jazz anymore, but not quite classical either. The former is a fascinating, beautiful but emotionally distant comment from jazz on a certain style of classical music, the latter very much an experiment in Modern music composed for the big band (perhaps more accurately called the huge band) that somehow manages to navigate an eccentric path between neo-Romanticism and the structures that 12-tone composers commonly developed. John Litweiler thought of “City of Glass” as a precursor to Cecil Taylor, and I don’t think he’s wrong; like Taylor’s work, it’s an example of what happens when artist decided to stretch well past their own traditions.

Argue is continuing this tradition. He’s updating the big band for the 21st century, in tune with contemporary popular and classical music – think of it as a Cord with a fuel-injected engine. The sense of orchestral color and interplay and the prevalence of various rock beats, rather than swing, are some of the modern hallmarks. What sets this music both inside history and outside of the crowd is Argue’s contemporary taste and his compositional thinking. You can hear it immediately on ‘Phobos:’ the heavily processed, skittering beat that would not be out of place on an Autechre or Radiohead song; a pulse-drive bass; a long, sinuous melodic line. These elements all move at a different pace and are encased in an odd-numbered meter that is incredibly subtle and supple – this is real polyphony and a possibility in a big band that has been under-explored. But then a lot of big band music is just large-scale instrumentation of standard jazz forms, and “Infernal Machines” is a collection of jazz pieces composed for the big band. The difference is in the long view, of how the music starts, where it should end, and how it gets there. In between there can be a great deal more than a 12-bar blues or theme-theme-bridge-theme song form. This opening track is in roughly an ABACD form, followed by a groove to disintegration. It’s a stunner.

Another element of contemporary music that is an important element of this record is the process of developing polyphony – many voices – and complexity out of setting different repeated pulses against each other. Steve Reich is one of the most well-known pioneers, and I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that there is an almost direct quote from Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” tucked into the music. It’s another element of a compositional, rather than arranging, approach. I can’t emphasize enough how Argue’s broad range of thinking makes this such a unique and important example of jazz composing. I also want to point out that this technical examination in no way expresses how exciting, grooving, how beautiful, powerful and emotionally rich his work is.

Allow me to repeat; this is a seriously great band, with a tremendous rhythm section, a beautiful blend of brass and winds, chops and enormous reserves of power. The soloists are outstanding, particularly Ryan Keberle’s tasty, funky trombone on ‘Zeno’ and Ingrid Jensen’s searching trumpet on ‘Transit.’ The album comes to an intense and unresolved end, not unlike Mingus’ “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” which just leaves one reaching for the replay button. Because, to repeat something else, this is a seriously great record, one of the finest examples of new jazz I’ve heard in the past decade, one of the finest big band records ever made, one of the finest jazz records I’ve truly ever heard.

“Infernal Machines” is out Tuesday, May 12. If you can’t wait, head to Galapagos Art Space this Friday to see the band in person. My personal tragedy is that over a year ago I committed to the Mahler Symphonies in sequence at Carnegie Hall, beginning this week, and so cannot make this show. My apologies to the great man, but damn you Mahler!

Roberto Polillo

All mp3’s on this site are believed to be in the public domain and are from the personal collection of the site owner.  If you are the copyright holder on one of the songs listed, please contact me and I’ll remove it immediately.

The following MP3s were added on March 2nd & March 3rd.  All MP3s are posted alphabetically.  Please see category listings.

Also note:  All of the following tracks were originally aired as part of the World War II radio program “G.I. Jive,” and the voice of Jill, the DJ of the show, can be heard introducing each song. 

Alexander’s Ragtime Band – Benny Goodman

Amen – Abe Lyman

Buckle Down Winsockie – Benny Goodman

Casa Loma Stomp – Casa Loma Orchestra

Don’t Cry Baby – Erskine Hawkins

Dukes Idea, The – Charlie Barnet

Eager Beaver – Stan Kenton

Easter Parade – Harry James

Hawaiian War Chant – Tommy Dorsey

I’ll Walk Alone – Martha Tilton

I’m Making Believe – The Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald

It Had to be You – Unknown Artist

Jingle Bells – Glenn Miller

Jumpin’ at the Woodside – Benny Goodman

No Love, No Nothing – Ella Mae Morse

Straighten Up and Fly Right – King Cole Trio

String of Pearls – Glenn Miller

Sweet Slumber – Lucky Millinder

Trolley Song, The – Vaughn Monroe 

You Are My Sunshine – Bing Crosby

All mp3’s on this site are believed to be in the public domain and are from the personal collection of the site owner.  If you are the copyright holder on one of the songs listed, please contact me and I’ll remove it immediately.

A Bee Gezindt – Cab Calloway  MP3  (1940)

A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird – Cab Calloway  MP3  (1935)

A Couple of Swells – Judy Garland & Fred Astaire  MP3

A Ghost of a Chance – Cab Calloway  MP3

Aba Daba Honeymoon – Arthur Collins  MP3

About a Quarter to Nine – Al Jolson  MP3

Accentuate the Positive – Johnny Mercer  MP3  (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Kay Kyser  MP3

Ain’t She Sweet – Eddie Cantor  MP3

Alexander’s Ragtime Band – Benny Goodman  MP3  (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Alligator Hop – King Oliver  MP3  (1923)

All of Me – Unknown Artist  MP3

Am I Blue – Ethel Waters  MP3

Am I Blue – Ethel Waters  MP3  (Copy #2)

Amen – Abe Lyman  MP3    (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine – Stan Kenton  MP3  (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better – Doris Day & Robert Goulet  MP3

Apollo Jump – Lucky Millinder  MP3

Are You Ready – Lucky Millinder  MP3

Ava Maria – Alma Gluck  MP3  (1913)

All mp3’s on this site are believed to be in the public domain and are from the personal collection of the site owner.  If you are the copyright holder on one of the songs listed, please contact me and I’ll remove it immediately. 

Eager Beaver – Stan Kenton  MP3

Eager Beaver – Stan Kenton  MP3    (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Easter Parade – Harry James  MP3    (From the World War II radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Elks Parade – Bobby Sherwood  MP3  (From the World War Ii radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Ella Cinders T-Shirts & Gifts

Embraceable You – Carol Bruce with Red Norvo  MP3

Every Little While – Al Jolson  MP3

Everybody Eats When They Come to My House – Cab Calloway  MP3  (1947)

Everything’s Coming Up Roses – Ethel Merman  MP3

Every Tub – Count Basie  MP3  (From the World War Ii radio program, “G.I. Jive”)

Sam Parkins, who was there, attentive, muses about Lester Young:

September 1945 I found myself back in the infantry at Fort McClellan, Alabama. The army had lost some of my training records and they needed me to fire the Bazooka and the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle – 30 cal. and a real bear to shoot), and they were in no hurry. I was going to have to re-graduate from basic training. Most of the rest of this rag-tag company were hardened combat veterans who had been fucked over by the army losing their records. It’s after VJ day.

The sergeants in charge were totally sympathetic; roll-call in the morning, traditionally out on the company street, included a lot of hung-over guys in bed, shouting from the sack, “I’m here sergeant”. Days on end with nothing to do so I found the band, started doing parades, the officers club ($5.00),the non-coms club ($4.00), and the USO. Played baritone with the big band. The drummer was a veteran of the entire European campaign, had been running into a fire fight with his best buddy beside him and watched the guy’s head being completely blown of by a mortar shell. He simply didn’t give a shit, and kept a bottle of Gordon’s gin under the bed for breakfast to keep the boogies away.

The army was totally, and I mean totally, segregated. The colored soldiers had their own gate, and there was a 100 yard lawn – a DMZ – between the two posts. No one allowed to pass in either direction. But their band had Count Basie’s drummer, Jo Jones, other Basieites, Lester Young (Basie’s star saxophonist) had just been drafted, was in basic training and played with the band when he could. Our drummer was the only one of us with the balls to walk across the lawn to rehearsals and dances and to get to know the black musicians.

He came back one night with a really lousy story. Lester Young (street name ‘Pres’) was in the guard house. He had pleaded to be excused from basic and be allowed in the band; the band leader petitioned the authorities, to no avail (and I wonder if a white musician would have made out better. I knew some who did, and after all, the war was over…).

In Goeff Dyer’s book, “But Beautiful” (great book if you can stand unvarnished tragedies), the author, using the Freedom of Information Act, got the transcript of the trial; there’s a lot of detail, all brutal, that I wasn’t privy to, but this here narrative is missing from all biographical accounts. No way any latter day historian could know it.

It’s night firing on the fifty caliber machine-gun range. Outside of the noise, it’s a pretty sight. Maybe twenty machine-guns lined up about eight feet apart, shooting down a slight incline at cardboard cutouts of enemy soldiers; every tenth bullet (tracer bullets) lights up as it’s fired so you see slightly arched lines of electric magic flowing from each gun barrel.

The sergeant, off to the side and slightly down-range, notices one line of magic markers disappear. He goes to investigate, and finds Lester Young lying on his back smoking a joint. Sergeant is aghast. “On your feet soldier!”. Pres’ reply is to hand the sergeant the joint and – “Hey sarge — aren’t the stars pretty up in the sky?”

In his left hand pocket of his fatigue jacket were five more joints; sergeant calls the MPs and the founder of a style that was to sweep the country (think Stan Getz and “The Girl From Ipanema”) is led off to jail.

There was no rush to bring him to trial. He started acting up in his cell, noisy, woke guys at night, he wanted his horn. So the guard got it for him. End of the world. He played 24 hours a day, made everyone crazy, so they took it away from him. And he really lost it. I have no details, but the guards were white – and so forth.

Disobeying a direct order, possession of narcotics, 400 days in an army detention center.

Finally, mid-November, I fired the bazooka at a rusted-out shell-shocked hulk of a tank and was declared through with basic – again – and was awarded a 15 day furlough. And re-enlisted for an extra year (paid a lot more GI bill) and they tacked on another 30 days, so I was home from Thanksgiving to New Year and then some.

[Here I had a memory lapse, because I have remembered this over the years as 1946, after Pres had served his sentence. Wrong. Jazz impresario Norman Granz got in touch with the authorities, applied some kind of heat, and got him sprung in a few weeks].

Of course I went to the Savoy and there on the bandstand was Lester Young, leading a quintet with trumpeter Jesse Drakes and rhythm section. He was struggling – and in the middle of a tune pulled the horn from his chops and began to cry.

He never again played with the fluency of the Basie days. There are, captured on record, moments of magic, but something was broken. And the last time I saw him, at Storyville a month before his death, you knew you were hearing and seeing a dead man. He was drinking and starving himself to death… You don’t want to hear it from me. Read “But Beautiful” (Geoff Dyer; North Point Press, 1996. Paperback).

ca 2.19.03 notes

Regarding the Army vs. Lester Young: Goeff Dyer makes it clear that the army had a pretty good idea from Lester Young’s pre-induction physical what they were getting – a wired, messed up addict with syphilis – and they took him anyhow. Here we can damn the army, but show a mitigating factor.

Damning: After the war, the army essentially apologized for doing such a lousy job of screening draftees, and vowed to do better next time. My wife, Camilla Kemple, spent her academic life teaching the battery of psychological tests used for this purpose, and she tells me that they were mostly in place by the early forties when she started teaching (at the New School in New York). The army made little or no use of them.

An example right under my nose covers two wondrously disconnected elements. In the bus with me (during the Battle of the Bulge) on the way to the army induction center (Ft. Devens, Ayer, Mass.) was a cute little cat named Little Pres. Always showed up at sessions (along with a baritone player who called himself Lester Parker in order to cover all bases). Little Pres didn’t play all that well, but he was a pioneer. Lester Young hadn’t hit yet; us tenor players were still consumed with Hawkins/Webster fever. So Little Pres tried to show us the new way. He was round, maybe 5 ft. 2, had fashioned a pork-pie hat in the manner of his master, and preached the superiority of Pres Senior.

I have to interrupt here to describe what we apprentice tenor players were up against when we encountered the real thing. Little Pres and I, with our horns, were wandering the streets of Boston one Sunday afternoon and said, “Hey – Arnett Cobb is at the Savoy. Let’s go see if we can blow with him”. Arnett Cobb, veteran of Lionel Hampton’s band, one of those huge sounding Texas guys, master interpreter of the Illinois Jacquette “Flying Home” solo (which I had to play four times a night a few years later at the Golfer’s Club in Ithaca – that black after-hours dance hall/gambling club).

Get to the joint – “Sure boys, come right on up”. And in the most kindly way possible, Arnett Cobb blew us right across the Charles River. There’s no point trying to put on paper how loud those guys were. Amplification for anyone but singers was unknown; the sheer power of the big bands came from acoustically loud (remember the girdles worn by the Condoli brothers, trumpets in Stan Kenton’s band. Prevented hernias).

I was in the army with a tenor player from Sam Donahue’s band. He described what the power-players did (Eddie Miller, Tex Beneke, Bud Freeman were of another, quieter, order). They bought the most open metal mouthpiece, filed it more open yet, got #5 hard reeds and clipped them. I tried a set-up like that and couldn’t make a sound. Not strong enough.

Back to Little Pres. He had seemed a little flaky, but what else is new? Drafted at the same time, we rode the bus together, had our uniforms fitted together, and parted. Assigned to different outfits, where a senior sergeant taught us to make a bed, army style. I didn’t see Little Pres again, but a week later heard about him. He was discharged. The flakes must have showed in some non-military way and he was sent home with a Section Eight. The most coveted pre-mature discharge in the army. Medical discharge. Dishonorable discharge or discharge-without-honor can screw you up in later life. Means the induction center did no screening of this guy at all. I could have told them he was unfit.

Mitigation: Lester Young was inducted in August of 1944 when he was 35 years old. The Battle of the Bulge was raging, we weren’t at all sure we weren’t losing the war, and there loomed the horrendous prospect of invading Japan, code name ‘Operation Downfall’ (a novelist, using all available planning records from our army and Japan’s, wrote a fictional history of what would have happened had we invaded Japan. You don’t want to know). The atom bomb decision came very late in the game.

Green troops were pulled out of basic before they learned anything; were flown across the Atlantic to try to plug the leaks in our too thin lines across the neck of the Bulge. The draft was scraping the bottom of the barrel; the draft age was raised to forty. In my first go at basic training, while the Bulge was still on, we had a guy come in late – one of those poor slobs whose training records had been lost. He had been sent back from combat in the Bulge because: I noted his Coke-bottle glasses and asked him how come he was sent home. Here’s what he said:

“I was running into battle when this lieutenant came up to me and said, ‘Soldier – why are you wearing your gas mask?’. I said, ‘Sir, I’ve broken my glasses and I can’t see without the gas mask’”. If you had really rotten vision, your GI gas mask had prescription lenses. This guy had 20/400 vision; drafted anyhow.

So the drafting of Lester Young in this context makes it make a little more sense. But Geoff Dyer observes that Young consistently infuriated the army from physical on by being so weak and so passive. In an account of a white lieutenant making him tear up a picture of Billie Holiday (perceived as white) in the presence of the rest of the company, Dyer portrays the officer’s feelings:

“…He’d never encountered a man more lacking in strength, but he made the whole idea of strength and all the things associated with it seem irrelevant, silly. Rebels, ringleaders, and mutineers – they could all be countered: they met the army head-on, played by its rules. However strong you were, the army could break you – but weakness, that was something the army was powerless to oppose because it did away with the whole idea of opposition on which force depends. All you could do with the weak was cause them pain – and Young was going to get plenty of that”.

But it ain’t that simple. Here’s Dyer from an earlier time in Lester Young’s life: “When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas City in ‘34 they played right through the morning; Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours of playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St. Louis for that night’s gig”.

That’s hardly a description of a weakling. But it’s ten years earlier, Pres is 25, and in that he freely admitted to having been an addict for ten years when he was drafted at 35, was at the time of this session drug free (‘though it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t blow a little gage – the term for smoking pot in the thirties). Here it should be noted that several Lester Young scholars find signs of his eventual disintegration in recordings made in the period just before he went in the army.

So what happened in 1944-45? Maybe the drugs. He had to be smoking pot, and admitted to amphetamines. Benzedrine, legal at the time, is truly vicious, starting with the cardio-vascular system and finishing with the brain. A combination of drugs may have begun to wreck his nervous system. And don’t forget the syphilis. It can go underground and leap out at you years – decades – later, and it eventually destroys the brain

But more likely – this from personal experience. In that session where he wasted Coleman Hawkins, he was on native turf, doing what he was born to do. In the army? Here’s an abbreviated version of my tale. Some of us have some schizophrenia and a touch of epilepsy in their ancestry; in my family, a lot (and look around you. More than you thought?). In 1950 my soon-to-be wife’s father came bombing up to Ithaca to prevent an unholy marriage. Ours. Late afternoon harangue. No dinner. Later and later harangue. I couldn’t walk away from it because it wold have put my wife-to-be at risk. Somewhere in the early AM I partially fainted. Still conscious, but removed from the scene. (We got married anyhow).

I’ll bet that under the brutal pressure Lester Young was subjected to, he simply shut down. It’s a mild seizure – protective circuitry kicks in. There was no way out of this. No Joe Glaser* to call. So the organism crawled into its shell. [* Joe Glaser - Louis Armstrong's connected manager, never let anything remotely bad come near Louis]. And most likely, a combination of the above.

Here’s the day after I wrote all that, and I find it dissatisfying, in part because it exposes an arrogant attitude on my part which implies that Lester Young might have acted “better”, or “stronger”, for which I abjectly apologize. Don’t delete the above, because it includes contributing factors, and will stand as “out-takes” but let’s take another crack at it:

First of all, this is 1945, civil rights legislation is years away, we’re in the South, Lester Young, however light, is black, and the officers are white. The situation mirrors slavery because the officers have absolute power.

Now go ahead to about 1972. The magazine ‘Psychology Today’ reported a failed experiment at Stanford in the psychology department. The mission was to examine the dynamics of being a warden/prison guard as against being a prisoner. So the entire graduate department was enlisted; half the students were assigned prisoner status, the other half became guards. They were to be observed for two weeks at which point their roles would be reversed; guards would become prisoners and vice versa.

It lasted barely a week. The faculty had to abort the experiment abruptly because the prisoners were having crying jags and some were approaching a nervous breakdown. The guards were showing increasing meanness bordering on brutality – physical violence was looming. Remember that this was a reasonably random cross-section of the population. Now go back to Lester Young in the army and take another look at it with this experiment in mind.

For another vision of Lester’s story, read Frank Buchmann-Moller’s extraordinary biography, YOU JUST FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE — which draws on the Army’s files to give the facts behind this most traumatic story.  And, yes, it is just as painful as the mythic versions we all knew before the files came to light.

Para escuchar mientras trabajo esta tarde, he elaborado una lista en iTunes con temas de jazz que tengo en mi Mac. Los he seleccionado con dos criterios: que fueran standards (o casi) y que fueran moviditos. Creo que ha quedado una recopilación muy atractiva, tanto para aquellos a los que os guste el jazz como para los que queráis probar por primera vez

Los temas de Una tarde de Jazz están interpretados por estrellas clásicas y consagradas (Duke Ellington, Sonny Clark, Bobby Timmons, Milt Jackson, Stan Kenton, Dexter Gordon, Billy Cobham, Donald Harrison o Ron Carter), algunas menos conocidas (Jutta Hipp, John Klemmer o Elmo Hope), e intérpretes algo más actuales –aunque ya clásicos– (Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz o Kenny Barron).

Como siempre, haced clic en la portada del disco para descargar las canciones y la carátula (la foto de la villa de Palladio la hice hace ya muchos años en Vicenza). Podéis ver el listado de temas AQUÍ.

Que tengáis una feliz tarde de martes.

It’s time once again for the annual rundown of my favorite music of 2008. If you’re not used to this feature, it’s not “my favorite cds of the year,” or anything of the sort. I listen to so little new music, that would be pointless.

This is instead, “songs I overplayed this year, no matter how old.” And some are really, really old. So, here we go, month to month (roughly, as my memory is slipping a little).

And let’s all cross our fingers that these posts stay up – with all these links, I’m probably pushing my luck.

Winter:
Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat
I just discovered him in a major way early this year.
Pink Martini – Lilly
It took me a couple of listens more than it probably should have to feel sure that they really were talking about a dog.
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra – Hey Ya
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra – Rehab
New group, old sound. Their Hits the Hits cd includes covers like the above, done in a ’60s jazz style.

Stan Kenton – Black Coffee
Thanks to my friend Ellie from Flickr for this one.
Jonathan Coulton – Famous Blue Raincoat
Not a month or much more after I heard the original for the first time, I heard Coulton’s version. I prefer it.
Sondre Lerche & Regina Spektor – Hell No
My friend Andrea sent me this one on a mix cd and I got hooked.
Spring:
The Coasters – Down In Mexico
Most recently from the Grindhouse Death Proof soundtrack. Also possibly the earwormiest song I heard this year.
KT Tunstall – I Want You Back
Jackson 5 cover. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a version of this song I didn’t love.

The Wild Wild West Theme
I’ve been Netflixing the entire series this year. I watched reruns of it on Sunday afternoons with Dad when I was a kid and loved the show then, and I’m loving it much more now. A Western, mildly spy-themed, proto-steampunk show with a definite ’60s aesthetic and great sets, costuming and music. Also, my childhood adoration of Artemus Gordon has come raging back.

Summer:
I spent a lot of time this summer driving around listening to a double mix cd I made of ’70s am summer music, so there wasn’t much time for lots of other music. From that mix cd, here is
Jay Ferguson – Thunder Island
and King Harvest – Dancing In the Moonlight
Besides that, there was also Dean Martin’s theme to the Matt Helm movies, Not the Marrying Kind, and The Carpenters’ Superstar. (I finally got to see Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and this got stuck in my head.)
The second half of the year is for tomorrow.
The first photo is from January’s Columbus Flickrmeet tour of the Southern Theatre, the second from an April trip to Logan, Ohio with my friend Angie and the third from a trip to Sidney with my friend Susan.

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Stan Kenton – Aniversario Nacimiento – Su Música

11 de diciembre


Stan Kenton (1911-1979), evidenció desde pequeño su pasión por el jazz.

Cuando tuvo la oportunidad de dirigir su propio grupo, tuvo la valentía de incorporar a una cantante blanca de jazz llamada, Anita O’Day, con la que obtuvo un éxito impresionante, hasta el punto de convertirse en la mejor bigband blanca de su época, al nivel incluso de la del gran Woody Herman.

Kenton, al frente de su orquesta, intentó fusionar la música clásica europea y la tradición jazzistica.

Hoy a Stan Kenton, con la perspectiva que da el tiempo, se le reconoce la capacidad para generar espacios creativos, creador de sonidos nuevos y haber sido un líder de orquesta carismático e inventivo.

Links

Stan Kenton – Jazz & Blues

Stan Kenton – The Ballad Style Of Stan Kenton – 1958