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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Archives for July 13, 2005

Perversity

The intellectually tireless arranger, composer, saxophonist, leader and writer Bill Kirchner called to my attention an important essay by Martha Bayles. Under the same artsjournal.com umbrella as Rifftides, Ms. Bayles is the proprietor of Serious Popcorn, a web log devoted to film. Her March 31, 2005 piece titled “The Perverse in the Popular” touches on matters of interest to anyone concerned about the size of the audience for serious art and about the quality of music, movies, television, and the internet as a source of entertainment. Here are two excerpts:

The entertainment industries are full of cultivated, intelligent people who think about their work in a much more traditional way than academics do. Recording artists ponder melody and rhythm; film and television scriptwriters wrestle with plot and dialogue; production designers worry about color, texture, and line; actors and directors compare themselves with admired predecessors in film and theater. The language these people speak is a craft language, directly descended from that of the older performing arts. In other words, each craft has its own center of excellence.
These people understand the depredations of commerce. But they also strive for that rare prize, the chart or ratings or box office success that is also a work of art. Such miracles don’t happen every day, or even every year. But they do happen. And what’s more, they last. In this time of dispute over the elite cultural canon, there is surprising agreement about what belongs in the canon of popular culture. The songs of Cole Porter, the compositions of Duke Ellington, the films of John Ford, the comic strips of Walt Kelly, the novels of Dashiell Hammett, and the 39 episodes of The Honeymooners that ran on CBS between 1955 and 1956 are just some of the works now described, without irony, as classic.

Perverse modernism would be a nonstarter today without obscenity. Gone are the days when audiences could be provoked by free verse, loose brush strokes, pounding rhythms, or vivid descriptions of lovemaking. In America, most people accept the right of the artist to do whatever he or she wants, because they know all too well that even if some fussbudget tries to drag an artist into court, the law contains a loophole big enough to drive a Hummer through. If 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty As They Wanna Be,” Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, and other controversial landmarks of the past 20 years can all be said to have “serious artistic value” in the eyes of the law, then blood-soaked video games and pornographic Web sites are home free.

You can read Ms. Bayles’s entire piece here. It ran originally in The Wilson Quarterly, a fact that makes me think it is time to resubscribe to that valuable little journal.

The Crimson Canary

Speaking of the cinema, Charlie Shoemake, lightning vibraharpist and late-night TV movie browser, sent a message after he read yesterday’s posting about the name of our adventure in blogging.

Concerning the “Hollywood Stampede’ session, tell your readers if (truly out of left field) they should stumble sometime in the wee hours of the morning across a 1945 “B” movie entitled The Crimson Canary (Noah Beery Jr.) to grab onto it because they’ll see Coleman Hawkins, Howard McGhee, Oscar Pettiford, Sir Charles Thompson, and Denzil Best playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” (“Hollywood Stampede”). I had it on Beta tape years ago but now can’t find it, though I continue to search. The band sounds absolutely great and Pettiford, in particular, takes a classic solo. The plot of the movie has Noah Beery Jr. as a dixieland trumpet player on the lam for a murder he didn’t commit. While ducking the law, he pops into this club and who should be appearing….you guessed it.

Charlie isn’t the only one who can’t find The Crimson Canary. I did a deep-dive Google search through a dozen or more web retailers who brag about their stocks of hard-to-get films. No one offered it for sale on DVD, VHS, Beta or cellophane strips. (Does anyone but Charlie still have a Beta deck?) If you know where to find The Crimson Canary, tell us all, please.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, … [MORE]

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