Archives for April 9, 2008

The Rifftides main computer crashed today. The ECTs (Emergency Computer Technicians) took it to the hospital for extensive tests. Results won’t be known for at least three days. It may need a heart transplant and has no health insurance, but suggestions of a benefit concert are premature.

This message is coming to you by means of a Big Chief tablet and a number 3 pencil. The Rifftides Staff hopes to be back in full operation no later than Monday. Please be patient. In the meantime, we refer you to the archive. Click on “Archive” in the center column. There are all kinds of blasts from the past there. For starters, here’s one of the earliest.

In his eighty-eighth year, Dave Brubeck is going to have to add another shelf to his trophy room–or another trophy room. His most recent honor came yesterday from the US State Department. Here’s a paragraph from the Reuters report in The New York Times.

“As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the ceremony where Brubeck received the department’s Ben Franklin Award for public diplomacy.

To read the whole story, click here.

It is admirable that the State Department is honoring Brubeck for the valuable cultural diplomacy he and his quartet practiced with government sponsorship as recently as the 1980s. But what is the policy of The United States today in using culture to reach out to the world? Sad to report, official cultural diplomacy is largely dormant at a time when the country’s international image is at its lowest point in decades. I recently delivered a speech entitled “Jazz Roots In The Bill Of Rights.” Cultural diplomacy was not the main theme of the talk, but this paragraph touched on it.

Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States Information Agency asked me to go to Eastern Europe as part of its US Speakers program. That program no longer exists because the USIA no longer exists. The Clinton administration killed the agency in a budget move. The function shifted to the State Department and under the Bush administration, nothing has been done with it. Cultural diplomacy exists on paper, but it is not being practiced. That’s a shame because there is intense interest in the world in how democracy and the concept of individual freedom work. We have laid aside a tremendously effective tool for making friends in the world by the simple, inexpensive means of sending Americans abroad to talk about America.

Let us hope that the next administration will understand the importance and impact of what the USIA did–when there was a USIA–and revive the agency or create one like it.

Have I mentioned that Dave Frishberg has a web site? He has. I am putting a link to it high on the Other Places list in the center column. The site has a discography, lots of photographs and a catalog of the songs he’s written, from “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue” (1963) to “Who Do You Think You Are, Jack Dempsey?” (2004). It also has a Written Word section that includes a page called Colleagues And Characters, who include the unlikely–George Maharis, Scatman Crouthers, Malcolm X, Ava Gardner–and the likely, Carmen McRae, Benny Goodman, Kenny Davern, Ben Webster.

Ben was very emotional and his feelings were close to the surface. I knew that Ben was famous for unpredictable outbursts of anger and violence, but I never saw him pull any of those stunts,
perhaps because he was trying to abstain from hard liquor at that time. He did drink beer–Rheingold. When he drank he was quick to weep. He would ask Richard (Davis) to play solos with the bow, and then he would stand listening with tears rolling down his cheeks. He would get tearful when he spoke of his mother. Once he told me that he missed Jimmy Rowles, who was back in California, and as he told me about his friendship with Rowles he began to cry. One night at the Half Note we heard radio reports of rioting in Harlem, and Ben wept openly as he listened.

To reach Colleagues and Characters, click here, but take my advice: if you have an appointment soon or were thinking of getting some Z’s, wait a while. Frishberg is hard to put down.