Archives for February 2010

After three years of keeping his alto saxophone in the closet, in 1974 Paul Desmond finally succumbed to the exhortations of the Canterino family and agreed for the first time in a quarter of a century to play a club date as leader. The Canterino’s club, the Half Note, had moved from lower Manhattan to Midtown. The new proximity was an important factor. “After all,” he told me, “It’s only a couple of blocks away. I can fall out of bed and onto the bandstand.” He hired Jim Hall on guitar, Ron Carter on bass and drummer Ben Riley. For two weeks, they played opposite the Bill Evans Trio.
Desmond enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do more quartet playing. He had been thinking about going to Canada. Hall told him about a Toronto guitarist named Ed Bickert and a club called Bourbon Street. Following negotiations, he went into the club with Bickert, bassist Don Thompson and drummer Terry Clarke, later replaced by Jerry Fuller. It was the group that became his beloved Canadian Quartet, and he played with them the rest of his life.
The young woman speaking with Desmond in the January, 1976, video below is the skilled interviewer Mary Lou Finlay, then the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Take 30. In the full program, the actor and jazz enthusiast Paul Soles fills Finlay in on Desmond’s career and on jazz, about which she confesses to know nothing. Then, in a pre-recorded studio video, the Canadian quartet plays “Wendy,” followed by Finlay chatting with Paul live. It is a pity that YouTube doesn’t offer the full segment, but at least we have a rare instance of Desmond speaking on television. The clip picks up after Finlay has asked him why the Dave Brubeck Quartet disbanded in 1967.

Desmond recorded this album with the Canadian Quartet at Bourbon Street. Chapters 32-34 of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond cover the Canadian period and the final 16 months of Desmond’s life. He died on Memorial Day,1977.

The Rifftides Department Of Language Reform (DOLR) has been neglecting its duties. Its members claim that their failure to stop the misuse of “absolutely” and “no problem” (see this archives post) discouraged them. At a staff meeting on the subject, the DOLRers moaned that they despair of succeeding where Fowler, Strunk, White, Bernstein, Ciardi and other titans of proper English usage have failed. They pointed out that people still say, “ya know” every few seconds; still say and write, “they” when they should use, “he” or “she;” millions still bloat their sentences with “on a daily basis” and “on a national basis,” wasting words when they could streamline with, “daily” and “nationally.”
“Never give up,” I told them. “It’s God’s — or Webster’s — work.”
“Maybe we’re being too fussy, too pedantic,” they said. “Maybe the language is just taking its evolutionary course, and what sounds wrong today will be right tomorrow.”
“Shut up and watch this,” I explained.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

To learn more about the poet Taylor Mali, go here. Thanks to Bobby Shew for calling this delightful wig bubble to our attention.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words. — George Eliot

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. — George Orwell

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. — Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs? — Beryl Pfizer

In April of 2009, a Rifftides review of a Daryl Sherman CD failed to mention the album’s lead song, “S’Mardis Gras.” It also perpetuated the tray card’s mis-naming of the bass player. Correcting those shortcomings is a fine excuse to again call attention to a CD that deserves more of it.

Daryl Sherman, New O’leans (Audiophile). Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the Crescent City inspired Sherman to record this collection of songs, but it goes beyond the post-disaster blues to touch on many of the aspects that endear New Orleans to the world. Harold Arlen’s “Ill Wind” was an obvious choice. Louis Armstrong’s “Red Cap,” Irving Berlin’s “Shaking the Blues Away,” Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” and Dave Frishberg’s “Eloise” may seem unexpected companions in a New Orleans tribute until you hear how Sherman and her colleagues use them to evoke the city. Rhodes Spedale’s “S’Mardi Gras” needs no enhancement in that regard; it is a tour of Fat Tuesday locations and emotions. Guitarist James Chirillo and trumpeter Connie Jones are Sherman’s best-known sidemen. Reed man Tom Fischer and bassist Al Bernard, misidentified as “Menard,” are in the same league. Sherman plays piano on this drummerless date. The infectious good cheer in her voice will make you grin, except when she makes your eyes moist with “Mr Bojangles” and “Wendell’s Cat.”

It seems there’s a new development every day in the saga of London’s Abbey Road Studios. Today, the building is off the block – if it was ever on – saved by designation as a part of history. The Los Angeles Times has the story with a splendid recent photograph of the building and the crosswalk the Beatles made famous.
Why does Rifftides care? Scroll down to “Studios And Sound,” February 21.

The Village Vanguard is observing its 75th anniversary this week. Joe Lovano and the band he calls Us Five are playing there through Sunday. I wish that I could attend. But I shouldn’t be greedy; in my New York years, I was fortunate to be in the club often. I heard music there that echoes in my mind to this day. Frequently on Monday nights, I wrapped up the newscast, jumped into a cab and headed for the Vanguard. That’s a night off for many musicians, and anyone might have shown up for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band in its weekly gig. Gene Ammons sat in one Monday when I was there, Sonny Rollins another. I missed the night in 1981, after the band had become the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, when Miles Davis successively borrowed all the horns in the trumpet section and played on Jones’s “Second Race.” With or without a surprise guest, that band was a joy. Both of its its founders are gone and it is still a joy…every Monday night at the Vanguard.
It was a pleasure to hang out during the breaks with the musicians at the bar or in the kitchen and to chat with Max Gordon. Max started the club in 1935 because he wanted a place where poets could read their work. Jazz came to the club later. On National Public Radio, Lara Pellegrinelli told a brief history of the Vanguard, Max and Lorraine Gordon (pictured) and some of the musicians who made a cultural institution of a triangular room in a New York Seventh Avenue basement. To read and hear her report, including the story of the foodless kitchen, go here.
Happy birthday, Village Vanguard, and many more.

According to Norman Lebrecht, the proprietor of artsjournal.com’s
Slipped Disc, financial tap dancing led to reports that Abbey Road studios was–or
might be–for sale. That does not invalidate the sonic issues raised in this
February 21 Rifftides post. It may relieve the anxieties of audiophiles who
cherish the great old studios. To read Mr. Lebrecht’s followup, go here.

Unexpected and welcome news from a Danish web site:

Denmark’s once legendary jazz club Montmartre re-opens in May 2010 in its original premises in Copenhagen. During the 1960’s and 70’s the club served as a European home for American giants like Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Kenny Drew and many others.

Pianist Niels Lan Doky and a partner will operate the club as a nonprofit enterprise. For details, go here. For recent Rifftides posts involving the Montmartre, go here and here.

Jazz At Lincoln Center has just announced the artists posthumously inducted into its Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame for 2010. They are Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Billy Strayhorn and Sarah Vaughan. Those honored are chosen by vote of a panel of experts from 17 countries.
Jazz at Lincoln Center will present concerts dedicated to the inductees. Here is the schedule:
Intuition: The Music of Bill Evans (May 14-15, 2010)
The Music of Billy Strayhorn (November 5-6, 2010)
The Music of Sarah Vaughan (January 21-22, 2011)
The Music of Bud Powell & Earl Hines (April 29-30, 2011)
Hines was a previous winner, as were 34 others including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Gil Evans, Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Jo Jones. To see the entire list and their photographs, visit the Ertegun Hall of Fame site. The hall is named for the distinguished producer of recordings by musicians from Kid Ory to Ornette Coleman. It was funded by his brother Ahmet, Nesuhi’s partner in Atlantic Records. Nesuhi Ertegun (pictured) died in 1989, Ahmet in 2006.

In the right hands, the accordion can be a wonderfully evocative instrument. To name a few jazz masters of the accordion: George Shearing, Joe Mooney, Eddie Monteiro, Pete Jolly, Ernie Felice, Angelo DiPippo, Tommy Gumina, and Sivuca, whose harmonic and rhythmic use of the accordion enhanced so much fine Brazilian music. Gus DeWert was a splendid accordionist from Kansas City. In his time, Art Van Damme may not have reached the general fame of Dick Contino (“Lady of Spain”), but he was immensely popular. Rifftides contributor Paul Conley of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California, prepared a report on Van Damme, who died last week on the threshold of his tenth decade. To listen to Paul’s piece, click here.
In the wrong hands, the accordion can be reduced to an object of ridicule and cruelty so universal that there is a web site solely devoted to accordion jokes.

For fifty years, the master of cordeen humor has been Pete Barbutti, a triple-threat musician and a comic capable of reducing audiences to helplessness with his accordion routines. Here is his most famous one, from a Tonight Show broadcast during the program’s Johnny Carson zenith.

For more on the sound quality issues raised in the following exhibit (February 21), see the comments that piece has stimulated (click on the Comments button at the end of the item). Also, go here for a golden oldie updating news about Roy DuNann, a late-20th-century hero of recorded sound. That post, in turn, will link you back to the original DuNann installment from March, 2007. Welcome to the Rifftides time machine.
The staff looks forward to your comments on current and past entries.

In their list of priorities, most serious listeners put music’s content before the quality of its sound. In one of our listening sessions at my house, I apologized to Paul Desmond for the scratchy surface of the old vinyl LP I was playing for him. “I don’t care if it’s recorded on cellophane strips,” he said, “as long as I can hear what everybody’s doing.” Nonetheless, Desmond’s own playback equipment was state of the art. He preferred first-class audio.
The Desmond episode came to mind as I read Eric Felten’s Wall Street Journal “De Gustibus” column about the importance of studios to the enjoyment of recorded music. Felten used as his point of departure the report that EMI may sell its Abbey Road Studios. Musicians venerate Abbey Road for the sound quality of recordings made there not only by the Beatles, Radio Head, Duran Duran and dozens of other pop performers but also by classical artists. Sir John Barbirolli conducted the premiere performance of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 at Abbey Road. French Horn virtuoso Dennis Brain recorded the Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds there.
Now, any 18-year-old tenor saxophonist with a computer and a bedroom can be a record company. Felten argues that the loss of the great studios to digital wizardry has resulted in homogenization and a leveling of individuality in recorded sound.

The digital-recording revolution has allowed producers armed with laptops and a few padded rooms in a basement to forgo the expensive environs of the traditional recording hall. Yet this comes at a cost.

Felten singles out the lamented Columbia 30th Street Studio as an example of what we have lost.

The airiness of classic ’50s jazz owed much to the acoustic properties of an old Armenian church in Manhattan converted by Columbia Records into its 30th Street Studio.
Miles Davis’s masterpiece, Kind of Blue, was recorded at 30th Street, and so too, just a couple of months later, was Dave Brubeck’s album Time Out. David Simons, in his book Studio Stories, suggests that the success of those two records owed something to how they sounded, something that wasn’t just a function of the quality of the recording equipment. There was the sympathetic resonance of the studio’s unvarnished wood floor and the distant reverberations reflected by its towering ecclesiastic architecture: “To hear 30th Street is to hear drummer Joe Morello’s snare and kick-drum shots echoing off the 100-foot ceiling during the percussion break in Dave Brubeck’s great ‘Take Five.'”

Much of the intimacy and warmth of Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah-Um (another masterpiece from 1959) and many of Thelonious Monk’s Columbia records also came from the unique properties of the 30th Street Studio. The same can be said of how RCA’s Studios A and B benefited recordings like Mingus’s Tijuana Moods, Desmond’s quartet albums with Jim Hall and the Juilliard String Quartet’s recordings of Debussy, Ravel and Webern. You don’t get that kind of sound with a laptop in your bass player’s rec room.
To read all of Felten’s thought-provoking column, including his reflections on the dread Auto-Tune, go here.

Rifftides reader Lauren Kesner O’Brien writes from New Orleans:

I’m the founder of a new video magazine, www.telegraph21.com, and am contacting you because all week we are featuring great videos about jazz and New Orleans. In particular I thought today and tomorrow’s video feature, The Sound After the Storm, featuring well known musicians Lillian Boutté and Dr. Michael White would be of particular interest to your blog readers:    

http://www.telegraph21.com/video/the-sound-after-the-storm

If it has been a while since you’ve heard these exemplars of modern New Orleans music, now in their 32nd year, here’s your chance. It’s Astral Project on the road last fall at the Artists Quarter in St. Paul, Minnesota. The band is Tony Dagradi, tenor (and at the end soprano) saxophone; Steve Masakowski, guitar; James Singleton, bass; Johnny Vidacovich, drums. The name of the post-Katrina piece is “Dike Finger.” Think about it.

(All right, the headline is a cheap play on words. I tried to resist.)
Speaking of Dawn Clement (see the next exhibit), Jim Wilke will broadcast her trio in concert next Sunday, February 21, at 1 PM Pacific Standard Time. It will be on Wilke’s Jazz Northwest program on KPLU-FM, the Seattle-Tacoma jazz station. He recorded the concert, which was part of the Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz series. The trio is Ms. Clement, piano; Geoff Harper, bass; Jazz Sawyer, drums. Seattle-area listeners can hear it at 88.5 FM. Internet listeners will find it at kplu.org

Jane Ira Bloom, Mental Weather (Outline). This 2008 quartet album by the soprano saxophonist deserved Rifftides attention long before now. Bloom is noted for her control, intonation and full-bodied sound on a notoriously thin and cranky instrument, but those qualities merely serve her creativity, which is at a high level here. She teams with drummer Matt Wilson, bassist Mark Helias and pianist Dawn Clement. Electronic effects sparingly employed on a few tracks enhance the precision and clarity of Bloom’s placement of lines and the freedom of her interaction with the rhythm section. Helias and Wilson solo impressively and, in Wilson’s case, with his customary wit. Their contributions as ensemble players account for a good deal of the album’s richness.
Clement’s playing in this collection further explains why musicians on both coasts are recruiting her for her craftsmanship and the imagination of her soloing. The tone and dynamic variation of her keyboard touch are important elements in her individualism. Clement and Bloom have an ability to anticipate one another that prevents splatter in the execution of a challenging concept like the metric escapades of the title tune. Bloom’s compositions embrace the unsentimental romanticism of “Cello on the Inside” as well as the adventurism of “Electrochemistry,” which is the sort of thing Lennie Tristano might be doing if he were still around. She wrote all of the pieces except “This Nearly Was Mine.” Bloom plays the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad unaccompanied in one ravishing chorus of melody. This one goes into the permanent collection.

Gerald Clayton, Two Shade (Decca). In one dimension, Clayton brings to mind predecessors like Junior Mance, Monty Alexander, Oscar Peterson and Bobby Timmons. The spirit and verve of that brand of full-bodied pianism come across powerfully in “Boogablues” and his vibrant take on “All of You, ” among other tracks. He displays further aspects in the ethereal “Casiotone Pothole,” incorporating harmonized wordless voices and just enough electronic manipulation not to do serious damage; the pointillism of “Trapped in a Dream;” and the prayerful quality of “Sunny Day Go,” with its intimation of Chopin. Bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown help make this a substantial debut album by a pianist who has developed dramatically in the decade since I first heard him as a 16-year-old sitting in with his father, the bassist John Clayton. His power, judgment, taste and maturity are evident in the integrated, cooperative nature of the trio. This band is the antithesis of piano with rhythm accompaniment. Still Clayton’s six-minute performance alone of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma” all but steals the CD. His ad lib introduction is a composition unto itself, the fruit of a fertile mind.

Harry Allen, New York State Of Mind (Challenge). Has Harry Allen been around so long now that people take him for granted? That would be a mistake. He is only 44. He got an early start. Great tenor playing is never out of style, and Allen has long since melded his primary influences–Ben Webster, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims–into an approach with tonal and rhythmic qualities all his own. In this collection of songs about New York, he seems occasionally to also have Al Cohn on his mind. Allen’s rhythm section is drummer Chuck Riggs, bassist Joel Forbes and the young Italian pianist Rossano Sportiello, who can manage in the course of one solo to evoke both Fats Waller and Al Haig. On six of the 11 tunes, the great trombonist John Allred is Allen’s instrumental foil. Their romp through the elusive metering of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is nearly worth the price of the CD. Their out-of-tempo reading of the rarely-heard verse of “Autumn in New York” seals the deal. In his tag to “Broadway Melody,” Allen comes about as close to quarter tones as a saxophone can handle. When is the last time you heard “Sidewalks of New York” or “Chinatown My Chinatown” as serious jazz vehicles? Not since Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong? Maybe it’s time to hear what updated harmonies can do for warhorses. Serious doesn’t mean solemn.

Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin, 474 pages, $30)
A good biography of a musician makes the reader want to listen. Alexander Wheelock Thayer triggered that compulsion with his life of Beethoven, Marion Hildesheimer with Mozart, Richard Sudhalter with Bix Beiderbecke. Terry Teachout’s Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong can be a workout; all that getting up and down. Reading it, I repeatedly set aside the book to go to the shelves and exhume Armstrong recordings. Teachout evokes the essence of the artist. Here he is on the musicology and genealogy of “Muggles” by Armstrong and his Hot Five (1928):

It is because of Armstrong’s climactic two-chorus explosion that “Muggles” belongs to the ages. He charges in on (clarinetist Jimmy) Strong’s heels with a two-bar break in which he doubles the tempo, proceeding directly to the most memorable of his many fantasias on one note, a chorus in which he rocks back and forth between a B-flat below middle C and the same note an octave higher, screwing up the tension to a pitch reminiscent of the last chorus of “West End Blues,” then releasing it with a dark-blue phrase borrowed from Joe Oliver’s solo on the Creole Jazz Band’s 1923 recording of ‘Jazzin’ Babies Blues.”

Teachout’s discussion of “Stardust.” (1931) is another instance of his ability to hook readers. Few could resist playing the recording as they read the author’s transcription of Armstrong’s vocal invention. Armstrong would have been as enchanted by that effect as Hoagy Carmichael was with the singer’s interpretation.

…Armstrong’s vocal is a paraphrase of Carmichael’s tune and Parish’s lyric, whose words he reshapes with a desentimentalizing freedom that delighted the composer: SometimesIwonderwhyIspendsuchlonely night (oh, baby, lonely nighnnmmmm) / Dreaming of a song (melody, memory) / And I am once again with you. Even for him it was a daringly imaginative transformation, much more so than the instrumental portion of the record, in which he mostly stays within earshot of the tune.

Teachout emphasizes in a hundred small and large ways that Armstrong accomplished his goal of making people happy, did it spectacularly, while producing music that set artistic standards influencing American music to this day. His genius remade jazz from a collective folk form into a soloist’s art and touched all areas of serious music. There is a bit of the influence of Armstrong in every aspect of popular culture, from three-chord rock and roll to no-chord free jazz, to the language and attitudes of fiction and the way certain actors move and speak on stage and screen. Great popular singers — Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald — would not have had their styles without Armstrong’s example. Armstrong and the quintessential bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie feuded over styles, but ultimately became good friends. Gillespie summed up the pervasiveness of Armstrong’s sway: “No him, no me.”
As I wrote in selecting Pops as a Doug’s Pick (center column), “Teachout combines with the advantage of unique access to Armstrong’s archives deep musical understanding and the gift of writing clearly about complex matters.” Those matters concern not only the workings of music but also of racism, politics and the Byzantine power economics of show business. Was Armstrong’s longtime manager Joe Glaser an exploiter who had moorings in organized crime? Yes. Was he good for Armstrong? Yes. Teachout shows that the dependent psychological makeup formed by his background and reinforced by the advice of his mentor Joe Oliver, ordained that Armstrong have Glaser or a white man like him take care of business. He also makes clear that Armstrong knew about the outsized share of his money that Glaser was taking and accepted it as the price of the freedom to concentrate on his music and “always give a good show.”
Was Armstrong as some blacks charged, a kowtowing Uncle Tom? No. He was a black man who grew up in a city where segregation could be vicious, and he was conditioned accordingly. Teachout presents evidence of outrageous incidents demonstrating that Armstrong’s fame and visibility gave him no immunization against racist humiliation in the south or the north. One of his most demeaning mistreatments, when he was at his peak of renown, was not in Mississippi or Alabama, but when he was denied the use of a restroom in Connecticut. In 1957 when the chips were down for his people during the civil rights struggles in the south, he attacked President Eisenhower as “two-faced” and gutless for not enforcing the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For good measure, he bestowed on Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus a scatological title. His angry outburst made headlines. Within days, Eisenhower ordered Federal troops into Little Rock to escort nine black children into the school. Teachout is persuasive in suggesting that, despite a lack of administration acknowledgement, pressure from news coverage of Armstrong’s outspokenness played a role in forcing the Federal government to act.
Through the access he was allowed, Teachout went more deeply into Armstrong’s archives than was possible for previous scholars. A result of his research is that many of the most fascinating parts of Armstrong’s saga come from his own writings and from hundreds of hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings. He was a constant writer and a tireless recordist of his thoughts, his household activities, his wife, his band members, his friends. He taped himself at home playing along with his classic recordings of the 1920s and ’30s. Teachout works material from the tapes into the fabric of the book, adding new detail to one of the most unlikely of all rags-to-riches stories. He does not gloss over Armstrong’s faults and foibles; a lifelong affair with marijuana, a string of troubled early marriages, a short temper. He balances the downsides with accounts of a mostly happy and faithful final marriage, a trail of generosity to friends and neighbors, reluctance to retain anger or hold many grudges, a keenly inquiring mind and the love of laughter.
As for Armstrong’s beginnings in the rawest part of the underbelly of New Orleans, his introduction to music, the bloom of his genius and the globe-spanning arc of his life, Teachout tells the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the story with the clarity and flow he brings to all of his writing.
In the eulogy at Armstrong’s funeral in 1971, his friend Fred Robbins said, “he was truly the only one of his kind, a titanic figure in his and our time, a veritable Picasso. A Stravinsky. A Casals. A Louis Armstrong.” Pops: A Life Of Louis Armstrong is persuasive and entertaining in support of that truth.
To see and hear the recent one-hour Brian Lamb interview of Terry Teachout on C-Span’s Q&A, go to this archive video. Be patient; it loads slowly and has a false start, but once it gets underway it is proof that conversation on television can be illuminating. “Talking heads” needn’t be a pejorative.

Critical carping and misguided stylistic arguments aside, in every period of his career Louis Armstrong was formidable in his playing and singing. His appearance with the All-Stars at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival reminded many who had taken Armstrong for granted of the power of his art. Through Bert Stern’s and Aram Avakian’s film Jazz On A Summer’s Day, his performance that night has reached untold thousands of listeners miles and years beyond the concert in Freebody Park.
The All-Stars were trombonist Trummy Young, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Mort Herbert and drummer Danny Barcelona. Jack Teagarden, Armstrong’s brother under the skin, was a guest for “Rockin’ Chair.” Willis Conover made the introduction.

Drummer Jake Hanna died last night in Los Angeles of complications from a blood disease. He was 78. Versatile across all jazz styles, in small groups and large Hanna swung with unremitting flexibility and power. He was the spark plug of big bands led by Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson and Harry James and worked with a score or more of small groups including Supersax and Toshiko Akiyoshi.
Here is Hanna in 1964 driving the Herman band in Bill Holman’s arrangement of “After You’ve Gone.” The video quality is a bit watery. The music is anything but.

In recent years, Hanna was in demand at jazz festivals and parties all over the US and abroad. To see and hear him jamming with trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, bassist Jeff Fuller, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, pianist John Bunch, cornetist Warren Vaché and tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton, go here.
DevraDoWrite, aka Devra Hall, has a story about the time her father Jim played a trick on Hanna the trickster. To read it, go here.