Archives for October 2019

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

13. Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits (Columbia)

Forty-nine years after the fact, I can’t remember how or why I first got interested in Miles Davis. Not that you would have needed a reason to be interested in Miles in 1970, for that was the year of Bitches Brew, the double album in which he broke away from the conventions of modern acoustic jazz and started playing his own idiosyncratic version of what is now called “fusion jazz.” Everybody in the world of jazz was talking about Miles Davis. But I wasn’t part of the world of jazz: I lived in a small town in southeast Missouri, I didn’t listen to modern jazz, and none of my friends listened to any kind of jazz, modern or otherwise. Nor did Miles appear very often on network TV: he turned up on a 1970 episode of The Tonight Show that was hosted by Bill Cosby, a jazz buff, but I didn’t see it. (My parents frowned on my staying up that late on school nights.)

I must have read something, possibly a review in High Fidelity or Stereo Review, that piqued my interest in Miles. Having done so, the logical next step would have been to hop on my bicycle, pedal downtown to Collins Piano Company, and buy one of his albums. Unfortunately, Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits, an erratically programmed 1969 compilation of small-group sides recorded for Columbia between 1956 and 1965, was the only one that the store had in stock. I would have done better to start with Miles Ahead or Kind of Blue. But Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits was what I brought home with me that fateful day, and it turned the trick far more than adequately.

I put on the first track, “Seven Steps to Heaven,” an up-tempo swinger whose title refers to the seven-note staccato riff that sets the tune in motion. WIthin a minute—less than that, really—my mouth was hanging open with astonishment, not just at Miles’ crisp, elliptical solo but at the lighter-than-air accompaniment of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, who sounded nothing like the rhythm sections I’d heard on the jazz albums in our living-room record cabinet. Their music had a right-this-second immediacy, a quality I’d been looking for without knowing it.

I had no idea who any of these three men were, much less that they were generally thought to be the most creative rhythm section in modern jazz. Nor did I know that Miles Davis himself was a unique figure in his own right, the only jazz musician who had succeeded in remaining innovative and influential throughout the greater part of his career. For that matter, I didn’t even think the Miles Davis Quintet was necessarily better (whatever that might mean) than Louis Armstrong’s All Stars or the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Even then, I knew by instinct that there were many mansions in the house of jazz, that you could move from one to the other as often as you liked, and that this flexibility was part of what made jazz so special.

“Attempts at a definition of jazz have always failed, and this reveals something about its mixed origins and later stylistic diversity,” Max Harrison wrote a decade later in the key article about jazz in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was, and is, exactly right. Jazz is a music distinctive above all for its ability to assimilate other musics without compromising its own clear identity. This has always been part of what I love most about jazz…and yet I also knew that I longed desperately to play bass someday in a band that sounded just like that.

I never did, of course. If I had, the rest of my life might have turned out very differently.

(To be continued)

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To read George Frazier’s original liner notes for Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits, go here.

“Seven Steps to Heaven,” by Miles Davis and Victor Feldman, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963. The band also includes George Coleman on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums:

“My Funny Valentine,” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet on stage in Milan on October 11, 1964. George Coleman is replaced by Wayne Shorter:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

“In the face of the lack of direct mathematical demonstration, one must be careful and thorough to make sure of the point, and one should make a perpetual attempt to demonstrate as much of the formula as possible. Nevertheless, a very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.”

Richard P. Feynman, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics” (Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965)

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

12. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Jazz Goes to College (Columbia)

Dave Brubeck beat Duke Ellington onto the cover of Time, a “distinction” that embarrassed him deeply forever after. He was a kind, modest man with a healthy sense of the appropriate, and no part of him thought that he was more deserving of the honor (which was just what it was back then, difficult though it is for us to imagine today) than Ellington. He deserved his fame, though: the original Dave Brubeck Quartet, which he led from 1951 until 1968, was for most of that time one of the world’s most popular jazz groups, and Jazz Goes to College, an immensely successful live album produced by George Avakian and released by Columbia in 1954, made Brubeck a full-fledged star.

Jazz Goes to College was one of the first jazz albums to be widely owned by people who didn’t usually buy jazz albums, my father among them. I found a mint-condition copy in his record cabinet that looked as if it hadn’t been played for a decade, perhaps ever since he’d ordered it from the Columbia Record Club: Jazz Goes to College, an album of cool combo jazz, wasn’t exactly his cup of tea. It suited me right down to the ground, though, and I played it repeatedly, paying increasingly close attention as I did so to the alto saxophone of Paul Desmond, Brubeck’s longtime musical partner.

I wrote about Desmond in The Wall Street Journal when Take Five, Doug Ramsey’s biography, came out in 2005:

You may not know Paul Desmond’s name, but you’ve almost certainly heard his music. He wrote “Take Five,” a sinuous minor-key tune in the once-exotic time signature of 5/4 (marches are in 2/4, waltzes in 3/4, pop songs in 4/4) that was recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. It shot up the charts a year and a half later, becoming the first jazz instrumental to sell a million copies.

In addition to making its composer rich, “Take Five” introduced the public at large to the inimitable sound of Desmond’s cool-toned, unsentimentally lyrical alto saxophone playing, which he once described as the musical equivalent of a dry martini. In part because of the unexpected popularity of “Take Five,” Brubeck and Desmond became the most famous jazz musicians of the 1960s, and “Time Out,” from which the song was drawn, remains to this day one of jazz’s top-selling albums.

As if being rich and famous weren’t enough, Desmond was also a talented writer of prose (usually in the form of wryly witty liner notes for his solo albums), a ladies’ man (he preferred fashion models, though he made an exception for the young Gloria Steinem) and a seemingly inexhaustible bon vivant (Elaine’s was his after-hours hangout of choice). He also managed to consume far more than his lifetime quota of cigarettes, alcohol and other, more strictly controlled substances, the combined effect of which presumably contributed to his death from lung cancer in 1977….

At a time when so many other saxophonists worked overtime to sound like Charlie Parker, the king of bebop (and a Desmond fan), he went his own soft-spoken way, steering clear of Parker’s searingly fast tempos and jolting broken rhythms. He preferred to stroll through familiar ballads like “Stardust” and “For All We Know,” spinning long, luminous webs of melody subtly tinted with rue. He called himself “the John P. Marquand of the alto,” a sly reference to the author of “Point of No Return” that says as much about Desmond’s impressive cultural literacy as it does about his unappeasable melancholy.

It was Desmond whose playing kept me coming back to Jazz Goes to College. Indeed, I loved it so much that I actually learned how to play the first few choruses of his solo on “Balcony Rock,” the first cut on the album, on violin. Sensing that this was a dead end, I taught myself how to play jazz bass by borrowing a plywood instrument from the band room of the junior high school in Smalltown, U.S.A., and spending the summer plucking along with Bob Bates, the bassist on Jazz Goes to College. A few years later I went off to Kansas City, there to play jazz with other people for the first time in my life.

While I no longer play music—I call myself a “recovering musician,” a joke that really isn’t one—I still listen to Paul Desmond, as well as to Jazz Goes to College, one of the albums of my lost youth that has proved to have the greatest staying power. To hear it now continues to fill me with memories of the far-off days when my ears were first starting to open up to the myriad beauties of jazz.

(To be continued)

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“Balcony Rock,” the first track from Jazz Goes to College. Bob Bates is the bassist, Joe Dodge the drummer:

“Stompin’ for Mili,” a short subject by the Dave Brubeck Quartet filmed by Gjon Mili in 1954. The personnel is the same as is heard on Jazz Goes to College:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

IBM Presents Clarence Darrow, a TV version of David W. Rintels’ one-man play, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Rich. This performance, taped at a live performance of the show, was originally telecast by NBC on September 4, 1974:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.”

Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

11. Louis Armstrong, Ambassador Satch (Columbia)

My father was for many years a member in good standing of the Columbia Record Club, the first of the many direct-mail “clubs” from which countless Americans of his generation who didn’t live close to a well-stocked record store bought vast numbers of LPs and, later, eight-track tapes and videocassettes. All of these clubs offered an introductory promotional deal that allowed you to get a dozen or so albums for next to nothing so long as you agreed to subsequently buy a fixed number of albums at full price. George Avakian, the legendary record producer, played a key role in the management of the Columbia Record Club, which was founded in 1955, and so made sure that it offered a generous selection of jazz LPs by Columbia’s artists, most of whom Avakian had signed and many of whose albums he produced. Several of them made their way into my father’s record collection, including Ambassador Satch, the only Louis Armstrong album that he owned and the first one I ever heard.

I explained how Ambassador Satch came to be recorded in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, my 2009 biography. Armstrong and His All Stars, the trumpeter’s combo, spent much of 1955 criss-crossing Europe. The rapturous reception they received there did not go unnoticed at home:

A few weeks earlier, while the tour was still underway, the New York Timeshad run a front-page story called “United States Has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz” in which the house organ of the liberal establishment claimed that Armstrong’s European concert tours had made him the “most effective ambassador” for the American way of life and offered a pointed suggestion: “What many thoughtful Europeans cannot understand is why the United States Government, with all the money it spends for so-called propaganda to promote democracy, does not use more of it to subsidize the continental travels of jazz bands…With a small Government subsidy, [Armstrong] might play the smaller intermediate towns and his tour stretched to six months by train instead of six weeks by bus.” The story had bureaucratic fingerprints all over it: “Somewhere in the official files of one of Washington’s myriad agencies all this has been spelled out. Because nothing has been done about it, more than one observant American traveling the Continent has remarked: ‘We don’t know our own strength.’” Two weeks later the Times ran a follow-up piece announcing that the State Department had decided to sponsor foreign tours by American jazzmen, and on December 15 the White House earmarked $92,500 to send Dizzy Gillespie’s band to the Middle East for the first in a long series of government-sponsored jazz tours intended to demonstrate to Third World countries that American capitalism was better than Soviet Communism.

Avakian rushed to capitalize on the free publicity by taping an album by the All Stars to which he gave the ideal title of Ambassador Satch. The cover showed Armstrong dressed in a cutaway, holding a dispatch case in one hand and his trumpet in the other. The broad smile on his face, he told Ernie Anderson, was one of anticipatory pleasure: “It was the same morning I had already made a date with my connection to pick up half a pound of fine mutah. So when you see that picture of Ambassador Satch you know he’s got half a pound of fine jive right there in his satchel.”

Naturally, I didn’t know what was in Satchmo’s satchel when I first heard Ambassador Satch in 1969, nor did I know much of anything about him. I’d seen him singing “Hello, Dolly!” on What’s My Line! in 1964 and playing it on The Ed Sullivan Show later that year, but it wasn’t until I sat down with Ambassador Satch that I started to grasp that he wasn’t just a charming but old-fashioned minstrel-show entertainer with a wall-to-wall smile. While it isn’t the best record he ever made, it does feature one of the best bands he ever led, an explosively vital six-piece group featuring Edmond Hall on clarinet, Trummy Young on trombone, and Billy Kyle on piano, playing at the very top of its potent form. As for Armstrong, he was very much himself throughout Ambassador Satch, genial, expansive, and—whenever it suited him to be so, which was frequently—as hot as a cranked-up blowtorch.

To be sure, Ambassador Satch isn’t quite what it purports to be, a collection of concert performances recorded live in Europe. Several tracks were in fact taped in the studio and overdubbed with cheers and applause. Even so, it’s still enormous fun and, quite often, a great deal more than that. I can still remember how thrilled I was to hear Armstrong and his colleagues tearing into “Royal Garden Blues” and “Tin Roof Blues.” I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that they’d opened the satchel for a little taste before the tape started to roll.

I had no idea in 1969, of course, that I was destined to spend much of my middle age thinking and writing about Louis Armstrong. I expected to become either a concert violinist or a small-town schoolteacher. Little did I know that my destiny was hiding in the record cabinet tucked in the corner of the living room of my childhood home in Smalltown, U.S.A., waiting patiently for me to open the door.

(To be continued)

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To read more about the making of Ambassador Satch, go here

“Tin Roof Blues,” a track from Ambassador Satch, recorded live in Amsterdam in 1955:

Armstrong and the All Stars play “Muskrat Ramble” on Timex All-Star Show #2, originally telecast by CBS on April 30, 1958. The band also includes Hall, Young, and Kyle:

Louis Armstrong appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? This episode was originally telecast by CBS on March 22, 1964. John Charles Daly is the host and the panel includes Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Ross Hunter, and Dorothy Kilgallen:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

From 2009:

I always remember the fate of Carrie Buck whenever I hear a judge praised for the literary artfulness of his opinions. I yield to no one in my admiration for what Walter Lippmann called “the grand style” of Justice Holmes’ writings. His was a great personality, one fully worthy of having been enshrined in the pages of Patriotic Gore, and it shines through every opinion that he wrote. But I squirm at the thought that the pith and vigor of his style may have increased the willingness of his fellow justices to order the eugenic sterilization of a teenage girl on wholly specious grounds….

Read the whole thing here.