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)

*  *  *

“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:

*  *  *

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)

*  *  *

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:

*  *  *

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.

“Horatio looked handsomely miserable.”

Charles Dickens, Sketches by “Boz,” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People

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.

10. Duke Ellington, In a Mellotone (RCA Victor)

My father, who was born in 1926, loved the popular music of his generation, especially the big bands of the Thirties and Forties (Stan Kenton was his all-time favorite) and the pop singers of the Forties and Fifties (he favored Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and June Christy). He started buying records of his own when he was in high school, and eventually amassed a good-sized collection of 78s, 45s, and long-playing albums, to which I was allowed to listen whenever I liked.

Alas, he started to lose his hearing in the Sixties, and a time came when he no longer listened to music for pleasure save when driving. By then, though, it had become surpassingly clear that I had a not-considerable amount of musical talent, and my parents went well out of their way to make it possible for me to pursue that talent. I started studying violin in the elementary-school music program of Smalltown, U.S.A., in 1966, and from then until I graduated from high school eight years later, I would spend much of my free time playing, listening to, and thinking about music.

It was, of course, classical music that I played on violin, but I’d taken a a shine to jazz and big-band music long before that. While my father wasn’t specifically interested in jazz, he picked up a fair number of full-fledged jazz albums over the years. After $64,000 Jazz, the first one to which I listened regularly and closely was In a Mellotone, an anthology of sixteen extremely well-chosen 78 sides cut by the greatest of Duke Ellington’s bands, the one that he led from 1940 to 1942.

Released in 1956, the year of my birth, In a Mellotone featured most of Ellington’s top soloists, including Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone, Ben Webster on tenor saxophone, and Cootie Williams on trumpet, and it contained several of the Ellington band’s best-remembered compositions, among them “Cotton Tail,” “Main Stem,” “Rumpus in Richmond,” “Perdido,” “A Portrait of Bert Williams,” and the title tune, a medium-tempo swinger that became and has remained a jam-session staple.

The track that hit me hardest, though, was “Sepia Panorama,” which featured Jimmy Blanton, the first bassist ever to become a major jazz soloist. I had only just started teaching myself how to play that notoriously unwieldy instrument, and Blanton’s slender, penetrating sound and breathtaking technical facility were worlds away from the simple one-and-three bass parts heard on most of the pop and country records played on the radio in those days. I didn’t know anything about Blanton, but I instinctively understood that I wanted to play the way he did, and within a few months I was capable of plucking out a more-than-approximate facsimile of his introductory solo. If anything in particular made me long to be a bass player, it was hearing “Sepia Panorama” at the age of twelve.

Beyond that, what could I possibly have made of the Blanton-Webster band, as this Ellington group is known to jazz aficionados, in 1968? The fact is that I took it for granted. It was, after all, one of countless musical discoveries that I made around that time, and no one in Smalltown knew enough to tell me that Ellington was a genius and In a Mellotone a landmark of American music. I must have assumed that this was what big-band music was supposed to sound like, and it took rather longer for me to understand that the Blanton-Webster band was to jazz what Men Without Women was to short stories.

Forty-five years later, I devoted the better part of two chapters of Duke, my 2013 biography of Ellington, to the Blanton-Webster band. The heart of the matter is in this paragraph:

Even the dullest of dullards finally figured out that the records [Ellington] cut in 1940 were setting a new standard, not just for him but for jazz in general, and today the recordings of what has come to be known as “the Blanton-Webster band” are generally thought to mark the summit of his compositional achievement. Long before his death, that view was enough of a commonplace for Ellington to find it oppressive. “I find I have all these other lifetimes to compete with,” he said. In time he found the competition so irksome that he relegated the Blanton-Webster years to a single sentence in Music Is My Mistress: “During this period—1940-41—we produced some very good music.” He had a point, for the band continued to play on a high level long after Blanton died, just as Ellington continued to write first-rate pieces. But never again would he do so with such consistency, nor would any of his later bands strike so perfect a balance of virtuosity and idiosyncrasy.

That, however, was in 2013. In 1968, I would have been content to assure you that In a Mellotone was a great album and that the guy playing bass on “Sepia Panorama” was…well, I probably wouldn’t have thought to call him a “motherfucker.” At least not yet, that is: I still had a lot to learn.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

“Sepia Panorama,” composed by Duke Ellington (with the unacknowledged collaboration of Billy Strayhorn) and recorded by the Ellington band in 1940. The bassist is Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist is Ben Webster:

“Sepia Panorama,” recorded by the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1988. The arrangement is by John Lewis, the group’s pianist, and the bassist is Percy Heath:

*  *  *

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.

Dock Boggs plays and sings “Pretty Polly” at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival. Before the performance, he talks about making his first phonograph records in New York in 1927:

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

“There’s enough sorrow in the world, isn’t there, without trying to invent it.”

E.M. Forster, A Room With a View