Archives for September 2005

My ArtsJournal confrere Terry Teachout is writing a biography of Louis Armstrong. If you have read his big biography of H.L. Mencken and his small one of George Balanchine, you know that Terry is a superb chronicler of lives. He is also a skilled musician who understands from the standpoint of musical technique as well as from a cultural perspective why Armstrong was a truly great man. Those qualities of literary and musical accomplishment have coexisted in only one previous Armstrong biographer—Armstrong himself. When TT told me over lunch nearly three years ago about the project, I instantly filled with anticipation that grew today as I read the long interview with Terry by Joe Maita on the Jerry Jazz Musician site. Here is a small excerpt:

JJM : In 1944, Leonard Feather wrote, “Americans, unknowingly, live part of every day in the house that ‘Satch’ built.” Can this still be said?

TT: Yes, it is still true, although today, people are influenced by people who were influenced by Louis, rather than, for the most part, being influenced by him first-hand. To an extent that most people just don’t get, Armstrong created the way that jazz sounds. He didn’t invent jazz, of course, but he set the parameters within which it operates, and had an influence on every other kind of American popular music too. The house that we live in, the house that Louis built, is a rhythmic house. Our idea of what it means to swing is, to a great extent, his doing.

To read the entire interview, go here.

As we all should know by now, there are many Katrina relief scammers attempting to profit from human kindness at the expense of the storm’s victims. Caution is in order before you give to any organization or person about whose credibility and honesty you are not certain. I knew and trusted Allan and Sandra Jaffe, who founded Preservation Hall. They were a selfless couple. Their son Ben, who runs the hall today, was a boy when I left New Orleans, but everything I have learned in checking out his stewardship of the organization leads me to believe that you can trust this pledge:

New Orleans Musicians
Hurricane Relief Fund

This fund is established by Preservation Hall to provide musicians with financial support during this tragic time. 100 % of money raised through this fund will go directly to New Orleans musicians.

Preservation Hall asks that you call 1-888-229-7911 and make your donation by credit card. Go to the Preservation Hall web site for more information. While you are there, view the ten-minute movie about the the hall. After you have seen and heard Louis Armstrong, Sweet Emma Barrett, Willie Humphrey, Dee Dee and Billie Pierce, George Lewis, the current band—and the people of New Orleans—you may decide that this is a city that will come back.
A sign on the back wall of Preservation Hall bandstand reads:

Traditional Request – $2.00

Others – $5.00

The Saints – $10.00

Listeners have been known to tip $10.00 not to hear “When The Saints Go Marching In” again. This fund is an opportunity to help assure that the option will exist because there will be musicians to provide it. Thanks to DevraDoWrite for calling it to my attention.
For news of the fate of the Preservation Hall band members, see Michael Brick’s story in The New York Times.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
—Bertrand Russell

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Jesse Hamlin has an article about Paul Desmond. In it, I am happy to report, he is kind to Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond and mentions that I will be signing copies of the book a week from today at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Hamlin sought out San Francisco musicians who worked with Desmond in his pre-Dave Brubeck Quartet days of the 1940s, and spices his piece with their recollections. Here are two of them:

Guitarist Eddie Duran hired Desmond whenever he could for his band. “He was so inventive,” Duran said. “He was so aware of harmonies. He could just weave in and out of them. When he improvised, he didn’t trash the melody; he kept the context of the original melody and created new melodies. He had taste. And total mastery.”

“He was always extremely lyrical, his time was good and he had that tone. He was a pure player,” recalled trumpeter Johnny Coppola, who worked with Desmond in the Bay Area band of Billy Shuart in the late ’40s. “He always sounded beautiful,” added Coppola’s wife, Frances Lynne, who sang with Desmond and Brubeck at the Band Box and the Geary Cellar. “Nobody got a sound like he did.”

The headline on Hamlin’s Chronicle story is long and accurate. Click on it and you can read the article: Paul Desmond’s sound was like a dry martini, and his melodies flowed like sweet wine.

The Jazz Refugee Project in Phoeniz, Arizona, is offering relocation aid for musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The project, set up by the drummer R. R. Phaneuf (aka DrSnazzy), makes this offer:

Once you are part of the Jazz Refugee Project, we will help connect you with shelter, food, clothing, and an excellent support network. We will be coordinating benefit concerts across the Phoenix area to help all Jazz Refugee Project participants. Funds from these concerts, along with support from sponsor families, will help address your financial needs.

Contact information is at the project’s web site.

Dick McGarvin writes from Los Angeles:

Your blog about watching the silent television images of the New Orleans disaster while listening to Miles’ recording of “Basin Street Blues” was quite moving. And, having played that recording many times, I could hear it without even taking the album off the shelf.

Richard Tabnik writes:

heard the ‘new’ bird and diz?
amazing…if that had come out 60 years ago, the entire concept of saxophone would be different
whew!

From the August 8 Rifftides posting:

Throughout, Gillespie’s control, range, harmonic ingenuity, melodic inventiveness and time—above all, his time—are breathtaking. In these performances, he and Parker give profound meaning to Dizzy’s frequently-quoted description of Bird as, “the other half of my heartbeat.”

To read the whole entry, go here.

For a while last night, I watched the latest images of New Orleans with the television babble turned off. From the CD player came the 1963 Miles Davis recording of “Basin Street Blues,” its muted trumpet solo a long, slow memory of loss, Victor Feldman’s piano choruses laced with hope. The music provided more optimism that the city would revive than the combined banalities of all of the officials, preachers and celebrities the cable channels keep looping through their coverage. Then, it was sound up on the TV and back to the reality jolt that we all need if resolve to resurrect the city is to overcome fiscal, social and political obstacles. For ten minutes, though, Miles calmed the spirit, and Vic Feldman buoyed it, and that helped ease the ache of witnessing the anguish of a place I know and love.

Several days ago, DevraDoWrite posted a piece about the all-but-forgotten guitarist Brick Fleagle. I then sent her a message that mentioned another important, now obscure, musician with an unusual name. She researched Fud Livingston and came up with a fascinating report. Here is a little of what she discovered.

Fud Livingston (né: Anthony Joseph Livingston). Born April 10, 1906, in Charleston, S.C., USA, he died on March 25, 1957, in New York, NY. USA. Fud originally studied Piano, Clarinet and Sax. His first professional experience came as a member of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where for five years he played sax and did arranging. After Whiteman, he worked with Freddie Rich and with Andre Kostelanetz, and others.

There was much more to Livingston. To read what Devra found, go to DevraDoWrite. Then, listen to Livingston’s advanced 1927 arrangement of his “Imagination” for the Charleston Chasers, a band that included Pee Wee Russell and Red Nichols. Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords has thirty-six mentions of Livingston and includes transcriptions of parts of “Imagination.”

A Rifftides reader writes:

While you admit that the problems New Orleans faced and knowledge of what was necessary go back to Camille and beyond, indeed had to have been known 300 years ago when the city was built, the only person who comes in for blame is, guess who?, George W. Bush.

This is really so tiresome. It seems to me a lot of people for a long time have been playing fast and loose with protecting New Orleans from a bad storm, and, sadly, the worst has come to be. Last week was not exactly the finest hour for a lot of folks: the Mayor of New Orleans and his police department; the governor of Louisiana, and the directors of FEMA and DHS. And New Orleans flood and hurricane protection has been underfunded for decades. But what do liberals care anymore? (And I say
this as someone who proudly called himself one for years, until liberalism slowly, since the late 60s, wandered into the swamp of bad ideas). Denounce Bush and, as Lenin said, everyone will know everything.

Doug Responds:
However you care to tie Lenin’s statement to current events and politics, this is what he actually said in a speech in October, 1917, when soldiers and workers led by his Bosheviks were storming the Winter Palace.

Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion of everything, and do everything consciously. – V. I. Lenin

As things turned out, that admirable idea of openness was not an operating principal of the Bolsheviks after they morphed into the Communist Party and formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Claiming the virtues of a free flow of information and assuring it in a political system are quite different matters. Governmental power wants secrecy. A free people is reluctant to allow secrecy. So far in our nation, the people have won that ceaseless struggle, but, as Wendell Phillips said 153 years ago, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That applies to threats from inside, even at the top, as well as to those from outside.

Following up on yesterday’s posting about the lack of preparedness for Katrina, Rifftides reader Garret Gannuch points us toward an October 2001 Scientific American article. The piece by Mark Fischetti provides additional detail about what it will take to help nature rebuild parts of the Mississippi Delta and to protect New Orleans from the river and Lake Pontchartrain. The challenge is rooted as deeply in human nature as in physical and fiscal difficulty.

Since the late 1980s Louisiana’s senators have made various pleas to Congress to fund massive remedial work. But they were not backed by a unified voice. L.S.U. (Louisiana State University) had its surge models, and the Corps had others. Despite agreement on general solutions, competition abounded as to whose specific projects would be most effective. The Corps sometimes painted academics’ cries about disaster as veiled pitches for research money. Academia occasionally retorted that the Corps’s solution to everything was to bulldoze more dirt and pour more concrete, without scientific rationale. Meanwhile oystermen and shrimpers complained that the proposals from both the scientists and the engineers would ruin their fishing grounds.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that “bureaucracy’s not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people.” Let us hope that he and the Congress are able to unify the myriad special interests—political, governmental, bureaucratic, industrial and scientific—that have collided to discourage correction of what man has done to the Mississippi. Here’s a bit more from Fischetti’s Scientific American piece. Remember, he wrote this four years ago.

If Congress and President George W. Bush hear a unified call for action, authorizing it would seem prudent. Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country’s seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America’s largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate. The other million inside the bowl would live at the bottom of a sinking crater, surrounded by ever higher walls, trapped in a terminally ill city dependent on nonstop pumping to keep it alive.

To read all of Fischetti’s article, go here.

Demonstrating the principle enunciated in the first item in the right-hand column, we have a tip from the same helpful Rifftides reader who raised the question about President Bush. He alerts us to a reliable source in the U.S. for the Buddy De Franco CD discussed in Doug’s Picks (also on your right). It is Worlds Records. Thank you, helpful reader.

During my coverage of the aftermath of hurricane Camille in 1969, I talked with experts who predicted that some day New Orleans would not be so “lucky.” Eventually, they said, unless massive preventive steps were taken, there would be a storm so big that the levees would not hold, the pumps would fail, the city would be inundated, the death and destruction would be like something out of the Old Testament. No one said that the devastation would be unimaginable; they were imagining it. There have been warnings ever since. There were warnings even before Camille.
In its October, 2004, issue, The National Geographic published an article by Joel K. Bourne, Jr., reporting on predictions by scientists and engineers of a disaster that would someday strike New Orleans. The piece included this vision:

A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

Last fall when that article appeared, what it described had not happened. This fall, it has. Bourne wrote about protective action recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers and a coalition of scientists, environmentalists and business people—and about the Bush administration’s refusal to commit to the spending it would have taken to start correcting the problem. The President said the other day that no one could have envisioned the levees giving way. Read the Geographic’s stark account. Then, decide whether the leaders of this administration understood what the experts were telling them and, if so, why they did not insist on immediate Congressional approval of flood-control funding.
This is not a question of hindsight being the best foresight. It is a scandalous rejection of foresight that was based on experience, evidence and expertise. It has gone on for decades at all levels of government; parish, city, state and federal. When the relocation, burials, cleanup and rebuilding are done, will there be leadership to put a plan in place to protect New Orleans from the next category 4 or 5 storm? That storm will come.

For anyone partial to Roy Hargrove, this would be a fine week to be in New York. He is appearing Wednesday through Sunday at The Jazz Gallery with his quartet (pianist Danny Grisett, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchison). Each night, Hargrove will perform with a different fellow trumpeter. His guests will be, in this order, Darren Barrett, Claudio Roditi, Tom Harrell, Nicholas Payton and Marcus Belgrave. Hargrove can be uneven, but when he is inspired—especially playing ballads on flugelhorn—he creates melodies on a level with some of the greatest jazz soloists of any era. All five nights at the Jazz Gallery are virtually guaranteed to be interesting, but it is most intriguing to anticipate on the same stand Hargrove and Harrell, two of the most inventive trumpeters of our time. This pairing could fairly be called an event.

The Chicago Jazz Archive is maintaining a list of New Orleans musicians found safe. The list is short but growing. Deborah Gillaspie, the archive curator, asks that anyone with verified reports of survivors e-mail her. She emphasizes that the CJA is not searching for missing people, only reporting on musicians who have been found. Ms. Gillaspie says, “Please don’t email or call ASKING about people.”
Among those located: Al Belletto, Henry Butler, Fats Domino, Johnny Vidacovich, Bill Summers, Irvin Mayfield and Banu Gibson. Go here to see the list so far.
Rather than duplicate effort, we direct you once again to the comprehensive set of links to blogs covering Katrina and its aftermath at Terry Teachout’s Arts Journal About Last Night. He and his blog partner Laura Demanski (aka Our Girl in Chicago) are offering a valuable service by constructing this clearinghouse of information to supplement traditional news sources.

Seattle’s Earshot Jazz magazine has a nice article by Philip Coady on Lucky Thompson. It includes stories about Clark Terry’s visits to his old friend before Thompson died. Coady also describes Ellis and Branford Marsalis going to Thompson’s hospital room and drawing out a man who had been mostly silent for years.

Branford played for Lucky, and in a moment none of us will ever forget, Lucky asked for something. In my years of visiting Lucky, I was always trying to discover what I could bring for him from the “outside.” “Is there anyting I can do for you?” I asked. But Lucky always replied, “Just be happy. That’s all I want.” This was repeated hundreds of times. Frankly, I had just never heard Lucky ask for anything—until this moment.

He asked Branford to play some more. “I’d like to hear more,” he said. This was coming from a man who hadn’t asked for anything in years.

Go here to read the piece and all of Earshot’s online pdf edition. Be patient. It takes a moment for the pdf to download.

“Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it.”
—George W. Bush

Among the many New Orleanians I have been worrying about is Al Belletto, the leader of the Al Belletto Sextet and, in recent years, also of a booting big band. Calls to him and his companion Linda Rhodes in the city and to their vacation retreat in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, went nowhere; the 504 and 601 area codes are a memory. I kept wondering if I would see them in one of those endless loops of television footage.
I answered the phone yesterday and heard, “This is Belletto and Linda. We’re in Dallas. We’re okay.”
When Katrina was aiming down New Orleans’ throat, they got out of town and headed for their place in Mississippi. Then, the storm turned eastward. It scoured virtually all of Bay St. Louis, including their house, off the landscape. By then, they had gone inland. After twenty hours stranded in McComb, Mississippi, they started driving slowly west and in a couple of days made the one-day trip to Dallas. They found refuge in the home of Al’s son and his family. Al thinks that they will be living there for a long time.
Belletto’s horns and books of arrangements for the sextet and the big band were in his house in the city. He thinks it likely that his house and Linda’s were swept away or ruined beyond restoring and that everything in them is gone. His and Linda’s lives are altered beyond description. The difference between them and hundreds, probably thousands of others, is that they have their lives. In the wake of Katrina, that is what New Orleanians consider good fortune.

Rummaging through biographical facts, I was reminded that the great pianist Jimmy Rowles and Minnie Pearl, the comic doyenne of country music both died in early 1996. That recalled a story Rowles told over lunch one day a few weeks before his death.
When he was Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist, he said, they were on one of those 1960s television daytime variety shows; Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin. Another of the guests was Minnie Pearl in full array, the straw hat with price tag dangling, the flour sack dress, the exaggerated southern drawl. Her pianist didn’t show. The producer suggested that Jimmy accompany Minnie Pearl, and he agreed. She asked him, “Waal, Jimmih, what dew yew think we oughta dew?”
After a long pause, Rowles said, “How about ‘Lush Life’?”