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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Around The Blogosphere

August 31, 2007 by Doug Ramsey

Mr. JazzWax, aka Marc Myers, tracked down the venerable baritone saxophonist Danny Bank, one of the few Charlie Parker sidemen still with us, to talk about Bird. Among Bank’s anecdotes:

“One morning, sometime in 1951, I think, I took out one of the Sonatas for Woodwind by Hindemith and used it to practice. That night, after I played on two or three recording dates that day, I went to Birdland to hear Charlie play.
“As soon as he saw me come into the club, he started to pay the Hindemith Sonata I had played earlier while laughing through his mouthpiece. Bird had been listening to me through the walls! His ear was so amazing that he played what I practiced from memory when he saw me that night.

I just discovered that I had a defective link to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math, the blog of The Bad Plus. I fixed the link. Use it to see Iverson’s tribute to the late British critic Richard Cook and read Cook’s evaluation of one of Horace Silver’s milestone recordings. I was startled to see how young Cook was. Dead at fifty. Enjoy life, folks.
The veteran Pennsylvania jazz broadcaster Russ Neff has launched a blog. Like his program, it’s called My Favorite Things. Neff’s first postings are based on archive interviews with George Shearing and Ray Brown.
Other Matters
If you’ve had nothing better to do, you may have been following every detail of the mens-room adventures of Idaho Senator Larry Craig and the apparent suicide attempt of film personality Owen Wilson. Society of Professional Journalists President Christine Tatum doesn’t mention Craig in her most recent Freedom Of The Prez posting, but this paragraph applies to his ordeal.

I completely get the public personality-or-official lecture delivered in Media Law 101. Heck, I even get the far more advanced versions gleaned over the course of my career. You cast yourself into the limelight or get yourself elected to public office, and you ask for the scrutiny. You ask for the criticism, the leering, the praise, the fawning, the constant flashbulbs, the boatloads of letters and e-mail and the stupid guy begging for an autograph while you’re in a public restroom. Once you enter that white-hot public spotlight, you can’t leave it whenever you choose.

She deals directly with the unfortunate Mr. Wilson’s being circled not only by the tabloid sharks but also by an appalling number of supposedly responsible journalists.

But journalists. What’s their responsibility when an Owen Wilson has a breakdown and asks the media (and, by extension, the general public) to allow him to heal in private? He’s no Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan or Nicole Ritchie driving under the influence on public streets. He’s not even a Britney Spears, who has an incredible knack for taking her wackiness public.
Might this be a time when we let a prominent person who apparently struggles with depression have the solace and privacy he needs? I certainly hope so.

So do I. To read all of Tatum’s posting, go here.

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Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Doug’s Picks

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

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Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger

Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger A generation of Canadian musicians is coming to prominence in their youth and making substantial impressions. One is drummer Harry Vetro. After he was graduated from the University of Toronto Jazz Program, the 23-year-old spent much of last year exploring his country as it celebrated its 150th year of […]

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Weekend Listening Tip: Maria Schneider & The SRJO

Jim Wilke tells us that his Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Maria Schneider conducting the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The program comes from his recording of the second of Ms. Schneider’s two concerts with the SRJO early this month. Her work has brought her five Grammy Awards, victories in many readers and critics […]

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Monday Recommendation, A Day Late: Atlantis Quartet

Atlantis Quartet, Hello Human (Shifting Paradigm Records) If you visit the Shifting Paradigm Records website in search of Hello Human, you may be startled to see the legend, “Name Your Price,” near a box with a dollar sign and an empty space waiting to be filled. In fairness, the offer has a notation that reads, […]

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Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown) Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world. Crosby retained that distinction until the expanding dominance […]

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Monday Recommendation (Unavoidably Delayed)

Wayne Shorter, Emanon (Blue Note) Although Wayne Shorter’s saxophone artistry and that of his quartet need no enhancement, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra shares the first disc of this three-CD collection. As always, the Orpheus is impressive for the precision of its musicianship, but the combination plods compared with the exhilaration of the second and third […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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