Archives for September 2013

For a couple of hundred years, newspapers used courtesy titles. Many papers that equated Abraham Lincoln with the devil often wrote about “Mr. Lincoln” or “The President,” even as their editorials pilloried him. Up until about the time of Ronald Regan, in news columns and in radio and television newscasts, whoever was president received the respect of title. The operating theory in most of US journalism was that the office warrants respect regardless of the politics and policies of its occupant.

Sometime in the 1970s or early ‘80s, liberationists of various persuasions pressured news organizations (or, if you insist, “the media”) to drop “Mrs.,” ”Miss,” “Mr,” “Dr.” and so forth. Their argument was that the titles offended an emerging sense that such distinctions are discriminatory, offensive to equality. Listening to the news on National Public Radio this morning, I found myself wincing every time anchors and field reporters called the president “Obama.” Today, after the first reference, we rarely hear or see titles, even when the second reference is to the President of The United States.

Among the few exceptions in print are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. I must acknowledge NPR’s Morning Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. Mr. Simon uses titles when he refers to people in news stories and interviews.

As for equality, I have never heard the argument for courtesy titles put better than the late Norman Isaacs put it in 1985. A former chairman of the National News Council and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Mr. Isaacs (pictured) was the keynote speaker at the first of a series of journalism ethics conferences that I put together for the Foundation for American Communications (FACS). His audience was a roomful of high-powered editors, publishers, reporters, journalism critics and educators. Here is an excerpt from his talk:

Do courtesy titles matter? A Howard University professor recently came up to me and said, “I don’t know of a black man or woman of substance who doesn’t wince when seeing his or her name in print and who is referred to only by the last name after the first full name reference. It takes their minds back to the days when we were all called ‘boy.’” I was taken by surprise by his candor and passion on the subject, yet I shouldn’t have been surprised. I have run into so many snide and negative comments about the practice that I feel we do great damage to the psyche of the citizenry at large. What does a young boy think when his father accomplishes something of merit and is called “Wilson” in the newspaper report? Can the boy address his teacher by only a last name? The Roper organization has done two recent polls on this matter. Both show widespread disapproval of the absence of courtesy titles. More telling, the disapproval is remarkably high among women who do not have college degrees. Do editors care? I pray so. I hope they care more about the families who buy their newspapers than the young staff reporters who hold such strong ideas about what newspaper policies ought to be.

Mr. Isaacs went on to quote studies that Kristen McGraff, president of Minnesota Opinion Research Incorporated, did for the ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors.

She traced a large part of the credibility gap to the young transient reporters on staff. Young transients, she said, often have views and opinions that counter the views and opinions of people who buy and read the newspaper. This is also true of the millions who watch TV. The credibility gap is real and it runs damn deep.

In 2013 are young transient reporters committed to social change still driving the idea that courtesy titles in print and broadcast news are undemocratic? Do three decades with courtesy titles all but banished mean that they are gone forever? The name of that conference was Journalism Ethics: Why Change? The question it implied is worth asking today, when ratings and circulation are declining:

Why not change?

Gerald Wilson celebrated his 95th birthday yesterday. He looks back on a career studded with achievement as a trumpeter, bandleader, composer and pioneering arranger. Early on in his writing Wilson achieved the unexpected, incorporating daring classical harmonic techniques in his big band arrangements and making them accessible to general audiences. He is the personification of a lifelong learner. Following big successes capped by a sold-out tour with Ella Fitzgerald, Wilson dissolved his successful post-World War II big band because he thought he needed more study. From my notes for Mosaic’s 5-CD set of Wilson’s Pacific Jazz recordings (out of print but available as an MP3 download), here is a section about that period in the forties when he had reached the top.

He thought he had got there too soon. In 1947, he disbanded. “I decided when I closed with Ella that I was going to have to study some more. I wanted to be able to write anything,” he told NPR’s Jazz Profiles. “I wanted to be able to write for the symphony orchestra, I wanted to write for the movies, I wanted to write for television. I wanted to be able to do it with great speed, great accuracy, and that’s what I did. But I didn’t stop playing.”

Wilson holed up with scores, analyzing works by Stravinsky, Debussy, Falla, Ravel, Kabalevsky, Khatchaturian, Bartok. In a prodigy of self-teaching, he absorbed the techniques of those classical masters. He would apply their lessons for all the years of his long career. He achieved each of his goals, including works for symphony orchestra, motion pictures and TV, but especially writing prolifically for big bands, his own and others. Half a year into his study exile, he got a call from another leader asking him for help. It was Duke Ellington. He wrote for Ellington off and on for most of the rest of Duke’s life, and occasionally filled out the trumpet section when Ellington needed an additional horn. Later in 1948, he joined Count Basie, playing and writing. “That was study, too,” he says, “sitting where swing really happened. That great rhythm section was really the common denominator for swing.” After Basie disbanded in 1949, Wilson joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. For Basie he wrote the lovely ballad “Katy” and with Basie composed “St. Louis Baby.” For Gillespie he arranged “Guarachi Guaro” which became influential in the development of Latin jazz in the forties and had a second life when Cal Tjader adapted it in the fifties. During all of that extracurricular activity Wilson continued studying and preparing for his next steps.

The next steps included the 1950s Wilson band loaded with soloists including Joe Pass, Bud Shank, Carmel Jones, Richard Groove Holmes, Harold Land, Joe Maini and a broad cross section of the cream of Los Angeles musicians. Video from those days is scarce, but here are the closing moments from one of Frank Evans’ TV shows. Wilson’s band plays one of his favored forms, a blues waltz, “Blues for Yna Yna.” Wilson solos on trumpet, Teddy Edwards on tenor saxophone, Jack Wilson on piano.

To hear what Wilson has been up to lately—particularly in regard to his remarkable harmonic imagination—I recommend his 2011 album Legacy.

If you, too, did not make it to Detroit over the weekend for the city’s jazz festival, reading about it may be small consolation. Nonetheless, Mark Stryker’s account in The Detroit Free Press conveys his excitement and covers the highlights as he heard and saw them. Stryker is not a sports reporter, but he named a most valuable player.

■MVP Award: The majestic drummer Billy Hart brought his extraordinary ability to both respond to and spontaneously shape a band’s conception to three performances with three different groups. Freedom, discipline, daring, passion, swing, broken rhythm, orchestral textures, interactive sparring, shocking dynamics, astounding creativity and authority. Want to know what jazz is really about? Listen to Billy Hart. (With the Saxophone Summit, David Weiss’ The Cookers, Quest)

(photo by Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

For all of Stryker’s story, click here. Don’t miss the highlighted sidebars and slide shows.

Here is Hart with his quartet at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York earlier this year with a lovely medium-tempo blues in G, title unknown. From left to right in the video: Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner, Ben Street, Billy Hart.

Go here for a recent Rifftides review of the Hart quartet’s new album.