Recorded music has never been as omnipresent as it is in 2011. If, heaven forbid, there should be a supermarket, gas station, dentist’s office or public street not blessed with speakers providing perpetual Muzak, that’s why Jobs made iPods. As technology moves from CDs to digital downloads to—perhaps—receptors implanted in the brain, it is instructive to look back to a time when finding music on record was less easy and much more dangerous. The time was the 1940s and ‘50s in the Soviet Union.

The subject of rib music came up in a discussion among jazz researchers about Willis Conover, whose broadcasts on the Voice of America constituted one of the United States’ most effective tools of Cold War cultural diplomacy. As Conover won friends for the US during a time of international tension so powerful that worldwide nuclear destruction was a fear on both sides of the Atlantic. Reception of his Music USA programs was banned in the USSR and its satellites, but his subversive audience there numbered in the millions. Many shortwave listeners learned English from Conover as they hid with their radios, risked arrest and absorbed music symbolizing freedom that was forbidden to them. A major reason for Conover’s popularity was the scarcity of recordings, particularly of music from the west. A few records made their way into the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, where controls were less strict, but they were unlikely to be of jazz or rock and roll. Almost no records got in from beyond the Iron Curtain.

The ingenuity of young people with technical skills led to the discovery that prohibited records—and illegal recordings of Conover’s programs— could be duplicated by pressing copies on an unconventional material—x-ray plates that had been discarded. The plates had images of broken ribs, cracked skulls, damaged spinal cords, chest cavities. There was a large and continuous supply, they were cheap, and millions of pressing made from them reached Soviet listeners through the x-ray press or roentgenizdat, the equivalent of the samizdat that reproduced and distributed illicit literature. The sound quality was dreadful, but people were hungry for the music.

For much of this information and for access to the rare photographs of three rib music records, I am beholden to Cyril Moshkow, the editor of Jazz Ru.Magazine. Cyril provided this account of how underground manufacturers got their raw material and made the records.

One would apply (unofficially, of course) to the local state-owned clinic (there was no private clinics anyway) and ask the nun at the “Roentgen room” (X-ray laboratory) if they had old X-ray plates. They did, and, according to the state fire protection rules, were supposed to get rid of them every three months; but clinic personnel normally consisted mostly of women, and they were reluctant to move hundreds of pounds of used X-ray plates themselves, and therefore very grateful to unknown polite young men who offered to “throw away” the plates at no charge.

Then, the dusty plates were cleaned, sorted, and cut in approximately round shape, the size of a 10-inch 78 record; an industrial beam compass was used to mark first the rim, and then the center, where then a spindle hole would be punched. All this would happen, of course, not at an industrial facility (which were controlled by government), but in somebody’s apartment or, in smaller towns, in a country house.

The final stage was the recording; some underground record copy facilities had professional equipment, some would use two gramophones with the tone arm of one of them loaded with some weight, and connected with the tone arm of the playing device with a tight cord. The recording device looked roughly like a gramophone; only, the “tone arm” was thicker and heavier, as it would cut the groove, not play it. These makeshift systems would, of course, produce a much worse quality than the regular recorders, but it would sell nevertheless, as jazz or early rock records were not officially available in the Soviet Union (with rare exceptions) until the 1970s. Even then, the “bone music” or “rib music,” as people would call the unofficial X-ray plate records, would still be available in the black market. I have even seen “rib music” recorded at 33 1/3 RPM!
Those records would be called “rib music” even if the material was not X-ray plates. They were made on film used for professional maps or technical drawings, which was of a much better quality, but much more expensive and harder to obtain.

Cyril Moshkow persuaded the owner of the rib music photographs, Igor Belyi, to give Rifftides permission to use them. Mr. Belyi asked that we provide a link to his website. We are happy to do so and hope that our readers who know Russian will find his work informative.

The fine jazz photographer Ron Hudson died at his Seattle home on Tuesday. He was 71. For more than 30 years, Hudson captured memorable images of Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Woody Herman, Milt Jackson, Bud Shank and dozens more of the leading musicians of his time. He worked exclusively in black and white and won admiration for the clarity of his prints. As noted in this Rifftides review of a book of his collected photographs, Hudson had the gift of anticipating a crucial stage in the act of improvisation and releasing his shutter at precisely the right millisecond. Most of his pictures were intimate action portraits, but he sometimes caught large groups in dramatic moments, as in this panoramic shot of a convocation of bassists a few years ago in a tribute to Ray Brown at the Centrum Port Townsend Jazz Festival.

A 2006 Katy Bourne profile of the photographer on All About Jazz includes several of Hudson’s photographs.

Many listeners know that Arturo O’Farrill is a talented New York pianist who leads Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. He has been a considerable force in Latin music in the US for three decades. Fewer may be aware that he is the son of Chico O’Farrill, a Cuban of Irish origin who was one of the most distinctive and versatile composers and arrangers in American jazz. In this week’s Village Voice, Larry Blumenfeld tells the father’s and son’s stories in the context of Arturo’s emotional trip to Havana with his mother and sons. He made the trip with full knowledge that anti-Castro Cubans in the US, including his friend Paquito D’Rivera, feel that any recognition of or cooperation with Cuba will be used by the Castro government as a propaganda weapon. From Blumenfeld’s piece:

Arturo squints into the sun and explains that, late in his life, after his father’s career had revived, Chico was ready to go back and play his music. He wanted to return. “But then his health took a really bad turn,” Arturo says. “It became impossible. So I’m completing that trip for him.” But this isn’t just a personal matter, he explains. “I’m not interested in making light of the fact that Cuban politics is rife with corruption and political imprisonment. I’m also not delicate about communicating that America is a nation built on tremendous bloodshed and continuous imperialism. I don’t think those are things that should be run from or ignored. They’re just historical facts. Anybody who’s half-awake in the world will understand the brutality of both sides. Music courses through and above all that. We need to connect, not disconnect.”

Blumenfeld’s lengthy article about O’Farrill’s visit to his father’s homeland has the flavor of a well-reported documentary. To read it, go here.

I should have alerted you earlier to another web concert by the excellent Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. It will be broadcast beginning at 1 pm (PST) today. Here are the details in an announcement from the SRJO.

Tune in to hear highlights of the SRJO’s “Jazz Goes To the Movies” (recorded in November 2011) on the next Jazz Northwest on KPLU 88.5FM – KPLU. It’s a concert of movie themes and incidental music played by the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The concert, directed by Clarence Acox and Michael Brockman is part of the annual series presented by the SRJO. Mission Impossible, The Pink Panther, Days of Wine and Roses and other jazz from the movies is included…we’ll even have some film clips (a rarity for radio!).

Sunday, February 20 at 1 PM Pacific on Jazz Northwest on 88-5, KPLU and streamed live at kplu.org. Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for KPLU. The program is also available as a podcast at kplu.org.

Sorry for the short notice; I’m buried in a Modern Jazz Quartet project that I’ll tell you about later.

Dave Frishberg will be featured this weekend at one of the main concerts of the Portland Jazz Festival. It’s an unusual gig for Frishberg; he frequently plays piano in his adopted hometown but rarely sings his songs there. In Oregon Music News, Jack Berry opens his piece about Frishberg with a story of the time Frishberg got a startling surprise when he spotted an old friend. Here’s a link.
To see the PDX Jazz festival schedule, go here.

This is what dominates the sky tonight. The photograph snapped by an inadequate camera merely suggests its chilly magnificence.
Hoagy Carmichael captured the mood the winter moon generates. This is from his 1956 album with the Pacific Jazzmen. Art Pepper has the first chorus on alto saxophone, with muted trumpet by Don Fagerquist. Jimmy Rowles is the pianist.

George Shearing died early today at the age of 91. With his quintet, Shearing used a locked-hands technique at the piano, blending with vibes and guitar to develop a style that resonated with listeners and became one of the most recognizable sounds in an era when jazz was still at the core of popular music. He was already a success because of his hit version of “September in the Rain” when the record of his 1952 composition “Lullaby of Birdland” solidified his popularity. The song also provided Shearing a reliable annuity; dozens of instrumentalists and singers incorporated it into their repertoires and recorded it.

Shearing, born blind, had become widely known in his native England when he moved to the United States in 1947. He was an early admirer of Bud Powell and quickly adapted to the new strain of music that came to be known as bebop. He was a fleet and inventive improviser whose brilliance was sometimes taken for granted because of his band’s popular success.

Fellow musicians recognized his gift. Shearing’s contemporary Dave Brubeck, told the Associated Press today, “I consider him one of the greatest musical minds I’ve ever been around. In the ’50s, George paved the way for me and the (Modern Jazz Quartet), and even today jazz players, especially pianists, are indebted to him.”
To read all of the AP’s Shearing obituary, click here.
When vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake joined Shearing in 1967, the other members were guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Bob Whitlock and drummer Colin Bailey. Shoemake stayed for seven years.

“He was tough if somebody wasn’t up to par,” Shoemake told me today, “but if you met his standards, he couldn’t do enough for you. When you go to work six, seven nights a week with a great band like that, you’re going to really improve. I had great admiration for him. Harmonically, I don’t think that he had any peers; he was as brilliant as anybody I ever met. His touch and his voicings and his chord substitutions on songs were from the heavens. Bill Evans, of course, was very influenced by way he used block chords. Bill very openly admitted that he’d learned a lot of that from Shearing. With George, I went from being an anonymous studio musician to someone sort of well known as a jazz vibes player. All the guys who played for him loved him.”

Here is Shearing in the early 1950s with his composition “Conception,” which became a jazz standard. The quintet has Don Elliott, vibes; Chuck Wayne, guitar; Denzil Best, drums; and John Levy, bass.

George Shearing, RIP.