Rifftides reader Eric Bruskin reacts to yesterday’s quote from Bertrand Russell:

Was this before or after Yeats put it much more memorably:

The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity …

That is not the only memorable line in William Butler Yeats’s The Second Coming (1921). I wonder whether any poem has had greater effect on observers of the chaos of the Twentieth Century and the early years of this one. It inspired, among other writings, the title of Joan Didion’s brilliant book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
—W.B. Yeats
On the off chance that you need help with Yeats’s mysticism and symbols (I’m raising my hand), here’s a start.

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.”