In the right-hand column under Doug’s Picks, you will find all new selections except for Food. We shall stay with crab cakes for now. I would appreciate suggestions from you folks about new culinary entries. The e-mail address is also on the right.

From the web site of San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club of California comes a transcript containing what may be the most unexpected question ever asked the head of a country in a public forum. The club’s speaker last November was Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. At the end of a question and answer session covering the European Union, Turkey, Iraq and the nature of elections in his post-Communist nation, this was the exchange:

Q: If you could be any jazz pianist, who would you be?

A: I will never be a jazz pianist in my life. Nevertheless, I think that jazz music for us is very important, and I must say that in the early 1960s, the beginning of jazz clubs in the Czech Republic, in Prague, was part of the culture of revolution which brought about the 1960s and the Prague Spring and all of that – so jazz plays a very important part in our lives.

Klaus thinks jazz is so important that in February of 2004, he initiated regular concerts of the music at Prague Castle, the Czech counterpart of the White House. With his selection of honored performer at the first of those concerts, he disclosed his levels of taste and sophistication in jazz. Klaus’s choice was the veteran pianist Emil Viklický, who appeared with his regular sidemen, bassist František Uhlíř and drummer Laco Troop. The Italian trumpeter Franco Ambrosetti was guest soloist. It was as if George W. Bush were to personally arrange for a concert in the East Room by Kenny Barron’s trio, or Bill Charlap’s, with Tom Harrell or Clark Terry sitting in for a few tunes.
I’ll pause while you collect yourselves.
(Pause)
That Prague Castle concert was recorded. Shortly after a recent tour of Japan, Viklický sent Rifftides a message about the concert’s aftermath, a new concert honoring another famous Czech musician, and a quaint story about Paul Desmond. I have edited his message only lightly in order to retain its charm and the sense of his voice.

The decision to issue recorded material on the CD came directly from President Klaus just shortly after the concert. The funny thing was that the president was leaving for China /official State visit/ on that very night!!! at 23.30. We have played an encore “The Slow Boat to China” about 22.10 and Vaclav Klaus was still sitting in the first row and enjoying himself tremendously. He really is and always was a true jazz lover for many years. I remember him in seventies as scientist/economist visiting SHQ band of Karel Velebny in Reduta Jazz Club. Karel Velebny was a key figure of czech modern jazz – everybody was in his band — George Mraz, Jan Arnet, Jan Konopasek. I have stayed with Karel´s band from 1974 up to his death in 1989 – just shortly before the collapse of communism.

There is a new CD coming out from Prague Castle – George Mraz’s 60th
birthday. Multisonic asked me to help with mixing and arranging things since George himself is not here in Prague. I will push Multisonic owner, Mr.Karel Vagner, to have better distribution for abroad.

While siting in plane from Nagoya for many hours, my 66 years old drummer Laco Tropp told me a story about Paul Desmond from Berlin festival in 1965: Paul have played there with Brubeck´s quartet and have met Czech musicians backstage. He was very curious to meet them and was hanging with Czech musicians quite a lot of time. Admiring especially their sense of humor. Especially Karel Velebny was a great personality / puns and jokes all the time/. Paul went to bars and restaurants with Czech guys, drinked beers with them, mostly talking with Karel. Laco Tropp is not very good in English, so he didn’t understand topics of the conversation. But he said Desmond really spend hours with Czech guys. Karel Velebny was quite OK with languages, unfortunately we can’t ask him anymore. Paul and Karel were very similar types – fragile, glasses, clever, mostly smilling, very good with words…

Best wishes,
Emil

Francis Davis, the jazz critic of The Village Voice, likes the new Sonny Rollins album, about which I have enthused a couple of times. On the other hand:

The problem is the string-of-solos format: When Rollins goes first, everything else is anticlimactic, and when he goes last, as is more often the case, the wait seems forever—you wish he’d give trombone and piano their own features and grab the spotlight. Why have Bob Cranshaw play electric bass if all you ask him to do is walk? The constant buzz is a distraction, and an upright would blend more handsomely with the wood in Rollins’s cello-like lower register.

Davis goes on to write:

Why am I so wild about Without a Song, then?

For his column-length answer, salted with personal anecdotes and an amusing run at Down Beat, go here.

I wrote this piece before Katrina sent New Orleans into agony. I almost held it back until the city revives. But that is likely to be years. Because I believe in the indomitable spirit of a place that is a part of my heartbeat and because WDSU’s news department is doing the kind of great work it always did in times of crisis, I offer this little recollection of the Crescent City in better times.
For a few years in the 1960s, when broadcasting companies still operated both radio and television stations, I had the good fortune to work for WDSU in New Orleans. The station was founded on the notion that public service was at least as important as profit. Edgar Stern, who owned the company, and A. Louis Read, who ran the TV, AM and FM stations, were committed to having the best broadcast news operation in the south, which they did. We covered the civil rights struggle, including school desegregation, not only for local viewers and listeners, but also for the network. NBC News had no bureau in the south then, and we frequently fed the Huntley-Brinkley show major stories on civl rights, Louisiana politics, Jim Garrison’s Kennedy assassination investigation, oil rig fires and hurricanes, among other things that happened in the best news town I ever worked in. I anchored the 6 pm and 10 pm television newscasts and did a fair amount of reporting.
Five nights a week, between the TV newscasts, I conducted a radio discussion program, Closeup, that had guests and invited telephone calls from listeners. This was years before Rush Limbaugh and his ilk laid waste to the idea of civil conversation on the radio. When I suggested that we try the same show on television, the station carved out a slot following the Tonight Show. We found, to our surprise, that a small late-night audience would watch a program whose only visual interest was two or three people discussing ideas and events, with calls from disembodied voices on a speaker phone.
Among the guests were politicians, sports stars, musicians and French Quarter characters. One memorable night during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Jaki Byard, Danny Barker and Paul Desmond came on. I persuaded Byard and Barker to play a couple of piano-guitar duets. How I wish that I had a tape of that program. Desmond, sans horn, sat and grinned in that Cheshire-cat way. Another time, the guests were Woody Herman, George Wein and Sweet Emma Barrett the Bell Gal. Advertising revenues did not exceed the overtime costs of keeping the studio live and the technical staff on duty after midnight, and after a few weeks, Closeup bit the dust. Still, it was the sort of thing with which WDSU was willing to experiment.
Stern, Read and their radio manager Hal Wheelahan indulged my wish to do a jazz program on the radio. For several years, I taped a weekly hour that ran Saturday nights on WDSU-FM and AM. Jazz Review had reviews, plenty of music and visits from New Orleans musicians—Paul Barbarin, Alvin Alcorn, Monk Hazel, Al Belletto, Willie and Earl Turbinton, Eddie Miller, Pete Fountain frequently and, once, the magisterial trumpeter Red Allen. When they were in town, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Gary Burton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson and other itinerant players dropped by. Jazz Review was well sponsored and more than paid for itself. The FM station had a signal that powered across the Gulf Coast flatlands as far as Alabama and up into parts of Georgia. I was astounded to learn years later that the governor of Georgia was a regular listener, long before he became president.
(I’m getting to the Charlie Parker part.)
The theme music for Jazz Review was Charlie Parker’s two perfect choruses on “Funky Blues” from the Jam Session #1 album on Verve. Googling recently, I came across a 2001 interview by the Boston broadcaster Christopher Leydon with the great writer Whitney Balliett. In the program, Balliett is reluctant to be analytical in answering Leydon’s questions. He maintains that music of the quality of Parker’s, Pee Wee Russell’s and Ben Webster’s is laden with secrets. He implies that it cannot be dissected. Leydon plays Parker’s solo for Whitney, who calls it one of his favorite pieces of music.
“He preaches the first couple of measures,” Ballilett says. “Now, that’s full of secrets.”
You can go here to listen to WBUR’s audio stream of the broadcast. Exactly six minutes into it, you’ll get that incredible solo. Whenever I hear Bird play those magical twenty-four bars, they conjure up for me a time in New Orleans when a commercial broadcasting operation had a community-spirited mission and a sense of adventure. If there is one like it anywhere today under the deregulated earnings-driven corporate pressures of 21st Century broadcasting, I’d be happy to know about it.

The new Sonny Rollins CD is out, the one I raved about after I heard the advance a couple of months ago.

Rollins is amazing on the title track and “Where or When.” Stephen Scott’s piano solos, dazzling and capricious, run Sonny a close second. Trombonist Clifton Anderson has a good night, and Bob Cranshaw demonstrates that a great player can give electric bass lines the definition, clarity, and swing of the acoustic instrument.

The album is Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert. Rollins plays with the force of the emotions he took into his concert four days after he witnessed the attacks on the twin towers, a story told by Bob Blumenthal in his notes for the CD. Sonny is elemental in this performance.

The man who created these all-too-human ballets led a life outwardly uneventful, at least by the standards of the best-seller list. He fled the Soviet Union in 1924, settling first in Europe and then in New York City, where he started a dance school and a series of ballet companies. For the rest of his days, he made and rehearsed dances. That was all there was to it, he claimed. Asked on one occasion by a journalist to sum up his life, he replied, “It’s all in the programs.”
—All In The Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, by Terry Teachout

My only conversation with Coltrane took place in 1963 when he was appearing with his quartet at a Cleveland jazz club called Leo’s Casino. I was the Cleveland correspondent for Down Beat and I was assigned to interview him.
“Why?” asked Coltrane on the telephone.
I allowed that he must be tired of interviews.
“Shouldn’t I be?” he asked. “I can’t explain anything. It’s all in the music. Come to the club and hear the music.”
—Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, by Doug Ramsey

As noted here earlier, to his credit Teachout temporarily refitted his Arts Journal About Last Night into a blog clearinghouse on Hurricane Katrina. In the process, he discovered something about this capacious and puzzling new medium.

As Hurricane Katrina finally slowed down and Monday lurched to a close, I stopped updating “Live from Katrina” and started thinking about the implications of what I’d been doing for the past two days. On the one hand, nothing could have been less typical of “About Last Night” than for me to have thrown myself head first into so unlikely an undertaking. Yet at the same time, nothing could be more characteristic of the new world of new media. One of the most distinctive properies of blogs, after all, is that they are instantly and infinitely malleable at the whim of the blogger. “About Last Night” is about art because Our Girl in Chicago and I want it to be about art. If we decided at noon tomorrow that it would henceforth be about hockey, or smoked salmon, there’d be nothing to stop us from changing course at 12:01. Instead, we decided to make a one-day detour into citizen journalism—and the blogosphere promptly sat up and took notice.

Read all of TT’s Katrinablog reflections here.

From a Rifftides reader:

Thanks for the postings and links on New Orleans. Teachout’s site led me to great info. I’m from New Orleans and most of my family still lives there. Naturally I lost contact during the storm and the WDSU site had the early video and allowed me to see the area where they live. Fortunately most of my relatives evacuated. What a disaster! Thanks again for your concern.

The worst of Katrina has passed New Orleans. Now, flooding is the big concern. With dozens of news organizations and hundreds of bloggers covering the storm and the city’s agony, there is little point in my attempting to add much from this distance. Monitoring tells me that my alma mater, WDSU-TV, is doing a good job of continuing updates, as is The Times-Picayune.
Here’s a recent entry from WDSU’s web log:

11:52 a.m.: Evacuees Huddle In Hallways At Chalmette H.S.
People who took shelter in Chalmette High School are now huddled in the hallways because the windows have blown out. The building has sustained significant damage. There are reports that the water is 10-feet deep near the high school and is rapidly rising. — WDSU.com Web Staff

And here’s one from the Picayune‘s Jon Donley in a NOLA weblog :

NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING…I DON’T WANT TO SWIM
9:34 – Reports of widespread flooding now, although not at the doomsday scenario levels. But we’ve got several hours to go before we’ve seen the worst past. Scanner traffic is busy with calls of rising water, including 18 inches and rising against the levee in the French Quarter. Dispatchers questioning officers on the scene, trying to determine if there is a break in the river levee, or if water is pouring over the top. Independently, NOLA has received a flooding alert for the French Market area.
Fairly heavy street flooding in front and behind the Times-Picayune . . . water appears about knee deep, whipped by the steady wind into whitecaps and breakers. Water is hubcap deep on the furthest vehicles in the employee parking lot, and rising quickly.

For a guide to other blogs on the Katrina situation, check the list at About Last Night.

With Katrina veering only slightly east, moving fast and staring New Orleans in the face, I’m worried about my friends there. We spent eight years in that amazing city and went through many hurricanes. We were there in 1969 for Camille, the one that’s being compared with tonight’s monster storm. I covered Camille. WDSU-TV was the only station in town with auxiliary power through most of it. I was on the air for something like thirty-six straight hours broadcasting to those who had electricity, hadn’t fled and were watching television. There was a surpisingly large number of them.
On average, the city is three feet below sea level, a massive dish. Camille hit the Gulf Coast considerably east of the city. When a cameraman and I went there a couple of days after the storm, we were stunned by the extent of the devastation in that relatively unpopulated area. I just now looked at the film we made, shaking my head at what would have happened if Camille had made a direct hit on the city.
It doesn’t seem possible that New Orleans will be as lucky this time. Everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin to President Bush has urged people to get out to higher ground. Reports are that many Orleanians, unable to accept that this really is the big one, have decided to stick it out. Some of them, apparently, are observing the old tradition, defying nature by hunkering down in their homes and throwing hurricane parties. How I hope that none of them are the folks I know and love.
Terry Teachout and Laura Demanski have set up as part of their Arts Journal About Last Night a clearinghouse of bloggers sending reports from the city or from where they have sought safety. If you are concerned about or interested in what seems certain to happen to New Orleans, I suggest that you check in with Terry and Laura, along with your traditional news sources.