It was a phone call I wished never to receive and knew was inevitable. Rod Levitt’s wife Jean called to report that he died peacefully in his sleep the night of May 8. A composer and arranger of inventiveness, warmth and resourcefulness, a trombonist whose kindness and humor radiated in his playing, Rod had Alzheimer’s. He was not warehoused in an institution, as so many Alzheimer’s patients must be. Jean kept him with her at home in Vermont. She said that although much of his past had slipped away, he kept his horn near and played it this week even as he was declining.
“You know, his trombone, his music, were his life,” Jean said. She left out the most important element in his life, Jean.
Mrs. Levitt said that they kept printouts of the Rifftides pieces about him in a neat stack on his desk and that he often asked her to read them to him. She said he was moved by the comments from Rifftides readers. For background on Rod and links to his music, see this item from January, and this followup from Steve Schwartz about Rod in his final years. Here is a little of what I wrote about the importance of his albums:

They comprise a body of recordings that are fresh, evocative and enormously entertaining forty years later. The writing was daring, finely crafted and marinated in wit.

The bassist Bill Crow knew Rod more than a decade longer than I did. He sent this recollection.

When I got out of the Army in 1949 and returned to my studies at the University of Washington, I soon discovered the afternoon jam sessions that went on in the U.’s music annex. I was a bebop valve trombonist and sometime drummer in those days. I met Rod Levitt at one of those jams, and we hung out a little together on the Seattle music scene until the winter of 1950, when Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer from Olympia, invited me to go with him when he went back to New York. I kept hearing about Rod, but when he came to New York, he didn’t hang with the same people I was interested in at that time. Whenever our paths crossed, we had a nice reunion, and he called me to play on a couple of his projects, which I enjoyed very much. I liked his playing and his writing, and always appreciated his sunny disposition.

Rod Levitt would have been seventy-eight in September.

As if our friend and fellow artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout weren’t polymath enough, he’s extending his cultural breadth. On his blog, About Last Night, he announces:

I’m writing an opera.

What?

I’M WRITING AN OPERA.

That’s what I thought he said. To get the details, go here.

The Rifftides staff is pleased to announced that (finally) we have posted a new group of Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column. A reminder: We now archive the Picks. To see past entries, click on “More Picks” at the end of the current crop.

Confession: Until recently, I could not get with Robert Schumann. I found him dull. The nineteenth century composer and pianist is, by general agreement, in the front rank of German romanticism, so I assumed that the shortcoming was mine. I was right. I wasn’t paying attention. What caused me to turn the corner on Schumann was “Waldesgesprach,” a piece of his lieder based on the work of the poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. I heard the song for the first time at a recital by Phil Grothaus, a tenor, and Andrea Prentice, a pianist, who live in my town.
Sub-confession: I’ve also never cared much for lieder, art songs set to poetry, usually German. That began to change a few years ago when I acquired a boxed set of Schubert lieder sung by the astounding Dieter Fischer-Dieskau with Gerald Moore at the piano (This CD is a generous sampler). I had always loved Schubert, but was put off by anyone’s lieder. Fischer-Dieskau turned that. Now, I am hooked on “Waldesgesprach” and warming to Schumann because of Mr. Grothaus’s and Ms. Prentice’s charming negotiation of its intriguing harmonies, which to my ear put Schumann far ahead of his time. He wrote it in 1840 during a flurry of lieder composition.
This experience helped me to understand why composers whose harmonic palettes I admire, among them Brahms, Faure and Elgar, were inspired by Schumann. I can’t imagine that Debussy and Ravel did not also study him. Go here to listen to recordings, in their entirety, of several artists’ interpretations of the song. They include Fischer-Dieskau with Alfred Brendel at the piano. See how you like it. If you think it took me too long to open my ears to Schumann, you’ll be right.
What does this have to do with jazz? Nothing, unless you accept that there is no such thing as jazz harmony. All harmony in jazz was first used by the great composers from before Bach to Stravinsky. To extrapolate loosely, you might say: no Schumann–no Tadd Dameron.
For a comprehensive biography and a nifty picture of Schumann, go here.
This CD has Fischer-Dieskau with his ideal accompanist Gerald Moore (every classical singer’s ideal accompanist) singing “Waldesgesprach” and several other pieces of Schumann lieder even better than he did with Brendel.

Carol Sloane, long one of my favorite singers, now also my favorite new blogette, is telling marvelous stories. Do yourself a favor. Go to her blog, read both parts of Jimmy Rowles’ adventures with Placido Domingo and her tale of introducing Cannonball Adderley to the music of Mstislav Rostropovich.

The news of Alvin Batiste’s death of an apparent heart attack early Sunday morning came as I was preparing to write a few words about his new CD. A great clarinetist, a masterly transmitter of the jazz tradition, Batiste was scheduled to play Sunday at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., two of the legion of Louisiana musicians who learned from him. As head of the music department at Southern University in Baton Rouge, much of Batiste’s teaching was in that four-year institution, but in recent years he was also the primary teacher of jazz instrumental music at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA).
He teamed with NOCCA’s founder, his lifelong friend Ellis Marsalis, to help shape the abilities of Connick, the Marsalis brothers (Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason), drummer Herlin Riley, saxophonist Donald Harrison and dozens of other young New Orleans musicians who have become prominent in jazz.
The first black soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic, Batiste was thoroughly grounded in the formal rules of music and brilliant in breaking them. As effective in free music as he was in traditional jazz and bebop, Batiste jammed with Ornette Coleman during Coleman’s New Orleans sojourn in the 1950s. Along with Ellis Marsalis, Harold Battiste, Ed Blackwell, James Black, Melvin Lastie, Al Belletto, Warren Bell, Jr. and a few others who fell under the spell of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and other pioneers of bebop, he helped establish modern jazz in the city.
In my encounters with Batiste in New Orleans over the years, I found him kind and gracious, with an endearing soft humor. In Batiste the educator those qualities were wrapped around a core of iron; he once ejected Branford Marsalis from the Southern University jazz band for insufficient commitment. Marsalis later said that the experience concentrated his focus. He went on to become one of the deepest improvising musicians of his generation.
Batiste’s Cd titled Alvin Batiste is an initial release in the Honor Series on the Marsalis Music label. It was produced by Branford Marsalis, who plays saxophone on three of its tracks. Riley is the drummer. The other name musician is guitarist Russell Malone. They are supported by two youngsters Marsalis recommended, pianist Lawrence Fields and bassist Ricardo Rodriguez, both impressive in this fast company. Singer Edward Perkins appears on four tracks. Batiste has played farther out than he does in this collection, but the CD provides a broad acquaintance with his scope, his daring and the depth of his fat sound. Seven of the ten compositions are Batiste’s, including “The Latest,” based on John Coltrane’s “Countdown” and the funky anthem “Salty Dogs,” which was adopted years ago by Cannonball Adderley. Exchanging phrases on “My Life Is A Tree,” Batiste and Marsalis, on tenor sax, are continuations of the same line of thought. Batiste’s bebop foundation is in stimulating evidence in the “Cherokee” derivative called “Bat Trad.”
Batiste’s concentration on music education kept him occupied. As a result, there is precious little of him on recordings. We may consider the CD Alvin Batiste a posthumous gift.

Quint Davis, the director of the New Orleans JazzFest, sums up Batiste’s importance in this interview with WDSU-TV. The New Orleans Times Picayune combines an obituary and a wrapup of the concert that replaced Batiste’s appearance at the festival.
Branford Marsalis will play with his quintet this week at The Seasons. I look forward to reminiscing with him about his friend and mentor.

The bassist David Friesen, an explorer, does not rule out the customary jazz trio instrumentation of piano, bass and drums; he had a superb trio with pianist Randy Porter and drummer Alan Jones. But for him the traditional configuration does not define the trio concept. Friesen has led trios in which the other instruments were Bud Shank’s alto sax and Clark Terry’s flugelhorn; Paul Horn’s flute and Jeff Johnson’s bass; Larry Koonse’s guitar and Joe LaBarbera’s drums; John Stowell’s guitar and Jeannie Hoffman’s piano; Gary Barone’s trumpet and Jones’s drums.
The other night at The Seasons, the sidemen in Friesen’s trio were pianist Greg Goebel and saxophonist Rob Davis, young musicians little known outside the Pacific Northwest but with the talent to make larger waves. With Goebel at a nine-foot Steinway to his right and Davis on a stool to his left, Friesen sat center stage cradling his Hemage electric bass in cello position, leading the trio through a concert of thirteen of his compositions. The harmonic depth, intense rhythm and subtle interaction they employed mesmerized a small audience. It is hard to imagine that after the first couple of tunes anyone thought about the absence of a drummer. The irresistible swing on a piece called “Wrinkle” came in great part from Friesen strumming his bass the way Freddie Green strummed his guitar for Count Basie, and getting the same result, quiet power. Davis’s sound on tenor saxophone has an agreeable graininess, on soprano a fullness unlike the strangled tone that so many soprano saxophonists cultivate. His soprano solo on “Goal in Mind,” which is built on what my notes call “sort of old-timey” harmonies, concentrated joy in flowing lines of spontaneous composition.
In Friesen’s solos, technical mastery is in the service of lyrical expression. He applies just enough virtuosic display to impress the listener, but cuts it considerably short of being a hip cornball. Unlike many jazz tunes, Friesen’s pieces are generally not based on the chords of standard songs, but on original harmonic structures loaded with challenges. Goebel and Davis thrived on the complexities. Concentrating on the lower register of the Steinway in “One Last Time,” Goebel’s solo rumbled with harmonic surprises that elicited a whoop from Friesen and earned sustained applause from the audience. Even in the blues, Friesen finds ways to be different. The trio played an eleven-bar blues and a ten-bar blues and, at the end, a standard twelve-bar blues with what Friesen identified as “funny changes.” It still felt like the blues, but the sophisticated harmonies gave it a wry character all its own. Indeed, everything the trio played was colored with a pronounced individuality. Friesen has not recorded with this group. I hope that he will.
In the meantime, there is plenty of Friesen on CD. His web site has an extensive discograhy. His newest release, a duo with the late pianist Mal Waldron, has been on hold since it was recorded at a hotel engagement in Los Angeles in 1985. They worked together regularly in the eighties and developed remarkable empathy, which is captured admirably in this live date. You can hear Davis and Goebel in good form with PDXV, a quintet based in Portland, Oregon. The band also includes trumpeter Dick Titterington, bassist Dave Captein and drummer Todd Strait. Their first CD on Titterington’s Heavywood label is called, logically enough, PDXV Jazz Quintet of Portland, OR, Vol. 1.

Hotel Pianist no longer blogs, thanks to having been outed by a numbskull fellow blogger. From time to time, though, she sends e-mail messages. This is the latest one:

Musician Jokes
I have two musician jokes for you today:
1. I’m often bored enough to drool at the piano. One way I try to counteract this boredom is by pretending I’m the “bass player” after I improvise a piano solo; I’ll do a little solo with my left hand while comping with my right. Last week, a saxophonist friend of mine came to listen in the lobby. When I started to play with my left hand, she joked: “Bass solo! Time to start talking.”
2. There’s a little joke among jazz musicians at jam sessions. You go up to someone and say, “You sounded good. HOW’D I SOUND?” Well, tonight a man came in who embodied this joke, but he wasn’t a jazz musician – he was a drunk who occasionally does some sort of work for the restaurant management.
He sat down next to me and asked, “How do I look?” In my dreams, I replied, “You have a face only a mother could love,” but in actuality I shrugged, “Fine.”
Then he requested “Someone To Watch Over Me.” I started to play this lovely tune and, of course, he started to warble over it. He could barely remember any of the words, but after I had played the last chord, there was the inevitable question from him: “How do I sound?”
I’m glad he stopped with that; I was worried the next question would be, ‘How do I SMELL?”

Louis Armstrong said that if you had to ask, you’d never know. That did not prevent Sid Caesar from attempting to answer the question on Your Show Of Shows in 1956.
Have a good weekend.

Duke Ellington’s urbanity and sophistication are part of jazz lore, but as the years go by there are fewer people who had direct exposure to his personality. Rare video of a 1963 interview provides a generous sample of Ellington’s charm. It also demonstrates the carefully crafted line of patter that served him both as effective public relations and as a layer of protection around a highly visible man who managed to keep himself private. Ellington spoke with Sven Lindahl of SVT, the Swedish broadcasting system.
The interview on SVT’s web site comes in two parts. This link takes you to part 1, in which Ellington gives elegant expression to his view of a future in which music would be without categories. To view part 2, you must go to this link and scroll up to “Duke Ellington del 2” in the menu labeled öppet arkiv on the right side of the screen.
Thanks to the musicologist Andrew Homzy of Concordia University in Montreal for leading the Rifftides staff to this valuable piece of history.

A few days ago, Rifftides alerted you to a concert posthumously honoring the Voice of America’s Willis Conover, whom we described as one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. Washington correspondent John Birchard, a veteran VOA broadcaster, attended the concert and sent this report.

I think Willis would have liked THE FIRST ANNUAL WILLIS CONOVER MEMORIAL CONCERT. He might have been a little uncomfortable with the title (he was pretty modest – for a radio guy), but the concert contained elements he would have appreciated: kids trying out their skills in the Blues Alley Youth Orchestra, the discovery of a “new” band, and the classics getting their due from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.
The concert was the brainchild of Harry Schnipper, the entrepreneur who has kept Washington’s Blues Alley nightclub alive through thick and thin. The Blues Alley Jazz Society and the Smithsonian Institution were the official “presenters” that arranged for the use of the Voice Of America auditorium for the event Saturday, April 28th. The purpose of the concert was “to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music…through the radio waves of the Voice of America.”
The Blues Alley Youth Orchestra opened the evening. The Orchestra, now in its 20th year, is made up of 14- to 17-year-olds from the Washington area. The band is subject to all the challenges that young musicians must overcome: uncertain intonation and time, solos that wander into a cul de sac of confusion, and teen-age shyness about standing out from the crowd. And then, there will be moments when a youngster gets off a good chorus and sits down with an embarrassed grin at the applause. Congratulations to Blues Alley for sticking with this educational effort.
Next came one of those segments that jazz fans live for: the jaw-dropping surprise. I was not familiar with the U-S Military Academy’s Jazz Knights. Expecting a band of college students, the first surprise was these guys were grown-ups, career military musicians like the widely-known Airmen of Note, the Navy’s Commodores and the Army Blues, all stationed in the Washington, D.C. area. I’ve long appreciated those three bands as the top of the tree in their respective services. Well, make room for the Jazz Knights from West Point. All of the band members are sergeants, ranging from staff to master sergeant. The Knights hit with a bright original, “Without a Doubt”. Ensembles were crisp and tight. Alto saxophonist Derrick James made clear right away his claim on the audience’s attention with a fiery solo. James made way for trumpeter Vito Speranza, whose tone put me in mind of Pete Candoli and whose attack was confident, even swaggering. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
Mike Abene’s arrangement of the Brazilian-flavored “Estate” was a showcase for the soprano sax work of Mike Reifenberg. Sergeant Reifenberg has a full, liquid sound used with dramatic effect on the lovely melody. He also has chops to spare and brought them to bear during his improvisation.
Snappy brushwork from drummer Bob Jones propelled Abene’s arrangement of Karolina Strassmeyer’s “The Sweeper,” Eric Ordway’s trombone solo shifted the piece into overdrive. Ordway gets around on the unwieldy horn in the virtuosic manner of the late Frank Rosolino, which ain’t chopped liver. Another strong solo from Derrick James rounded out the performance.
The Jazz Knights don’t have a weak link. According to the information on their CD “Commissions 2006”, they do some traveling around the northeast, bringing free concerts to the public. If they show up in your neighborhood, you won’t be disappointed if you seek them out.
Master of ceremonies Dick Golden‘s warm presentation included portions of interviews Willis Conover did over the years on VOA with Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. As Ellington made his recorded exit with some typically charming remarks about Willis, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra under David Baker began its portion of the show with “Take the A Train,” appropriate for the occasion but in a perfunctory performance. Baker’s own “Cotton Club Revisited” followed, then a Bob Mintzer arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance”. The band didn’t strike sparks until it played Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy.” Trumpeter Kenny Rittenhouse soloed with funk and humor, producing smiles on band members’ faces and enthusiasm from the audience. The trumpeter seemed to inspire tenorman Tedd Baker and pianist Tony Nalker to some enjoyable solos.
But then it was back to re-creating jazz history with Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings”. Nice, but lacking in pizzazz. Technically, the band runs down the historical charts with authentic style. The members can clearly play their instruments, but when the night is over what have you got? As you might be able to discern from these remarks, I’m not a fan of jazz repertory bands. I’d much rather hear a bad-but-enthusiastic original than the most competent copy. And the very name of this band – the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra – seems like pretty heavy baggage to lug around.
I don’t know where Willis would come down in this debate, but throughout his long and distinguished career he seems to have emphasized the originals, the real thing,. Full disclosure: I am not an unbiased observer. I am a 14-year employee at the Voice of America, the senior news broadcaster in the English language division, a fan of the man and his marvelous impact on the world beyond our shores. He remains the single most important broadcaster in the 65 years VOA has been on the air.
Saturday night’s concert is a small down payment on what America owes Willis. I’m glad to report that Harry Schnipper promised there will be a 2nd annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert next April. As we used to say in radio, stay tuned.
John Birchard

To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may search the archive (link in the right-hand column) with the keyword “Conover” and find several additional items.

A Rifftides reader chided me for not writing more often about cycling. My thought is that anyone’s cycling experiences are intensely interesting to himself and that everyone he tells about them will be bored.
However, since I have a new road bike, I don’t mind telling you that I took it out for a ride before supper. It made little sense to ride in a high wind, but sense and road cycling frequently part company. The manufacturer’s sales blurb for the bike claims:

This great roadster boasts Mavic’s Ksyrium Equipe wheels, too, which cheat the wind for free speed and are built to last.

I could have used a little more of Mavic’s wind cheating. I was cranking uphill against a 25-mile-an-hour west wind that became a north wind and stayed in my face when I turned at the intersection of two orchard country roads at the top of a steep hill. The hill sweeps down for half a mile to the valley floor. Fighting the gale, but with gravity on my side, I pedaled furiously down and gave a banshee whoop when, in spite of Aeolus’s interference, the speedometer registered 36 miles an hour. As I coasted to a hesitation for the four-way stop at the next intersection, a man pulled up beside me in a pickup truck and yelled with some heat, “What are you, nuts?”
I grinned. Then he shrugged and grinned, too, and we went on our ways.

Rifftides reader Bruce Tater came across a classic Warner Bros. cartoon from the Looney Tunes series. He called our attention to Three Little Bops, a perfectly preserved piece of 1950s hipness. Stan Freeburg is the narrator. Shorty Rogers did the music. Notice the stylized drawings of the nightclub audience. Don’t miss Shorty’s little sui generis muted solo near the end. Here’s the link.

Jessica Williams linked readers of her blog to the Before & After test she allowed me to give her for the current issue of Jazz Times. In the test, she reacted to recordings by ten pianists. To read some of the comments she received, go to Currents and scroll down.
Oddly, Rifftides has received no reaction to the article despite Ms. Williams’ unreserved assessments.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday included a report by Howard Mandel on Sonny Rollins, who recently founded his own record label, Doxy. In a sound bite, Rollins asked Mandel not to identify him as a corporate executive of a record company. “Don’t do that to me man,” he laughed as he pleaded with Mandel. “No, I don’t want to screw anybody.” Then he talked about the contradiction between corporate thinking and jazz thinking.

The corporate culture is anathema to jazz. We don’t like cookie cutter, everything exactly the same way. We’re about creation, thinking things out at the moment, like life is. Life changes every minute. A different sunset every night; that’s what jazz is about.

To hear Mandel’s profile of Sonny Rollins at seventy-six, click here.

The past couple of days I have been listening to two CDs containing fresh old music and enjoying it as much as if hearing it for the first time.
LaFaro
Scott LaFaro had a rich musical life before he joined the Bill Evans Trio in 1959 and helped change the role of the bass in interactive improvisation. In 1957 when he was twenty-one, LaFaro was playing in Chicago with Pat Moran, a young pianist from Oklahoma who had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and been infuenced by Bud Powell and Horace Silver. During the short time LaFaro was with her trio, Moran recorded a trio album and another adding the singer Bev Kelly. They have been combined in a CD just issued by Fresh Sound. LaFaro has often been quoted about his dissatisfaction with most of his early recordings:

I don’t like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. I don’t even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.

We can hear why he made that exception. The strength, authority, swing and harmonic ingenuity in LaFaro’s bass lines are gripping. Moran, drummer Johnny Whited and Kelly are fine, but LaFaro–beautifully recorded and dominating the right stereo channel–demands the listener’s attention, particularly on the trio session. When Evans found LaFaro and combined him with drummer Paul Motian, he was able to put into operation the trio concept he had been hearing in his head for years. These recordings make it easy to understand how excited Evans must have been the first time he heard LaFaro.
Previn
In 1960 MGM released a feature motion picture more or less based on the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans. The movie about a bunch of San Francisco beatniks was so-so, maybe not quite that good, but it had a superb Andre Previn orchestral score, Previn’s compositions for small jazz groups and wonderful playing by a bakers dozen of the best musicians of the period. Gerry Mulligan had a part as a priest who played the baritone saxophone. Art Farmer, Art Pepper and Shelly Manne played themselves, as did Previn, Red Mitchell, Dave Bailey, Russ Freeman, Bob Enevoldsen, Bill Perkins and Buddy Clark. Jack Sheldon is heard in solo with the orchestra and in a quintet with Pepper, Freeman, Mitchell and Manne.
The film has all but disappeared and is apparently impossible to find on DVD or VHS. The sound track, fortunately not only has survived but is expanded for a CD reissue that includes twice as much music as the original release. This increases the small available number of recordings Mulligan’s group made when Art Farmer was his trumpet player and adds a few tracks to the legacy of Previn’s trio with Manne and Mitchell. Previn’s main theme, “Why Are We Afraid,” made its way into the repertoires of a few musicians in the sixties. It is puzzling why so memorable a melody failed to become a standard.

There will be a concert this weekend in Washington, DC, honoring Willis Conover, the Voice of America jazz broadcaster who was one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. The nation he served did little while he was alive to recognize his contributions and since he died in 1996 has done less. Efforts to persuade President Clinton, then President Bush, to award him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom have gone nowhere. To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may browse the archive (link in the left-hand column) and find several items.
There are those in Washington not in the administration who know the value of what Conover accomplished. They include people at the VOA and at the Smithsonian Institution and, apparently, all of the Blues Alley Jazz Society. Here is the announcement about Saturday night’s concert.

Blues Alley Jazz Society invites you to the First Annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert, featuring the U.S. Military Academy “Jazz Knights” and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Whereas H.R. 57 officially proclaimed jazz as America’s indigenous musical art form, we seek to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music during the Cold War era through the radio waves of the Voice of America. It is our hope that you will join us in making Washington, D.C. the home of jazz music during this component of the Third Annual Big Band Jam.
The Willis Conover Memorial Concert will be held from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 28th at the Voice of America Stage. You are asked to arrive at 6:00 p.m. with photo identification as the Voice of America building is a federal facility. Some street parking is available, and attendees are encouraged to utilize the Colonial Parking service located at 6th and C Streets, SW. Reservations are required due to security issues; visit the Big Band Jam Web site to make a reservation.

Willis Conover at the White House, 1969
Under Doug’s Picks in the right column, you will find mention of a new book about Conover.

During a 2005 trip to New York to promote Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, one of my rewarding encounters was with the longtime broadcast journalist Bill Vitka. After we talked about Desmond for CBS Radio News, Vitka mentioned that he had recently interviewed Kurt Vonnegut. He said Vonnegut told him that Desmond was his favorite musician. Back home, I arranged for Vonnegut to be sent a copy of the book. Vitka and I planned to get together with the great writer on a later visit to New York. My next New York trip was brief and hectic. I decided to set up the meeting when the three of us could have a relaxed visit. Then Vonnegut fell and suffered the brain injury that led to his death on April 11.
In the course of preparing a story about Vonnegut, Bill stayed in touch with him. Last November Vitka delivered to the author a copy of the feature profile that he developed out of their interview. He took his younger son, Sean, with him to Vonnegut’s townhouse on Manhattan’s East Side . What follows is the story of that visit. Bill sent it to me in an e-mail message. I asked his permission to share it with you.

I grieved when Vonnegut died.

His voice is still on my phone machine.

He had called several times — while I was working on an interview/feature for the Network — to make sure I got things right.
On Meeting Kurt Vonnegut (11/18/06)
When Sean and I were ushered into Kurt Vonnegut’s townhouse on New York’s East Side, what we found was a home.
His wife, Jill Krementz, had to wake him. We were expected but not at that hour (3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon).
Vonnegut was a redwood, hair like gray broken branches. He smiles. Extends his hand. Tell us to make ourselves at home, then politely he plants himself in a soft, upholstered chair that he knows well.
He’s sizing us up, subtle to the point of being sly. I catch his eye sometimes as he drinks us in.But malice, any kind of ill will, seems so foreign to his nature as to be a distance measurable in light years. All I feel is a sensation of disarmament. My defenses stand down, willingly conquered.
Sean is quite animated. He does much, if not all, the talking for a patch. Vonnegut is curious about his schooling, asking questions and Sean answers, enjoying the attention — but more then that — he rises to meet someone who would address him as an equal. Sean is 17.
There is an out-of-time character about Vonnegut, not unlike Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. He isn’t tethered to the 21st century or to the last, but outside of both. He speaks with a kindness, even innocence as though he hasn’t grown up.
At this moment, I can’t imagine the source of the razor wire, which I know can be found in his writing. His jokes, satire — gallows humor — doesn’t seem to fit the man.
If he comes to know us by our answers, I come to know him by his questions. Our name, Vitka, he hasn’t heard before. What nationality is it? Where did we come from? Our parents, perhaps my parents and grandparents — who were they? I oblige. He rewards us with details of his own family. There is, like us, a Catholic bloodline. He says his grandparents were so consumed by Darwin that they became free thinkers. They abandoned religion. He had asked us about belief. He was curious about the Byzantine rite on my Mother’s side. Did the priests marry? As we – Sean and I — draw closer to our past, Vonnegut draws more from his own childhood. He recalls blues musicians from the South who performed on his family’s lawn. Jazz and Blues. Joe Heller’s name comes up. He misses Joe.
Vonnegut is now 83, an age when so many that you know are gone.
His family, he said, came over before the wave that brought my family to Ellis Island. They were entrepreneurs. They had money. They were smart. They invested. They did well.
At some point I realized that he could feign sleepiness, even laziness, to disguise casualness with a purpose. He was working.
He talks about teaching. He’s been talking to Sean about the classroom for fifteen minutes or so and he mentions that John Irving was one of his students at the Iowa Workshop. What did you teach your students, about writing, I ask? He answers that it takes two. A writer is writing for a reader. (as much as a reader needs a writer.) It’s not enough to write. Someone has to read what you write (as though it would be incomplete otherwise).
He talks about reporting. One of his first jobs was just that in Chicago. He would talk to a guy on the phone, filing the story, telling him that Joe Whatzit, age 48, was arrested for disorderly conduct and drunkenness at the corner of Waverly and Blastoff. “See,” he says, “everything in the first sentence is right out there. The reader doesn’t want to find out on page 48 that Lizzie was black. He wants to know right away.” You can’t — shouldn’t — cheat the reader is the lesson. Would, to do otherwise, mean the writer is cheating his or herself?
At first I think he will smoke the Pall Mall cigarette he has pulled from the pack, drawn from beneath the sweater which I am sure he slept in, but instead he is stroking it, as though a man petting a cat. Over the course of an hour, he does this but does not light it
He talks about the golden age of radio. (I work in radio) I mention someone at the CBS Broadcast Center who had said he remembered Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater. So I picture him planted in front of a radio, a machine the size of refrigerator — listening intently and laughing. Because he likes jokes. Because, I suspect, he likes people. Because we are fools. Because we make mistakes. Because, in Vonnegut’s universe, it doesn’t matter — but it does. He doesn’t want to hurt people and he doesn’t want people hurt but the human race continues to find original, if not ingenuously cruel methods to inflict pain. And he’s looking at 17-year-old Sean as he talks about radio. I mention Fred Allen but he is addressing Sean and says “Say good night, Gracie.”

A working journalist since 1972, Bill Vitka has been a correspondent for CBS News and NBC News. To hear his 2006 Vonnegut profile, go to this archive podcast of the CBS News Weekend Roundup hosted by Dan Raviv and advance the timing slider to 33:59. Or listen to the entire hour and hear how little things have changed in the world, which might have saddened but not suprised Vonnegut.

Rifftides reader Jon Foley recommends a YouTube clip of the Dave Brubeck Quartet with the comment, “They were in a good mood that night!”
They sure were. I thought that we had linked to this performance before, but I can find no trace of it in the archive. The clip isn’t dated, but it is amost certainly from the quartet’s 25th anniversary reunion tour in 1976. The piece is “Three To Get Ready.” I have no idea what set off the merriment, but the silliness was contagious and brought out Brubeck’s inner Cecil Taylor. To join in the fun, click here.