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Ted Nash, The Mancini Project (Palmetto). The multi-reed star of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra finds the jazz core of fourteen Henry Mancini songs or themes from films and television shows. There are familiar melodies here, but Nash avoids some obvious choices–the Pink Panther theme and “Moon River” for instance–to explore more obscure pieces.

Among them is a gorgeous alto saxophone-piano duet with Frank Kimbrough on the ballad “Cheryl’s Theme” from a movie called Sunset. Bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Matt Wilson are central to the effectiveness of “The Party,” with Nash stomping in full-blown R&B mode on tenor sax and Kimbrough lacing his solo with wry harmonic departures.

Nash’s trombonist father Dick and saxophonist uncle Ted were veterans of the big band era who made the transition to Los Angeles studio life and worked in dozens of Mancini sound track projects. He chose several of these pieces because of his father’s and uncle’s prominence in the screen versions. Mancini wrote the evocative “Something for Nash” for Dick Nash to play in the film Blind Date. His son does it on alto flute. In the exposition chorus of “Dreamsville” from Peter Gunn he pays tribute to his uncle Ted’s wistful alto sax treatment before doubling the tempo. The quartet romps through the rest of the track, with solos by Nash and Kimbrough in the bebop spirit. Nash inserts a phrase from “Solar,” one of the few direct quotes I’ve heard from this restlessly inventive soloist.

Nash is impressive on alto, soprano and tenor saxophones, flute and piccolo, but it is his range of expression on tenor that has me going back to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Soldier in the Rain,” “Two for the Road and the modal “Experiment in Terror.” Even when he roughens his tone and leaps up and down unorthodox intervals, he maintains a captivating lyricism. Part of the success of this album comes from the order and pacing of the tracks, including transitional use of four Mancini pieces in versions less than two minutes long. Nash leaves the listener with a sense of the thread of characteristic melodicism that makes Mancini’s music not merely a collection of superior pop pieces, but a substantial and durable body of work.

(More Recent Listening tomorrow) 

The Yakima Herald-Republic asked me to write about the musicians who will appear in The Seasons Fall Festival October 10-18. The piece ran in On Magazine, the paper’s weekly arts and entertainment supplement. Here is the lead paragraph:

A weeklong festival of this quality would make a splash in any major city, including New York and Los Angeles. The Seasons has managed to put it together in a high-desert town of 85,000 people in the upper left corner of the nation.

In the online version of the YH-R article opposite a reference to a picture of me, the editors have instead placed a photograph of Tierney Sutton, a much better idea. To read the piece, go here.

I hope that Rifftides readers will be among the legion of listeners pouring into Yakima for what has the makings of a memorable week. Below is video of a performance by one of the festival’s headliners, Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band, with Gonalez, flugelhorn and percussion; his brother Andy, bass; Larry Willis, piano; Steve Berrios, drums; and Joe Ford, alto saxophone.

The Portland Jazz Festival’s news conference yesterday yielded no information about performers for the revived festival. A pledge of major support from Alaska Airlines on Tuesday brought the festival back from the dead. The demise of the event was announced in early September, but Alaska Air came zooming in “out of the blue,” as artistic director Bill Royston put it, to resuscitate the festival.

At the news conference, festival officials did not name headliners or other musicians for the festival, which is restored to its original dates, February 13-22, 2009. No time was set for the roster to be put in place. Royston’s festival co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith said, “We are putting on our track shoes. We are contacting our landlord, insurance company, all the artists and agents in New York and artists across the world.”

The bailout is a big enough municipal deal in Portland that The Oregonian has an editorial about it in this morning’s edition.

The Portland Jazz Festival reports that it is not dead after all. Nearly a month ago, the festival announced that a lack of major sponsorship and funding caused it to be canceled. Earlier this year, the telephone company Qwest dropped out as the event’s primary sponsor. With the economy limping, fuel costs high and revenues pinched, airlines are not thriving, but Alaska Air Lines is flying to the festival’s rescue, aided by a coalition of former and new sponsors. Alaska Air has promised to provide $50,000 a year for two years. Qwest has agreed to a contribution of $5,000. The resuscitated 2009 festival, February 13-22, will be built around the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records.

Co-founder and artistic director Bill Royston (pictured) told the Portland Oregonian that Alaska’s offer came “out of the blue.” In a news release, his co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith added, “I’ve been astonished at how incredibly supportive this community has been since our announcement. Portland recognizes the value of the arts. It makes me proud to live here.”

Headliners for the 2009 festival were not announced. Royston told Rifftides that the festival will hold a news conference this afternoon. For details of the rescue package, see this story in this morning’s Oregonian.

It was nearly dawn after a round — several rounds — of music and conviviality during the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival. A few of us were sitting on the balcony of Bobby Hackett’s hotel room on Bourbon Street swapping stories and thinking it might be about time to call it a night. Hackett’s guests, in alphabetical order, were Count Basie, Jack Bradley, Willis Conover, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Paul Desmond and I. Dropping those names is a bit disturbing because all of their owners but Jack and I are memories. There was a good deal of laughter and — to use a phrase I wish hadn’t fallen out of fashion — shuckin’ and jivin’. We decided to extend the party and order breakfast from room service. Before we adjourned, we toasted the sun rising over the rooftops of the French Quarter. That was a good night.

Rifftides readers no doubt recognize all of those names except, perhaps, Bradley’s. Jack is a photographer, quite a good one. He used to do a fair amount of writing for jazz publications. I’ve never been entirely sure how he supported himself; probably not by writing about jazz and shooting pictures of musicians. I used to see him occasionally in New Orleans and, later, fairly often in New York. Here, Louis Armstrong and Jack are pictured together in 1963. I knew that this garrulous and engaging man was close to Armstrong and collected Armstrong memorabilia.  Until Niko Koppel’s story in the Sunday New York Times, I didn’t know the extent of that closeness or his collecting obsession.

Mr. Bradley archived just about anything from Armstrong that he could save — discarded letters, eyeglasses, handkerchiefs, even clothes that did not fit properly after Armstrong lost weight. In addition, he paid Armstrong’s valet and housekeeper for goods and ephemera that the musician gave to them. “It was important to preserve everything that he spoke and he did,” Mr. Bradley said. “He was the genius of the 20th century.”

Now, Jack is passing his extensive Armstrong collection to an institution that will preserve it and show it to the public. To read the whole story, go here.

If you need a reminder of why it is easy to be obsessed with Louis, watch this video. It’s also a nice way to remember Paul Newman.

Alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón is one of twenty-five winners of 2008 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships. The grants were announced today. Each of the awards is for $500,000 over five years, to be used in any way the recipient decides. Although not officially described as “genius grants” by the MacArthur foundation, that is what the fellowships have come to be called.

This year’s fellows include writers, scientists, an architect, a farmer, and artists in various fields. Zenón was cited for “drawing from a variety of jazz idioms and the indigenous music of his native Puerto Rico to create a new language of complex, yet accessible sounds that overflow with emotion.”

For a Rifftides review of Zenón’s most recent recording, go here. In the video below, Zenón is with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Henry Cole playing for a good-natured New York audience.

             

Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, was chosen by MacArthur for “offering both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.” Ross has a first-class blog called The Rest Is Noise.

For biographical sketches and photographs of all twenty-five MacArthur fellows, go here. If you are interested in applying for one of next year’s grants, forget it. Candidates don’t know that they are in the running. They are chosen in secret by a committee whose members’ identities are also secret. Some years ago when I had business at the MacArthur Foundation headquarters in Chicago, I jokingly offered to fill out an application. The executive director said he would be glad to put me on a list of those to be notified when they are not chosen.

I know, I know; Doug’s Picks is overdue for new entries. They’ll be coming along, but the Rifftides staff is engaged in a number of projects, including preparation of a reading from Poodie James, with strings. More about that later. Among other things, I’m writing the notes for a forthcoming CD co-led by Charlie Shoemake and Terry Trotter. It is a delight. I’m not at liberty to tell you about it except to say that its title is Inside and the music, uncompromising but accessible, is a delight. It will be released later this year.

In any case, since Norma Winstone’s latest CD is one of the current picks (see the center column), it seems fitting to let you know that Bill Kirchner (pictured) has prepared a Winstone spectacular for his next broadcast, which will be streamed on the internet. Here is his announcement:

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).

Britain’s Norma Winstone (b. 1941) is not exactly a “well kept secret” (though that’s the title of one of her albums), but she’s much less known than she deserves to be, given her stature as one of the finest vocalists in current jazz. She’s capable of singing everything from standards to challenging original material. And she’s a first-rate lyricist as well.

We’ll hear Winstone with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, reed players Tony Coe and Klaus Gesing, pianists Jimmy Rowles, John Taylor, and Glauco Venier, bassist George Mraz, drummer Joe LaBarbera, and Wheeler’s big band.

The show will air this Sunday, September 28, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

Dave Frishberg’s friendship and collaborations with Dick Sudhalter go back more than three decades. He sent this appreciation.

I want to say something about Dick Sudhalter and the sadness of his passing . I’m staggered by Sudhalter’s contributions to jazz literature and criticism. There are plenty of good writers who write about the music, but for my money Sudhalter and Benny Green stand out as the enduring literary giants of the genre. Both of them were involved with “classic” jazz and swing music, both of them were excellent professional musicians, and both of them could, with authority and elegance, write critically about the heart of music . They were widely informed and narrow-minded — requisites of good criticism, as I see it. My favorite jazz literature: Green’s The Reluctant Art and Sudhalter’s Lost Chords. I find myself going back again and again to those books and never failing to enjoy them.

You find Sudhalter’s writing in the unlikeliest places. In the series of large spiral-bound piano albums published by Reader’s Digest in 1980s , e.g. Treasury of Best Loved Songs, and Popular Songs That Will Live Forever, I found the annotations to be sophisticated and beautifully written. Sure enough–turned out to be by Sudhalter. (Incidentally, the piano arrangements in this series are all by Dan Fox, and they are easy to play and very hip.) Sudhalter also annotated a lot of the Mosaic reissue packages, and his comments are essential to the enjoyment of those collections. Richard wrote with power, grace, and precision; his literary style just sang right out as if it were music. He sure will be missed.

Richard M. Sudhalter gave elegance and exactness to speech, writing and music-making.

Dick’s perfection of expression came in natural flows, whether he was writing,
 playing the cornet or chatting over dinner. Gene Lees observed that Dick was the only person he knew who always spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs. Sudhalter’s mastery of language is everywhere in his biographies of Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael and his monumental study Lost Chords. Currents of coherence, logic, passion and humor are equally evident in his playing.

A few years ago, a stroke robbed Dick of the ability to play and caused halting speech. Then a disease called multiple system atrophy (MSA) attacked him and, over a few years, shut down his body. He lost speech and the use of his limbs. The disease left his intellect intact but destroyed his ability to communicate, the thing he did extraordinarily well. Friends and admirers around the world donated to a fund for his medical expenses and there was a benefit concert, but MSA is progressive and incurable. Dick died in a New York hospital shortly after one o’clock this morning.

He sometimes used trumpet and he had a distinctive way with the flugelhorn, but he preferred cornet, the instrument his hero Beiderbecke stayed with despite the trumpet’s having come to dominance in jazz. Dick was a man out of his time in other ways, too. In an era of increasingly casual dress, he preferred the bespoke tailoring he learned to love during his London years as a UPI correspondent. He was open-minded about new developments in jazz,

but had a firm attachment to the emotional and intellectual straightforwardness of Bix and the Chicago School. You can hear it on all three of his instruments in this CD with friends including Dave Frishberg, Daryl Sherman, Dan Barrett and Bill Crow, among others. (In the picture, Dick, on the left, is with Crow.) Sudhalter is exclusively on cornet in The Classic Jazz Quartet with Dick Wellstood, Joe Muranyi and Marty Grosz — a gathering of four spirits aligned in their love for music, writing and clowning.

Because of its subtitle, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 was reflexively attacked by partisans who chose to see it as an effort to diminish the importance of black musicians. Had they bothered to read the book, they would have found that Sudhalter does quite the opposite while balancing the historical record of achievement in jazz and providing deep insights into the nature of the music. As a player, Bix was his hero and primary influence, but Dick also wrote beautifully about Louis Armstrong in, among other places, the notes for Heart Full of Rhythm, Vol.2, a CD with some of the music Armstrong recorded for Decca. Here’s a small sample of his ability to draw on the present in illuminating a performance from the past.

Pianist Bill Evans used to insist that excision of sentimentality yielded the purest form of romanticism. My bet is he’d have been delighted with what Louis does to “Once in a While.” Even on paper its lyric teeters precariously on the edge of bathos. Yet Louis manages (how? what’s the secret?) to strip away the self-pity and make it affecting, even poignant.

A few months after Dick’s stroke, I was in the lounge above the front lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. His close friend Daryl Sherman was playing Cole Porter’s piano and singing. She told me that Dick was going to try to be there, but not to count on it; he was having some bad days. Soon, though, I saw him making his slow way across the room to where our friend Jill McManus and I were listening to Daryl. He was impeccably turned out in sport coat, slacks and tie, just the right late-afternoon outfit for the proper New York gentleman of the 1940s, a decade in which I think he would have preferred to be living. When Daryl took a break, the four of us sat chatting. Dick’s wit and incisiveness shined through the slow speech, but he tired quickly and returned to the apartment to rest.

After that encounter, we talked by telephone a few times. Then, he could correspond only by e-mail — then, only through relays from other people — then, not at all. One can only imagine how it was for this most articulate of men to be imprisoned within himself, unable to express ideas or emotions.

Dick wanted to go, I’m sure of that. His ordeal is at an end. Knowing that it was inevitable and coming soon did not prepare me for this depth of sadness. His music, his books, the good luck of his friendship, will enrich me for the rest of my life.

Our mutual close friend Terry Teachout was extremely helpful to Dick in his last year or two. For Terry’s tribute, go here.

(Photo of Dick Sudhalter courtesy of Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University) 

 

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard watched a DVD of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s 1994 35th Anniversary Tour and sent this review.

 

The 57 minutes were recorded at the Freiburg, Germany, music festival in 1987 and the evening shows the guys in average (that is to say brilliant) form.

 

The program opens with a vigorous “Rocking in Rhythm” from the Ellington songbook, featuring stop-time passages for each member. It seems that in their later years together, the four grew somehow both tighter and looser. The ensembles were ultra-crisp from so many performances, yet the feeling is one of relaxed, flowing conversation.

 

Milt Jackson handles the announcements and they are models of economy, no wasted words. The program resumes with “Echoes”, a lovely ballad that picks up momentum with the MJQ’s patented chugging two-feeling. Was there ever a better ballad player on vibes than Jackson? 

 

“Kansas City Breaks”, dedicated to Charlie Parker, follows, then a rather fussy version of “Django”. The quartet must have played “Django” ten thousand times or more over the years and John Lewis often re-arranged the piece to keep it fresh. This arrangement tinkers with the structure rather more than necessary.

 

Gershwin’s “Summertime” is next, then “Bags Groove”, another piece that the group surely performed in the thousands of times. But, at least for this listener, it has never grown stale. The medium blues showcases the strengths of the MJQ – John Lewis’ infectious, epigrammatic comping and his deceptively simple solos… Jackson’s never-ending supply of great blues choruses…Percy Heath’s ferocious, stomping four-to-the-bar time… and Connie Kay, head slightly bowed and turned to the left as he listened, laying down the foundation upon which the others built their soul-satisfying structures. 

 

The DVD ends with the group’s encore — “A Day in Dubrovnik”, one of Lewis’ compositions inspired by European cities. Lewis introduces it in his soft, almost apologetic way, saying it’s an extended piece that describes in music the flavor of the old Adriatic city  — the arrival of tourists in the afternoon, the night life and the quiet of the morning. Lewis wrote several attractive European-sounding themes for the piece, as he had done before in such compositions as “Spanish Steps” and “Vendome”. It is my own shortcoming that I cannot appreciate this part of John Lewis’ talent as much as I do his more straight-ahead jazz writing and playing. But I can tell you the Freiburg audience was vocal in its appreciation of “Dubrovnik” and the group, of course, played it well. Not my cup of tea, but the rest of the DVD is top-notch MJQ. 

 

The disc is a reminder of what we have lost with the passing of these gifted men. They each recorded with other artists, and often the recordings were very good to excellent. But together they created a unique body of work, a blend of delicate strength and refined funk that stands alone.

 

                                                                — John Birchard

 

 

The scourge of heroin addiction among jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s is central to dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays and movies, most of them dreadful, overwrought clichés. Bad art aside, the monkey on the backs of musicians was real. It rode many of them to their graves. Unhorseing the habit required triumphing over more than the punishing chemical consequences of withdrawal. It meant also withstanding social pressure to conform in tight little communities of addicts whose lives were governed as much by the drug as by music.

It is impossible to exaggerate the courage of musicians who purged themselves of heroin addiction. Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Don Lanphere and others managed to survive a legion of colleagues who committed the slow suicide of slavery to heroin. However much the long-term effects of drug damage may have ultimately shortened their life spans, when they got clean they added productive decades.

Sonny Rollins is also a victor over drug addiction. There is power in the story of his struggle. As the recent Chicago Jazz Festival got underway with the 78-year-old Rollins as a headliner, Neil Tesser told Rollins’s story in an article in the Chicago Reader. The piece is called “How
Sonny Defeated the Dragon.” Rollins told Tesser about temptation in Chicago when he went there in 1955 after being released from the narcotics hospital at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. One night when he thought he had accumulated enough fortitude, he went to a prominent jazz club known as a gathering place of addicts.

“When I got there, I saw a lot of old friends, a lot of the guys: ‘Hey Sonny, let’s go get high,'” Rollins says. “I had to be strong enough to withstand that. And that’s where I faced my Goliath. It was hard, man, because some of these guys knew I was not that far from using drugs. It was one of these biblical-like temptations. I resisted–my palms got sweaty and everything, but I resisted. I went back to my custodial job, but I thought, ‘I gotta get back into music.’ It was very difficult, because to tell the truth, I just escaped that first time; I just was able to resist all my friends offering these free drugs. But I thought, ‘I’m a musician and I have to be strong enough to be around drugs,’ because that was the scene.”

To read all of the story, go here. The online piece incorporates two audio clips of Rollins playing with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet. One of them is a twenty-two-minute “Get Happy” with Rollins full of confidence and wit, and astonishing work by Brown. Thanks to Harris Meyer for tipping me to the Chicago Reader story.

In 1963, eight years after he rescued himself, Rollins appeared, hale and hearty, with his quartet on Italian television. Jazz had changed, in part because of the freedom introduced by Ornette Coleman.  With Rollins were Coleman’s trumpet pal Don Cherry; bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Billy Higgins. The tune is Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme,” in an eccentric sculpted arrangement by Rollins. As you will see, they didn’t call Higgins Smiling Billy for nothing. At the end, the lights go up, Sonny almost smiles, a big band plays them off and we get a quick shot of a woman who may have been the hostess of a variety show.

Following a brief Rifftides review of the CD reissue of two of Bob Brookmeyer’s 1954 quartet recordings, Bill Kirchner wrote to recommend Back Again. It is a Brookmeyer quintet album that I didn’t know existed. I acquired it quickly and have been listening to it with interest and pleasure over the past two or three weeks.

Back Again has the valve trombonist in 1978 with cornetist Thad Jones, pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist George Mraz and drummer Mel Lewis. Jones and Lewis, of course, were co-leaders of the magnificent orchestra that bore their names. Brookmeyer had been a major
soloist in that band and wrote some of its most memorable arrangements. Mraz was the Jones-Lewis bassist from 1972 to 1976 and was now working around New York with Rowles. One of the most unclichéd pianists in jazz, Rowles’ history with Brookmeyer went back to the trombonist’s first L.A. tour of duty, when they and bassist Buddy Clark recorded two classic albums in 1953 and 1960. Now, in ’78, Brookmeyer had returned to New York from a second west coast stay that he found uninspiring. He was happy (see the cover shot) to be back and in a studio with this congenial group, recording for the Swedish label Sonet.

With their mutual depth of harmonic understanding and willingness to let whimsy lead them where it might, Brookmeyer and Jones made a two-horn front line loaded for beauty and surprise. Playing off one another in “Sweet and Lovely,” they give us both. Brookmeyer the melody maker opens the improvisation with a delicious phrase any composer would be proud to have written. The lunging West Indian feeling of “Carib” sets up two choruses of counterpoint between the horns that approaches downright abandon. There is a lot to like here, not least Brookmeyer’s through-improvised solo — if that’s the term — on “Willow Weep for Me,” on which he wrote a deathless orchestration in 1966 for the Jones-Lewis orchestra. Here, he invents one slow chorus of pure, original, melody that is itself worthy of orchestration.

“In a Rotten Mood” belies its title with chorus after chorus of assertive, good-natured vigor in a fast B-flat blues with altered changes. It has a slot for unaccompanied Rowles holding no finger in reserve, splendid soloing by Mraz, and more of that free-spirited counterpoint. The other tunes are “Caravan,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (more mutual commentary by Brookmeyer and Jones) and two takes of “I Love You;” standard material, extraordinary results. Throughout, Lewis sustains his reputation for perfect time and perfect adaptation to every subtle change in flow of ensemble and soloist. Rowles is, simply, Rowles; unimitative and inimitable, one of the great originals.

During this period, Brookmeyer had not yet moved past his penchant for half-valve phrases, growls, slurs and exclamatory, explosive, glissandos in both directions. His playing in those days often achieved the approximation or intimation of human speech that a few master horn players — also including Pee Wee Russell, Eric Dolphy, Lawrence Brown, Clark Terry and Bill Harris — made such endearing parts of their styles. I love the way Brookmeyer plays today, but that was a special time in his development.

I bought the Back Again CD from an online company in Canada that now says it is sold out will not have more copies. But don’t give up. This outfit announces that it will have Back Again back again on September 23 at a sale price. Who knows for how long?

The publisher of Poodie James has reduced the price of my novel. My slight loss in royalties is your gain. Ordering direct from the publisher benefits everyone on the writing and production end.

From a review:

I’ll cut to the chase: Poodie James is a very good book. Not only is it handsomely and lyrically written, but Ramsey’s snapshots of small-town life circa 1948 are altogether convincing, and he has even brought off the immensely difficult trick of worming his way into the consciousness of a deaf person without betraying the slightest sense of strain… Ramsey is no less adept at sketching the constant tension between tolerance and suspicion that is part and parcel of the communal life of every small town. — Terry Teachout, Commentary

With esteem for the United States at a low ebb around the world, the government continues to dismantle the Voice Of America, for more than half a century one of the nation’s most effective creators of good will abroad. The Washington Post reports on the latest VOA service to be stilled by the Bush administration:

NEW DELHI — At the height of the Cold War, as India leaned resolutely toward the Soviet Union, one direct line of communication remained open from Washington to India’s teeming millions: Voice of America, the U.S. government’s radio network. Rangisah Prasad, 70, recalls the days when there was just one radio set in his village, and Voice of America’s Hindi-language broadcasts provided an escape from the dull drone of India’s state-controlled radio news.

The Cold War is over, but Prasad’s devotion to VOA lives on. “I have been hearing this station for 40 years now. Their tone was always friendly and informal. People gathered around the radio in the village square and listened to Voice of America,” Prasad said in a telephone interview from Dumarsan village in the Indian state of Bihar. “We understood the world through their programs.”

But in a move that reflects shifts in U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors has decided that VOA’s seven-hour Hindi-language radio service will end this month, after 53 years. VOA will also eliminate radio broadcasts in three Eastern European languages. Radio broadcasts in Russian went off the air in July.

To read all of the Post story, go here. The administration’s relentless disassembling of one of the most effective and cost-efficient US tools of cultural diplomacy seems to have gone unnoticed by either presidential campaign. The candidates should be asked what they would do to revive the VOA. The Rifftides staff’s concern with this matter goes back a long way. The lack of public concern disturbs me.It should disturb all Americans, and those in other countries who wish us well.