New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
The National Jug Band Jubilee and the Kentuckiana Blues Society were successful in collecting enough funds to provide a headstone for Louisville jazz singer Sara Martin (1884-1955). The photo is from the unveiling in 2017. I mentioned this way back on July 13, 2014. Unfortunately the link to Louisville Music News is broken.
Before LeBron James, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lawler ... before Kong itself ... there was King Oliver.
The song Sweet Like This may not be the very best example of Joe "King" Oliver's work, but as a cut included on an LP called Guide to Jazz, it was my introduction to his body of work. The album was intended as accompaniment to a book of the same name, by the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié, and was released in the mid-1950s. At the age of 10, or thereabouts, I checked it out from the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library and committed it to cassette tape.
You might say that I caught up with rock and roll a bit later.
Why think back to King Oliver? Because of Sara Martin. And who was Sara Martin? Louisville Music News explains.
A Headstone For Sara Martin, at Louisville Music News
Here’s a fundraiser for all Louisville music fans – and I mean EVERYBODY - to pay attention and donate a few shekels toward: Louisville blues singer Sara Martin, noted for her early 20th Century recordings which earned her the nickname of “The Famous Moanin’ Mama” (and “The Colored Sophie Tucker”), is buried in an unmarked grave in Louisville Cemetary. The Kentuckiana Blues Society and the National Jugband Jubilee have joined forces to raise money to buy a headstone for Martin’s grave ...
If I go to church on Sunday
Then just shimmy down on Monday
Ain't nobody's bizness if I do
Is the film clip from Ken Burns' Jazz series? That'd be my guess. A few days ago I streamed a couple of Bessie Smith's compilation albums, and if you know her recorded output by "Gimme A Pigfoot" alone, there's lots more of interest in the archive. Insofar as Bessie Smith could do it her way, she did. The result was a canon that has endured for 80-odd years since her final recordings.
At an early age Bessie began performing on the streets of Chattanooga. In pursuit of a better life, Bessie left Chattanooga in 1912 to join a traveling minstrel and vaudeville show as a dancer and singer with Pa and Ma Rainey. As a teenager, Ma Rainey became Bessie’s mentor and she stayed with the show until 1915. She gradually developed her own following in the south and along the eastern seaboard. Ma Rainey greatly influenced Bessie’s showmanship, however Bessie’s elegant contralto and her hypnotizing delivery was very different from that of Rainey.
By the time of her death, Bessie was known around the world. She was a beloved diva who appeared with the best players of the day at sold out concerts in theaters coast to coast. Bessie’s pleasing contralto and mesmerizing showmanship propelled her from poverty to international fame as a singer of “classic” blues tunes, many of which she wrote and co-wrote. Before the Great Depression, Bessie was the highest-paid black entertainer in the world, collecting as much as two thousand dollars a week to sing such songs as her own, “Nobody Knows you When You’re Down and Out,” “Empty Bed Blues,” and “Backwater Blues,” accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Lonnie Johnson, and Benny Goodman.
Bix Beiderbecke was born 117 years ago today in Davenport, Iowa. He died at 28 in 1931, and thanks to the LP collection at the public library, I discovered him around the age of 12 (okay; circa 1972).
Bixology means a lot to me. The first road trip that Diana and I made as a couple was to Davenport to stay at a bed and breakfast in Bix's grandfather's house, and to look for the musician's resting place at the local cemetery. We'd missed the centennial party, but found the grave.
The recording of "I'm Coming Virginia" embedded here is typical of what Bix brought to music. This rendition somewhat morosely plods along until it's the cornetist's turn to solo, at which point the black and white blossoms into color.
Bix enters the proceedings as though from another planet; so it was throughout his sadly truncated life.
Following are two previously published remembrances, from 2007 and 2017.
What better time than my current period of home recuperation following rotator cuff surgery to break out Bix Restored for an epic listening party?
Bix Restored gathers all surviving 78 rpm records made by jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931) along with more than a few alternate takes. The music is arranged chronologically by recording date, and takes up four 3-compact disc sets.
That’s right: 12 CDs.
From my vantage point astride the top floor recliner, and with frequent breaks for napping and the mandated three daily hours of physical therapy (ouch), I finished the final disc on Thursday evening.
With respect to jazz as an art form, Bix’s legacy is substantial, and dozens of professional musicologists and academics are fully capable of explaining why, sparing me the obligation other than to note that to a previous generation of his contemporaries, Bix symbolized the inventive, daring and hopelessly impractical artist, forced into artistic enslavement (see Whiteman, Paul) and then cruelly cut down in the prime of life.
The truth is somewhat more prosaic. Employment with Whiteman’s ponderous pop orchestra, with which Bix cut the majority of records, was in fact a plum position, highly paid and much sought. And, the sad reality of Bix’s self-destructive drinking habits – dying before the repeal of Prohibition of complications from alcoholism, Bix certainly ingested more than his share of rotgut – isn’t east to overlook even if he was universally adored by friends and fellow musicians.
In the end, the truth’s in the music. Bix’s full tone, clarity of phrasing and melodic lyricism usually carry the day even when accompanying musicians are clueless or Whiteman’s less adept arrangers clutter the soundscape with pomp and circumstance. In jazz parlance, he plays “cool” whether or not the music’s “hot.” He can’t help it.
Understandably, being dead for more than three quarters of a century and being known for skills on behalf of a uniquely American music that most Americans no longer acknowledge has its way of making millions of Americans forget all about you, with unpleasant ramifications for anyone who wants “to be remembered.”
However, as with cultural icons of previous eras, ranging from the Marx Brothers to the Berlin Wall, and from the Paul Reising Brewing Company to ordinance enforcement in New Albany, I’ll do my best to keep memories alive.
This strange holiday digression begins with a social media group devoted to jazz legend Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke, where this little known Christmas song from 1945 by Hoagy Carmichael was posted: "My Christmas Song For You," with vocals by Martha Mears.
The reason why an obscure song by Hoagy Carmichael, as recorded 14 years after Beiderbecke's woefully premature death, would be posted on a Bix fan site is that the two are inextricably linked, so much so that Carmichael chose "Bix" as his son's middle name.
Furthermore, they met at Indiana University when Bix's band the Wolverines came through Bloomington in 1924. This passage from a wonderful account at Indiana Public Media sets the scene.
Throughout that spring Carmichael found attending the Wolverines’ gigs difficult, as he was often working a date himself on the nights that Beiderbecke’s group played. On one of those first Saturday afternoons, however, the Wolverines set up at Hoagy’s frat to rehearse, and he finally got a chance to hear Beiderbecke—the newly-advanced Beiderbecke of 1924—play.
Carmichael would recount this scene time and again for the rest of his life. As the Wolverines started to warm up, “Every nerve in my body began to tingle,” he writes in Jazzbanders:
My hands shook… Then I saw Bix get out his cornet and Jimmy told him to take the break in the middle of the chorus… Bix played just four notes that wound up the afternoon party. The notes were beautiful, and perfectly timed. The notes weren’t blown—they were hit, like a mallet hits a chime, and his tone had a richness that can only come from the heart. I rose violently from the piano bench and fell, exhausted, onto a davenport. He had completely ruined me… I’ve heard Wagner’s music and all the rest, but those four notes that Bix played meant more to me than everything else in the books. When Bix opened up his soul to me that day, I learned and experienced one of life’s innermost secrets to happiness—pleasure that it had taken a whole lifetime of living and conduct to achieve.
“Something that he heard in either Bix’s tone or the way he put phrases together affected him very deeply,” Carmichael biographer Richard Sudhalter said in a 2002 interview. “Deeply enough so that when he started to try his own hand at writing music—also the suggestion of Beiderbecke—it was inevitable that his whole approach to phrase-building, to composition, would be based on what he’d heard coming out of Bix’s horn.”
It's the same Richard Sudhalter whose book Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 was reviewed here, earlier this year.
Much later in Carmichael's life (he died in 1981), the songwriter discussed Beiderbecke's inventive style; specifically, the way Carmichael once wrote a chorus for four cornets in an arrangement of another of his songs, "Old Man Harlem," as a tribute of sorts to his friend.
Carmichael composed "Old Man Harlem" in 1933 with pop star Rudy Vallee; on a version recorded during World War II with Carmichael on piano, the drummer is Spike Jones of City Slickers fame. It was easy to find the recording mentioned by Carmichael with the Bix-like chorus.
Now this digression flies even further off the rails with a blog flashback to October 19, 2007.
A life-size bronze statue of Hoagy Carmichael at his Steinway Grand Piano will be visiting downtown New Albany, Indiana October 19-20, 2007 at the Speakeasy Jazz Club, 225 State Street, and Indiana University Southeast October 22-25. This visit is part of a statewide tour to re-engage Hoosiers’ knowledge of this creative composer and his enormous contributions to the landscape of American music. At the conclusion of the tour this fall, the statue will be dedicated and permanently installed at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Hoagy was born and received a law degree.
Somewhere I have a photo of the Speakeasy statute placement, but until it turns up, here is the view of the permanent setting in Bloomington.
This stream of consciousness ends with a novelty tune occasioned by a mention in the Bookseller's blog almost four years ago.
Barnacle Bill, the Sailor, is a now obscure but once vivid presence in popular culture. Several generations of children learned the song (at least the bowdlerized kiddie version) and it still maintains a commercial presence in various American seaside haunts, including several seafood restaurants.
Here is a raucous 1930 recording with both Hoagy and Bix present.
Bubber Miley, an African-American and sideman for Duke Ellington, plays alongside soon-to-be swing era stalwarts Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa in defiance of segregated convention, and violinist Joe Venuti takes certain liberties with the background vocal in the second chorus.
Listen carefully.
My final point has to do with barnacles. They're eaten as a sort of bar food in Portugal, no doubt accompanied by Super Bock lager beer ... and we'll be there in 48 days.
I'll drink a toast to Bix, Hoagy and the great musicians of their era before returning to fado.
Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong's finest and most innovative trumpet playing came during the 1920s, first as a sideman with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Clarence Williams, then fronting his Hot Five and Hot Seven combos. His recordings with these aggregations still are regarded as revolutionary in terms of jazz improvisation.
From the early 1930s until 1947, Armstrong followed the fashion of the age and led a big band, becoming a "pop" star in the modern sense. He was known more as a singer and entertainer, and less as a jazz trendsetter.
In 1947 Armstrong played a concert in New York with a small group of selected musical friends, including trombonist Jack Teagarden, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and cornetist/trumpeter Bobby Hackett; the latter plays the first solo in the recording here, following Armstrong's vocal, and his phrasing is noticeably modeled on Bix Beiderbecke.
The concert was a smash success; big bands were in the process of dying amid changing postwar times, and so Armstrong wisely formed the All Stars, a band with revolving members, with whom he toured for the remainder of his life. By the time of his death, Armstrong had added fame as a global cultural ambassador to the list of so many achievements.
It's odd enough that Sidney Bechet was born and died on the same day (May 14, 1897 - May 14, 1959). A jazz innovator of the founding school, Bechet also excelled at playing the strange and generally lesser used soprano saxophone. This links him with latter day "modern" jazz great John Coltrane, whose 1960s recordings find him exploring the instrument.
Who was the New Orleans jazz pioneer who did most to make this music a unique art form? When this question is asked, the name of Louis Armstrong invariably comes to mind, and rightly so. But there is another jazz musician whose name deserves to be coupled with Armstrong as the greatest of the New Orleans Jazz players. His name is Sidney Bechet.
By all accounts except his own, Bechet was of mercurial and disputatious temperament. Being compelled to perform mediocre songs like "Dear Old Southland" (above) while in the employ of Noble Sissle cannot have helped, but although the vocal and lyrics are cringeworthy, Bechet's majestic playing absolutely dominates the record.
On this gently swinging version of "Save It Pretty Mama" from circa 1940, Bechet is joined by an all-star lineup:
Double Bass – John Lindsay
Drums – Baby Dodds
Piano – Earl Hines
Soprano Saxophone – Sidney Bechet
Trumpet – Rex Stewart
I could go on all day. The lesson for me is that in times of stress and villainy, old-school jazz chases away the black dog. Happy birthday to Sidney Bechet. He may have been a handful personally, but he produced lovely music.
Only in New Orleans could there be a National Park for jazz! Drop by our visitor center at 916 North Peters St. to inquire about musical events around town. In the mood for a world class musical experience? Attend a jazz concert or ranger performance at the new state of the art performance venue on the 3rd floor of the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) may or may not have been the first jazz musician. The cornetist made no recordings, and all we have for evidence are the recollections of certain of Bolden's contemporaries, all of whom are long dead. A likelier explanation for the advent of jazz is that numerous musical strands came together during the early years of the 20th century and combusted.
(I dislike biopics, but for those so inclined a long-awaited film about Bolden has been released: Bolden, by Keith Uhlich.)
Bolden's name was mentioned whenever jazz lovers talked about the oldest times, but he didn't even get a proper headstone until 1996. Here's a good overview of Bolden's story by Gayle Worl in the Washington Post.
"King Bolden had everybody in the city of New Orleans real crazy and standing on their heads," Willie "Bunk" Johnson, a trumpeter and Bolden contemporary, recalled in an interview with the late jazz historian Bill Russell. Louis Armstrong, 23 years Bolden's junior, didn't give his predecessor as much credit. "Buddy Bolden had the biggest reputation, but he just played loud," Armstrong said. "I don't think he really knew how to blow his horn right."
PJ Morton, the keyboardist for the band Maroon 5, is a New Orleans native. He's spearheading an effort to restore Bolden's residence.
PJ Morton's party was a kickoff celebration for the Buddy's House Foundation, his recently announced plan to renovate Bolden's house, in consultation with the Preservation Resource Center (PRC) of New Orleans, an organization which advocates for the city's historic architecture. According to Morton, the house will become a community center, museum and recording studio, offering music-business education for young performers and celebrating the jazz originator's legacy.
To close, a recollection by a jazz writer, broadcaster and archivist. Jelly Roll Morton's version of "Buddy Bolden's Blues" is embedded above.
I am occasionally asked why my professional card, letterhead, website, and blog are headed by the phrase “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say. . . .” Sometimes, a person will inquire, “Who is Buddy Bolden?” Well, the phrase comes from, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” which was originally titled "Funky Butt" when it was a song in the repertoire of New Orleans cornetist and bandleader Charles “Buddy” Bolden (1877-1931), the legendary father of jazz. You can read about Buddy here. For further reading, I recommend Donald Marquis’s In Search Of Buddy Bolden: First Man Of Jazz and Danny Barker’s Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville.
Some consider "Funky Butt” the oldest known jazz tune. It was Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941) who bestowed the title “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” upon it and fashioned his own lyrics ...
I could go on and on about the entire rich history of jazz in America during the early 1900s, but I won't. My aim is limited tonight: for you to meet Muggsy Spanier, be aware of his "Great 16" sides of music, and know that "ragtime" is among the components of what we'd now refer to for the sake of convenience as Dixieland.
Dixieland, in music, a style of jazz, often ascribed to jazz pioneers in New Orleans, La., but also descriptive of styles honed by slightly later Chicago-area musicians. The term also refers to the traditional jazz that underwent a popular revival during the 1940s and that continued to be played into the 21st century. See also Chicago style, New Orleans style.
New Orleans was not the only city where early jazz took root at the turn of the 20th century, but it was the centre of that musical activity, and most of the seminal figures of early jazz, black and white, were active there. It is likely that both blacks and whites played the music that came to be known as Dixieland jazz.
New Orleans during the late 19th century was, in effect, two cities: Downtown was home to most whites and Creoles, and Uptown was home to freed black slaves. The strictness of the city’s segregation was evidenced in 1897 with the establishment of Storyville (known as “the district” to locals), a 38-square-block area, designed to isolate such activities as prostitution and gambling, that was split by Canal Street into black and white areas. Virtually every brothel, tavern, and gambling hall in Storyville employed musicians. The unique urban culture of New Orleans provided a receptive environment for a distinctive new style of music.
The scant available evidence (mostly anecdotal) suggests that the black and white musicians of New Orleans shared many common influences, although it would appear that white bands tended to draw on ragtime and European music, whereas black bands also built on their 19th-century ethnic heritage ...
J. Russell Robinson was born in Indianapolis and began writing songs while in his teens. "That Eccentric Rag" dates from 1912.
Jazz didn't really come to be identified as such until just after the Great War, which in turn couldn't be called the First World War until there had been a Second. Robinson's tune became a standard, with the first known jazz band recording by the Friar's Society Orchestra coming in 1922.
Francis Joseph "Muggsy" Spanier, who borrowed his nickname from baseball legend John McGraw, was born in 1901 in Chicago. Like the songwriter Robinson, Spanier's professional music career began early. He patterned his playing style on Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, the top African-American jazz trumpeters of the day.
Spanier spent the late 1920s and most of the 1930s as a sought-after sideman in name orchestras. While passing through New Orleans in 1938 with the Ben Pollack band, Spanier was diagnosed with a perforated ulcer that required treatment and a prolonged stay in the Touro Infirmary. Back on his feet again, Spanier determined to go out on his own and form a band to play the music he preferred, hence the formation of his popular but short-lived Ragtime Band in 1939.
From an excellent biographical sketch of Spanier:
Before the band broke up they made 16 exceptional hot jazz records: 4 in Chicago and 12 in New York for the RCA Victor Bluebird label. When the first long-play collection of all the sessions was issued, it was entitled The Great 16, and this immediately became the generic name by which they are recognizable to all jazz buffs.
Among the titles was "Eccentric," shorthand for Robinson's ragtime composition.
There's much to be explored about Spanier's contributions to jazz, but his band mates are far more obscure these days. Trombonist George Brunies began performing at eight years of age, and also played on the aforementioned Friar's Society recording of "Eccentric." The clarinetist is Rod Cless, a truly forgotten jazz virtuoso of the period who died at 37 in 1944.
This piece about Cless is well worth the time. Jazzmen of the period, whether black or white, had a fraternal bond that had much to do with relative privation. Then as now, no one want to pay the musicians.
I recently came upon a stash of old jazz magazines, including some copies of ‘The Jazz Record’, edited by pianist-bandleader Art Hodes and his sidekick Dale Curran between 1943 and 1947. It’s fascinating stuff, full of contemporary reports of what was going on at Nick’s in Greenwich Village and what the likes of Pee Wee Russell, Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon and James P. Johnson were up to. The piece reproduced below is from the January 1945 edition of the magazine, and I found it particularly moving. Clarinetist Rod Cless is now all but forgotten, but in the early 1940’s was a well-known and popular figure on the New York jazz scene. He died in December 1944 as a result of a fall over a balcony after heavy drinking, and then drinking some more from a bottle or flask smuggled in to him in hospital. This obituary – by someone who is obviously a close friend – strikes me as worth republishing as an example of how jazz people mourn.
During the last two weeks of February I listened to the Great 16 as a bloc five or six times. Just before that had been an extended period with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, both very different from Spanier's milieu. I always come back to all of this music at intervals, soak it up again, and try to learn a little bit more than I knew before -- as with this column from 2017.
Because of the international appeal of jazz, many breweries have honored the most esteemed musicians of this genre by naming a few of their beers after them. Below are seven of my favorite jazz musicians and the beer named after them.
The first two beers listed are the only ones I've experienced: Brother Thelonious (Monk, pianist and composer) by North Coast, and Bitches Brew (the classic Miles Davis album) by Dogfish Head.
I'd like to see a beer dedicated to Kamasi Washington, but then again I realize few of my readers are jazz fans, and Iron Maiden's beer probably has better sales potential. Maroon 5 Low Calorie Amber, anyone?
Today Pints&union is tapping a sixth barrel of Dogfish Head Wood-Aged Bitches Brew. From opening at 2 p.m. through 5 p.m., there'll be a musical soundtrack of Miles Davis to accompany your sipping pleasure.
Much like Jazz fusion, which blends different musical styles, our Wood-Aged Bitches Brew is a fusion of three threads of Imperial Stout aged on oak and one thread of Tej - a native African honey beer - aged on Palo.
The result is a roasty brew chock full of aromas of vanilla, licorice and chocolate, while you’ll find notes of sweet roast coffee with every sip. It’s slightly dry in the mouthfeel with a mild bitterness that make it the perfect sipper.
Miles Davis and the Making of Bitches Brew: Sorcerer’s Brew
The story behind the seminal jazz-rock album Bitches Brew
August of 1969 marked Miles Davis’ boldest venture yet into undiscovered country. This time there was no more holding back, no more tentative experimentation, no more “walking on eggshells.” The album that emerged, Bitches Brew, was groundbreaking, beginning with its stark title and Abdul Mati Klarwein’s memorable cover painting. Made on Miles’ personal invitation, Klarwein’s expressionistic work captured the zeitgeist of free love and flower power, depicting a naked black couple looking expectantly at an ocean, a huge vibrant, red flower beside them. The background of the title is unknown, but a clue is provided by the absence of an apostrophe at the end of the word “bitches,” making “brew” a verb, not a noun. Carlos Santana speculated that the album was a “tribute” to “the cosmic ladies” who surrounded Miles at the time and introduce him to some of the music, clothes, and attitudes of the ’60s counterculture. Gary Tomlinson, on the other hand, assumed that “bitches” referred to the musicians themselves. Just like “motherfucker,” the term “bitch” can be used as an accolade in African-American vernacular. Whatever the title meant, it sounded provocative. Teo Macero remarked, “The word ‘bitches,’ you know, probably that was the first time a title like that was ever used. The title fit the music, the cover fit the music.”
The music on Bitches Brew is indeed provocative, and extraordinary ...
The trumpeter's reinvention had a little in common with Bob Dylan's "electric" controversy at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and Bitches Brew received mixed reviews at inception.
Miles's embrace of electricity split the jazz world between excitement and contempt but he remained unrepentant. "I had seen the way to the future and I was going for it like I had always done," he reflected later. "I had to change course to continue to love what I was playing."
There's probably an analogy to be attempted somewhere with New England-style "Hazy" IPA or peanut butter and jelly beers. If so, you can make it. I'm busy listening.
The Tom May Content Multiplier's "letters to the editor" section has become a shadow of its former entertaining self, and it's not entirely the fault of our chain newspaper's enduring absentee ownership.
These days, people barely capable of communicating in writing still manage to inflict their views on the general populace via various social media platforms, accompanied by memes someone else conjured. A reincarnated H.L. Mencken doubtless would observe that American civilization is regressing quite markedly toward reclaiming grunts and groans from its simian forebearers.
Like Greg Phipps, we've met the enemy, and he is us.
Speaking of animals, it seems the presence of dogs at New Albany's farmers market has single-handedly rejuvenated the newspaper's letters section.
I love going to the Farmers Market on Saturday morning and was there the morning of July 28. However, this morning was not a pleasant visit as there were more dogs than humans. In fact, you could barely walk through because of so many dogs and I almost tripped over a small dog. Who would be liable for an accident? I like dogs in their place and this is not their place. This is a food market not a dog market.
Carolyn Carter, New Albany
No one goes to the farmers market any more -- far too many people are there -- and it would seem that the balance of vendors long since has tilted to merchandise, arts and crafts rather than food, but I digress.
A similar canine complaint followed only three days later.
Last week at the Farmers Market I had just entered the food area off Market Street, which was very crowded. The next thing I know a dog licked my right hand and I didn’t even SEE the animal. My first thought was: They should not allow animals at this public place! I’m leery of dogs and this scared me. And now I see this article which has prompted me to write.
Also, animals around food that humans will be purchasing and eating does not sound healthy to me.
I think it would be much cleaner with just humans at the Farmers Market.
No animals.
— Jamey Aebersold
"Syncopated Germophobe" sounds like the name of a rock band, not jazz.
germ·o·phobe
ˈjərməˌfōb noun
A person with an extreme fear of germs and an obsession with cleanliness.
Let's have a closer look at the saxophonist's link. I'm reminded of Frank Zappa's immortal album, Weasels Ripped My Flesh.
Doctors have been forced to amputate a man's legs and parts of his hands after he suffered sepsis believed to be caused by being licked by a dog ...
... A representative for the New York Animal Hospital told The Independent that it’s "extremely rare" for humans to become ill after contact with Capnocytophaga canimorsus, which was found in Mr Manteufel’s blood. In rare instances, the bacteria — which can be found in dog and cat saliva — may cause infections when it comes in contact with an open wound or burn, while the majority of Capnocytophaga canimorsus-related illnesses occur through dog bites.
In fact, there have only reportedly been 500 cases of sepsis caused by Capnocytophaga canimorsus without a dog bite being found in the US and Canada since 1976.
Obviously it's no laughing matter to contract sepsis from a dog's lick, but on the other hand, probably more than 500 pianos have landed on American sidewalk strollers since 1976.
No smoking, no animals; Aebersold's "anti-" range pleasingly grows. My own pet peeve is Puritanism, which I think should be banned from all public gatherings like the farmers market, city council meetings and DNA-sponsored events.
Mencken's definition remains the standard in the English language.
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
However, lest the jazzman has forgotten, at times the shoe occupies the other foot, assuming it hasn't been amputated.
During the Cold War, jazz was still banned in some Eastern European countries for being subversive and decadent. Well into the 1980s, the underground clubs where it was performed in these countries provided meeting places for political dissidents.
What if no anchor-bedecked city officials were allowed at the farmers market? Then we'd be getting somewhere. Keep the dogs -- just remove the bottom-feeders.
ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (2): A book about Bunny Berigan, his life and times.
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
I was born in 1960, and grew up during the pinnacle of the swing era – the big bands, the great bands, and the swinging years.
Well, no. Not really.
It only seems that way to me, thanks to my otherwise musically disinclined World War II veteran father’s Sunday morning habit of reliving his youth with the aural assistance of LP collections filled with the songs he remembered and enjoyed.
His only son usually was within earshot, and the rest is disjointed personal history, though make no mistake: I’m grateful for the tuneful area buzz from my youth. I love big band music. Swing led me backward and sideways, to jazz’s myriad configurations. Rock and pop predictably grabbed me, and so did classical.
The musical mash-up in my brain can get very strange at times, but the overarching point is that for someone born more than two decades after the heyday of the big bands, I carry a disproportionate weight of their epoch with me, every day.
Sadly, it’s all ancient history now. The newscaster Tom Brokaw once coined a clever phrase, and in 2017, when you’d have to be at least 80 years old to have early childhood memories of World War II, Brokaw’s stylized notion of the “Greatest Generation” is tempered by the knowledge that most of them have long since gone.
It’s actually far more nuanced and complicated than all this, though for the sake of the argument, the Greatest Generation shorthand can be accepted. As we’ve been told, these men and women started coming of age in the 1930s, when the Noble Experiment (Prohibition) was just a bad hangover, but the Great Depression ongoing and seemingly intractable.
It took a planetary conflagration to cure the economy, and many of the “greatest” became citizen soldiers, shipped abroad to slay fascism, a job they performed with requisite modesty, not to mention Coca-Cola and Hershey’s chocolate bars for the kids whose elders had sold them down the pike.
When they returned home victorious, the American Dream was made concrete reality, at least for white people during a scant period of time lasting roughly three, maybe four postwar decades. Many veterans hadn’t reached retirement age before neoliberalism became the preferred mechanism for the 1% to begin nostalgically reconnecting those profitable dots interrupted by war.
Obscene capital accumulation by wealthy elites accordingly resumed, and perhaps this is the real, recurring problem in American life – but I digress.
We might look to facets of the Greatest Generation’s upbringing for clues to its distinctive merits. One needn’t be versed in advanced psychology to grasp the importance of early life experiences in what we come to be.
In terms of population, America in the 1920s and 1930s had officially become industrialized and urban. The countryside wasn’t always sure it approved of this. For better or worse, regional differences still mattered, but owing to a number of factors, these were narrowing.
“Big” government was birthed at the time of World War I’s taxation and national security needs (arrest them Reds, now), followed by an more intrusive nanny state emanating from Prohibition.
There were no interstate highways, but a national network of roads was emerging, and the automobile brought with it seeming freedom of mobility, not yet illusory, though harboring the seeds of future suburban sprawl.
The emergence of mass media also was a huge factor in shaping perceptions during the Greatest Generation’s youth. Newspapers and magazines remained somewhat localized and were absolutely essential in conveying basic information, but the emerging mediums of film and radio seriously threatened ink-stained hegemony, paving the way for television’s collective national brain-shrinking and -washing.
In short, in the 1930s both news and entertainment were merging together as a mass-market cultural phenomenon, shared by greater numbers in ways not possible before.
Hollywood famously brought escapist motion pictures into theaters; these were new generation circuses to accompany bread lines and soup kitchens. Movies at least were still experienced communally, in a venue, with other humans.
However, one needn’t leave home to listen to the radio. It offered news, scripted comedy, religion, drama … and plenty of music.
Prior to the invention of the phonograph, culminating in “records” as we know them today, music was strictly a live performance art. Embryonic radio stations obviously played recordings, though the musical accompaniment to original entertainment productions overwhelmingly remained the domain of musicians carrying union cards, playing live during live broadcasts.
One bedrock requirement for a musician seeking such a secure and well-paid job was the ability to sight-read sheet music, quickly and accurately. Another was stringent professionalism, as there was no way of correcting mistakes. It was one take, and gone into the irreparable ether.
It was into this dynamic milieu that a young man named Bunny Berigan landed with noticeable fanfare. As with so many others, Berigan at first accepted the corporate paycheck. It brought him to the big city, but he yearned for something more.
The jazz bug had bitten him, and now jazz itself was morphing into something else beyond small groups in dingy speakeasies. The backroom combo became the ballroom big band, fusing the spirit of improvisation with the crowd-pleasing predictability of increasingly sophisticated arrangements, both at the point of origin and for a far wider audience of nightly radio listeners.
Berigan was perfectly suited for the advent of swing, quickly forsaking the remunerative safety of studio employment in the Big Apple to play in constantly touring big bands, first as a featured sideman, and later as leader of his own aggregations.
Berigan’s high water mark as a big band leader came during the late 1930s, when the swing era still was in its ascendancy. By the standards of the day, he had it all: professional respect, personal popularity, a wife, children, house and car.
But by 1942 Berigan was dead, his liver ravaged by cirrhosis, the victim of stunningly heavy drinking. Three-quarters of a century later, very few Americans remember Bunny Berigan, but for a while before most of us were born, he could do no wrong.
Even Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong thought as much.
Long after the big bands provided America’s WWII soundtrack, a Canadian named Neil Young suggested it was better to burn out than fade away. Roland Bernard “Bunny” Berigan provided a case study in how to do it, with nary an electric guitar in sight.
Berigan began as a fair-haired, corn-fed lad from Wisconsin, preternaturally talented and instinctively musical. He lived the normal Midwestern life of the time, made it through high school and dabbled at college. He was quiet and generally affable, and always regarded warmly by his friends and associates.
Seemingly destined for great musical achievements, his trumpeting skills took him to New York City, where his studio prowess can be heard, usually uncredited, briefly salvaging numerous pop songs with no redeeming qualities whatever, save Berigan’s inspired soloing.
Berigan’s trumpeting style still stands out from the era’s norm. He had the rare technical ability to play well in the instrument’s lowest and highest registers, with an amazingly burnished, broad clarity of tone. His was not the agitated attack of a Harry James. Berigan’s improvised solos were thoughtfully calculated, lyrical and “risky,” as trumpet players liked to describe them.
In fact, Berigan’s solos were as iconic in their time as Eddie Van Halen’s were a half century later, whether for Benny Goodman (King Porter Stomp, Sometimes I’m Happy); Tommy Dorsey (Marie, Song of India); or in the trumpeter’s own bands, as with his greatest hit, I Can’t Get Started.
Earlier in the year, I read a biography of Berigan: Mr. Trumpet: The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumph of Bunny Berigan, by Michael P. Zirpolo. It is one of two major biographies written about the musician; the other is Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz, by Robert Dupuis.
Zirpolo’s book isn’t perfect, but it’s as definitive a survey as any writer is likely to produce at this late date, when none of Berigan’s contemporaries are alive to tell the tale.
Granted, the author is far from a disinterested party, and on occasion seems happy to reprise ancient blood feuds and eager to pick a side in them, as with the big band journalist George T. Simon’s purported indifference, perhaps even antipathy, to Berigan.
Simon began as fanboy swing enthusiast, started young as a writer, and perhaps most unforgivably to his enemies, outlived just about everyone else who’d been there at the time, thereby achieving a cult status through sheer longevity.
Zirpolo also isn’t always kind to Berigan’s long-suffering wife, who wasn’t prepared for the jazz lifestyle or her husband’s infidelities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had a drinking problem of her own, and probably deserves greater benefit of the doubt.
Far more informatively, Zirpolo amply describes the entertainment industry milieu in which Berigan and so many other musicians struggled to stay afloat amid the machinations of resident charlatans, piranhas and cutthroats.
Indeed, these are constants throughout showbiz history, and perhaps Zirpolo’s greatest single contribution in writing his biography of Berigan is to settle accounts with those (like Simon) who continued to insist that the trumpeter was an indifferent businessman and a poor bandleader.
At least some of Berigan’s circumstances were extenuating. It’s true that as a bandleader during two separate stints, he was beset by simple bad luck, seemingly unable to catch a break. We know he drank too much. At the same time, he was badly served by monopolistic booking agencies, conniving managers and uncooperative record company executives.
More importantly, far from being detached, Berigan exhibited considerable skill in recruiting and drilling his musicians, constantly receiving positive reviews from the public even when cash-poor and operating at a loss, which seems inevitable given the challenging economics of one-night stands and a paucity of recording opportunities in the latter stages of Berigan’s short career.
Ultimately, the story of Bunny Berigan’s life is inseparable from the tragedy of his early death. Zirpolo cites a former Berigan sideman’s testimony that near the end, his boss was drinking two bottles of rye whiskey per day; his cirrhosis, for which the author posits a genetic predisposition, steadily worsened, and the trumpeter was broke and living out of a suitcase.
Without intervention, it was only a matter of time. Still, numerous accounts confirm that Berigan’s embouchure, chops and ability to perform remained largely intact amid this onslaught, until just before his liver finally disintegrated.
We now understand that alcoholism is a disease, and while Berigan certainly refrained from treating it, the support mechanism for sobriety had not yet come into its own. Taking time away for treatment subsequently became a rite of passage for rock stars, but societal attitudes hardly supported this approach at the time.
Berigan was left to his own devices, stuck in a moment like a hamster on a treadmill, unable to stop trying to make money even as the pace of his efforts left him increasingly indebted, with a break-even point that arrived only when he died. It’s useless, sad and infuriating, but in the end, it just is.
Zirpolo documents Berigan's life more than capably, and I recommend the book.
The music of the big band era has survived the departure of its creators and consumers, albeit as tribute rather than preference, according to the half-life that follows the demise of cultural relevance.
In retrospect, the era of peak big band in America was remarkably short-lived – ten, maybe twelve years at most. The music rose out of the Depression, reached a crescendo during World War II, and receded just as quickly at war’s end.
We can listen to Berigan’s recorded output; ponder his many might-have-beens, and imagine the musical scene long since passed. All of it, a society and culture, have been consigned to the history books.
At times it is a melancholy remembrance, though a necessary one, at least for me.
These three quarter-century old musical documentaries remain excellent, and are essential to your cultural education. Each is about jazz, but moreover, each also is about the social history and experience of Black America. Needless to say, most of the interviewees are gone, but their testimony remains. We are richer for it.
Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (1989)
The film was part of the "American Masters" series on public television, intended to accompany the book by writer Gary Giddins.
The seeds of modern jazz, or “bebop,” as the new style came to be called, were also being sown by now legendary pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drummers Kenny Clark and Max Roach, and trumpeter Miles Davis. All were frequent Parker collaborators on recordings and in the lively 52nd Street clubs that were the jazz center of the mid-1940s. Beyond his amazing technical capacity, Parker was able to invent a more complex and individual music by disregarding the four- and eight-bar standards of jazz and creating solos that were both fluid and harsh.
Giddins' book has held up very well since its 1987 first edition (Beech Tree Books). The author "revises" his work by only providing an updated preface and discography (retaining the original discography for comparison). His text remains as it was, taut and trim.
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John Coltrane - The World According to John Coltrane (1990)
These many decades later, Coltrane's virtuoso spirituality is fascinating. He stands alongside musicians like Jimi Hendrix in the sense of "What else would he have done?"
In his short life, John Coltrane continually pushed the boundaries of music. From swing to bebop to hard bop to free jazz, Coltrane was a restless seeker of new sounds. Inspired by the hypnotic, trance-inducing traditional music of North Africa and Asia, Coltrane created a new kind of music that fused jazz and Eastern spirituality.
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Eric Dolphy -- Last Date (1991)
Parker's lifestyle did him in, while Coltrane was a casualty of cancer. Dolphy should not have died when (and where) he did, particularly since Europe was affording him a level of professional achievement impossible in the States in the early 1960s.
This 1991 documentary is a love letter to Eric Dolphy, mysterious master of the alto sax, flute and bass clarinet who died at 36 in Germany after he lapsed into a coma brought about by diabetes; doctors mistakenly assumed it was because he was a drug addict and didn't give him the proper care.
1959. It was a pivotal year for jazz. Musicians started breaking away from bebop, exploring new, experimental forms. And four absolutely canonical LPs were recorded that year: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis; Time Out by Dave Brubeck; Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus; and The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman. 1959 also found America on the cusp of great social and political upheaval. Integration, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis — they were all coming around the bend, and sometimes figures like Mingus and Coleman commented musically on these events.
That's right, Artie Shaw -- you know, tattoo artist/writer Jonathan Shaw's old man, although this Esquire piece on the son doesn't even mention dad's name.
This 5-disc set from Jasmine Records, entitled "Six Star Treats" is perhaps the most essential box of jazz clarinet recordings available. Not only does it bring together, for the first time, all of the studio recordings of the various groups to work under the Gramercy 5 name, but it provides alternate takes and many live performances, including some tunes the group never recorded in the studio.
Shaw's cantankerousness is the stuff of legend. Some persons took to it ...
... If that sounds like the phlegmatic raving of an embittered misanthrope, Shaw would’ve been the first to admit (albeit in a bellicose manner) that he never lost his maverick streak.
... while others couldn't help noticing a darker side.
(Artie) Shaw said his father “had to be a selfish bastard” for leaving his family. One journalist who conducted a long series of interviews with Shaw echoed both the syntax and the judgment in speaking of the son: “Absolutely he’s got to be the most selfish man that ever lived. So you’ve got this enormously narcissistic man in a cocoon, who is quite happy. There’s no tragedy, I guess — other than for some of the women, and the two sons.”
Artie Shaw: Quest for Perfection is the BBC Four documentary, and clicking the video embedded above takes you to entire film. The interviews with Shaw were conducted just before he died. Although the overall quality certainly isn't the best ever witnessed at YouTube, it suffices.
It should suffice to say that the music made by The Comet Is Coming is the polar opposite of the 1920s and 1930s jazz I've been listening to these past few weeks. After listening to the video posted here, I'm ready to continue experimenting with Manhattan cocktail proportions while listening to late period Miles Davis.
Overall, it is encouraging to know there is life in this century-old form of expression, something vividly illustrated in 2015 when Kamasi Washington's audacious and sprawling three-disc release became the soundtrack to my mayoral bid.
“JAZZ isn’t dead,’’ Frank Zappa once said, “it just smells funny.” If he were around today, Zappa might point to the music of a London-based trio, The Comet Is Coming, with its curious scent. At the Montreal International Jazz Festival earlier this month, the fiery saxophone of Shabaka Hutchings, Dan Leavers’s pulsating synthesiser and Maxwell Hallett’s arresting percussion dazzled an audience with its mash-up of jazz and cosmic sounds. Halfway through the show, some entranced listeners rose from their seats and danced to a tune perfect for a rave. The trio calls its music “apocalyptic space funk”. More important, Mr Leavers adds, is the group’s goal: like a comet it “travels through distant galaxies exploring musical concepts”.
As promised (threatened?) yesterday, here's the 1975 documentary featuring Earl Hines. "Atmospheric" is an understatement, and with the performer still spry at 70, the documentary favors piano over commentary. It's an hour well spent.
I grew up listening to jazz and swing, and now that 40 years have passed, there are times when the brain waves become muddled.
As an example, there is a song called Save It Pretty Mama.
This musical digression begins at a random encounter with an entirely different song, Jersey Bounce. It popped up in the right-hand column on YouTube, as performed by Benny Goodman, presumably because I'd been searching for a song of Goodman's that featured trumpeter Bunny Berigan.
When I saw Goodman's Jersey Bounce, it immediately occurred to me that I've always liked a version performed by Earl "Fatha" Hines and His Orchestra, which I located. It was recorded in 1941, when the pianist was leading a big band, and appears at this post's end.
However, by now I'd forgotten all about Berigan and began searching for information about Hines (1903-1983). Hines came to prominence while playing with Louis Armstrong during the latter's revolutionary 1920s period -- as an aside, if you know Armstrong only from his later period as beloved entertainer, it's worth your time to dig into his earlier oeuvre, as here. The jazz trumpet had not been played this way previously.
Fatha Hines takes a solo, and in fact, he's just as renowned for his innovative piano work with Armstrong during this period as the headliner himself with the trumpet. It's epochal stuff, indeed.
The next song to pop into my head was Save it Pretty Mama. I knew that Armstrong's recording with Hines was the version I knew best, because it was on a compilation LP from my youth. The song was recorded in 1928, and proved easy to find on YouTube.
So far, so good.
Now, what typically happens when a piece of music catches my attention is that after first hearing the song, it remains dormant for a period of hours before circling back to become part of the constant playlist playing constantly in my noggin.
This can be especially strange when I find myself whistling a forgettable pop song, only to realize I'd heard a snippet in the supermarket the day before.
So it went with Save It Pretty Mama, except the version I heard playing in my head a day later kept oddly morphing into something different, and I couldn't determine why. I listened to the Armstrong version again. Why did my brain insist on playing a completely different ending?
And, wasn't there a solo missing?
Finally the answer dawned on me. It's because there was a completely different performance I still recall from my days of youthful jazz immersion, this one in 1941 by a group led by the master of the soprano saxophone, Sidney Bechet.
These two very different versions have one common element: The pianist in both of them is Earl Hines. Over time, they'd become fused together in my musical subconscious. I've separated them again, but by the time this happens again when I'm 90, who knows?
In closing, here is the Earl Hines recording of Jersey Bounce.
Currently I'm watching a 1975 documentary about Hines, and will report on it when finished. Meanwhile, you know that imaginary free house I mentioned last week? There'd be lots and lots of older jazz played there -- hypothetically, of course.
Go ahead. You try to come up with a way of describing an hour-each, three-CD release from a youthful virtuoso saxophonist working with a collective of skilled musicians, orchestra and choir. It's
dense, ambitious and audacious, and rewards repeated listenings.
The player is Kamasi Washington, his album is The Epic, and the review at All Music does it justice. From my standpoint, it's gladdening that jazz persists, and I feel a cold weather revival coming on.
Before LeBron James, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lawler ... before Kong itself ... there was King Oliver.
The song Sweet Like This may not be the very best example of Joe "King" Oliver's work, but as a cut included on an LP called Guide to Jazz, it was my introduction to his body of work. The album was intended as accompaniment to a book of the same name, by the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié, and was released in the mid-1950s. At the age of 10, or thereabouts, I checked it out from the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library and committed it to cassette tape.
You might say that I caught up with rock and roll a bit later.
Why think back to King Oliver? Because of Sara Martin. And who was Sara Martin? Louisville Music News explains.
Here’s a fundraiser for all Louisville music fans – and I mean EVERYBODY - to pay attention and donate a few shekels toward: Louisville blues singer Sara Martin, noted for her early 20th Century recordings which earned her the nickname of “The Famous Moanin’ Mama” (and “The Colored Sophie Tucker”), is buried in an unmarked grave in Louisville Cemetary. The Kentuckiana Blues Society and the National Jugband Jubilee have joined forces to raise money to buy a headstone for Martin’s grave ...
... Watch this video recording of her singing “Death Sting Me Blues” with King Oliver’s Orchestra from 1928 ...
It has been eight years (February 17, 2006) since Jimmy Scott performed at the now defunct Jazz Factory in Louisville. We attended, and I wrote about it the following day.
It took me the longest time to locate a version of this song, primarily because it has two titles. I was looking for Sounds of Africa, as the piece is identified on a three-LP compilation called "Jazz Odyssey, Vol. 3: The Sound of Harlem".
Along with companion sets featuring music from Chicago and New Orleans, these Harlem recordings were a staple of my listening at the tender age of roughly twelve, as copied onto cassette after borrowing the album from the library. Repeated listenings those many years ago have left indelible imprints on what remains inside my noggin, and now after hearing Charleston Rag, I'm digging out all the ragtime and stride piano that can be found.
Eubie Blake's very long life was fascinating, and worth a glance. He might well be among the pinnacle of greatest ever Baltimoreans, a list that includes HL Mencken and Art Donovan.
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