Category: Music

Confluences: jazz, immigrants, and Martin Luther

As I am reading W. H. Kenney’s Jazz on the River I am also listening to the audiobook of Michael Massing’s Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. Martin Luther, when he wasn’t blowing up Catholicism or excoriating the Jews, wrote many significant hymns that became central to Lutheran worship and helped to create a musical culture in Germany that was exported to the U.S. by German immigrants in the 19th century. One group of such immigrants, the Streckfus family, saw the decline of the packet boat industry along the Mississippi River in the 1890s and, perhaps because of that German musical culture, conceived the idea of converting their vessels into excursion boats featuring live orchestras and huge dance floors. It was on Streckfus steamers that Fate Marable spent fifty years leading Black orchestras, introducing New Orleans jazz to white audiences and teaching scores of notable jazz musicians (with Louis Armstrong at the top of that list) to read music fluently enough to make them employable when they (part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South) moved on to a bit of fame, if not fortune, in Chicago and New York. And another German immigrant, Bix Beiderbecke, growing up on the Mississippi shore in Davenport, Iowa, caught the jazz bug after hearing the riverboat orchestras, and became one of the first notable white jazz musicians. Martin Luther, no doubt, would have been appalled by Beiderbecke’s music.

It’s the same old song . . .

Summarized from Jazz on the River, by William Howland Kenney (2005), pp. 107-108:

  • 1896: The American Federation of Musicians is founded with forty-four local unions. Local #44 is the Black musicians’ union in St. Louis, Missouri. For three decades Local 44 prospers, with Black musicians playing the venues that white musicians didn’t want: dance halls, nightclubs, and riverboats.
  • 1927: With the end of silent movies, the white musicians who formerly played in movie theatres lose those jobs and begin moving in on the riverboat jobs, throwing Black musicians out of work.
  • 1929: With the Depression, white musicians lose most of their other jobs playing  vaudeville, stage shows, opera houses, and concert halls.
  • 1930: The A.F.M. revokes Local 44’s charter, making it impossible for Black musicians to negotiate for contracts playing on the riverboats. Subsequently, three-quarters of the remaining riverboat jobs go to white musicians, leaving most Black musicians playing in marginal venues for non-union wages. Similar stories played out in cities across the nation.
  • 1944: the A.F.M. finally charters a new union for Black musicians in St. Louis, Local 197.
  • 1971: Local 197 is dissolved when the St. Louis musicians’ union is finally integrated.

Mama Lou

I just came across this lovely piece by Eric McHenry in The American Scholar that seems to provide the definitive story behind “Mama Lou” and the origins of songs like “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:

“Queen of the Castle: Looking for Mama Lou, the legendary singer whose work helped inspire American ragtime”

Bessie Smith’s recording of “Hot Time” may be the closest we will ever get to Mama Lou’s original version, but the UK’s Ottilie Patterson and Chris Barber do a great job with it, too.

Roy and Lou

On November 9th we lost Lou Donaldson (November 1, 1926 – November 9, 2024), and today we lost Roy Haynes (March 13, 1925 – November 12, 2024), two giants of music who gave so much to us, and who proved that the good do not always die young. As Roy told Jon Batiste in an interview a few years ago, every day is Thanksgiving. Thank you, gentlemen. The world is a better place because you were here. As for the rest of you: go listen to their music!

Give some to the drummer?

Fate Marable (1890 – 1947) spent most of his life as pianist and bandleader on Mississippi River steamboats. In 1910, with a thousand passengers dancing to his orchestra’s music,

a fire broke out in the hold. Despite their orders to keep playing lest the passengers panic, each of the musicians in turn laconically allowed as how he figured he’d just ease on over and ‘see what was happening to the boat,’ in order, of course, to report back. Each one in turn slipped out and disappeared, including Marable, who left his drummer to carry on alone.

Sigh. I imagine the drummer thinking, “Ah, at last they’ve given me a solo!”

The steamboat

. . . burned to the waterline that evening. As a local paper reported: ‘Wild panic broke loose among the passengers, and . . . a general stampede ensued. Screaming, cursing, praying men, women, and children fought, jammed, and trampled over one another in mad chaos and confusion.’ Two passengers lost their lives, and crew members, who jumped into the water to help floundering passengers, later reported that babies rained down on them from the deck railings. After reuniting with his musicians on Bad Axe Island, Marable found that without the [steamboat] he and his band . . . no longer enjoyed gainful employment. Happily, John Streckfus [the owner] soon went out and bought a whole fleet of boats . . . .

—William Howland Kenney, Jazz on the River, p. 43

So, the drummer—who was he?—seems to have survived, but no word on whether he was able to save his drums.

Toxic Globalization: guns, drugs, oil, and music

Bread and circuses, my eye. Those Romans were amateurs.

Globalization began with Silk Road traders bringing bubonic plague to Europe, wiping out a third of the population.

It continued with Columbus and other Europeans bringing a catastrophic pandemic to the Americas in exchange for gold, silver, tobacco, tomatoes, and potatoes.

It reached a new high with the British triangle trade: guns and cotton fabric to West Africa in exchange for slaves who were taken to Caribbean and American colonies to work on sugar plantations and, later, cotton plantations. Sugar, rum, cotton—and lumber for shipbuilding—went from the colonies to Great Britain, completing the triangle.

Sugar was needed for the tea to which Britons had become addicted. The tea came from China, and as the Chinese wanted nothing British except silver, which the Brits did not want to part with, a two-pronged solution was conceived. First, they exported opium from another British colony, India (which included what we now call Afghanistan) to China and bullied the Chinese into trading tea for opium, eventually addicting millions of Chinese. Second, they stole the secrets of processing the leaves of Camellia sinensis into tea, and then developed tea plantations of their own in India and Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka).

In the 20th century, especially after World War II, globalization expanded. All those factories built to make weapons for the war needed new markets. Guns went to “developing” countries, i.e., former European colonies in Africa and Asia and Latin America; in return came illegal drugs to feed the growing addiction market in Europe and North America: marijuana, cocaine, and our old friend opium, now refined into heroin. The third major commodity of world trade was petroleum, without which international trade would have been much slower—petroleum, which literally fuelled automobile culture, the international travel industry, and the global environmental crisis.

Indispensable to all this commerce were bankers and gangsters.

Organized crime works by skimming profits, and globalization provided unprecedented business opportunities. Dictators and insurgents around the world needed weapons; gangsters could provide them, even where the commerce was prohibited by law. Weapons were often exchanged for drugs that could be exported and re-sold at enormous profits, using the clandestine networks developed by the gangsters. The dirty money acquired in these transactions needed to be cleaned (“laundered”) and that’s where bankers, casinos, and real estate developers came in.

In the United States, the sale of alcohol was made illegal in 1920. Prohibition led to an explosion of organized crime. Big money could be made running illegal breweries, distilleries, bars, and nightclubs, and importing alcohol from outside the country. During the Great War of 1914-1918, another wave of the Great Migration had swelled Black urban populations in the northern cities where factories churned out war matériel. They brought their music with them: gospel music, blues, ragtime, and jazz. An economic boom followed World War I. Urban populations had money to spend. Organized criminals supplied the music and the booze. At the same time, technology enabled recordings that could be distributed nationwide—and beyond—and radio broadcasts sent the new music into almost every home. Entertainment and music became industries controlled by organized crime. Musicians were kept in poverty by nightclub owners and record companies that skimmed most of the profits for themselves.

In Chicago, Al Capone adored the music and fostered an entire generation of music. In Harlem, the Mob-owned Cotton Club had as its house band the sophisticated Duke Ellington Orchestra. Kansas City had an entire district of jazz clubs . . . made possible by a corrupt political machine that served as a model for the Havana Mob [of the 1950s] as constructed by [the gangster Meyer] Lansky, [Cuban dictator Fulgencia] Batista, et al.

—T. J. English, Havana Nocturne, p. 244

After Prohibition ended in 1933, many of the gangsters switched to drugs: marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. (Others, most notably Meyer Lansky, disliked the drug trade and instead moved most of their operations to the casino business in Cuba.) Musicians were often paid in drugs, and their addictions provided a new market for the drugs being imported by the mafia while also ensuring that the musicians would remain dependent.

Musicians unwilling to perform and record on the gangsters’ terms simply could not work. Behind the scenes of almost any star singer, musician, band, or comedian you will find the mafia. Louis Armstrong hired a mobster, Joe Glaser, to be his manager, knowing that Glaser would enrich himself at Armstrong’s expense. Why? Because Glaser would protect him. Forty years later, five young men who later came to be known as The Band could not get a recording contract from anyone except the mobster Morris Levy; faced with the choice of getting ripped off or not recording at all, they signed with Levy. Such famous cases are not extraordinary—they are typical. The mob’s control of the “entertainment industry” was pervasive.

[1931, Chicago] By this time he had his big ‘Pistol—Pulling it out—As he said—”My name is ‘Frankie Foster.” And he said he was sent over to my place (Show Boat) to see that I ‘Catch the first train out to ‘New York. . . . Then He Flashed his Big ‘Ol’ Pistol and ‘Aimed it ‘Straight at ‘me. With my ‘eyes as big as ‘Saucers’ and ‘frightened too I said—”Well ‘Maybe I ‘Am ‘going to ‘New York.”

—Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, p. 110

Instead of going to New York, Armstrong fled. He spent two years in Europe. When he returned, he hired Joe Glaser to be his manager, following the advice given to him by a friend when he left New Orleans:

[Black Benny] said (to me), “Dipper, As long as you live, no matter where you may be—always have a White Man (who like[s] you) and can + will put his Hand on your shoulder and say—“This is “My” Nigger” and, Can’t Nobody Harm’ Ya.”

There was a positive side to these relationships. Both Jews and Italians had been the victims of prejudice as immigrants, and neither group had quite the same racist aversions to Blacks as did the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. Among many of these Italian and Jewish gangsters, Black musicians found protectors who shielded them from racist patrons and cops, bailed them out of jail, gave them a meal or a drink when they were down and out, or paid their rent, and employed them. There was also a significant number of Italian and Jewish performers—singers, comedians, musicians—who shared stages with Blacks and became friends, breaking the taboos of racism and leading the way toward a future of equality and justice. Overall, however, all performers were exploited by the gangsters, and white gangsters were just as racist as other whites.

In 1950s Cuba, Havana’s casinos, nightclubs, and brothels were mob operations that financed the Batista dictatorship. Hollywood movie stars, politicians like the young John Kennedy, along with many other celebrities and high-flyers provided a glamorous cover for this sordid arrangement. When the Castro revolution expelled the mob from Cuba, they retrenched to Las Vegas’s garish casinos and hotels, where middle-class Americans with money to spend could “let their hair down”: gambling, strippers, big-name entertainers, and lots of alcohol.

In the 1980s, Reagan’s deregulation of banking and finance made it possible for a new class of billionaires to suck money away from the middle classes into their own bulging pockets, until the U.S. wealth gap came to resemble the traditional wealth gaps in monarchies and dictatorships: a tiny group of the super-rich at the top, and then everyone else. The difference between this deregulated hedge-fund capitalism and the “pure capitalism” of organized crime? The hedge-fund guys had purchased legislators who made their operations legal.

Long before the 1980s, there were discreet but obvious ties between the Mob and “legitimate” businessmen. Frank Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, recounts a holiday gathering of gangsters in Palm Springs:

And it wasn’t just Sam Giancana. Throughout the day one mob boss after another showed up at [Sinatra’s] Alejo house. There was Johnny Rosselli, . . . a guy named Joe F. and another called Johnny F, and some others with Italian names no one could pronounce. Each guy came with at least one or two thick-necked bodyguards. . . .

That weekend I would drive Sam Giancana around Palm Springs to meet his visiting fellow mobsters, each of whom was staying in some gated mansion, not of celebrities but rather of the faceless fat cats from all over who owned manufacturing companies and heavy industry . . . . Those mobsters were certainly connected, although I’m not sure to whom.

—

Mr. S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra, by George Jacobs and William Stadiem (2003)

Drugs and alcohol, guns, oil . . . an “entertainment industry” controlled by the same criminals who trade in guns and drugs . . . a corrupted banking industry facilitating the transfer of huge amounts of money . . . billionaires in super yachts while middle-class folks struggle to buy a home or pay medical bills or finance an education beyond high school . . . pandemics spreading worldwide faster than we can even track . . . a climate crisis that threatens to make much of the planet uninhabitable.

That’s what globalization has brought us, but like the addicts we are, we tolerate all the short-term side effects and long-term debilitation in return for the highs, the sweetness, the bliss. Without globalization, would we have Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc.? Would we have Olympic champions, the World Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and all the amazing athletic achievements of the past century? Would we have dazzling holidays around the globe? Would we have restaurants serving up delicious ethnic cuisines in our home towns and “world music” on our playlists? The culture and economy spawned by globalization feed our addictions, both literal and metaphorical, and it seems inevitable that we will end up as all unreformed addicts do.

CODA

So, what are the “through lines” in this story?

  • Technology, from the wheels and sailing ships that connected China to Europe in the days of the Silk Road, to the cell phones and social media that connect everyone to everyone else today.
  • Genius and talent, funded by gangsters both legal and illegal. Think of the Florentine bankers who financed the Italian Renaissance, making Michelangelo and Leonardo possible; or the hedge fund billionaires who own the Los Angeles Dodgers, making Shohei Ohtani possible; or Werner von Braun, funded by Hitler, and then the US government; or the fabulous music of post-WWII Cuba, funded by the Mob’s casinos.
  • Addiction. To tea, to sugar, to alcohol and other drugs. To entertainment. To gambling. To sex. To shopping. To social media. To everything.
  • Environmental destruction. Coal. Petroleum. All the pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers required for industrialized agriculture. Air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination. Insect and bird populations, aquatic life, hundreds of other species extinct or in danger of extinction. All of this leading to climate change, mass migrations, and potentially making the planet uninhabitable.
  • Pandemics, from the bubonic plague to smallpox and syphilis to influenza to SARS and COVID and mpox, with more to come, we are told.
  • Exploitation of vulnerable populations. Of China by the British in the 18th century. Of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East by Europeans in the colonization that began with Columbus and continued for the best part of 500 years. In the “neo-colonial” economic imperialism of the Cold War era that followed decolonization and World War II, and continues today. Of women, trafficked around the world, both for sex and to labour in sweatshops where they help to feed the appetites of those who are better off for more and more things, at bargain-basement prices. Of migrants working illegally to process chickens or harvest vegetables so the rest of us can buy groceries at prices we can afford.

E. F. Schumacher, the author of Small Is Beautiful, was right. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, was right. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, was right. But they were all, along with many others less well known, spitting in the wind of globalization. Me, too.

Further Reading

CODA #2

Listen to the younger son of independent Singapore’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew. The Lee family has controlled Singapore, poster child for the post-WWII Asian economic “miracle,” since 1965.

“There is a need for the world to look more closely, to see Singapore’s role as that key facilitator for arms trades, for dirty money, for drug monies, crypto money.”

A Singapore government spokesperson said the country had “a robust system to deter and tackle money laundering and other illicit financial flows”, pointing to its favourable ranking in Transparency International’s corruption perception index, well above the UK.

Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International UK, said: “As Britain knows all too well, countries can look like they don’t have a domestic corruption problem yet still play a key role in enabling corrupt networks elsewhere. Singapore’s regional role as a major financial hub makes it attractive to those seeking to move or hide illicit funds, especially from a relatively high-risk neighbourhood.”

—https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/22/son-of-singapore-founder-says-campaign-of-persecution-forced-him-to-seek-asylum-in-uk-lee-hsien-yang

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: Two Photos

(ca. 1923) Left to right: Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Baby Dodds, drums; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; Louis Armstrong, second trumpet; Joe “King” Oliver, lead trumpet; Lil Hardin (married to Armstrong, 1924 – 1931), piano; and Bill Johnson, banjo.

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, 1921. Left to right: Ram Hall, drums; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; King Oliver, trumpet; Lil Hardin, piano; David Jones, saxophone; Johnny Dodds, clarinet, Jimmie Palao, violin; Ed Garland, bass. Courtesy of The Frank Driggs Collection.

The first photo shows King Oliver’s group after Baby Dodds and Louis Armstrong came aboard. According to Baby Dodds, he and Louis left Fate Marable’s riverboat orchestra in September 1921. King Oliver was in San Francisco at the time, and the second photo would appear to be a publicity shot made in California. Late in 1921 Oliver’s drummer, Ram Hall, left the group and was replaced by Baby Dodds over the objections of his older brother Johnny, who had not heard Baby play in some time, and who distrusted him because of his drinking. But Davey Jones, shown in the second photo with the saxophone, had played with Baby on the riverboats and urged Oliver to hire him—which he did. In 1922 Oliver took the band—most of them, at least—back to Chicago, and in 1923 (according to Baby Dodds) Armstrong, who had been playing in Chicago since leaving the riverboats, was added to the group. (Source: The Baby Dodds Story, As Told to Larry Gara.)

I am curious about the second photo. The group would have performed in formal dress, as in the first paragraph. The clothing in the second photo seems designed to play to racist stereotypes about Blacks as country bumpkins. Whose idea was it to present the band like this? Did these clothes belong to the musicians, or were they rented or purchased for the photo shoot? Who posed the group so artistically? (Notice how the angles of Dutrey’s trombone, Oliver’s trumpet, and Dodds’ clarinet match, as do the angles of Hardin’s right arm, Jones’s sax, Dodds’ torso, and Garland’s bow.) Were they really playing, or just miming? Was Lil Hardin just pretending to protect her ear from Oliver’s trumpet? Finally, are there other versions of this photo from the same session, with the same costumes but different poses? We don’t have video of them performing, but videos I have seen of other New Orleans musicians (including Armstrong) do not include the kind of showmanship suggested in the second photo. Is that because the musicians in the later performances were more restrained, knowing they were being filmed? Were they looser and more animated in their live performances?

If anyone knows more, I would love to hear from you.

21st-Century Do Re Mi

Based on Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” (1940).

Lots of folks down south, they say, headin’ north every day
Desperate to get away from poverty and crime
Back home the gangsters own the cops, climate change has killed the crops,
The tragedies just never stop, their lives’re on the line.

But the police at the port of entry say,
“You’re number fourteen thousand for today,” and

Chorus:

If you ain’t got that do re mi, boys,
If you ain’t got that do re mi,
You better go back to beautiful Libya,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, DRC.
You may dream of being European,
Or America may be your fantasy,
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
If you ain’t got that do re mi.

Maybe they board a leaky boat, or maybe they try to swim or float
To happiness that’s just across that river or sea
Or jump a train that’s speedin’ by, or just keep walkin’ if they can’t fly,
Riskin’ life and limb, to be free.

But the Northern papers say it every day:
“We don’t want you brown-skin people, go away!” and

[chorus]

Earl Palmer remembers . . .

Excerpts from Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, by Tony Scherman—long out of print, but wonderful. Earl Palmer was a first-call session drummer in Los Angeles from the late 50s into the 80s, but got his start in New Orleans (where he began as a boy tap-dancer) making records with Fats Domino and Little Richard. He is credited with inventing the straight-eighths beat on the hi-hat or cymbal that is characteristic of rock ‘n roll, and says that he got the idea from Little Richard’s straight eighth-note pounding on the piano. He is the drummer on hundreds of hit songs from the 1960s and 1970s, but also recorded film scores, TV jingles, etc., in almost every musical genre. He could sight-read almost anything, and also did a bit of arranging and composing.

Three of us in that group were the best jazz players in New Orleans at the time: Edward Frank , Red , and me. Sam Mooney never became well known but he was a good guitar player. Ellis Marsalis used to sub for Frank and sometimes for Tyler; sometimes he’d even play Earl’s bass. We welcomed that, because Earl couldn’t play. We used to cheer every time he hit a note that was actually in the chord. The people thought we were crazy. Earl had never gone near a bass, he just didn’t want to hire a bass player.

————————

[Racism in New Orleans]: White musicians who were in town at the Roosevelt came down . It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t take you downtown; you knew they couldn’t do a damn thing about it. 

I saw a white guy get thrown off a city bus once for sitting in the black section. “Can’t sit there, it’s the black section.”

“I can sit anywhere I want.”

“Not with niggers you can’t.” Threw him off the bus. One time Mike Sherpas, a white trumpet player we called Cheese, painted himself green. Got on the bus and said, “Where do you want me to sit, I’m green!” Threw him off, too.

————————

Me and Rene Hall and Plas Johnson always talked about how we could make some money and not leave the studio. One day I said, “Let’s do a rock version of ‘In the Mood.’”

“‘In the Mood’?”

Bought my house on it. 

You see, back in New Orleans millions of old white guys always said, “By God, do you boys know ‘In the Mood’?” If they liked it so much, why wouldn’t their kids, if we put a rock-and-roll beat to it? Rene and Plas said, “Okay, write an arrangement,” so I did. We put it under Ernie Fields, an old bandleader wasn’t doing nothing. It was a big, big hit. It went to number 4—that’s pop, not no R&B chart. We never did another thing, but it worked once. I’m telling you, “In the Mood.”

————————

When it really dawned on me that I could do this was when I had to play cartoon music, the hardest music I ever had to play. . . . Tom and Jerry fucking cartoons. . . . That music looked like fly shit, notes all over. 

————————

Rene Hall arranged everyone’s records. His stuff wasn’t my favorite but I admired one thing, the simplicity of it. “You Send Me,” that’s a perfect example of simplicity, I can’t think of any arrangement that could have been better for that tune. . . . 

I remember the stop-time in the bridge made me think of tap dancing. You know, that may have been my idea. I sort of remember suggesting that. 

————————

There was an engineer out there, I won’t call his name; somebody must have asked him what he thought once, and from then on he had to assert himself. Come a time he picked the wrongest thing in the world to say to the wrongest person and boy, when he said it the studio got to where you could hear a mouse piss on cotton. Because Red Callender was very, very particular about tuning his bass. Red was known to have great pitch, he was known to hit the note. So this engineer, sounding very authoritative, says to Red one day, “By the way, Red, I think you’re a little out of tune.”

Everybody say, “Oh shit.”

“Out of tune, you say?”

“Yeah, Red, a little bit.”

Red looks at the cat like he’s staring at an ant.

“And how in the fuck would you know?”

————————

Curt Wolf had the thickest German accent you could ever hear. I used to say, “Curt, man, when you going to speak English?” He’d say, “I em spicking Engglish, Airl!” 

————————

During a coffee break the subject came up about Orval Faubus, the segregationist in Arkansas. This same guy’s opinion was, “Segregation is a terrible thing, but those people,” meaning us, “have to be patient. Things like that don’t change overnight.”

He turned to me and said, “Do you or don’t you agree with me?”

I said, “Man, that’s a rough question.” I kept scratching my head. He didn’t notice I was stepping on his toe, harder and harder.

“Hey, you’re hurting my toe!” he finally yells. 

“Have a little patience, man. I’ll get off in a minute.”

He got my point. We became good friends.

————————

[Phil] Spector wasn’t an arranger of notes; I don’t know if he could write no notes at all. He was an arranger of ideas, of the elements that make a hit record. If there is any genius in him, that’s where it was. He had his finger on what other producers would die for: he knew what the kids wanted to hear. But you ain’t getting me to accept him as no musician.

————————

Sarah Vaughan was a chick that liked to hang. She was the Hang Out Queen, outhang anybody, drinking and getting high, day and night, talking and laughing and joking. . . . She had a mouth, too. Guys got furious at her but they took a swing at you. Anytime you was with her, you ran the risk of getting punched.

————————

The first time I met Ike [Turner] he’d just come in town. He wanted to pay everybody cash. I said I didn’t work for no cash. He starts to cuss me out and opens a briefcase with stacks of cash and a gun. That’s about what I expected. I’d heard he was a thug.

“Who the hell are you?” he says.

“I’m Palmer, and I don’t work no cash dates. I’m a union musician.”

“What I’m supposed to do, make out a contract just for you?”

“You going to have to do something like that, because I don’t want no cash money. When I get fined fifteen hundred dollars by the union, are you gonna pay?” He wound up filing a contract for me alone.

————————

[Bobby Darin]: He was head above shoulders more professional than most of the little singers I was doing around then: Paul Anka, Fabian, Bobby Rydell. Wayne Newton was a long-legged short-torso kid but Darin struck me as professional right off the bat.

————————

Paul Revere & the Raiders . . . was Hal [Blaine]’s client. . . .  

Teddy Reig asked me to do Manufacturers of Soul,  Basie’s album with Jackie Wilson. Harold Jones, Basie’s drummer at the time, didn’t play rock, which is part of why Teddy hired me. At the session he asked me, “What can we do to make these charts a little more commercial?”

“One thing, we could try using a tambourine.”

“Who can we get to play tambourine? Larry Bunker?” That made no sense—a top-notch percussionist, just to play tambourine?

“Man, let Harold play tambourine,” I said. 

“Can he?”

“All niggers play tambourine, Teddy.” Harold Jones played tambourine and got paid for it. I still have a medallion he gave me for that.

Teddy once tried to hire me to join Basie. “There was a time I would have paid to join this band,” I told him, “but I can’t afford to now.” Teddy said he understood. I said, “Man, I’m probably go home and get drunk after this.”

————————

They made a movie called Zachariah, a real hokey satire on cowboy days. Elvin Jones played a gunslinger. In his big scene, instead of saying, “Draw,” he says, “Gimme them drumsticks” and plays a big solo. . . .

Anyway, somehow or other the sound got messed up. The drum solo had to be played all over again. Jimmy [Haskell] told the producers, “Oh yeah, we can do that.”

I said, “Wait a minute. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to fucking do this, man.”

Haskell said, “Why not?”

“Do you know who this is? I can’t match Elvin, nobody can. The man is a genius.” Finally I said, “All right. Give me two hours.” I took my lunch and a Moviola machine and some music paper, went across the alley into a little room, and transcribed Elvin’s whole solo. Took me two-and-a-half hours to  write out a five-minute solo.  Then I played it. I not only got paid overtime, I got a bonus when they realized how hard that was and how near it came to being perfect.

————————

NUMEROUS DATES, 1970-74 — BAKED POTATO, SWEETS EDISON. Sundary nights, always a Sunday night. Never paid much, twenty bucks, but we drank for free and got a lot of coke. Don Randi, who owned the place, asked me about getting a group in there. I said, “Why don’t you get Sweets? He’s going to bring all the pimps and hookers in. Every musician that comes in town going to come by and see Sweets.” Sure enough, the Basie band came through and they all sat in. Ellington band, same thing. Red Foxx came in to work out his nightclub routine; he’d get up there and stay an hour or more. The band was me, Sweets, Plas Johnson, Dolo Coker on piano, Larry Gales on bass. That’s some of the best jazz I played here. Sweets is a stylist, a great stylist: the minute you hear him you know him. . . .

JANUARY 18, 1973 —  INAUGURATION, $1,500.00. Don Costa, Sinatra’s man, was musical director of the thing. Sinatra was emcee. . . . As it turned out, everybody brought their own band, so I wound up only playing with Roger Miller. All I had to do was walk around tasting hors d’oeuvres here and there. Since I was with Sinatra’s man, they gave me a Secret Service button that let me go in any room I wanted. All the guests are wondering, Who is he? They didn’t have many black Republicans then to speak of, so they all figure this is somebody they should know and don’t. It dawns on me: they’re worried. They don’t know who this nigger Republican is that’s big enough to be in this particular room. Who is this nigger? That’s exactly what they thinking. Who is this nigger? For him to be in here, must be somebody we supposed to know! I’m reading their minds. Who is this nigger? Must be an important nigger, an important nigger Republican AND WE DON’T KNOW HIM! Jesus, let’s don’t fuck up. Somebody find out who he is!

Nobody knew, except Mrs. Pat Boone. She saw me and came running over.

“Earl, what are you doing here?”

“Well, hi, Shirley. How’s Pat?”

“Wait, I’ll get him!” And she went and gets Pat and we’re shaking hands and hugging because I did a lot of work with him at Dot Records, and little Debbie’s hugging me and Shirley’s hugging me . . . . And the guests must have all breathed a great sigh of relief. Now we can find out who this nigger is. Everybody came swarming around Pat, who gave them the story.

“Oh! He’s an entertainment nigger! One of those kind, by God!

So now they all come up to me. “Oh, Mr. Palmer, are you having a nice time?” Mrs. Nixon, for one, very sweet lady.

“Yes, Mrs. President, I am, thank you very much.” I was feeling pretty good—I’d just smoked some weed with Pete Fountain’s band and Al Hirt. 

I met them all, I’m telling you, everyone but Nixon. John Dean was the only one asked me anything about what I did.

“Who are you going to be playing with?”

“Well, I don’t know yet. That’s why Mr. Costa had me come along.”

“You mean you’d be able to play with any of them?”

“Sure, that’s what we do all the time, play with anybody we have to.”

“Must be quite an experience.” . . . 

I was shocked when Sinatra exploded. They got their signals crossed and he introduced somebody, I can’t remember who, but Joey Heatherton came on. Wrong act. Sinatra hit the roof. I was in his dressing room with Costa and he storms in. “These cocksuckers don’t know what the fuck they’re doing!” I hadn’t realized until then what a rough guy this was. “Wait till my man gets in there, he’ll straighten this shit out.” I’m wondering, “What does he mean, his man? Nixon’s in.” You know what he was talking about? Agnew. He didn’t like Nixon worth a shit. That was his man, old Spiro.

————————

SEPTEMBER 25, 1973 — Midnight Special, . . . She came up the hall at NBC whe I was getting my shoes shined. I said, “Hello there.” Nothing wrong with saying hello.

She turned and said hi. Slowed down.

I said, “How are you? My, you look awful good.”

She said, “Thank you.” I got down off the shoeshine stand and talked to her. She was pretty, and very shapely. Had an Afro, not too big. One feature I liked about her, she had a little space between her teeth. That do something to you, too? She said she was there to be on some kind of talk show. 

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Angela,” she said. She never mentioned Davis. 

I suggested we meet for lunch. She said, “Yeah, that would be nice.” She didn’t turn a cartwheel, but she responded. I wouldn’t have imagined her to be receptive, and this is why I didn’t grasp who she was till long after. 

We met at the Carriage House, . . . I told her what I did and how busy I was. She wanted to know, “Do you have any control over what you do, over your work situation?”

“Control? Yeah, I take the job or I don’t.”

“Well, you’re rather prominent as a musician. You should be doing this and this and this,” and suddenly she’s talking all kind of politics. 

I said, “Wait a minute—why?”

She said, “Because there’s the exploiters and the exploited.”

I said, “Honey, nobody’s exploiting me, I’m just working.” I got a little indignant right there. She don’t know me from Adam and she’s already made a decision as to I’m being exploited and I don’t know what’s what in my job. I didn’t tell her she didn’t know what she was doing in whatever she did. What made her think because I flirted with her and hit on her that I was automatically an idiot? This had turned into something that had nothing to do with two people meeting and flirting, it was a real confrontation. 

She said, “Well, I can see there’s no way of reaching you. You’re just not prepared to hear what I have to say.”

“You’re damn right,” I said, and got up and walked away.

————————

It didn’t hit me right in the face. Maybe it should have. Ain’t like I wasn’t affected—I felt it in my pocket. Producers started letting groups record their own music, instead of session men doing it. . . . 

And then it finally hit me straight on, where you say, “Oh! This is why it’s happened and why it’s going to get worse.” If you remember, there was a movie called Chariots of Fire and one man, this Vangelis, did the whole score. Had electric drums, electric piano, had all this stuff. One man. And he got a Oscar. I said, “There you go. There’s the end of it right there.”

Kenny Clarke: Jazz has become classical music.

Kenny Clarke:

Jazz has become classical music. We try to play some of the old things we used to do good, really good. I mean you have Beethoven specialists, people who play Beethoven all their lives, the same pieces over and over again. No one ever says to them, “Man, why don’t you change your repertoire?” So they play Beethoven. OK. I play Charlie Parker. I play Thelonious Monk—and I’ll be playing it all my life. The important thing is that it’s well done. If you play it good, it’s good.

—1973 interview, quoted in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, by Mike Hennessey

Philly Joe Jones on Kenny Clarke: “I was so knocked out that I didn’t sleep at night.”

Kenny Clarke influenced me enormously. He totally revolutionized the world of the drums. He originated the way we play bass drum today—all those spaces. He taught us so much that we could progress a little further. When I first heard him play, I was so knocked out that I didn’t sleep at night. When I listened to Kenny I had the impression of being in the presence of the gods; that’s how impressed I was when I saw him play.

We lived together in New York for a time and that was a great opportunity for me. Kenny was my mentor. Max Roach and Art Blakey also expressed great feeling on the drums—and there are other great drummers like Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes. Some of them are excellent. But not like Kenny Clarke. Even Max, great as he is, doesn’t touch me as much.

—Philly Joe Jones in Jazz Hot, October 1985. Quoted in Mike Hennessey, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke.

Kenny Clarke: “I always thought drum solos were very stupid.”

I was never a soloist. I always thought drum solos were very stupid. I always concentrated on accompaniment. I thought that was the important thing. That was my basic function: to accompany. And I think that’s why a lot of musicians liked me so much.

—from Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, by Mike Hennessey

Kenny Clarke recording at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio. Minimal equipment, maximum results.

Take the Fifth, eh?

Dedicated to TFG & Co., with apologies to the great Duke Ellington.

If you,
must take the Fifth, eh?
you,
will quickly find yourself to be in prison.

If you,
don’t take the Fifth, eh?
you’ll
find an even quicker way to prison.

Hurry, hurry, stop your mumblin’
All your clever schemes are crumblin’

When,
you take that Fifth, eh?
soon,
you’ll be sitting pretty up in prison!

George Saunders: What happens to me when I read fiction

From his wonderful book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House, 2021)

I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.

My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.

I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).

I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

Most of that applies to other art forms, too.

It Don’t Mean a Thing, If Your Nose Can Be Seen

[Tune: “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing”]

It don’t mean a thing, if your nose can be seen
Pull up pull up pull up pull up
pull up pull up pull up your mask!

[Bridge]
It’s no good if it’s only on your mouth
It’s still not safe, if your nose is out!

So get with the scene, keep your nose behind the screen
Pull up pull up pull up pull up
pull up pull up pull up your mask!

[Bridge 2]
It ain’t no good to cover just your mouth
So pull that mask up, cover up your snout!

Your MAGA Hat Won’t Get You Into Heaven

[A variation on the late, great John Prine’s “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven,” with apologies.]

While digesting Reader’s Digest
In the back of a dirty book shop,
I stumbled on a box of MAGA hats,
Twenty-five cents a pop.
Well, I picked one out and paid two bits,
Pulled it down it over my eyes,
And if I could meet that Melania Trump
She’d get an awful big surprise.

[Chorus]
But your MAGA hat won’t get you into heaven, not today,
The pandemic’s dead are sharing harps and taking turns to play,
And Jesus don’t like hatred, no matter what those liars say,
So your MAGA hat won’t get you into heaven anyway.

Well I went to the grocery store today
And the doorman said to me,
“I’m sorry, sir, you need to wear a mask
Here, we’ll give you one for free.”
“I don’t need no freakin’ mask,
I got a MAGA hat!” I said,
I went on in and bought a dozen eggs,
And a loaf of that whole-wheat bread.

[Chorus]

Well, my MAGA hat kept slippin’ over my
Eyes so I couldn’t see.
I ran the car upside a curb
And right into a tree.
By the time they got a doctor down
I was already dead.
And I’ll never understand why the man
Standing in the Pearly Gates said…

[Chorus]

Cymbal Crash

In Grade Nine, as the youngest member of the high school concert band’s percussion section, I was assigned the cymbal part for a long symphonic piece whose name I have forgotten. 

On the night of the concert, the auditorium was filled with parents and students. I stood in the back row on the highest riser, a tall, skinny kid feeling uncomfortable. Partly my discomfort was due to the tie that was strangling me, but mostly it was because I had had very little rehearsal time for this number. There were, it seemed to me, about 5,000 measures of rest, including several repeated sections and other confusions along the way, before my single cymbal crash. The cymbals were heavy, 16 or 18 inches in diameter, and I stood for a long time, hands gripping the leather straps, a cymbal at each side resting lightly against my thighs. In vain I searched the music with one eye and kept the other on the band director as he conducted, hoping fervently that he would give me a sign when my moment was near.

To crash the cymbals properly, however, required some preparation. I had to raise them up in front of me, about six inches apart, one about twelve inches higher than the other. I worried that the band director, having more important matters at hand, would not alert me long enough before the crash to give me time to prepare. Finally it seemed to me that I had better get ready, so I raised the cymbals up to their proper positions and waited. Just as my arms were starting to quiver under the weight of the cymbals, the director looked at me and discreetly shook his head. 

As inconspicuously as possible, I slowly lowered the cymbals and stood again with my hands at my sides. Only later did I realize that a tall, skinny boy raising a large pair of shiny cymbals in the back row provided, for most of the audience, the only real interest of the performance.

The piece continued, and I waited, hoping desperately for either a section of music that I recognized, or a sign from the conductor. 

Nothing. 

Once again, fearing I would miss my cue, I raised the cymbals, and waited. Again my arms began to tremble. Again the conductor shook his head, and again I lowered the cymbals slowly to my sides.

I can’t remember now whether this sequence repeated three times, or four, but finally, my arms now visibly shaking, the conductor nodded. With immense relief I recognized the crucial passage of the music, and I successfully crashed the cymbals, right on time. 

My relief turned to shock, however, when—right in the middle of the piece—the entire audience erupted in applause! They had been waiting through almost the entire, dreary number for that cymbal crash. The tension caused by my repeated false starts must have been excruciating.

A week or so later, my French teacher kicked me out of class and sent me to the vice-principal’s office. She was angry with me because I refused to carry the heavy textbook home each night to complete her five-point homework assignments. “If you did your homework, you could have an A!” she shouted in exasperation. When I told her that I was quite happy with my B+, she kicked me out.

The vice-principal, hardened by constant experience with rather more serious discipline problems, listened to my story, looked at me without expression, blinked once, and invited me to sit down. “I really enjoyed that band concert,” he said. “You did a great job with those cymbals.”

Taken aback momentarily, I recovered my footing and we talked for several minutes about the weight of crash cymbals. We discussed the care one must take not to catch one’s tie in between the cymbals and thus spoil the crash. And so on. We pretty much exhausted the topic. Then he looked at me and asked, “Do you think she’ll let you back into class now?” He wrote a note for me and sent me back.

Fado!

Fado is Portuguese folk music that is found almost exclusively in Lisbon.

I went there for a teachers’ conference in 1989 when I was working in Morocco. The guy that was supposed to pick us up at the airport was late, so I and a couple of buddies bought a map and jumped on a city bus. We talked up a friendly girl, who told us the name of a restaurant in the Bairro Alto (an old neighbourhood of the city) where we could hear good fado. That’s the first time I heard the word.

The restaurant was a family-owned greasy-fish place filled with locals drinking cheap red wine and eating greasy fish. We sat down and ordered food (and cheap red wine) with the help of Cristina, daughter of the owner, who spoke enough French for us to communicate. There was a guitar leaning against the wall, but nothing else. After a while a nondescript fellow wandered in, shook a few hands, then picked up the guitar and started singing this amazing music, with the locals singing along on the choruses. After about 15 minutes he put the guitar down, joined a table, and had his meal.

As the evening progressed this happened repeatedly, with different singers coming in, doing a set, and then either sitting down for a glass of wine or wandering off, presumably, to the next place. How or if they got paid was unclear.

Finally, about midnight, there was this scruffy looking guy with the guitar. Our waitress, Cristina, took off her apron, walked up to join him, and began singing like Maria Callas. She and the guy began doing a kind of duet, but clearly it was improvised, with lots of snarky back-and-forth between them and the crowd roaring with laughter.

We stayed as long as we could, and went back repeatedly during our three-day conference. Cristina, it turns out, had recorded an album, and she sold me a tape cassette of it. The tape was good, but in person she was magnificent.

Of course we didn’t understand a single word of the lyrics, but it didn’t matter. The music was so beautiful, and powerful, and sad. One guy told me, “Fado is the Portuguese blues.”

Here is the great Amália Rodrigues:

And here, more recently, is Carlos Manuel Moutinho Paiva dos Santos Duarte, whose stage name is Camané:

Enjoy!

Quality vs. Taste: The Ice Cream Story

No ice cream was consumed during the writing of this story, and consuming ice cream of any kind is NOT recommended. If you want something sweet, eat fruit.

One Saturday afternoon my friend and I were walking down the pedestrian-only section of the main shopping district downtown. My friend looked to the left and saw a Mr. Softie vendor selling swirls of soft ice cream in three different colors, with sprinkles of various kinds available at additional cost. “Oooh! Mr. Softie!” he cried, and started toward the stand. “Wait!” I said. “Do you have any idea what’s in that stuff? It’s just air and chemicals and artificial sweeteners and artificial flavors and artificial colors. The only real thing about it is the very real damage you do to yourself when you put that poison in your body.” “I know,” he said. “It’s crap, and it’s really bad for me, but I love it anyway.” And off he went. 

Waiting for him amid crowds of shoppers, I began looking around. On the opposite side of the street to the Mr. Softie stand was a Waldorf-Ritz Gourmet Ice Cream shop. The best, most expensive, and most delicious ice cream in the world! Without hesitating I walked through the ornate double doors, already salivating as I imagined a scrumptious bowl of Waldorf-Ritz Rocky Road. The moment I passed through the doors, lights began flashing, celebratory music began playing, and confetti began falling from the ceiling. The store manager rushed straight up to me, smiled happily, and said, “Congratulations, sir! You are the one millionth customer to walk through those doors!” He took me by the arm and led me to a special roped-off table that had been prepared for the occasion. “Please have a seat here, sir,” he said. Then he called to his employees, “Bring out the Prize Ice Cream!” In a kind of procession, the entire staff escorted the master ice cream chef to me as he carried, on a silver tray, a large bowl of ice cream. “There you are, sir!” said the manager. “Three scoops of our unbelievably delicious pistachio ice cream, free of charge, with our compliments. I know you will enjoy it.”

I looked at the ice cream, and then at the circle of happy employees waiting to see me take my first spoonful, and then at the manager. “I really appreciate this,” I said, “but I’m sorry to say that I don’t like pistachio ice cream.” The manager looked shocked, but then smiled. “I think you misunderstand, sir,” he said. “This ice cream is handmade in small batches by our master ice cream chef. All the ingredients are 100% natural, organic, and completely free of any artificial additives or colorings of any kind whatsoever. The cream comes from cows raised in luxury dairy farms where they are treated like movie stars. Nowhere in the entire world will you find ice cream even half as good as Waldorf-Ritz Gourmet Ice Cream!”

“I know that your ice cream is the best in the world,” I sighed. “But I don’t like pistachio ice cream!”

The moral of this sad tale, of course, is that judgments of quality are different from judgments of taste. I may love Mr. Softie ice cream, or I may love a corny movie or a trashy piece of pop music, even though I know that if I judge their quality, they all fail the test. On the other hand, I may admit that Waldorf-Ritz Pistachio ice cream or the novels of James Joyce or the ballets of Igor Stravinsky are all superb examples of ice cream, fiction, and dance, while still not enjoying any of them. In the words of the great American film critic, Roger Ebert, “Does it make a movie ‘good’ because you ‘like’ it? No, it doesn’t, and I have liked a lot of bad movies.” We can put this another way: no one can tell you that your judgments of taste are wrong. No one can say, “You are wrong to dislike pistachio ice cream!” But if someone who knows more than you do about literature and ballet says, “You are wrong to claim that the novels of James Joyce or the ballets of Igor Stravinsky are crap,” he just may be correct.

Kansas City, 1938

Jesse Price (L) and Charlie Parker (R) horsing around in the summer of 1938. Price was 19, Parker a year younger. Jesse Price was a drummer and singer who worked largely as a sideman but made a few great recordings as a band leader and vocalist in the early days of R&B, similar in style to early Louis Jordan. “Frettin’ for Some Pettin'” (1948) and “Jump It With a Shuffle” are great examples of his work. Photo credit: American Jazz Museum.

Gene Krupa: how to develop your left hand

The author has found it very helpful to try do as many things with the left hand as is usually done with the right. Opening doors (the ones with the door-knobs being an ideal hand turning exercise), lacing your shoes, carrying parcels, tieing your necktie, buttoning your shirt, feeding yourself at the table, and writing, have been found to be excellent exercises for the left hand.

—Gene Krupa’s Drum Method (1938)

Sit on your trap case!

Daniel Glass’s podcast conversation with Brooks Tegler reminded me of the old days when drummers sat on their trap cases and a cushion. I learned in the podcast that Gene Krupa was the first to sit on a purpose-made drum “throne,” which in his case was a “box throne” designed at the urging of a concert promoter who didn’t like the look of Gene sitting on his trap case. The box throne was never put into production, but was followed by the canister throne that was—I learned—initially open at the bottom, but later turned into a . . . trap case! . . . by putting a bottom on it and putting clasp hinges on the lid. I still like the minimalist beauty of just sitting on the trap case. Here are two photos of the great Kenny Clarke sitting on his trap case. The first might make you think that this was only done in rehearsals or recording sessions when the drummer didn’t want to haul a lot of gear, but the second one is clearly a performance. As for not wanting to haul a lot of gear . . . who needs a lot of gear, eh Kenny? Bass, snare, hats, one cymbal—done!

Here’s Krupa himself, sitting on a trap case:

And here he is again, sitting on what appears to be that custom-made box throne, wrapped in white marine pearl to match his drums: