People vs. Dr. Chilledair

Something to fall back on, Not that he'll need it.

2012-01-21T12:13:00.001-08:00

Blossom on the Beeb

2012-01-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

Here are links to a doc on Blossom Dearie on the BBC from last December.

pt. 1

pt. 2

pt.3

For Handy completists everywhere

2012-01-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

In December 2008 the One Shot Wonders series that I help oversee for SSJ Records (Japan) released a terrific one off by singer Flo Handy. At the time, had I known about the existence of this additional single by the singer on the same label, I probably would have added it as a bonus track to the CD. Then again maybe not, due to the vertiginous drop-off in quality from the body of the album proper. This track represents a pretty bad attempt to get down with the new kid music. As for the flip side, "Go Stand in the Corner," I haven't heard it, so I can't vouch for the quality. Though the pedigree of the writers, Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker, is well-regarded, still I'm not holding my breath.

"Rifftides" Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

2012-01-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2012 PINKY WINTERS Winters in Summer (SSJ)

To borrow from Paul Williams’s words to Ivan Lins’ “Love Dance,” Winters knows how to turn up the quiet. Using subtleties in phrasing, pitch, intensity and tone shading, she takes ownership of a song without violating its writer’s intentions. Here, her bossa nova repertoire includes Jobim, Lees and Moraes, plus Brazilianized songs by Cole Porter, Dave Frishberg, Bob Florence and Jack Jones. A highlight: her caressing of Jobim’s and Lees’ “Dreamer,” which also has one of several simpático tenor saxophone solos by Pete Christlieb. Years pass between Pinky Winters albums. When one appears, it is an event.
________________________________________________________
And check out that kraaaazeeeee backup singer on track two!

Please pass the Cyanide Float

2011-12-30T08:12:00.000-08:00

Chris Connor sings "Happy (?) New Year"

Be there or be square or you can be both!

2011-12-29T16:36:00.001-08:00

click image twice for full screen

It's Christmas Day in Japan!

2011-12-24T09:28:00.001-08:00

Delightful Doris Drew Sings White Christmas

2011-12-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

Listen

Sue Raney at Vitello's

2011-12-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

December 30 (Friday) Sue Raney with the Tom Ranier Trio will be performing "Johnny Mandel and More" at 8 pm - two sets (the second begins at 9:30). Vitello's is located in Studio City, CA at 4349 Tujunga AV, phone 818 769 0905

Music charge $25.00 w/ a $13.00 food/drink charge.

Kurt Reichenbach Sings The Christmas Waltz. . .in Tokyo

2011-12-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

Positively Eighth Street

2011-12-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

by Bill Reed

This is an expanded version of a chapter from my memoir, Early Plastic. It concerns the Eighth Street Bookshop, an independent Manhattan bookstore that served as a focal point for the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. You can buy his memoir Early Plastic at Amazon.

Staggering through the aisles of today’s giant bookstores, it’s hard not to imagine that most of the merchandise won’t eventually find its way to the nearest Jersey landfill rather than a reader’s night table. Ever since these behemoth-sized emporiums took root in the 1980s, trafficking in assorted lamps, T-shirts, gewgaws, Simone de Beauvoir coffee mugs, Samuel Beckett tote bags, and — oh yes — books, the importance of the printed word has become almost a consumerist afterthought. It’s the effect of the literature that these stores sell — a perfume of culture. So omnipresent has this book sales surround become, it almost seems as if — even to those forty and beyond — it has always been with us. But bookstores used to just sell books. And just as importantly, they offered useful information, something nearly impossible to glean from today’s post-literate, cradle-to-grave-minimum-wage chain store clerk. In fact such bookstores of yore, most of which were a quarter of the size of today’s overstuffed bazaars, were often social and cultural gathering-places where literature took precedence over lattes.

Until the early 1970s, nearly all of the large and small bookstores in the U.S. were individually owned and operated. By the end of that decade, however, nearly a seventh of these 7000 independents in the U.S. had shut their doors for good. How could these vertiginously multiplying outfits like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks offer the likes of The Olivia DeHavilland Macrame Cookbook at a price even BELOW wholesale? The answer is simple: volume Volume VOLUME. Then in the ’80s came more chains such as Crown and, in addition, mega-retailers like Walmart and Costco; and in the 1990s, chain SUPER stores the likes of Barnes & Noble and Borders. And, mostly as a direct result of this influx, a few thousand more independent bookstores folded. By the year 2000 the total number of independents had fallen from 5,132 in 1991 to just around 3,200.

As recently as 1991, independent bookstores still managed to account for the largest amount of book sales (32 percent). But today, thanks to the insult added to injury of “Shop Naked” cyber sites like amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, the number of independents has dropped below the 3,000 mark, with a significant portion of those remaining stalwarts only barely managing to hang on. The independents are fighting back in a myriad of ways, including, in at least one notable book distributor / store chain merger, seeking the intervention of the Federal Trade Commission. But the ground has shifted underneath them in ways that would appear to be irrevocable.

With today’s computerized inventory systems, the chances are better than good that you’ll find what you’re looking for in the “average” book superstore — if you know what you’re looking for. Still one can’t help but wonder if such consumer certitude is an adequate trade-off for what the independent book retailer had to offer in the way of bibliophilia, knowledge, literacy, familiarity with stock, trust, experience, readerly advice, etc. To underscore what the ABA and its members are trying to preserve, it might be instructive to recall a bookstore that was not only the largest independent (or otherwise) in the U.S. at one time, but one that also exemplified some of its best attributes and traditions — New York’s Eighth Street Bookshop.

When I lived there in the 1960s, Greenwich Village was still known far-and-wide as the antidote for “Cleveland blues” — the place to go to kick over the traces and let your hair down. Whether this still holds true or not is debatable, but the (just plain) Village of my teens and early twenties continued to be a haven for — among other unconventional sorts — pinkos, an-ar-kists, and long-haired men and short-haired women; as was still being noted with forthright amusement by guides on the tourist buses snaking their way past me through the Village’s narrow streets. This image of the Village was nothing new, of course, but stretched back to before WWI, as Warren Beatty’s invaluable Reds attests.

In the mid-1940s, at the southeast corner of Eighth and MacDougal, stood a branch of the very un-Village-like Womrath’s franchise (a precursor of the chains to come), specializing in greeting cards and the latest bestsellers. But when two young proprietors, the Wilentz brothers, Ted and Eli, took over in 1947, all that changed: OUT went the froufrou calendars, gift box ribbons, children’s toys, etc. and IN came an inventory consisting almost entirely of real books.

Under its new name, the Eighth Street Bookshop rapidly became a literary gathering-spot reflecting and in turn influencing the latest local, national and international vogues in everything from poetry to astrophysics. Over the next few decades Eighth Street would become as fine a book emporium as any in the U.S., and a worthy rival to Blackwell’s in London.

A big factor in the store’s success was its willingness to embrace the new paperback phenomenon of the 1940s. While other retailers, clinging to the concept of the hardcover book, tended to eschew those 35 cent editions of the sort featuring Madame Bovary heaving out of her bodice or Captain Ahab ravishing a scantily clad native woman, Eighth Street presciently embraced them. As more trends developed (existentialism, the Beats, etc.), the categorical demarcations on the shelves became more dizzyingly Jesuitical by the hour. The dernier cri in taxonomy was reached in the early 1960s the day a magic-markered sign went up for a new section featuring Astral Projection, all the rage that season. Relegating most best sellers to its lower shelves, Eighth Street filled its display window with the latest Ezra Pound, new translations of Kafka and the like. As if to say, “No Jacqueline Susann sold. Our customers don’t read her.”

By the time I came on board as an employee in 1963, in-store sales, coupled with phone and mail orders meant the operation had no choice but to secure larger quarters. However, so associated was the store with the street’s numerical name by ’63 that “Ninth Street Bookshop,” “Tenth Street…,” etc., “formerly Eighth Street Bookshop” just wouldn’t do. Finally in 1967 there became available, slightly eastward at 17 West Eighth Street, a five story townhouse where Texas Guinan, of “Hello, Sucker!” prohibition fame, once lived. The Wilentzes purchased it, and the gutting of the interior began (they never did find Guinan’s legendary gold bathtub when they excavated the place). Once renovation was completed, the new location possessed little of the hamische atmosphere of the old place. “All the warmth of an airline terminal,” as one employee put it. But the opportunity to play Library at Alexandria was a fair exchange. Even larger than most of today’s Borders outlets, the three sales floors of Eighth Street Bookshop at 17 West prided itself on stocking over 60,000 neatly arranged titles. By its own estimate “Greenwich Village’s Famous Bookshop,” the United States’s Famous Bookshop was more like it.

Long after most other Greenwich Village retailers had gone the way of high-tech security systems to snare shoplifters, Eighth Street did not require one to “Please check all bags, etc. at the front counter.” So lax was overall security that one employee who worked there was able to steal many thousands of dollars from the till before getting caught. A self-styled struggling artist, even though the Wilentzes paid wages nearly twice as high as any other bookstore in the city, he most likely felt his actions justified. But emblematic of the fluffy white cloud of paradox hanging over the place, when this not-so-petty thief was finally uncovered and sent packing he was given generous severance pay. Just what you might expect from a couple of only partially reconstructed lefties like Ted and Eli. The aforementioned pilferer notwithstanding, working at Eighth Street was considered a sinecure by most who toiled there. Another time, an employee, known for his hangovers, mistakenly ordered a mammoth number of non-refundable books: “Just give me one of everything,” he had told a salesman. Typically, he was allowed to stay on.

Wilentz senior had been a furrier, but his youngest son Eli, instead of following in dad’s footsteps, harbored ambitions of being a sculptor. There was an exquisite rumor among Eighth Street’s employees, probably begun by some droll clerk, that Eli had been a Martha Graham dancer in his youth, thus summoning up far-fetched images of the stolid and rather dour Eli leaping about the stage of Town Hall clad in tights. Whatever his personal designs on being an artist might have been, the store certainly provided a wealth of artistic atmosphere.

Eighth Street’s regular clientele included Edward Albee, Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, the curmudgeonly Joseph Campbell, essayist-novelist Albert Murray (every day), author-activist Michael Harrington, cartoonist William Steig, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, poet-translator (later, MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient) Richard Howard, and Alger Hiss, also the store’s stationary supplier. One time I received a note from Hiss praising me for my courtesy and friendliness. In all likelihood, this convicted commie spy, and one of the most vilified men of the century, wrote encomia like that to anyone who didn’t punch him in the face.

Nearly every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing literary stardust out of your eyes. As poet Jonathan Williams wrote in his 2001 Eulogy for Ted Wilentz, “One minute: Pee Wee Russell, the next Geraldine Page, the next Edward Dahlberg, the next e.e. cummings. Ted would be on cue, like Toscanini– absolutely poised.” Veteran photographer Fred McDarrah in his book, The Beat Generation, recalled, “Ted and his family lived in an apartment above the store, and there he threw his informal book parties, which were the closest thing to a literary salon in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s.”

“This is Shelley Winters, 225 Riverside Drive,” the party on the other end of the line said. “Perhaps you recognize the voice. (Who wouldn’t?) Do you know who this Emma Goldman person is? I’m auditioning to play her in a movie but I’ve never even heard of her.” I would have sworn that left-leaning Winters had not only heard of Goldman, but somewhere in the heart of her Riverside Drive co-op had a shrine dedicated to the legendary feminist / communist / anarchist. The call came in at Eighth Street one evening just before midnight closing time. Winters wanted to know if we had any books on Goldman. We did; practically an entire section. That night the store stayed open past its usual closing time, just long enough for a driver to arrive and pick up “one of everything” on Red Emma.

A measure of the enormous degree of clout once possessed by book reviewers happened in 1963 when Avon Books reissued the obscure Depression era novel, Call it Sleep, by the long forgottenHenry Roth. In an act practically unheard of, this mass market 95 cent Avon paperback reissue was the subject of a front page write-up in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, in which it was deemed perhaps the Great (albeit lost) American novel. Minutes after Eighth Street opened that day, the store was overrun with customers in search of a copy of the undeservedly forgotten work. All that were on hand went flying out the door in minutes, Ted made a weekend emergency call to the publisher, and bright and early the next morning we had received enough stock to supply the demand for this belated “overnight sensation.”

It seems as if every literary lion in the Village (and beyond) was a habitué of the place. The one notable exception being Djuna Barnes, author of the 1934 novelNightwood, which wielded as much if not more influence on a newer generation of women writers in the 1960s as when it was first published. Even though, since the 1940s, Barnes had lived in a one-room apartment at number 5 Patchen Place, just off of nearby Sixth Avenue, she was not only curiously absent from Eighth Street Bookshop, but from the streets of the Village as well, though there is one candid street photo of her, caught unawares, trudging along Greenwich Avenue in McDarrah’s aforementioned book. Word was that the unexpected success of Nightwood so freaked Barnes she was barely able to write anything after that.

Then one winter’s day in 1974 store clerk Tom Farley spotted a very aged crone, stooped and barely able to make it to the top of the second landing. I saw him move from behind the counter to help her up the last couple of steps, and as he reached out, I overheard him say: “Welcome to Eight Street Bookshop Miss Barnes.”

Here at last was one of the locale’s most famous literary lights making her long overdue debut at Greenwich Village’s famous Bookshop. I flinched; I thought maybe this Garbo of avant lettres might, upon being recognized, turn around and walk right back down the stairs and out the front door. Instead, she looked up and said to Tom:

“However on earth did you recognize me?”

“Why from your photo on the back of Nightwood,” he explained, referring to the famed Stieglitz portrait that adorned the paperback edition.

“Do you realize that picture was taken long before you were even born?” Barnes said in amazement. It had been taken more than forty years before.

“Well, you haven’t changed a bit,” he replied.

At that, Barnes blushed just like a young school girl.

As far as I knew at the time, one of the store’s regulars wasn’t a writer at all. Instead, the main claim to fame of Samuel Loveman — a very sweet old man looking like a cross between W.C. Fields and the latter-day William Burroughs — was that he had once been the lover of a certain very famous writer. But in his 1976 obit, I learned that Sam had not only been, as the newspaper tastefully couched it in the language of the time / Times, “a youthful protégé and lifelong friend [itals. mine] of Hart Crane,” but in the 1920s, a poet and critic of some renown himself. Loveman more or less lived at Eighth Street in the 1960s, with its employees constituting a sort of surrogate family, especially Conrad Brenner, the night manager, whose main claim to literary fame was that in 1947 he had written the first-ever English language essay on Vladimir Nabokov (so famous that it has been affixed to the standard edition of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.) As Sam shambled about the premises, poetry and / or Hart Crane groupies would point discretely at him and whisper with the fervor of film fans spotting Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany’s.

As late as the 1960s, the tradition of publishers specializing in experimental prose and poetry was still a way of life in the Village. Too avant-garde or obscure for most other book houses to bother with you? In the 1960s, one had to look no further than Eighth Street’s own Corinth / Totem Press, which trafficked in first or early works by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Diane DiPrima, et al. Perhaps the most important of the Corinth volumes was Charles Olson’s Projective Verse,in which the New England writer laid down many principles that still hold sway in American poetry. Especially vital to the continuance of the small press aesthetic were the acolytes of poet Frank O’Hara. Run down and killed by a taxi on Fire Island in 1966 at age forty (an accident nearly as freakish as the one that claimed another of America’s great artists of the advance guard, dancer Isadora Duncan), O’Hara, long after his death, is now far more widely known than he was in life. Among those who satellited around him back then were Larry Rivers, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Kenward Elmslie, Alfred Leslie, Bill Berkson and sui generis writer-painter Joe Brainard, all Eighth Street habitués. And nearly all of these artists and many more were given encouragement through-publication by Corinth / Totem Press. It comes as no surprise that, today, a slim, stapled volume (more like a pamphlet) of O’Hara’s, Second Avenue,published by the press in 1960, fetches upwards of two hundred dollars on the collectors’ market.

The press also dabbled in reprinting works by too-good-to-let-go-out-of-print writers like poet Delmore Schwartz, and publishing The Beat Scene, a poetry anthology that was the first of its kind. Beat Scene was edited by Eli, but it was brother Ted who was the real literary groupie, which is the best kind to be if one is going to aspire to that sort of thing. Corinth’s forays into the “experimental” also included the publication of Mrs. Aphra Behn, 17th century figure who is now widely considered to be the first feminist writer.

Much like San Francisco’s City Lights Bookshop / Books, also an important small press publisher, Eighth Street functioned as a mail drop, social club, post office, loan department and employment agency for much of New York’s literary avant garde. Whenever a Marianne Moore or W.H. Auden came by the store, it was invariably Ted and not the somewhat introverted Eli, who tripped all over himself bowing and scraping. It was entirely in keeping with the older Wilentz’s almost groupie-like avidity for such eminent personages that one day he came rushing up the steps to the mezzanine, snagged me by the collar, and breathlessly confided as he dragged me down the steps that there was someone on hand that I just had to meet. Rounding a corner, I came face to face with Neal Cassady. A decade and a half after his and Jack Kerouac’s peregrinations for the ages had been chronicled in the latter’s On the Road, he was the Beat Generation’s eminence grise. Like a golden retriever laying a dead bird at his master’s feet offering him first chew, he proffered merely the briefest of intros: “Neal Cassady… Bill Reed” etc. Then hyper-kinetic Ted (were there ever any two brothers less alike than he and Eli?) was off like a “Flash” (the employees’ secret name for him). This was a classic awkward social situation. Cassady was not so much a writer, as a character in a roman Ã clef. What could I say? “I sure did enjoy you in On the Road,” like it was some dumb road movie. We shook hands, then mutually bid “Goodbye.” Thanks, Ted! Despite the awkwardness, I’m glad I had the chance to meet the real “Dean Moriarty.” I also remember Lenny Bruce, around the time of his Lower East Side Loew’s Theatre concert, coming into Eighth Street wearing the brightest, most dazzling white-on-white linen suit since Sidney Greenstreet.

Over the years, a surprising number of store employees were able to move beyond book clerking into various degrees of public recognition: LeRoi Jones worked there at one time; so did Allen Ginsberg’s soul mate, Peter Orlovsky (as janitor), along with poet A.B. Spellman, the author of the seminal jazz book, Four Lives in the Be-Bop Business and drama critic / editor Jan Herman. At the height of his public notoriety, David Mitchell, notorious “draft dodger,” was part of the crew. My friend, Ken Weaver, was briefly employed as the store’s janitor just prior to or after — I no longer remember which — Peter Orlovsky. Then Ken quit, when the Fugs, the shock-rock group he founded along with poet-peace activists Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, became an overnight sensation and the three found themselves off on a round of, at first, national, then international touring. This isn’t to say that all the clerks became famous — though many were already “famous in their own mind.” In fact a friend once took note of the “Mandarin-like demeanor” of some of them, as a mark of what we’d now call “attitude.” But in the end, at least they possessed the answers to any question a not-easily-intimidated customer might raise.

In the early 1970s when shopping mall and chain store mania began, not even Greenwich Village was exempt from the blight. Seemingly impervious longtime Village establishments began displaying more and more “Closed for Remodeling” signs, which fooled no one. Miraculously, a few old haunts remained afloat: former speakeasy and watering hole Chumley’s on Bedford Street; to the east on Thompson Street, the literary hangout Grand Ticino; and El Faro, with its exotic mix of Chinese, Spanish and Italian food. Eighth Street also managed to hang on. And well into the 1970s, it looked as if the place might roll on forever… even when a branch of a new large discount bookstore chain opened nearby, with more of its kind on the way. But even success was no guarantee of staying power. Vertiginously escalating rents were hitting nearly everyone: Bleecker Street’s still-popular Café Figaro, where Jack Kerouac had once worked as a dishwasher, closed up. Almost overnight the place became a Blimpie’s hoagie shop. My Eighth Street co-worker Andre Codrescu (now NPR commentator and author) said it looked like someone had stood at the door of the Figaro and blown up a giant balloon containing the franchised interior of a Blimpies.

Around 1969, the Wilentz brothers had some sort of breakup and Ted unceremoniously departed Eighth Street; now Eli was the sole owner. Most working there felt like kids caught up in custody battle, and no one could tell any of us what the “divorce” was all about. Otherwise it was business as usual for the next few years, then around ’75 the door the door to Eli’s office began to remain closed most of the time while he held meetings with various people who tended to shout a great deal. Something was wrong after all; it appeared that Eighth Street Bookshop, too, was falling victim to the changes taking place in the Village. Eli, who had previously been only phlegmatic and sometimes hard to read, now became downright uncivil, especially to his employees, an almost straw boss who even refused to discuss with me the matter of my long overdue vacation. Tough shouldering the responsibility of such a large outfit on his lone shoulders, I guess. So one spring afternoon in 1976, when my lunch hour came round, I made a B-line for the nearest employment office where I filed a grievance. I never set foot in Eighth Street again, but not because of the recent unpleasantness. The following morning I received a phone call from Joe Bitowf, an Eighth Street co-worker and a notorious practical joker:

“Where were you early this morning at around five o’clock?”

The opening conversational gambit was par for the course with the notoriously elliptical Joe.

“Asleep in my bed,” I answered. The Truth. “Why?”

“Eighth Street Bookshop burned almost to the ground last night; and since disgruntled ex-employees are the first ones they usually question, you should be ready with an alibi when the fire inspector comes around.”

I didn’t quite believe Joe, even when I rang off, but later that day in the New York Post, under the headline “Blaze at Eighth Street Bookshop,” I learned he hadn’t been joking after all. Curiously, no Fire Inspector Bill ever came calling. I’m sure Eli — a basically good AND assertive man — convinced them to leave me alone. Not long afterward, the neighborhood newspaper, the Village Voice, reported there were a number of witnesses to the fire being arson-related. But nothing ever came of it.

In Dan Wakefield’s memoir, New York in the Fifties, poet Harvey Shapiro recalls a gathering of artists and writers held shortly after the blaze “to honor the store and the owner, to give him the desire to go on after the fire… you know, the Eighth Street Bookshop was the place for poets — I met other poets there, some poets even got their mail there, it was a real center for us. What I remember about the evening was that Allen [Ginsberg] improvised a poem, “The Burning of the Eighth Street Bookstore.” It was really good… He thought it was good too, and after reading he ran around the audience to see if anyone had a tape recorder so he could save it.”

Later that year Eighth Street reopened its doors with a kickoff party covered in the October 4, 1976 issue of The New Yorker. By this time I had departed New York City for good to live in Los Angeles.

“Familiar faces,” the publication reported, “included Joe Lash, Margo and Nat Hentoff, Michael Harrington (the writer, not the congressman), the poet Richard Howard, and Imamu Amiri Baraka [Leroi Jones], who arrived with his wife and some free copies of Unity and Struggle, the political organ of the Revolutionary Communist League.”

But the Eighth Street Bookshop that opened some six months after the disastrous fire, “name” first night guests notwithstanding, was not the Eighth Street of yore. The large third floor social studies section, which had drawn heavy business, was gone. Jacqueline Susann was so longer relegated to plain brown wrapper status, which I noticed to my shocked amazement one day when I was back in the city for a visit and walked past the store, but was dutifully displayed in window, along with a lot of other current discounted bestsellers. I also learned from friends who still worked there that the place was now as realistically security conscious as any other run-of-the-mill retailer in the Village. No longer was Eighth Street a bookstore where, the Village Voice once reported, “on the front shelves you found Walter Benjamin chock against Charles Bukowski, and inevitably some ragged edition ofNightwood…”

In my picaresque 1960s, I left Eighth Street Bookshop employment at least a half-dozen times, usually to hit the hippie highway. But coming back off the road and finding myself beached on the shores of Manhattan, I was always welcomed back by Ted and Eli to its staff of 40 or so. With its unusually high and fair wages, the place seemed to offer cradle-to-grave security. I once believed that Eighth Street would last forever, then in the 70s revised that downward to… hanging on for a while. The rebuilding after the fire seemed to indicate that. But I was wrong. Under a headline reading, “Great Moments in Labor History,” the October 1, 1979 issue of the Village Voice reported that the store’s personnel had shown up for work earlier that week to find, without prior notification, the locks on the door changed. The Voice implied that Eli Wilentz, rather than give in to unionizing his operation, as the majority of his employees were now pushing for, decided to close up his store for good (although Eli later denied that was the reason). A sign in the window read:

“To customers and friends — After thirty-two years of running the bookshop, I have decided to retire. I appreciate your friendship over the years. Long live Greenwich Village and its poets, writers and readers.” — Eli Wilentz

There was no mention of the store’s staff of would-be union men and women, who must have stood around for a brief while scratching their heads and shuffling their feet, then straggled off into that great good Village morning heading for the nearest unemployment office.

Stores, theaters and restaurants, so reflective of the character of the Village from an earlier day were now dropping like soldiers in battle, including: the Cafe Cino, stomping grounds for a generation of New American Playwrights; gone too were: Sutter’s Bakery, which had been in the Village for a long as anyone could remember and still seemed to be going great guns when it unexpectedly closed its doors forever; the nearby Women’s House of Detention reduced to a pile of 19th century rubble; the Stag Shop with its stunning line of abbreviated, tight-fitting male clothing creations by Parr of Arizona (the Marie Curie of “Basket”). All — and more — gone and replaced by inauthentic pizzerias, discount clothiers, gay leather shops, newsstands stacked high with the latest issues of Orgy, Eat, and Screw.The Village Barn and Bon Soir nightclubs were also victim of the change. The smell of fresh bread wafting out of dear, departed Sutter’s, gave way to the stomach-churning odor of open air souvlaki clashing head-on with the patchouli oil and incense that came drifting out of head shops.

Now, Eighth Street Bookshop (born 1947 – died 1979), one of the last holdouts of a — some might say — more authentic Greenwich Village, was gone. The “Engulf and Devour” (thank you, Mel Brooks) conglomerates had finally won the first battle of the war. There are still a few bookstores which, on a smaller scale, carry on in the tradition of a store like Eighth Street. Although operating on a much smaller scale, Book Soup in Los Angeles (of all places) caters to the serious reader quite successfully. The secret of the success that Soup and other independent stores have discovered, is not in supplying an overwhelming amount of stock, or trying to match the megastores in discount pricing, but through providing impeccable service. If you have a question about a book or an author you can be assured of getting a useful and polite — and, most likely, Un-Mandarin-like — reply. The literary salon atmosphere Eighth Street epitomized — and centralized — may be gone with the era that nurtured it, but many of the things it provided still persist in other forms — from sundry cozy independent book nooks to the pixilated realms of cyberspace. But the center that was Eighth Street no longer holds.

Christmas countdown. . .

2011-12-07T06:20:00.000-08:00

CDR of a track from the rare Duncan Sisters EP.

The Diva Detective Strikes Again!

2011-12-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

I still can't quite believe I finally tracked down Delightful (and wonderful singer) Doris Drew. She was a fixture on U.S. TV variety shows in the 1950s, but then---poof!---gone w/o a trace. Drew seems to have retired in her early 30s. I've spent many dozens of hours off and on over the years trying to figure out whatever happened to. But it finally paid off. And, at last, today in the mail. . ....

Rare Ronnie Deauville

2011-11-30T17:52:00.001-08:00

Judy's Groceries

2011-11-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

click image twice for full screen

It runs in the family

2011-11-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

His great grandfather helped "invent" Bug Bunny; his grandfather is one of West Coast Jazz's most respected instrumentalists; his grandmother is a doyenne of American jazz singers and his parents are widely regarded architecture photographers. Is it any wonder he plays so wonderfully?

Dodo 2day

2011-11-27T15:43:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again!

2011-11-22T07:10:00.000-08:00

. . .my true love gave to me this special Smith and Wesson mix of the Phil Spector Christmas album.

Eugene Landau Murphy's Got Talent

2011-11-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

The winner of this year's America' Got Talent. Finally someone from all these multifarious so-called TV talent shows who actually seems to be able to sing without sounding like a moose in heat. A tad too Sinatra-cloney for my tastes. But he's only 36 years old. Give him time. He definitely swings!

This is the music video for his first CD. . .out tomorrow. Shot at the legendary Capitol Records' Studio A. (And how many first call sidemen could you spot?) Not a bad way to start out for this good ole West Virginia boy (I'm sooooo proud). Another music victory for "our side."

Veteran Japanese singer tops foreign album charts

2011-11-20T09:59:00.000-08:00

ASAHI SHINBUN
November 11, 2011
By TOSHIHIRO YAMANAKA / Correspondent

NEW YORK—A collaboration between the veteran Japanese singer Saori Yuki and the Portland, Oregon-based jazz orchestra Pink Martini is topping the album charts in the United States, Canada and Greece.

The album, "Pink Martini and Saori Yuki – 1969" features 12 songs from the past, including Yuki's 1969 debut hit "Yoake no Scat (Melody for a new dawn), "Blue Light Yokohama" sung by Ayumi Ishida, and "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary. Released early in November, the album ranked at the top of the jazz chart in Apple Inc.’s iTunes store in the United States.

In Canada, it rankedat the top of iTunes' foreign music category and stood fourth in the overall album chart in Greece.

Pink Martini's leader Thomas Lauderdale first encountered Yuki’s music after buying one of her albums at a used record store in Portland, and that eventually led to a joint concert in Japan in 2010.

Yuki and the orchestra also took part in a charity concert for March 11 quake relief in late March as they were putting together the album.

Commenting on the new recording of "Yoake no Scat," her first in 42 years, Yuki told The Asahi Shimbun that she had tried to sing in the same key she had used in the 1960s.

“A bassist in the orchestra commended me, saying, 'You sing precisely on the key. I feel great!'" she said.

The album is expected to be sold in 22 countries.

Born Akiko Yasuda, Yuki started her singing career in a choir when she was attending elementary school. She debuted as Saori Yuki with "Yoake no Scat" in 1969.

Her extensive career included hosting a children's television music program, acting in various films and television dramas and performing with her sister Sachiko Yasuda, who is also a singer.

_____________________________________

In essence, then, this is the number one CD in the world. Score one for our side! --- Dr Chilledair / LISTEN

Jazz Times review of "Listen Here"

2011-11-13T13:18:00.001-08:00

11/13/11

Sue Raney
Listen Here
SSJ

By Christopher Loudon

One of the most underappreciated jazz vocalists of the past half-century, Sue Raney is also proving one of the most durable. Raney, who has been singing professionally since age 14, delivered a trio of excellent albums for Capitol while still in her teens and early 20s, then endured a peripatetic recording career that involved multiple labels and occasionally lengthy gaps (filled with teaching and jingle work—as both writer and performer). Through it all, she has never stopped plugging and, remarkably, still sounds as vibrant and clarion-pure as ever.

In recent years, Raney has formed a mutually beneficial alliance with pianist Alan Broadbent. It was Broadbent at the helm, as arranger, conductor and accompanist, on Raney’s previous album, the silken Doris Day tribute Heart’s Desire. Here it’s just Broadbent and Raney, two thoroughbreds shaping an exemplary exercise in simpatico intimacy. They open with Dave Frishberg’s tenderly introspective “Listen Here,” then keep the tempo on simmer through a spectrum of major league ballads, extending from the romantic coziness of “My Melancholy Baby” and “You’ll Never Know” to the hazy heartache of “He Was Too Good to Me” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

The pace quickens slightly for a sprightly “It Might as Well Be Spring” and a shimmering “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” But the standout piece in this sea of marvelous tracks is Raney and Broadbent’s gorgeously realized treatment, neither too maudlin nor too wistful, of Joe Raposo’s “There Used to Be a Ballpark.”

Kurt Reichenbach reviewed @ TUC/Tokyo 11/11 by Makoto Gotoh

2011-11-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

フランク・シナトラ張りの歌を聴かせるカーク・ライケンバックが今週水曜から全国６カ所で公演、「TOKYO TUC」にも出演するというので出かけてきた。カートは1953年メリーランド生まれの57歳。オトナの歌を聴かせるオトコの歌手だけにお客さんも厳選。違いのわかる本物のオトナのみだ。歌手のみならず俳優としても芸能活動を続けるカートは2003年に初アルバムをリリース、2009年4月には日本でのデビュー作となるライブ盤『ウィズ・ア・ソング・イン・マイ・ハート』を出し、そして今回が待望の初来日。

ステージは軽快なテンポのスインガーで幕を開け、続いてミディアムやスローなど、曲ごとに場面を転換させながら進行。バンドも、この日のみトランペット＆フリューゲル・ホルンの伊勢秀一郎が加わったことで、ソロやサウンド全体の彩りが、より華やかになった。レパートリーは今年参加したチャリティＣＤの曲や、敬愛するフランク・シナトラやジャック・ジョーンズ、サミー・カーンゆかりのナンバーや、季節がらクリスマス・ソングを含む絶妙のバランス。終わってみるとアンコールを含めて全37曲を熱唱。時の経つのを忘れた約2時間、冷たい雨の降る夜を、心を温められた気分で帰路に着いた。
Kurt Reichenbach(vo)福井ともみ(p)俵山昌之(b)岡田朋之(ds)伊勢秀一郎(tp,flh)
1st set
1.With a Song in My Heart (Rodgers-Hart)

2.The Way You Look Tonight (Jerome Kern)
3.Here's to My Life (Artie Butler;Phyllis Molinary)
4.I Thought about You(James Van Heusen;Johnny Mercer)
5.Here's That Rainy Day(James Van Heusen;Johnny Burke)
6.All the Things You Are(Jerome Kern;Oscar Hammerstein II)
7.All the Way(Jimmy Van Heusen;Sammy Cahn)
8.The More I See You(Mack Gordon;Harry Warren)
9.Manha de Carnaval(Antônio Maria;Luiz Bonfá)
10.The Christmas Waltz(Jule Styne;Sammy Cahn)
11.My Romance(Rodgers-Hart)
12.What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life(Alan and Marilyn Bergman;Michel LeGrand)
13.Come Dance with Me(Sammy Kahn-Jimmy Van Heusen)
2nd set
14.I Only Have Eyes For You(Al Dubin;Harry Warren)
15.I Can't Get Started(Ira Gershwin;Vernon Duke)
16.Lush Life(Billy Strayhorn)

17.I Remember You(Johnny Mercer:Victor Schertzinger)

18.Call Me Irresposible(James Van Heusen;Sammy Cahn)
19.Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!(Jule Styne;Sammy Cahn)
20.My Heart Stood Still(Lorenz Hart;Richard Rodgers)
21.All My Tomorrows(James Van Heusen;Sammy Cahn)
22.Teach Me Tonight(Gene DePaul;Sammy Kahn)
33.My Foolish Heart(Ned Washington;Victor Young)
34.Speak Low(Kurt Weill;Ogden Nash)
35.The Last Dance(Jimmy Van Heusen:Sammy Cahn)
36.I'm All Smiles(Herbert Martin;Michael Leonard)
Encore
37.Day by Day(Axel Stordahl;Paul Weston;Sammy Cahn)

Norman Granz bio reviewed

2011-11-11T16:24:00.001-08:00

The Forgotten Man of Jazz

by Terry Teachout
Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011

According to Percy Bysshe Shelley, poets -- and, by extension, artists of all kinds -- are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Yet the people who make it possible for artists to make art typically get even less acknowledgment. Agents, managers, editors, patrons, producers, art dealers, even the odd critic: All play pivotal roles in the creation and dissemination of art, but few are known by name save to insiders, and fewer still receive the posthumous credit that they deserve. Yes, Joe Orton's emergence as a major playwright was one of the great theatrical success stories of the 1960s -- but the author of "What the Butler Saw" might never have gotten anywhere if Peggy Ramsay, Orton's agent, hadn't taken him on. Yes, Jasper Johns is now universally acknowledged as a key figure in the history of postwar American art -- but it was Leo Castelli's decision to show Mr. Johns's work at his gallery in 1958 that set the painter on the path to fame.

Nowadays the name of Norman Granz, who died in 2001, is known only to gray-headed jazz buffs, but there's a fair chance that you own at least one of the hundreds of albums that he produced for Verve, the record label that he founded in 1956. The "songbook" albums in which Ella Fitzgerald recorded her interpretations of the collected works of such classic songwriters as Harold Arlen, George Gershwin and Johnny Mercer were Granz's idea. So were the 14 albums taped at a series of marathon sessions in 1954 and 1955 in which Art Tatum, the greatest of all jazz pianists, recorded 120 stupendously virtuosic solo performances -- nearly the whole of his working repertoire. So was Jazz at the Philharmonic, the now-legendary series of concert tours in which Granz brought together such illustrious artists as Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich and Lester Young.

Granz is now the subject of a much-needed biography by Tad Hershorn called "Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice" (University of California Press). The title may sound a bit sober-sided, but it serves as a useful reminder of what Granz thought to be his most important achievement: A passionate opponent of racial segregation, he insisted as early as the '40s that all Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts be open to mixed-race audiences, and he went well out of his way to ensure that the many musicians who worked for him, be they black or white, were generously paid and properly treated wherever they went, even in the Deep South. "I insisted that my musicians were to be treated with the same respect as Leonard Bernstein or Jascha Heifetz because they were just as good, both as men and musicians," Granz said.

He wasn't kidding. All Jazz at the Philharmonic contracts contained ironclad antisegregation clauses, and Granz would cancel a show whenever those clauses were violated, no matter what it cost him at the box office. Moreover, he was equally respectful of his artists in the recording studio. A hands-off producer, he believed in letting the musicians whom he admired play whatever they wanted to play, and his concert tours were so lucrative that he was able to release albums that had no chance of turning a profit, simply because he thought that the music on them deserved to be heard.

Though Granz goes unmentioned in the standard histories of the civil-rights movement, his contribution to the cause of racial justice in America was considerable. That said, it seems likely that he will be remembered longest for his work as a record producer. It's extraordinary in retrospect how many of the albums he released on Clef, Norgran, Pablo and Verve, the four jazz labels he ran at various times between 1947 and 1987, have proved to be of permanent interest. "The Art Tatum-Ben Webster Quartet," "The Astaire Story," "Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings," "Ella and Louis," "The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival," "Stan Getz and J.J. Johnson at the Opera House": All of these records, and many more like them, exist because of Norman Granz.

Granz was notorious in the world of jazz for his arrogance. He was the kind of man who never hesitated to say that he knew better than you, even when he didn't. But when it came to the musicians he admired, he was genuinely modest. "He looks upon himself as a kind of conduit down which the music has flowed, that's all," one of his close friends said. "In that sense, he has no ego at all." That's why he was reluctant to cooperate with the many scholars who sought to chronicle his achievements. "I don't care about posterity," he told Mr. Hershorn. "I don't care about what I accomplished, if anything." Maybe he didn't -- but posterity will.

Be there or be square OR you can be both

2011-11-06T17:39:00.000-08:00

For those of you who didn't read his review in the International Review of Music, here's jazz crit Tony Gieske's "take" on singer Jane Harvey's 5/5/11 turn at L.A's Catalina B @ G. In case you missed that show, there's another chance upcoming this 11/16, same time, same station. Here's some additional info.

Live Jazz: Jane Harvey at Catalina Bar & Grill

By Tony Gieske

No need to add encomia to the already overloaded resume of the great Jane Harvey, who transformed Catalina’s into a hip little branch of the Apple the other night.

She probably could have gotten by with just singing her resume, this lady. (Lorraine Feather could have written the music.)

Harvey might have started the job list with her employment on the Benny Goodman band back in the 1940s. Her version of “He’s Funny That Way,” recorded with Goodman’s sextet (Slam Stewart on bass!) as the war clouds departed, still gives off plenty of steam in the version you can still hear on the net.

Then she could put down the band of Desi Arnaz before he met Lucy, when he worked with Bob Hope.

There’d be a subhead for television, headed by Steve Allen on “The Tonight Show” and proceeding to Jane Pauley on “The Today Show”; a Broadway section (”Bless You All” with Pearl Bailey); and a long stretch of recordings as they advanced from 78 rpm to mp3.
At Catalina’s, Harvey did utterly convincing, if not transformative, performances of tunes from her newly re-released CD, “Jane Harvey Sings Sondheim.” Not too many gals in their 80s are out there pushing their latest sides, right?

I was struck by the unusual skill with which she sang, and with her adroitly supportive trio of piano, bass and drums. Her time and her pitches were kept precise. That, of course, got her carefully weighed phrasing working. Each lyric became a moving little drama — tragic, comic, anecdotal… no sweat.

The savvy old chanteuse kept the program moving right along. For every “Send in the Clowns” tear dropper there was a sarcastic “Could I Leave You.” She made “Send in the Clowns” quite palatable; she even saved the inevitable “I’m Still Here” with a touch of weariness that proved moving, even to the sated L.A culture quaffers — present company excepted — who came to listen to this remarkable artist.

From the archives here at Oblivion Towers

2011-11-06T14:55:00.001-08:00

two Two TWO books in one!

2011-11-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

Upcoming in Los Angeles on Fri & Sat, Nov. 11 & 12, is a book launch for author Tad Hershorn's long-awaited bio of legendary jazz producer/promoter Norman Granz. Subtitled "The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice," not only does this remarkable University of California Press publication function as a biography and a superb history of jazz circa 1940 up through the near-present, but it also serves as an invaluable overview of Civil Rights struggles in the U.S. during the same period.

The event will also offer the opportunity to purchase a signed-by-the-author copy of the Granz biography; a reading by author Hershorn; a screening of Norman Granz and Gjon Mili's Oscar nominated short "Jammin' the Blues" (presented by film archivist Mark Cantor) AND a Jazz at the Phil-style jam session featuring some of L.A's finest jazz musicians.

Here are some of the advance reviews this book received prior to its Oct 17, 2011 pub date:

"The JAZZ AT THE PHILHARMONIC concerts were a turning point in my life. My fellow Californian Norman Granz figured it out. This biography lays out, in impressive detail and insight, the incredible contribution of Mr. Granz to the world of music and art. The deed of the vast recordings of ART TATUM says it all." --Clint Eastwood

"Norman Granz was one of the most important people in the world of jazz. He did more to escalate respect for jazz and raise our salaries than anybody else. He absolutely loved jazz and jazz musicians. I'm honored to have shared a beautiful friendship with Norman for many, many years. Hopefully, with this incredible book by Tad Hershorn, the world will have a chance to learn about Norman, and his phenomenal contribution to our beloved music--jazz."--Clark Terry, author of Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry

"Tad Hershorn's Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice is a relentlessly readable, rigorously researched, deeply empathic portrait of the complex and heroic man who was arguably the greatest champion of this great American art form--and its great artists. Essential reading for anyone who loves jazz." --James Kaplan, author of Frank: The Voice

"Norman Granz was renowned as a vivid force in jazz history, both as a producer of invaluable classic recordings by many of the music's most original performers and also for his world-wide, all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic tours. Moreover, he broke the color line dividing jazz audiences by mandating the end of segregated seating his continually popular concerts. Yet until this magisterial, deeply researched biography of Granz by Tad Hershorn, there has been no full-scale inside account of the achievement and combats of this often larger-than-life personality who, without playing an instrument, was so swingingly instrumental in making jazz an international language." --Nat Hentoff, author of At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene

"Norman Granz, one of the most significant non-musicians in jazz history, took gutsy public stands but remained a private person. Tad Hershorn's years of dedicated research reveal the man behind the lasting legacy, on which he sheds new light as well.. This great American story is a must read--and not just for jazz fans!" --Dan Morgenstern, author of Living with Jazz

"Norman Granz was an institution in jazz. He was loved by some, hated by others, often controversial, and always fearless. But Granz was also elusive and, until now, sometimes came across as more symbol than man. Tad Hershorn has changed all that in this stunning, beautiful biography of the music's most relentless advocate of social justice." --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Norman Granz was an important man, and Tad Hershorn tells his story with a fearless compassion grounded in yeoman research. Imperious, vain, and rude, Granz was also generous, inventive, and brave. He fought valiantly for jazz and civil rights, made pots of money, and never failed to bet it on his passions and beliefs. If you do not know him, you couldn't ask for a better introduction than Hershorn's judicious portrait; if you think you do know him, you are in for more than a few surprises." --Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz

For further info, phone the Ebony Repertory Theatre:
Phone: 323.964.9768
Box Office: 323.964.9766

The Ebony Repertory Theatre is located at: 4718 West Washington Boulevard,Los Angeles, California 90016

PETE RUGOLO R.I.P.

2011-10-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Here comes Chick Webb!

2011-10-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

"I was puzzled. Because with the music I had known, I had never known anything but progress. . .things were getting better and more complex. We were adding stuff on and all of a sudden it was falling off." The speaker is the great singer Jo Stafford in my newspaper interview with her from 1982. The quote was part of her analysis of the rise of a music whose ultimate "achievement" rang the death knell for the continuum of American vernacular music, especially as exemplified by 30s and 40s swing. Post WWII, she offered, was the first time in human history when adolescents and teenagers had attained a degree of economic parity. And thus it befell the overlords of the music biz to "invent" a simpler kind of music, replete with the monotonous cadences of nursery rhyme to tap into this new source of consumer revenue, i.e. rock and roll. Now there is a brand new film, The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music That Changed America, that beautifully documents what much of the far more sophisticated and artistic stateside music world was like before it was blown away by the 50s tsunami of rock and roll.

Drummer-bandleader Webb was inarguably as well known in the land as any of his musical peers---Ellington, Goodman, et al--- before his obscene and untimely death at the age of 30 (some say 34) in 1939. But the lore and legend vanished quickly, with most, today, if they remember Webb at all, recalling him as discoverer of and mentor to Ella Fitzgerald.

Director Jeff Kaufman set before himself the daunting task of not only thoroughly documenting Webb's career (and redressing historical oversight), but also telling the story of the evolution of jazz up to and including the Webb era, detailing social life in the Harlem of those times, AND cobbling together a somewhat brief but nevertheless highly informative film bio of singer Fitzgerald. In all of these, and several other sub-tasks as well, Kaufman has succeeded with flying colors. The film is eye-poppingly graphically animated to the degree that it never stops moving, panning, swirling, etc.; a visual delight from start-to-finish (just the film of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dance troupe alone. . .).

The Webb music on the soundtrack is plentiful, and the character voiceovers constitute a veritable who's who of current show biz, i.e. Bill Cosby, Janet Jackson, John Legend, Andy Garcia, Billy Crystal, Danny Glover, et al. Those names alone should lend a pretty good idea of what a first cabin effort is The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music That Changed America.

I was honored by being given an advance look at the just-completed film only last week. Distribution plans are still in the process of being decided upon, but public screenings at fests and wider showings will soon be forthcoming. As my late friend Jonathan Benair was always fond of saying: "I laughed, I cried, I loved every minute of it."

Lucy Ann in Japan

2011-10-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

Lucy Ann sings Burke and Van Heusen

2011-10-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

Swinging on a Star Listen
Album available here

Lucy Ann w/ The Four Polks

2011-10-22T17:00:00.001-07:00

MORE LUCY ANN

2011-10-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

I posted this earlier today on the yahoo jazz west coast site:

Lucy Ann Polk, perhaps the most underrated jazz singer in the history of the art form, has just died. I received the news from a totally reliable source, but about all I know is that it happened on the 10th of this month. I had a few "live" encounters with Lucy Ann over the years, and she was absolutely one of the sweetest, brightest, funniest people I've ever met. She sang at one of the parties where I first met her---circa 2005---and she still had "it."

When I was first introduced to Lucy Ann 5-6 years ago she warned me, in so many words, that she was suffering from dementia, then proceeded to be terribly quick on the uptake. Two of her wittier remarks that I recall:

Me: You ARE aware that experts on the subject consider you a very important singer, aren't you?

Lucy Ann: No. I guess they've been keeping that from me.

Me: I just listened to a late period Frank Sinatra recording where he added 54 syllables to the lyrics of a song (i.e. "hey now," etc.)

Lucy Ann: Well I guess he must think that's hip.

Maybe, as they, say, "you had to be there" and it was all in the delivery, a practice at which Lucy Ann was most adept.

If you would like to know more about Lucy Ann---a lot more---I strongly recommended the following web site erected by her number one fan, Siegfried Holzbauer:

http://www.advancedpoetx.com/MUSIK/LUCYANNPOLK.PDF

Don't know any details at this juncture except that she died on the 10th.

Lucy Ann Polk Sings "Chicken Road"

2011-10-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

REPOST FROM 11/29/06
LISTEN HERE TO ONE OF MY FAVORITE LUCY ANN POLK TRACKS

From Jerry Fielding's Decca album "Fielding's Formula" Other musicians include: Buddy Collette, Joe Howard, and Pete Candoli. From Fielding's Liner Notes:

This is a blues ballad by Joe Greene---which is to me one of the most interesting things ever written anywhere at any time by anyone. The choice of words, almost all of them, is such that it becomes more of a conversation piece than a lyric. And the fact that, as is later revelaed, it is supposed to be sung by a ghost, makes it even more interesting. The ghost in this case is a warm one, not the frightening, menacing kind. I felt that the words on this were so important that I invited Lucy Ann Polk to do this one with us. She does it as perfectly as could possibly be imagined. But sad though it may be, you do not get the feeling of despair you might expect, but rather a simple commentary on a series of seemingly trite, yet highly important and very personal occurences.

Chicken Road
By Joe Greene

Once I got a splinter in the joint of my little toe
And a garter snake bit my knee by the bend of the little St. Joe
Honey that's Missouri, the land of the dust and the toad
It's a wonderful town, Chicken Road

Once I had a scorpion on the lobe of my good right ear
And I lived with my great-great grandma
Who could hear what she wanted to hear
Honey that's Missouri, the land where the sky overflows
It's a wonderful town, Chicken Road

Beasts of burden, nip at their hay
And a poolroom banjo playin' to the close of every day
Night so quiet, you could hear a mouse
Tippin' through the parlor of a boarding house

Once I got a sunburn on the back of my itchin' neck
Went for a ride in a Model-T and I died in a beautiful wreck
Honey that's Missouri, the land that the Lord never knowed
Yes, it's a wonderful town, Chicken Road

Lucy Ann Polk R.I.P.

2011-10-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

Just received news from a reliable source that the wonderful singer Lucy Ann Polk has died. More details as they become available. Update: date of death was the 10th of this month.

EARLY PLASTIC

2011-10-02T05:55:00.000-07:00

Prologue last Monday 9/26/11

CHAPTER ONE: Beans and Kool-Aid

My father, Tom Reed, traveled out of the state of West Virginia only twice in his life: once during a brief stint in the service in World War I, and a few years later to Staunton, Virginia. Reading my parents' love letters sent back and forth in 1918, when he was a student at West Virginia University and she was enrolled at Mary Baldwin Seminary, the pent-up passions between the lines makes it clear they couldn't wait any longer. So when she was sixteen and he twenty-two, my dad hopped a bus to Staunton, where the pricey girls' school was located, and they eloped. The next night found them blissfully back in West Virginia standing before a Justice of the Peace in whose chambers they wed in a double ceremony along with another couple. But the next normative step, settled domesticity, was a long time coming. My parents did pretty much everything they could as members of the local fast set to avoid the reality principle, including commission of the Big Three No-No's: partying, drinking and smoking (in public yet!), with a possible fourth social transgression, my mother's bobbed hair. These Scott and Zeldas of the Hills were probably as responsible as anyone for what little of the Roaring Twenties that made its way to the medium-sized Bible Belt city of Charleston, West Virginia, where they set up housekeeping. Their unconventional behavior continued on well past the early 1920s with the birth of their first child, my oldest sister Ruth Dolores, and didn't stop with the arrival, a few years later, of my only brother, Tom, Jr.

When I came along in 1941, more than twenty years down the line, it was an unexpected and apparently painful birth for a woman entering her forties. Later my mother appeared to revel in telling what seemed like rooms full of strangers how my breach birth had nearly killed her. I squirmed and felt guilty (and later angry) but eventually decided, in fashionable dysfunctional ese, to "forgive" this overwhelmed and overworked woman. My mother would end up having minors in her charge for forty years plus: four kids whose births were evenly spaced out over slightly more than a twenty year period. I find it a chore to care for a child more than a few hours at a stretch.

As people once put such things, my mother, Mary Shelton, came "from money," but thanks to a combination of the Depression, thieving relatives, bad marriages, and terrible investments, by the time I came along the family's oil and gas empire had all but vanished. Anyone on my mother's side who had barely escaped "relief"-as welfare was once called-was considered fortunate. One of my mother's brothers, John, hacked and hewed away in area coal mines all his adult life only to expire poor of black lung in the early 1960s. During the summer, I would sometimes stay with John and his two sons, Joe and Sonny, at the shotgun shack they lived in at the nearby coal fields. There was a company store where you paid for goods with funny money known as scrip. At the time I remember thinking there was something quite fascinating about food and staples being bought with this "other" kind of money-almost as if one were living in a parallel universe. This was, I later learned, a classic example of peonage that kept American workers in their place with no possibility of looking for more advantageous employment elsewhere (vide the song"Sixteen Tons" and the narrator who "owes my soul to the company store"). I also remember my uncle had the thickest, bushiest eyebrows I'd ever seen, like twin canopies perfect for keeping coal dust out of the eyes and an homage to the equally hirsute miners' crusading champion, union leader John L. Lewis.

Unlike many of my generation I was spared the usual Depression tales of hard luck and having to eat the family dog. With my father's bohemian sails somewhat trimmed by the late 1920s, he found himself steadily employed as a bookkeeper for a concrete supply outfit where he remained for the next two decades. As a result, our immediate family managed to move fairly smoothly through the Great Crash and its aftermath. Tom Reed, in the parlance of the times, was "a good provider" for his wife and eventual four kids-in addition to Ruth and Tom, my sister, Nancy, was born in '30. I came along a few months before the start of World War II. About the only thing I remember were ration stamps which adults in the house had to keep away from me; if they didn't keep a sharp look out I would paste them allover everything in sight. I also dimly recall those gaudy, gold-stitched silk pillow covers with a painting of Mt. Fujiyama (and the like) my sailor brother, Tommy, brought home from the war. One other thing leaps to mind, that long ago precursor to eco-recycling, WW I I Paper Drives.

We weren't poor, we weren't rich, but whatever we were was a far cry from the affluence in which my mother had been raised. Around the turn of the century my maternal grandmother, Dora Downey, had married my prosperous grandfather, Richard Shelton. She was still in her teens and he was more than twice her age. Six children came along in fairly rapid order before he died of an eye infection in North Carolina sometime around 1915-fully a quarter century before my own birth. I still receive three and four checks every once in a while from oil and gas deals my grandfather made nearly a century ago. Not exactly like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies but enough to warrant the comparison, when my grandmother was in her sixties she still had four of her six aging children (unmarried, widowed or divorced) along with several of their offspring still living under her roof. At one time, the matriarchal menagerie included my mother, my sister and I, when we stayed with her for a time in the late 1940s. Also on an itinerant or regular basis were my coal miner Uncle John and his two sons, Joe and Sonny, my Uncle Richard, a state government functionary, and my Aunt Ruth, a stereotypical old maid who loved and doted on her surrogate son, me (perhaps even more than my mother did). Years later as she lay on her hospital bed wracked with cancer, my prim and demure aunt looked up at me and dazedly let fly with a volley of four letter words when I hypocritically insisted she was going to be "just fine." I was astonished. It was probably the first time Ruth Shelton had ever uttered any such epithets in her life. Leaving her hospital room, the doctor assured me of my aunt's suspicions: she was not going to leave the hospital alive. But she did! The Cursing Cure had apparently saved her. The next five years she lived were probably her best. I have a packet of leters from her to that effect: "I'm reading Mary. Queen of Scots, also The Persian Boy. I just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra. I thought it was very good. I read an awful lot but there isn't much else to do." All this has caused me to have a slightly queasy feeling regarding euthanasia.

A half century earlier as a spoiled and pampered young wife and mother, Dora Downey had acquired the habit of leaving her six children in the charge of governesses while she---and this was the word employed by nearly everyone in the family to describe her peregrinations---"gallivanted" about the state of West Virginia" spending money as fast as her husband earned it." And so it was that forty years later, living in a house now overrun with her children's children, the only things she could "cook" were beans, Kool-Aid, and Jello. Well into the late 1940s my eccentric grandmother still had an old-fashioned icebox in her kitchen the kind that called for the iceman to cometh on a regular basis. Because she preferred it over one of those new electric or gas jobs, I was sure this automatically meant it was a more efficient and economic method of preserving food. Maybe it is.

Having had parents as well as a grandmother with roots solidly sunk in the soil of an earlier time, I regard myself as more a child of the 19th than the 20th century. Heavily horizoned and cautious to a fault, I bought my current auto 25 years ago, always say Sir and M'am, call an increasingly dwindling supply of elders by their last name, and am often the last to pick up on the latest technological advances. What do I need with one of those fancy High speed modems?; the one I have is plenty fast enough for me.

While we were living with my mother's mother, one of her sons had some fairly stiff child molestation charges leveled at him. Mama (as everyone called her) stood proudly by him during the entire front-page ordeal. I recall her much more upset over being described by reporters as "elderly" than by the social embarrassment attendant to the proceedings. My uncle eventually got off thanks to a character witness from no less than the governor of the state; in all likelihood an imprimatur engineered by my grandmother who clearly retained leftover clout from earlier times. I remember this uncle as being completely inattentive to me. I worried a lot over being excluded from his favors and attention. When I found out he was molesting other little boys, and not me, it wreaked havoc with my self esteem. Now I understand that I simply wasn't his pedophilic type; a Little League baseball coach, he liked boys who were butch and lean. Generally, however, I was too busy at that young age putting on puppet shows and playing house with the neighborhood girls--- no!, not that kind of playing house---to try and conceptualize too much about the who, why and what of sex.

No matter how good or bad a parent she finally was to her own children, my grandmother---a tough old bird-was my strongest childhood influence and I loved her dearly. But the pragmatic suspicion and cynicism I found so compelling in Mama weren't enough to protect her in the long run. After my grandfather died she married a rounder who, family legend has it, was responsible for draining off the last dregs of the estate left her by husband number one-a man so Highly connected in regional politics that even long years after his death my grandmother still had the goods on just about everyone in state government. Ironically the house she lived in during her final years was located directly across from the West Virginia State Capitol Building. As the various offending parties came and went, she sat in her sitting rocking chair, to one side an old Maxwell House coffee can serving as a snuff spittoon, on the other a radio pumping out non-stop soap operas she called her "stories" as in . . . "it's time for my stories." She kept up an ongoing narrative to her captive audience of pre-adolescent me, grumbling, "See that one going there? Whyyyy, when his daddy was governor I used to change that boy's diapers, now he's nothing but a good for nothing horse thief." Even with six kids of her own she probably had never changed one diaper in all her life. It didn't take an unwanted Sixties war to fuel my distrust of the government; my grandmother got the job done quite nicely.

In the early 1960s two of her children, now old themselves and still living with her, heard a noise downstairs one night. Investigating they looked out the front door to see Mama in her night clothes running down the middle of the street clobbering a would-be house robber over the head with an improvised cudgel-doorbell chimes ripped off the hallway wall. This when she was well into her eighties.

I am my grandmother's son not only for reasons of temperament but also because her house was usually where I ended up staying when my mother's drinking got totally out of control. Nearly a half-century later the digits of that emergency phone number I dialed so often---24-873---are still engraved in my brain pan. After a day or two at my grandmother's house I'd call home---20-658---and if I heard my mother's sober voice on the other end of the line I'd extract the usual empty promise from her that she'd never "take another drink as long as I live." I'd kiss Dora goodbye, hop on the bus and return home. If I was lucky I might even get taken back home by my uncle Richard in his car. One time I bore witness at my grandmother's house to a neo-Luddite upheaval that occurred when she ceased her usual routine of snuff, soap, and censure long enough to make a phone inquiry about a water bill. The first words out of her mouth, when the call was completed, consisted of a string of curses, then she ripped the phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room. Her inquiry, she said, had been answered by a "record player." I rang up the number myself to see what she was ranting about and on the other end got a mid-1950s prototype of the answering machine, one that must have filled half a room. Used to being bowed and scraped to all her life, Dora Downey Shelton Smith was simply not equipped to handle such impersonalization. No wonder I was the last one on my block (more that twenty years after they had become commonplace) to get one of these newfangled contraptions.
Throughout my childhood I had automatically assumed that this non-conformist grandparent's position on the subject of race ran counter to the prevailing bigotry of the times. Disabuse of the notion came to me only shortly before her death. One night after supper I offhandedly mentioned to her that I had a date with a girl later that evening whom she knew to be African-American (back in the fifties they didn't call blacks anything nearly that respectful, with the most liberal appellation being "colored"). When I told my grandmother of my plans she began behaving like she had in response to the water company's answering machine, and between gasps exhorting a variant on the Jeremiad usually reserved by her for crooked politicians, "Why, I wouldn't trust a n----r any farther than I could throw one, and that's not very far." Then she flipped over backwards in her rocking chair, knocking over the omnipresent snuff can in the process, and nearly fainted. My grandmother had barely recovered when I left for the evening. A few months later she was dead; hopefully, her passing not hastened by my exposing her to the newfangled concept of minority inclusiveness. They don't make 'em like my grandmother anymore and considering her position on race maybe that's just as well. In all fairness, given the customs of the time and place, Christ incarnate would probably have been a raving racist. Everyone else was. Bigotry in the rest of my family tends to run cooler than Mama's, but, unfortunately, just as deep. When a nephew doing some genealogical research recently came across a Native American forebearer some generations back (not really that close in time), the clan's response was one of classic denial and the closing of ranks. Relatives insisted, "Well, that just couldn't be." And why not?, my calm voice of reason inquired. "Well, it. . . it . . it just couldn't ---that's all." That the family's apparently otherwise lily-white European lineage might be tainted by so much as a drop of Indian blood was simply too much to bear. At last the riddle of my grandmother's over-the-top racism was solved, at least, to my satisfaction: it was her defense against the dead Indian hanging from the family tree. And so, more than a hundred years after its official dismantling, the legacy of "the peculiar institution" lived on in my family ("Well, that just couldn't be. . . ").

My grandmother had an extreme mistrust of doctors. According to the custom of an earlier time all of her children had been born at home. She was proud of the fact that never once had she been a hospital patient. In her eighties and fading fast from the usual old age combination of a broken hip and pneumonia, the inevitable could no longer be avoided and an ambulance was summoned. When it arrived, though, she fought off the driver and the attendant with such force they refused to transport her and departed. A half-hour later, my grandmother's strength now ebbed even more, an ambulance was summoned again, and this time they were able to take her away. An hour later found her in a hospital bed with one of her sons by her side. Looking at him with an expression that used up every last bit of anger that was hers to muster up, she said, "This would never have happened if you hadn't brought me here." And she expired. My grandmother had always had the last word all her life and she was not about to stop now!

My mother had attended one of the most exclusive schools for aristocratic young ladies in the country; an institution then known as Mary Baldwin Seminary-now Mary Baldwin College-in Staunton, Virginia. It was an academy so protective of its delicate flowers of young womanhood that in the winter the girls traversed the campus on sidewalks inlaid with heated pipes for melting the snow. I can still hear the way my mother, an otherwise unaffected woman, aristocratically pronounced S~ton. . .fifty years after she last laid eyes on the place. Even when nearly everything else around her had collapsed to rack and ruin, she clung to the memory of Mary Baldwin like a drowning man to a life raft. During later years of faded family glory, all that finally mattered to her was that one day when I finally reached my majority I would somehow manage to revive former Sheltonian renown.

Nearly all my maternal grandmother's children were stunted emotionally; including my mother with her chronic alcoholism. My dad could drink her under the table but mostly I remember him sober. Respective childhood photos find us looking remarkably unalike; now that I've reached middle age, later mutual portraits reveal an almost uncanny resemblance. As the years wear on our ears, struck by gravity, keep getting larger and larger, and the expressions on our faces increasingly dour.

Like most married couples of their time, my mother was saddled with domestic responsibilities, while the majority of his duties lay in the job sector. When my mother wanted to have our own family home built after more than twenty years spent renting, my father's usual low-key response was to the point, "Why Mary, you know we don't have that kind of money." In reply, she reached in a cookie jar and pulled from it thousands of dollars she had been secretly saving over the years for just such an eventuality. The incident became a linchpin of her personal mythology with friends and family continuing to talk about it long after she was dead. Construction on our very own two-story, modest family manse thus got under way in short order; its completion coinciding almost exactly with my birth. Located at the fringes of a then just-beginning-to-expand residential neighborhood, there were still muddy ponds to slop around in and woods in which to play for a while after I came along.

I retain only a handful of vivid memories of my father, the strongest being from the winter of 1945, when I was closing in on five and the two of us were playing in the front yard building a snow man. The next thing I knew, right in front of me, he fell on the ground insensate and uncomprehending. The scene was soon enveloped in chaos and he was taken away on a stretcher. The next day I was told about a vague "long trip" my father had gone on, and I might not be able to see him for a while. I was being lied to, I knew, and fell to the floor screaming, "You're lying, he's dead." I sobbed till I was out of tears and breath while the circle of adults huddled around me looking down, their faces covered with now-what-do-we-tell-him? expressions. How I had managed to gain such a precocious purchase on eschatological finality? They surely wondered.

And for years to come I too was puzzled. Then one day in my mid forties, the memory of a stem lecture I had received from my father four decades earlier visited me on a conscious level for the first time! I was four and had come home one day at the height of summer to proudly inform him about the way my other pre-pubescent pals and I had been putting tadpoles in jars and leaving them out in the sun, with the result that they soon ceased to function. It seemed as if we weren't doing anything wrong, with cruelty being the last thing on our minds. It was mere magic. But my dad wasn't impressed at all and proceeded to give me a stem lecture about the basic sanctity of all sentient existence. It was from this, then, that I had precociously extrapolated the certainty and finality of his mortality. Gone off on a long trip indeed! When a parent drops dead in front of a child it's the most natural thing in the world for the child to think he or she caused it. After all, I had been lobbing snowballs at my dad when he collapsed. But if I ever felt this way, I'm not aware of it (Freud 101). I later learned he had lingered on, comatose from a massive cerebral hemorrhage, for several days.

Born near the turn of the century, Tom Reed's 1916 High school yearbook depicts a sophomore Renaissance man; in addition to drawing all the caricatures in the publication, he was also involved in chorus, the literary society, Latin and drama clubs-even sports-and was the president of his class of twenty. After High school he attended West Virginia University for a year, then volunteered for the service during what turned out to be the final days of World War One. For years after his death my mother received a service pension based on his few weeks spent in the military. My father's father, William Rosencranz Reed, had at one time been a sheriff of Clay County, West Virginia, the place where almost everyone you've read about up until now comes from. This grandfather managed the tragic feat of outliving his son by a few years.

The only memory I have of my grandad is after his death when, one day I looked up and saw a steamboat bearing his name on its side floating down Charleston's Elk River. At age nine I thought that mighty impressive and wonder if even now it might be still plying its way up and down one of my hometown's two waterways.

My dad was in his early forties when I was born and my nearly-unexpected birth brought about middle age renewal in him. I can still recall his carrying me down the street on his shoulders, holding me aloft, displaying me almost like a trophy. All the long way down Matthews Avenue to Pendle's drug store, on West Washington Street across from where I eventually went to High school. Even though I was not quite five when he died, other things I remember about him include a liking of historical non-fiction of the Lawrence of Arabia variety, a passion for rose gardening and an overweening fondness for strong drink. Tom Reed was a “good provider" who "never took a day's vacation" in all his twenty years with Pfaff and Smith Sand and Gravel. Not because of extreme dedication to his job; he held an inconsequential bookkeeping position that must have required his working extremely long hours in order to maintain a family of six and a new, fairly expensive house. It isn't surprising that he checked out so young, almost certainly from overwork, or that he left behind so little economic buffer for his wife and two remaining children at home (my sister, Nancy, and myself) when he died. In snapshots of him taken a few weeks before he passed, he looks tired and woebegone, verging on angry. Most likely he had just finished another hard day at the office.

Buy Early Plastic by Bill Reed at amazon.com or download at Scribd

A review of Pinky Winters new(-ish) CD Winters in Summer

2011-10-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

by Joe Lang from the Nov. issue of Jersey Jazz

One of the special record labels around today is the Sinatra Society of Japan. Thanks to their President, Yasuo Sangu, and with assistance from Bill Reed, they have been committed to releasing new and reissue vocal albums, ones that deserve wider distribution in the United States. One of the artists who has several releases on the label is the sublime PINKY WINTERS. Her latest effort,Winters in Summer (SSJ – 1518), is a collection of mostly Brazilian songs, and a few that found their first life on these shores, but are given a Brazilian setting. There are songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Ivan Lins, Sergio Mendes and Roberto Menescal, plus “Another Rio” by Jack Jones and BobFlorence, Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You,” and a trip to “Zanzibar” via Dave Frishberg. Taking the Brazilian excursion with Winters are Jim Cox on piano and Hammond B-3 organ, Tom Warringtonon bass, Ralph Penland on drums and percussion, Pete Christlieb on tenor sax and Ron Anthony on guitar. Winters is right at home in this genre, and perfectly captures the gentle swing of the music. She has a smooth and soothing voice that adapts well to any song lucky enough to have her sing it. There are many pleasures to be derived from time spent with Winters in Summer. (www.eastwindimport.com)

I hope he decides to run, then wins so I can write. . . .

2011-09-30T06:28:00.000-07:00

CHRIS CHRISTIE IS SO FAT THAT WHEN HE SITS AROUND THE WHITE HOUSE, HE REALLY SITS AROUND THE WHITE HOUSE.

"How bleak was my puberty. . .."

2011-09-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

EARLY PLASTIC

by BILL REED

Cellar Door Books, Los Angeles

Second edition, First Printing October 2009

Published by: Cellar Door Press

Los Angeles, CA90035

e-mail: drchilledair@yahoo.com

____________________________________

TO: David Ehrenstein

and

The Memory of Charles Walters

For reading my "life" line by line---infinitely more slowly than I lived it---much appreciation to Recinda Jeannine. Gratitude to Wil Haygood whose great book, The Haygoods of Columbus, inspired me to pick up and complete an abandoned manuscript. And to David Ehrenstein, with whom I share my life, thanks for more useful suggestions than there are pages here

***

"When you come to a fork in the road. . .take it."

--- Yogi Berra

***

Contents

PROLOGUE

1. Beans and Kool-Aid

2. Kancer Kapital of the World

3. It's the Cathode Ray Tube Show

4. Confessions of a Voluntary Negro

5. Randy and the Romilars

6. With No Mother to Guide Him

7. Carnal Interface

8. "The Beast of Everything"

9. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

10. Public Displays of Rhythm

11. The Lower (East) Side Dep ths

12. The Eighth Street Follies

13. Warning! I Brake for Hallucinations

14. The City and the Pillow Biter

15. Fire Island, Island of Romance

16. (Not So) Gone With the Draft

17. Freak F1ags at Half Staff

18. Lemons in the Gutter

19. Woodshuck

20. The Big Sledgehammer of 1969

21. Life in the Off-Ramp

22. Sex!

23.You Can Go Home Again, But. . .

AFTERWORD

***

PROLOGUE

Recent years have seen the publication of a wide variety of memoirs in the form of everything from self-help manuals to 12-step recovery sagas; standard show biz bios like Lauren Bacall's, to the writings of disgruntled ex-mates of the rich and famous, etc. Early Plastic isn't like any of these. I have no "raised consciousness" axe to grind and there is not one ounce of self-pity or trendy disfunctionalese contained herein; still, if the odds stacked against me in childhood had toppled over you could have heard the crash from here to Zaire. I lost my father when I was four, my mother had a serious drinking problem, I was sadistically beaten up by a grown family member on a fairly regular basis, and I could barely pass a test in school. I was poor and for the better part of my life have managed to stay that way. (Ah! la vie de la Boheme.) Before biting the reality bullet in my mid-thirties my life was out of control; I was even reduced to sleeping in my car on occasion. But with the exception of a couple of bad drug episodes, I have pretty much remained my usual sunny self---Candide incarnate.

As to why I sat down to write this book? There's no simple answer. My life hasn't been all that exceptional, but it's been far from ordinary. The thing that did occur to me as I began trying to put the pieces of it together on paper is that, either by accident or design of the fates, I've been witness to some of the most interesting social phenomena of the last half-century: particularly the 1950s, growing up, and the 1960s, during which I reached adulthood.

One reason increasing numbers are writing and reading memoirs nowadays is because the official histories of certain periods and events are so inadequate and misleading. I find this especially true of the Fifties and Sixties in which fads, fashions and important social movements tend to be collapsed into one another to form a kind of nostalgic stew. As if liking the Beatles and opposing the war in Vietnam were exactly the same thing. The end of the so-called "Summer of Love" and the rise of Charles Manson were not as radically opposed to one another as some of us might have been led to believe. I was there from beginning to end, and the Sixties weren't the way they've usually been represented in print up to now. It was much less romantic, far scarier and not nearly as ingenuous as some are prone to remember it.

Nearly three decades ago an urban morality fable appeared in the New York Times about a woman awaiting her turn on free appraisal day at Sotheby's. Ahead of her stood dozens of others also queued up and clutching the requisite mooseheads, kitschy paintings and antique snuff cans, etc. from grandma's attic. Unlike most of the others' wouldbe treasures, however, hers was a small one in the form of an unassuming piece of jewelry. Upon reaching the front of the line, which stretched out the door and part of the way down New York's Fifth Avenue---she proffered the item to the auction house official seated at the table in front of her. He examined it for a second or two, then gasped, "But madame, this is plastic!" Without missing so much as a beat (and as if any further proof were needed that hope does indeed spring eternal in the human breast) the undaunted woman immediately, ingenuously, and hopefully replied:

"Early plastic?"

I know the feeling.
______________________
Chapter One next Monday 10/3/11

Buy Early Plastic by Bill Reed at amazon.com or download at Scribd

A Fonzie scheme?

2011-09-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

Peter Sellers Sings

2011-08-29T06:32:00.001-07:00

The Indian road company of MFL

2011-08-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

2011-08-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

2011-08-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

Jeryy Leiber R.I.P.

2011-08-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

My review of Leiber and Stoller's 2009 autobio

____________________________________________________

Pinky Winters sings Leiber and Stoller

. . .and Ross!

2011-08-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

I've always believed that jazz singers should need a license to scat. As should be obvious from this clip, Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert passed their test with flying colors.

Disc o' the Day

2011-08-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

Hear a complete track from From California With Love at allaboutjazz.com

Happy 100th, Lucy

2011-08-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm in a public space where I Love Lucy is being shown on a TV set---airport lounges, post offices etc.---almost always the entire assemblage (punks, Hassids, slackers, DINKs, et al) tends to come together as one, trading knowing laughter, nudging one another with elbows, etc. A truly shared, worldwide common cultural experience. Perhaps the only one! Just about everyone on the planet---dig those Russian subtitles---knows and loves Lucy (still on the air in more than 77 countries).

I still retain sense memory of seeing this episode on TV the first time it was aired. I was but mere protoplasm in Buster Brown Shoes, but I haven't ever laughed so hard before or since.

Take that!, Arthur Tracy

2011-08-04T14:46:00.001-07:00

2011-07-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

Read this really nice review of From California With Love here

Dees 'n Dat

2011-07-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

Happened upon this 2009 Susan McCray radio interview with singer Michael Dees, of whom critic Rex Reed recently remarked, "A soupcon of Sinatra, a pinch of Frankie Randall, and swinging all the way." You can find out for yourself on August 29th when Michael (accompanied by the Terry Trotter trio) performs at Vitello's in Studio City. It's Michael birthday, but the listener gets all the gifts.

They're Going Fast

2011-07-27T06:29:00.001-07:00

The Silver Masked Baritone sings. . .

2011-07-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

.. . .Night and Day

Re-run from 2005 in the form of a R.I.P. Fran Landesman

2011-07-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

The mailman just delivered copies of Bobbi Rogers' 1980 recording,Tommy Wolf Can Really Hang You Up the Most. (link for a limited time only)It's now available on CD for the first time. . .in Japan, natch. It is a personal favorite, and I'm (I'll go so far as to say) proud that I played a small part in getting this miracle-of-a-recording back in print. I wrote a bit about the CD and Ms. Rogers in a blog entry a few months ago.

I didn't really do much except to put Toshie Miyaki , of Celeste Records , together with Mort Fega, the producer of the original recording and owner of the master. And, oh yes! At the very last minute, when Wolf's publisher couldn't supply the songs' lyrics for the CD booklet, I copied them while auditing the recording. At first, it proved a bit slow-going and tedious, but finally, when I realized just how good (was there ever any doubt?) Fran Landesman's lyrics are, I realllly got into the process of playing lines over and over again to get it just right (they really hold up even under the closest of scrutiny).

This is now available at amazon.com. And while, per usual with Japanese CD imports, the price is, ahem, a trifle high, in this case I would say the it's definitely worth every last penny of the 33 simoleons that it costs. It is also possible that allmusicservices does or will soon have copies.

Celeste has packaged this quite nicely, with liner notes also in Japanese by Keizo Takada, and Mort Fega did a beautiful job in overseeing the digital remastering of the disc just before his death earlier this year.
____________________________________
2011 postscript: If you ask me---and nobody did---the ratio of news coverage accorded the recent deaths of Landesman and of another practitioner of that business called show---no names puh-leese out of respect for the dead--- should be exactly reversed.

From California With Love CD release party

2011-07-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

The event last Saturday night at North Hollywood's Vitello's to raise money for victims of Japan's recent natural disaster was highly successful despite fears of negative attendance impact from the 405 freeway closing., i.e. "Carmageddon." There was a nearly full house and many CDs were sold. Importantly, too, was the level of artistry achieved by the six participating "acts" which included singers Kurt Reichenbach, Diane Hubka, Leslie Lewis (& pianist Gerard Hagen), Michael Dees, Pinky Winters, and Sue Raney. The house band was made up of pianist Jim Cox, bassist Tom Warrington and drummer Ralph Penland. That's a true "first call" outfit if there ever was one!

Each artist performed three or four numbers and so there was much shuffling on and off the stage, but the whole thing ran like clockwork with nary a single hitch. Singer Reichenbach was (his phrase) the "connective tissue", i.e. emcee that held it all together. Each singer was at the peak of his or her powers that night, and if there had been encores built into the format, the evening would have gone on for far longer than its final two hours or so. The audience seemed especially unwilling to let singer Michael Dees leave the stage at the conclusion of his "turn." His Night and Day" nearly blew the roof off the place. I observed the faces of the performers watching their fellow acts on stage and they seemed to be in a constant state of appreciation at what they were experiencing. Nearly every "turn" elicited a standing ovation from the audience, and I don't think I saw a single walk-out during the entire evening.

For more info the From California With Love CD, go here.

GREAT MUSIC FOR A GREAT CAUSE!

2011-07-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

AVAILABLE TODAY AT CDBABY

SSJ CD RELEASE PARTY

2011-06-28T08:28:00.001-07:00

Click here to buy CDs or downloads of: From California With Love

2011-06-28T08:24:00.001-07:00

Drchilledairland CSI

2011-06-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

A free copy of this hand-wrought Kay Penton CDR to anyone with information leading to the post-1956 whereabouts (or lack thereof) of this '40s, '50s singer. Here is what we know thus far.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH HELEN MERRILL . . .

2011-06-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

. . .and Dick Katz, George Mraz, Lewis Nash, and Steve Wilson (NYC 2001)

SHE'S BACKKKKKKK!

2011-06-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

Look what I found!

2011-06-12T12:37:00.001-07:00

Lambert from Peter on Vimeo.

More raves for Sue's new one

2011-05-28T05:42:00.000-07:00

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters..

May 27, 2011

[Sue] Raney is an interpreter of classic popular song whose creative gift and technical skill are matched by few singers in any category. Her empathy with Alan Broadbent was on display in their last collaboration four years ago. In that instance, her accompaniment was an orchestra that Broadbent arranged and conducted. This time, the orchestra is Broadbent at the piano, providing support and full partnership. After years of mutual admiration and occasional gigs, they have come forth with the duo album their admirers yearned for. It is a collection of ballads, but that by no means indicates that it lacks rhythmic interest. These two can swing at any tempo. That gift is striking in the medium bounce of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” “Aren’t You Glad You’re You” and “It Might As Well Be Spring” with Broadbent’s “Joy Spring” introduction. In slow tunes, Raney can break hearts and moisten eyes. She finds the pathos in “He Was Too Good To Me;” uncloying sentiment in “My Melancholy Baby;” the poetry of longing in “Skylark,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Listen Here,” the inspired title song with words and music by Dave Frishberg.

When Raney enters a note, it is never by a side door. When she bends one, it is to enhance mood or feeling. Broadbent comps and solos with chord voicings that enrich not just a song’s harmonies but its meaning. Their version of “There Used to be a Ballpark” could almost make you forget Sinatra’s. This collection of 14 songs is bound to become a classic, if it reaches an audience. That could be a problem for an expensive album on the label of the Sinatra Society of Japan, which has limited distribution.

####

A little elaboration on the last line of the above review is called for. It is not just SSJ CDs that are "expensive. I remain shocked, at this late date, at how few U.S. record buyers (not Doug Ramsey, of course) are familiar with the traditional high prices of Japanese import CDs and, before that, LPs. These items are also comparatively pricey in their country of origin. There was a time when vinyl in Japan was so expensive that co-operative record listening groups sprung up, with alternating members deputized each week to purchase a certain title which would then be brought to the next week’s meeting and spun whilst members listened attentitively to this precious acquisition. We’re talking about a time even before the era of common home recording (i.e. copying) devices.

Some such listening clubs continue on in Japan to this day, but mostly for reasons of fraternity rather than parsimony. The groups now tend to follow a lecture format, interspersed with spun tracks. I, myself, belong to one such group, The Tokyo Vocal Jazz Appreciation Society, and have even given a talk in broken Japanese on One Shot Wonders, i.e. fine, deserving jazz singers who ended up, circa 1950s, ’60s, recording exactly ONE album and then disappearing from sight, due mainly to the oncoming tsunami of rock and roll sweeping the land. There were hundreds of them, from which I chose twelve to talk about. I think that the TVJAS has been in operation approaching forty years now.

The priceiness of these CDs has something to do with some sort of Japanese entertainment tax coupled with a law that prevents competitive pricing in that country. And at the present yen vs. $ exchange rate, the costs are even higher, eventuating in such current high prices that even an artist’s hardest core of fans find themselves reluctant to ransom their first born in order to secure said artist’s latest wares. That being said, there is a reliable Japanese vendor, CDJapan, sellingListen Here at 2667 yen, which translates to $32.43 (the lowest price I can find on the net). Shipping is not so daunting if you choose to have it sent around the cape, i.e. surface. But that can take a while…as long as (ulp) twelve weeks. OR. . .

.. . .one can wait until the first of 2012 at which point a much more budget-friendly version of Listen Here will be released in the U.S

If this is Wednesday, it must be Yokohama

2011-05-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

photo: David Ehrenstein

Singer Pinky Winters' upcoming Japanese schedule

June 2 Thursday 6:00 pm - Cafe Albert - Tokyo

June 3 Friday 6:00 pm - All of Me Club - Tokyo

June 4 Saturday 5:00 pm - G Face Cafe - Maebashi

June 5 Sunday 3pm - Three Arrow Club - Tokyo

June 6 Monday 7:30 pm Ishimori Kangakki - Tokyo

June 7 Tuesday 7:30 pm Interplay - Fujisawa

June 8 Wednesday 7:00 pm - Farout - Yokohama

June 9 Thursday 7:00 pm - New York Papa - Toyota

June 10 Friday 7:30 pm - Lovely - Nagoya

June 11 Saturday 7:45pm - Jazz on Top - Osaka

June 12 Sunday 7:30 pm - Adirondack Cafe - Tokyo

More Pentoniana

2011-05-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

"Kay Penton was one of the greatest singers I ever heard. She didn't appreciate her great talent but Benny [Goodman] did." ---Teddy Wilson

POSTSCRIPT 5/25/11

I've unearthed a bit more info about singer Kay Penton, who I first wrote about herein last November 29.

She was born in New Orleans in 1924 and began singing publicly at the age of five. There are a couple of articles about her in the New Orleans Times Picayune (4/15/40 & 3/4/42). The first is an ad for Penton's appearance with N'awlins' famous Pinky's (Vidacovich) Orchestra (aka The Dawnbusters); the second concerns her role in a 1941 George White's Scandals and finds the legendary producer quoted as saying the singer will become a "great name" in show business. He should know!

Her first big time gig as a band singer was with Guy Lombardo (Louis Armstrong's favorite big band. . .seriously) in 1943, and by 1944 she already had her own Friday night radio show on CBS. One article about her at this time deemed her the "prettiest girl in radio" (radio. . .did it really matter?) and stated that three movie studios were courting her for a screen test. There is, however, no info on the net that these ever came to pass. In 1947, in Miami, FL, she married "textile magnate" Lou Bolton; the marriage, though, was annulled less than a month later. Somewhere along the way, she also dated John Hertz, the ex-spouse of Myrna Loy. Yes! John Hertz of the Rent-a-Car operation. Factor in her relationship with Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo along with this romantic factoid and you have to admit the gal really got around.

Has anyone who had so high a public profile for so many years ever fallen so far below radar? Thirty years old. . .over and out. There's still not even a single photo of her on the internet. There is now. At least, there's a caricature. If Penton's alive today, she'd be 87.

From California With Love

2011-05-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

Click here for: From California With Love sound collage

FCW/L website

Bob Flanigan R.I.P.

2011-05-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Four Freshmen in Tokyo 1964. The entire broadcast is available on youtube in increments. Video quality leaves more than a lot to be desired. But the audio, as can be heard from this clip, is good. From the sidelines, FF co-founder Flanigan continued to oversee the group, now in its 22nd configuration, right up to the very end. You'd probably never guess it from today's dumbed down musical U.S. landscape, but the Freshmen continue to be one of the most popular touring acts in the world. Can still draw thousands in locales that retain the capacity to comprehend melody, rhythm, harmony AND musical intelligence.

Cliff Edwards Radio Show 1946

2011-05-17T06:51:00.001-07:00

Two perfect musical minutes!

2011-05-15T14:35:00.001-07:00

Anita O'Day "Live" in Tokyo 1963

It's Fred Astaire's birthday

2011-05-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

In case you've never seen this, parts 2 & 3 are available on youtube ("Astaire" "Levant") And don't tell Robin. It's Astaire's first time on TV. The main reason for the appearance was that wanted to see how "telegenic" he was. Apparently he wasn't too disappointed. Not long after that, he did the first of three award-winning "Evenings With" specials.
According to Hollywood folklore, a screen test report on Astaire for RKO Pictures, now lost along with the test, is reported to have read: "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance a little."
Which leads us other possibly apocryphal true stories. Telegram spotted on a H'wood studio desk by Cary Grant: "How old Cary Grant?" Grant wires back, "Old Cary Grant just fine. How you?"

"God's gift to musicians."

2011-05-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

Advance reviews for my friend Tad Hershorn's long-awaited authorized bio of Norman Granz to be published Oct. 1 by Univ. of Calif Press:

"The JAZZ AT THE PHILHARMONIC concerts were a turning point in my life. My fellow Californian Norman Granz figured it out. This biography lays out, in impressive detail and insight, the incredible contribution of Mr. Granz to the world of music and art. The deed of the vast recordings of ART TATUM says it all."

--Clint Eastwood

"Norman Granz was one of the most important people in the world of jazz. He did more to escalate respect for jazz and raise our salaries than anybody else. He absolutely loved jazz and jazz musicians. I'm honored to have shared a beautiful friendship with Norman for many, many years. Hopefully, with this incredible book by Tad Hershorn, the world will have a chance to learn about Norman, and his phenomenal contribution to our beloved music--jazz."

--Clark Terry, author of Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry

"Tad Hershorn's Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice is a relentlessly readable, rigorously researched, deeply empathic portrait of the complex and heroic man who was arguably the greatest champion of this great American art form--and its great artists. Essential reading for anyone who loves jazz."

--James Kaplan, author of Frank: The Voice

"Norman Granz was renowned as a vivid force in jazz history, both as a producer of invaluable classic recordings by many of the music's most original performers and also for his world-wide, all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic tours. Moreover, he broke the color line dividing jazz audiences by mandating the end of segregated seating his continually popular concerts. Yet until this magisterial, deeply researched biography of Granz by Tad Hershorn, there has been no full-scale inside account of the achievement and combats of this often larger-than-life personality who, without playing an instrument, was so swingingly instrumental in making jazz an international language."

--Nat Hentoff, author of At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene

"Norman Granz, one of the most significant non-musicians in jazz history, took gutsy public stands but remained a private person. Tad Hershorn's years of dedicated research reveal the man behind the lasting legacy, on which he sheds new light as well.. This great American story is a must read--and not just for jazz fans!"

--Dan Morgenstern, author of Living with Jazz

"Norman Granz was an institution in jazz. He was loved by some, hated by others, often controversial, and always fearless. But Granz was also elusive and, until now, sometimes came across as more symbol than man. Tad Hershorn has changed all that in this stunning, beautiful biography of the music's most relentless advocate of social justice."

--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Norman Granz was an important man, and Tad Hershorn tells his story with a fearless compassion grounded in yeoman research. Imperious, vain, and rude, Granz was also generous, inventive, and brave. He fought valiantly for jazz and civil rights, made pots of money, and never failed to bet it on his passions and beliefs. If you do not know him, you couldn't ask for a better introduction than Hershorn's judicious portrait; if you think you do know him, you are in for more than a few surprises."

--Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz

Mike's other hat

2011-05-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

photo: James Harrod

A couple of months back, I went to Vitello's in Studio City, CA to catch singer Michael Dees, a big favorite of mine. I had only seen him "live" one other time, late last year in a terrific big band blowout with Frankie's Capp Juggernaut. Afterward, I posted a somewhat crude video that I captured with my IPod camera. Kinda got the job done, though. For those who missed it first time around, here's a link to my initial youtube post. But I digress. . . as is my wont. Instead, we are gathered around the campfire to discuss Michael Dees, the songwriter. And until my aforementioned Vitello's experience, I had only heard rumors about that aspect of Michael's artistry. I liked what I heard that night, so much so that I wanted to hear more. So I rang him up out of the blue and asked if there was a Dees demo, and indeed-y there was. He sent me one and, his permission secured, I'd like to share a couple of tracks with you. In fact, the first cut was actually recorded that night at Vitello's and just now added to his demo. And who better to sing them than Michael Dees, the King of the Demo Singers himself?

Here is Michael singing his songs "A Kiss" and "Back in New Orleans" , which has recently been recorded by Houston Person.

FYI: Michael's publisher is Terri Fricon Entertainment , located in Hendersonville, TN 615 626 2288

Dithyrambia Personified

2011-05-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

Double click on image for full frame
The (truly) legendary Earl "Snakehips" Tucker

Thees ees a talk-king peekture

2011-05-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

Double click on image for full frame

Vid o' the Day

2011-05-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

Click on image twice for full frame

Betty Be-bop gives Mary Martin a lesson in how to scat.

2011-04-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

International Review of Music

Live Music: Sue Raney and Alan Broadbent at Vitello’s

April 27, 2011

By Don Heckman

On Friday night at Vitello’s, Sue Raney gave an unofficial seminar in the art of song. A seminar, that is, that illustrated by example, not by textbooks. And the key word was “art.” Because Raney’s remarkable vocal skills were completely at the service of her creatively illuminating interpretations of material from the Great American Songbook — and beyond.

Sue Raney

The performance began impressively with a stunning solo rendering of Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean” by pianist Alan Broadbent, who would provide the sole accompaniment for Raney’s set. Long term musical companions, the near-symbiotic presence of Broadbent’s extraordinary support was immediately established as the launching pad for Raney’s soaring interpretations.

Her first song was the Burke/Van Heusen classic (most famously sung by Bing Crosby), “Aren’t You Glad You’re You.” Done with buoyant, whimsical charm, it immediately defined one of the many aspects of Raney’s story telling skills. A tender version of Dave Frishberg’s “Listen Here,” followed by a jaunty romp through Burnett & Norton’s pre-WW I “Melancholy Baby,” further revealed the breadth of her vocal art.

As did similarly insightful readings of Sherwin & Maschwitz’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square,” Rodgers & Hart’s “He Was Too Good To Me,” Warren & Gordon’s “You’ll Never Know” and David Raksin’s atmospheric theme from “The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Alan Broadbent

The set hit its peak with stunning anthems to Spring — including Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “It Might As Well Be Spring” and Michel Legrand and the Bergmans’ “You Must Believe In Spring.” In the closing vamps, Raney light-heartedly tossed in quotes from other songs about Spring. And, more subtly, Broadbent slyly used the opening phrase from Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring” as an introduction.

What Raney brought to all this memorable material was a stunning mix of craft and dramatic imagination, engagingly expressed via her warm-toned, far ranging voice — all of it combined in a perfectly balanced, utterly compatible musical blend.

I’m not sure how many singers were in the overflow crowd, but I know there were a few. And I’m willing to wager that they came away from Raney’s casual but mesmerizing seminar with some vital ideas about the enhancement of their own vocal art.
###
________________________
Heckman got the day of the week wrong. It was Monday. O'wise, he's spot on!

Fido's Lament from Il Barkio

2011-04-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

"One of the wonderful facets of free improvisation is that, unlike more formal music, practitioners aren't limited to the human race. This one minute jam consists of disjointed minimalist piano patterns which are soon joined by a barrage of full-bodied falsetto wails and deep growls. The heavy-handed piano provides the perfect counterpoint to the operatic vocals and what we hear is an imperfect sound that vibrates with unique colors and textures. A piece of rarefied beauty." Jason J. Guest

Sue Raney & Alan Broadbent KPFK-FM 4/21/11

2011-04-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

Interviewed by John Schneider

PART 1

PART 2

Sue's news

2011-04-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

Listen here to an advance audio sampling of the new Sue Raney CD, Listen Here , to be released 4/24/11. At the 88's, none other than Alan Broadbent.

Randy Wood (1917 - 2011)

2011-04-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, slightly before the Punic Wars, late night found many of us in Charleston (WV) listening not to local radio stations, still continuing to pump out our parents' retrograde faves like "April in Portugal" and "Lisbon Antigua", but to the 50,000 watt clear channel station out of Nashville, WLAC, featuring deejays Gene Nobles and John R.

Enacted after-hours and away from parental scrutiny, auditing WLAC was so clandestine and forbidden, that it almost operated like a vicarious trial run for sex---something of which few teens in the 50s had partaken. Not in my set, anyway. In between their pitches for mail order rhythm and blues packages from Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee and salacious paeans to the lubricating properties of White Rose Petroleum Jelly, this powerhouse outlet blanketed almost the entire country with the real deal in black music instead of the pale white simulacrum coming to be known as rock and roll. Randy's was owned by Randy Wood, also the proprietor of the Dot record label. He died last weekend at the age of 94.

Years later I learned that the jockeys on "LAC" ("a service of the Tennessee Life and Casualty Company") weren't actually black, but only "sounded that way." And I wasn't the only who got misled. Legend has it that no less than the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown, showed up at the station late one summer evening with his first recording tucked under his arm hoping to get a break from men whom he had presumed for years were "Negro," until being led into the studio and learning otherwise. When the secret history of r n' b and r n' r is writ large, it will probably be made apparent that it wasn't really Dick Clark who turned on teenage America to black music, but instead, this seldom acknowledged radio phenomenon out of the heartland of America---WLAC and Randy Wood.

It is also of interest that the so-called "cover" records of black rhythm and blues songs by some of Dot's white artists played a major role in establishing the careers of the original purveyors of the music, such as Little Richard and Fats Domino, et al, all of whom have been at pains, over the years, to accord Wood the proper credit he played in boosting their professional fortunes. These Dot recordings by whites are in addition to the hundreds of black rhythm and blues sides that also originated on the label.

And don't forget the nearly 1,000 albums turned out by Dot, overseen by Randy Wood, recordings that partook of the entire spectrum of American popular music and jazz.

Wood is survived by his wife, three grandchildren, a great-grandson, and three children, one of whom, jazz pianist John Wood, is a close friend of mine. My sincere condolences to all of them.

Musical relief

2011-04-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

In the recording studio yesterday with Sue Raney, Pinky Winters, Jim Cox, Alan Broadbent, Tom Warrington, and Kurt Reichenbach laying down the first tracks for an upcoming Japanese earthquake/tsunami relief jazz CD, "From California with Love." All donating their time and artistry along with Andy Waterman & Umbrella Media. If what went down is any barometer, folks will snap this up as much for the music as for the worthy cause. Due out on CD and downloads June 1. PS: I don't sing on it at all!

Singers (and Sondheim) on the brain, pt. 4

2011-04-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Last night in Dreamsville, I worked in a supermarket where the manager of each department, year in and year out, was required to sing a certain Stephen Sondheim song assigned to them over and over again to a karaoke track piped into their work area. I was the produce manager, and for twelve years running I had been intoning this (in reality, non-existent S.S.) melody entitled "Identity." Finally, I could take it no more, and beseeched the store manager to allow me to expand my Sondheim repertoire. He relented and assigned me a new song, "Charity"(!) But just as the new karaoke track began began to play, I woke up!

My, my, my, you must agree that what a rich, full fantasy life I must lead!

Who will I dream about tonight? The Cherry Sisters?

Singers on the brain, pt. 3

2011-04-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Last night, strolling along right arm locked in the left of Morpheus, I passed a book store that was having a signing by Blossom Dearie, not of her CDs, but of her various books, all of whose pages and covers were shaped like animals, objects, and buildings, etc. Each one I picked up had the printed price crossed out with a higher one written in in ballpoint. Hmmmmm? Calling Doktor Freud!

Can't wait to dream about Florence Foster Jenkins.

Singers on the brain, pt. 2

2011-04-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago I had a dream about Patti Page. It opens on a high camera angle down on a crowd as large as one in Vatican Square. It is 1998 in front of Miss Porter's Dress shop in Oklahoma where the now PP used to work after school as a teenager. A limo pulls up in front and as the crowd begins to go wild, Patti barely escapes with her life as she she is pulled into the store to safety while the crowd continues to shout: "Clara Mae, Clara Mae!" PP's real moniker. And who among us can blame her for changing her name. "That Singing Rage, Clara Mae Fowler," simply doesn't make it.

In the dream, she also did a TV Spam commercial! I don't make these things up; It must've been that ham I et before turning in.

On the radio

2011-04-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

Singer Sue Raney and Alan Broadbent will be making an appearance on Global Village on radio station KPFK-FM (90.7) at noon, Thursday April 21.They'll be interviewed by host John Schneider about their new CD Listen Here, an upcoming April 25 appearance at Vitello's in North Hollywood, CA, and the duo's participation in the forthcoming Japanese earthquake/tsunami relief jazz CD, From California With Love. You can listen over the air or streaming from the website www.kpfk.or g.

Singers on the brain

2011-04-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

I had the craziest dream last night. . .in which I was listening to the radio and Mel Torme was singing Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Gentleman is a Dope." I could "hear" it right down to the Marty Paich arangements. But, heyyy! Wait a minute! What was Torme doing singing this irreversibly gender specific song, i.e. "why am I crying my eyes out, he'll never belong to me"? Just then the number ended and the dee-jay announced: "There's a track from the new album, Mel's Gone Gay."

A pluperfect example of what Freud called "a nonsense dream." For as Herr Dotor once observed, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Hear here!

2011-04-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Hear samples from the new PINKY WINTERS IN SUMMER CD here! Available now at fine CyberSellers everywhere. Co-produced by moi and Ms. Twisner. The track two background vocal marks my recording day-boo.

Every little bit. . ..

2011-04-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Keep a look out for "From California With Love/SSJ All Stars," a Japan earthquake/tsunami relief effort, due out in May on world-wide itunes and CD, and featuring such jazz artists as Sue Raney, Alan Broadbent, Diane Hubka, Kurt Reichenbach, Pinky Winters, Jim Cox, Leslie Lewis, Gerard Hagen, Johnny Holiday, Dick Noel, Christian Jacob, Frankie Randall and more. Most tracks are brand new, recorded especially for this project.

One Born Every Minute

2011-03-31T07:48:00.000-07:00

came across this on youtube

The following post accompanied the clip:

"I have in my possession what I believe to be an original and unreleased reel-to-reel recording of what sounds like Ol' Blue Eyes himself.

I got the recording in a box of old recording equipment and tapes that were sold on auction from a storage facility in Hollywood two years ago. The reel-to-reel tape is titled "A7May66Reprise", and no other information came with it. I have digitized a sample of the recording and uploaded it for you to listen to. I think there may be other recordings on the tape but due to my time limitations, I haven't checked.

I am asking $19,500 (o.b.o.) for this obviously rare reel recording:

Leave it to Jane!

2011-03-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

pic by James Gavin on Facebook

Singer Jane Harvey (right) after her show last night (3/28) at the Regency in New York. Here she is with jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern, singer-pianist Daryl Sherman, and Cinderella.

ACTUALLY WATCHABLE / LISTENABLE MUSIC TV

2011-03-28T13:27:00.001-07:00

click on image twice for full frame

See Sue Raney (even better) "live" April 25 w/ Alan Broadbent at Vitello's in North Hollywood, CA

Will Friedwald weighs in on Jane Harvey

2011-03-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Feinstein's at Loews Regency

540 Park Ave.
(212) 339-4095, Monday (March 28)

Feinstein's offers an abundance of musical riches, with an appealingly wide generational span. The featured attraction is the delightful Nellie McKay: eclectic, irreverent, funny, sad, poignant, silly, often all at once, whether she is re-tooling a standard or offering one of her originals (which are also heard on a special weekend late show). On Monday, the main event is, quite possibly, the last major active female vocalist of the swing era. Jane Harvey headlined at Café Society and with the big bands of Benny Goodman and Desi Arnaz. Later, she recorded a short but choice series of albums that culminated in what is still the best overall jazz vocal take on the songs of Stephen Sondheim. Ms. Harvey, whose New York appearances are far too infrequent, is such a vital performer that when she sings "I'm Still Here" (lately an overdone anthem for veteran divas), it almost seems redundant.

But "Why"?

2011-03-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

It's more than obvious that the Japanese govt knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that attempts to salvage the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are beyond hopeless. Nearly every public statement from TEPCO now contains the phrase "we don't know. . .."

I refer you to the very most recent revelation (3/24) of vegetables grown in TOKYO becoming contaminated with radioactivity. And so why allow the ongoing actions to allegedly restore the facility to continue---at clearly the cost of hundreds (thousands?) of lives with each passing day? It is not a pretty picture. I say Chernobylize the dump and get it over with. Surely Tokyo Electric Power can find some way of writing this off their taxes if they are unable to salvage the plant. If one didn't know better, one might begin to suspect that the powers-that-be don't give a feather or a fig whether people live or die. It's all beginning to feel like a version of Kiss Me Deadly starring the Marx Brothers. (revised 3/25)

He couldn't be righter

2011-03-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

New York Observer
March 22, 2011
Rex Reed

Back in the good old days, People Who Knew Things praised Jane Harvey as one of the big-band era's most exalted song stylists. A little thrush from New Jersey, she was discovered at the Blue Angel by Desi Arnaz, who got her on "The Bob Hope Show" and showcased her with his band at Ciro's. She followed Peggy Lee with the Benny Goodman orchestra, replaced Doris Day with Les Brown's Band of Renown and recorded some memorable albums that are collector's items now.

She still lives in Hollywood, but at Feinstein's at the Regency, where she knocked their socks off last Sunday and makes one final appearance on Monday, March 28, she is living proof that real talent never fades. The first singer to record the jazz side of Sondheim, she brought that out-of-print album out of mothballs last year. Rave reviews and a lot of cash-register action followed, and here she is, better late than never. It would be hard to imagine a more natural or heartfelt interpreter of this material, and the sensational pianist Mike Renzi provides beautiful chords for her to swing in.

On everything from a gentle reading of "Would I Leave You" from "Follies" to a heartbreaking "Not While I'm Around" from "Sweeney Todd," she is different from everyone else, and even on the overexposed stuff like "Ladies Who Lunch," she stamps the arrangement with a unique style as personal as a tattoo. Almost
conversational in tone, her phrasing is unlike anything you've experienced in the past, and her ideas are fresh and startling. Who else would think of using the ossified "Send in the Clowns" as a lead-in to Rodgers and Hart's sad, exclusive "It Never Entered My Mind"? Presuming (correctly, alas) that as much as we admire him, we're so up to our eyeballs with a glut of Sondheim during the never-ending celebration of his 80th birthday that we're beginning to feel like force-fed geese with exploding livers in preparation for foie gras, Ms. Harvey wisely moves into the Great American Songbook for the balance, with easy, unforced and warmly intimate classics like Jerome Kern's "Remind Me," Oscar Levant's "Blame It on My Youth" and Harold Arlen's "This Time the Dream's on Me." (She plans more of the same on March 28, so plan ahead.) Rich, subtle and earthy, Jane Harvey is a true treasure brought back to life just when we need her most.

Life Goes On

2011-03-22T06:19:00.001-07:00

New CD by Pinky Winters displayed on Tokyo's Ginza at Yamano Music Store.

From Eden Atwood to Japan

2011-03-20T13:42:00.001-07:00

Click image twice for full screen

Deep Doctor C.

2011-03-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

My understanding is that U.S. nuclear agencies initially offered their support to Daiichi.. . .IN TURNING THE PLANT INTO A PARKING LOT. I never saw news of this on American TV, but it was reported on the Japanese internet. And that is why U.S. assistance was, at first, rebuffed. Tepco obviously wanted to gamble on saving billions of dollars worth of investment at the price of what will clearly end up being the loss of hundreds of thousands of Japanese (and where else?) lives in the long run. If world powers can get it together to sufficiently bomb Libya into oblivion, I can't understand why they can't also stand together and force the powers-that-be in Japan to shut the nuclear plant down for good. . .before it is too late. Time is running out. The buck stops "somewhere": in Japan and whoever is finally responsible for this ever-growing disaster should seriously be contemplating ritual seppuku at this juncture..

Jane Harvey alert

2011-03-16T06:31:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder for those in the NYC area that singer Jane Harvey makes her first appearance there in 25 years this Sunday at Feinstein's with an encore the following Monday, March 28.

Tori* Amor (*Japanese for chicken)

2011-03-13T08:59:00.003-07:00

click on image twice for full image

Pinky number ten!

2011-02-27T06:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an advance look at the new Pinky Winters CD, to be released on March 23. It is now available for pre-order at ebay at a not-too-terribly excessive price as far as Japanese imports go. And check out that background vocal on track two!

Marsha Sings!

2011-02-25T08:15:00.000-08:00

Click twice on image for full picture

For several years, before Hollywood beckoned, actress Marsha Hunt's chief source of income was singing on the radio. Ironically, after being brought to Hollywood in 1934 by Paramount Pictures, despite the massive amount of work in every possible field, not just films, but also Broadway, radio, TV (Star Trek), Marsha only sang publicly one lone time, and that was in the MGM movie, Unholy Partners. The irony here is that the vehicle is not a musical, but a drama about the newspaper world. Also, unusual for a film like this, Marsha gets to sing an entire number, and with only one brief dialogue cutaway. I've had the pleasure of being with Marsha at performances by singers. Her face lights up, and she simply can't take her eyes off of them. Loves the stuff.

I remember seeing Marsha Hunt on a Soupy Sales network special in the early 1970s. She was quite the "game girl." No pie in the kisser, though.