This is very funny—and it is an absolutely brilliant bit of musical improvisation from Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye. I think my favorite moment is when Louis says “but don’t forget Fats Waller” to rhyme off of Danny’s Gustav Mahler, and without missing abeat Danny replies “I wouldn’t do that” in what to my ear [...]
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Remembering Blossom Dearie
The great singer and pianist Blossom Dearie died on Saturday. I first discovered Blossom Dearie’s music in 2001, when I heard her song Manhattan in one of the musical interludes for a Fresh Air episode in the first weeks after 9/11. I had never heard Blossom Dearie and I was completely floored—by the lyrics, by [...]
I Listened to It Straight Through
And it’s good. You can check it out on the player embedded below the fold (so the auto start doesn’t kick in when you load my home page). It’s a project called The Harlem Experiment.
This Was a Revelation
The Beatles were my first musical obsession. When I became a fan of the Beatles in middle school, I collected every recording, poured over every liner note, read biographies, studied the lyrics, listened to the solo projects . . . It was the first time I’d gotten into music like this. I think it was [...]
I Cover the Waterfront
I had already listened my way through the phenomenal Hot 5 and 7 recordings from the 1920s and fallen in love with Nat Hentoff’s selections from the supposedly inferior big band recordings of the 1930s. In fact I had collected nearly all of the pre-All Stars recordings, had listened to a good number of those [...]
West End Blues
The flooding in New Orleans reached its current epic proportions when—after one levee was breached on Monday morning, August 29, in the eastern, downriver portion of the city, known as the Ninth Ward—another was breached across town at the 17th Street Canal Levee, very early Tuesday morning, August 30. The 17th Street Canal separates New [...]
From A Native Son Of New Orleans
St. James Infirmary Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five, December 12, 1928, Chicago Louis Armstrong – trumpet, vocal Fred Robinson – trombone Jimmy Strong – clarinet and tenor sax Don Redman – clarinet Earl Hines – piano Dave Wilborn – banjo Zutty Singleton – drums This recording is from the last of the Hot [...]
Studs On Pete
This is a little dated, but it’s good and Technorati says hardly anyone blogged it. For all my fellow red diaper babies: Pete Seeger Is 86 by STUDS TERKEL It is hard to think of Pete Seeger as an elderly gaffer, because the boy in him, the light, remains undimmed. It was sixty-five years ago [...]
Serenade
1. The hospice nurse checks again The water temperature. Swelling in the hands, The legs, the sensitive feet, My father in the lift device Shows no discomfort, Even beams a little, Looking at me. Fluorescent light in the poster frames. Around a breezy field, silver coastline . . . The patient closes his eyes And [...]
Hungry Blues IV
I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down [...]
Hungry Blues III
Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is “Lonesome Blues” , the story I posted in September, named after the song by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives . In “Lonesome Blues,” the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father’s.
Hungry Blues II
I wondered if Dan Morgenstern could help me find out more about Frankie Newton. A little googling revealed that Morgenstern is the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies , housed not at Princeton but at Rutgers. I sent him a letter on September 7, 1999. More than a month went by. I’d just about given up all hope of receiving a reply when in mid-October an envelope arrived in the mail with “Institute of Jazz Studies” in the return address. A letter from Morgenstern!
Hungry Blues I
The process began in 1991, when I made my first attempt to understand my father’s relationship with Frankie Newton, the mostly forgotten jazz trumpet player, whose career peaked in around 1939, during the period when his band backed Billie Holiday at the Cafe Society in New York.
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