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.
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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 around […]
Everyone - John Lennon [1:43m]:
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Monday, December 25, 2006
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 […]
Monday, September 5, 2005
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 Orleans’ […]
Friday, September 2, 2005
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 5/Hot 7 recordings that Louis Armstrong made between 1925 […]
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 I first ran […]
Thursday, February 24, 2005
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 moans as he is washed.
2.
Dream #2: I pull into the driveway
With a […]
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
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 […]
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
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.
Also filed in Books, Paul Greenberg 101, civil rights movement, document, family, frankie newton, hungry blues, jewish, labor movement, long days short nights ms., nyc politics, old left/new left, race and racism, writings of PG
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
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!
Sunday, February 20, 2005
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.
Frank Newton and Vic Dickenson
Are playing ping pong in the kitchen
From the window, Union Sq
Listen! it’s Peewee Russell on the gramophone
Peewee got a letter all the way from China
To The Maker Of Heavenly Music
Nick’s, USA
And the pennies we always threw, by the net, in the rug
Anybody who shows up with pennies
Throws them on the floor
Tonight […]
My father graduated from the eighth grade of Public School 89, Elmhurst, NY (Queens), in June of 1941. Like other kids graduating PS 89, he planned to go on to high school about a half mile away, at Newtown High School. According to his 8th grade autograph book, my father’s favorite author was Jack London, his favorite book The Sea Wolf ; Stardust was his favorite song; he loved baseball and worshipped Mel Ott.
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