Larry Kart

I think that at this point in time, as the particulars of their individual immediacies inevitably fades to reveal the permanence of their intents (that is to say, all human behavior ultimately comes down to a handful of "types" of actions, although the ways they get acted out are seemingly infinite), that they are far more alike than not. Sounds interesting, but, on second thought, I don't know what you mean here. I'm not pulling your chain, but please amplify if possible.

Whoa -- When I wrote "If you're a non-fan of opera, you won't get a fair bit of where Armstrong and Bechet in particular were coming from," I was under the impression that you (and I didn't mean you in particular as much as I meant "one," as in "anyone of us") had in your life pretty much avoided the stuff on the "fat loud tenors, shrieky sopranos" principle . Since then you've explained that that's not the case at all. Fine; I understand. But I didn't feel the need in the light of that info to then formally retract what I'd first said, not realizing that we were in court of law or something. Also, my "won't get a fair bit of" point was based on my own experience; I didn't get that aspect of Armstrong and Bechet until someone pointed it out to me, played some of the pertinent records, noting resemblances, and showed me some of the texts that made it clear how much opera Armstrong and Bechet been exposed to in their youth in New Orleans.

MG I said two different things: What you quote above, and this ("...if you do run across good examples of some or all of that stuff, it's not unlikely, if you're a curious, broadminded jazz fan, that you'll find yourself enjoying yourself some. It ain't just anthropology/musicology, nor is it sauerkraut juice"). I believe that both these things are true and don't see how they're incompatible. As for "I'm not sure how an amateur, accidentally running across examples, would know whether they're good, bad or indifferent"), first, there are as in all things degrees of amatuerish-ness; one tries to learn some and listen some at the same time, and even if you're not making a conscious effort to learn, with increased exposure you often do. Second, while some musics are so damn different from other musics that one is clueless without hardcore tutelage, I think that in the case of the musics were talking about, some basic musicality on the part of the listener will carry him or her a good ways in the right directions.

But Reagan's influence/zone of being was that of political and social power, while opera's is in the (or "a") zone of potential aesthetic pleasure. Thus, it would seem to me, getting what Reagan was about and being a fan of Reagan is not very comparable to getting what opera was/is about and being a fan of opera. Different strokes, of course, when it comes to what one finds pleasurable; you can't enjoy what you don't enjoy. On the other hand, and this is certainly understandable, some people who don't like opera (or musicals or cabaret -- not these are at all the same kind of thing) do so for reasons that are analogous in part to why you and I might not like Ronald Reagan. That is, there are social issues and auras and histories of groups winning and losing involved; if an art form reeks of a crowd or attitudes that you rightly can't take (given who each of us -- rightly for ourselves -- are), then that is likely to be the end of it. As for MG's: "But do you need to be a fan of military band music in order to appreciate New Orleans jazz? Or a fan of Spirituals? Or a fan of various kinds of African-descended music sourced from the traditional musics of the Wolof, Mandinke, Bambara and Serahule peoples that, in their contemporary, late nineteenth century form, we can never hear?" No you don't need to IMO, but if you do run across good examples of some or all of that stuff, it's not unlikely, if you're a curious, broadminded jazz fan, that you'll find yourself enjoying yourself some. It ain't just anthropology/musicology, nor is it sauerkraut juice.

No? You mean I have to be a "fan" to grasp the influence? Hmmmm.... It would help, probably. Anyhow, there's so much great music there, i.e. in Opryland. BTW, Battistini's "A Tanto Amor" (I think it's the 1906 recording, but I can't be sure) can be downloaded here: http://www.emusic.com/album/Mattia-Battist...d/11009191.html The passage I have in mind comes almost at the end, but the excerpt that I can listen to without doing the whole downleading thing, only runs about 20 seconds.

Just to be clear, there is evidence, in addition to the sound of their music, that Armstrong and Bechet encountered, really dug , and were influenced by Italian opera in the New Orleans of their youth.

Jim -- If you're a non-fan of opera, you won't get a fair bit of where Armstrong and Bechet in particular were coming from. There's a 1906 recording of Donizetti's "A Tanto Amor" by the great baritone Mattia Battastini (1856-1928) where in the course of a closing cadenza he throws in a roulade that's so thrillingly Armstrong-like that you might not believe it. The tenor Fernando De Lucia (1860-1925) was another singer of that era who did things with time and timbre that jazz musicians could have fed on. Caruso (1873-1921), too, of course, but Battistini and De Lucia were of an earlier era in which a good deal more rhythmic fluidity and all-around freedom prevailed. But even if opera had no connection to jazz whatsoever... well, up to a certain point in my early teens I thought most classical music was indistinguishable from Mantovani.

Shill

Anthony Trollope's "Phineas Finn." Highly recommend his "The Eustace Diamonds." The central character, Lizzie Eustace, is one of most amazing and closely observed monsters in fiction. She could eat Becky Sharpe for breakfast.

It's those meaty arpeggios I have a problem with.

I am the real Larry K., know well to almost all of you. Send your nice money to me, and I will return it soon with extra money.

Granville Theodore Hogan Jr. (G.T. Hogan) born 1/16/29 in Galveston, Tex. Don't know those details on Wilbur Hogan, except that he is or was, as they say, a different drummer. I know this BTW because the subject came up some 45 years ago, when G.T. was making his few but excellent records (e.g. Two Horns Plus Rhythm, with Kenny Dorham and Ernie Henry) and the distinction between the two drumming Hogans was explicitly made.

According to Eugene Chadbourne's entry at www.allmusic.com they were one and the same person. Mr. Chadbourne is wrong.

I have Grado SR125s and like them a lot. The original over-the-ear pads were very fatiguing to wear, though; they cut into the back of my apparently too-large-for-Grado ears. Finally, I got some replacement pads from a good hi-fi store that fit Grados and rest on the ear and don't enclose it, as the original Grado pads do. As I recall, the on-the-ear pads very slightly change the sound "style" and/or imaging of the phones, as one might expect (if only because the sound sources are now a bit further from your ear drums), but the phones still sound fine to me, and the increase in comfort makes a big difference. I should add that I listen through speakers most of the time, using phones only when I want to listen in a very close-in "analytical" manner or don't want to disturb my wife when listening to something very loud late at night.

Off the top of my head, my favorite Kerouac book is "Desolation Angels," followed by "Big Sur" and "Book of Dreams."

Bad boy.

Visited Ms. Souza's website. That's quite a honker she has on her.

FWIW, a piece on Kerouac from my book: JAZZ AND JACK KEROUAC [1983] What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight. A good place to begin is at a level that might not seem very important at first--the quasi-journalistic, jazz-tinged vignettes that Kerouac sometimes used as scenic backdrops. Here, in The Subterraneans, is Roger Beloit (a character based on tenor saxophonist Allen Eager) “... listening [on the radio] to Stan Kenton talk about the music of tomorrow and we hear a new young tenor man come on, Ricci Comucca, Roger Beloit says, moving back thin expressive purple lips, ‘This is the music of tomorrow?’” The actual name of the musician involved is Richie Kamuca, not Ricci Comucca, but leave that be. What matters is the way Kerouac has captured a small yet essential twitch of the jazz sensibility. Beloit-Eager, “that great poet I’d revered in my youth,” as Leo Percepied says to us and to himself a few pages later on, was a first-generation white disciple of Lester Young and, of all those players, the one best able to modify Young’s style to fit the more rhythmically and harmonically angular world of bebop; while Kamuca, coming along a half-generation or so behind Eager, was also inspired by Lester Young (and perhaps by Eager as well). Eager was at his peak in the mid- to late 1940s, but “now it is no longer 1948 but 1953 with cool generations and I [i.e., Percepied-Kerouac] five years older.” So the joke, if that’s the way to put it, is that Beloit-Eager’s “This is the music of tomorrow?” remark is steeped in mordant irony, as though he were saying, though he’s too “hip” to be this explicit, ‘Hey, I was ahead of this guy five years ago.” Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fic¬tional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time. In Kerouac’s fiction there are a number of other moments like the Beloit-Eager passage--brief, seemingly casual glimpses that take the reader and the narrator into the heart of what Kerouac chose to call, at various times, “Jazz America” (On the Road) or the “Jazz Century” (Book of Dreams). But these glimpses are only glimpses. The narrator happens to be there, and what he sees or overhears doesn’t bring him into direct contact with what he has perceived. A good example, no less shrewd than the Beloit-Eager vignette, is the narrator’s reminiscence, in Desolation Angels, of Stan Getz sitting in a toilet stall in Birdland, “blowing his horn quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything--(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said),” Marsh being Tristano’s tenor saxophonist of the time. Again, this has meaning within Kerouac’s self-referential fictional world; it’s a thought that ought to occur to Jack Duluoz at the time. But “Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh!” is also, one suspects, exactly what Getz was saying to himself as he sat there in that actual toilet stall. It would be nice to linger over these precise, attractive insights, but now it’s time to look at the painful stuff, the yearning Kerouac’s heroes have to be part of something they can’t really belong to. At times there is (at least one hopes there is) a deliberate edge of farce to the program, for how can one do anything but gag at stuff like “I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero!” (Visions of Cody), “good oldfashioned jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls” (Visions of Cody), and “wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (On the Road). As Jack Duluoz says in Visions of Cody, referring, perhaps, to Sherwood Anderson’s novel: “Dark laughter has come again!” Of course this is fiction, and it’s fair, especially in the “true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” case, to put some distance between Kerouac and his narrator, who at that point in On the Road ought to be half a fool. But common sense finally says that this not only fiction but is also, more often than not, exactly what it seems to be--a moonstruck desire to turn jazz into some imaginary black earth-mother and, in the process, shed all sorts of inhibitions, just like those “unashamed…good oldfashioned jitterbugs.” And Kerouac pushes it even further at times. “You and I,” writes Jack Duluoz to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, “could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians”--a vision that again raises the question of how much distance there is between the narrator and his words, for if “You and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians” is to be taken at anything close to face value (and I can see little reason not to take it that way), it is the self-delusion of a naïve tourist. Jazz has, and always will have, its romantic component, but surely this is a music of overriding emotional realism. So if anyone thinks that there is some intrinsic bond between the music of Charlie Parker or Lester Young and a “weekend climaxed by bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano...and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group…(this from Visions of Cody)--well, James Dean played the bongos, too. But what of the “jazz” texture of Kerouac’s prose and verse, for which some grandiose claims have been made (Kerouac himself saying of Mexico City Blues: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday”)? The “spontaneous prose” business isn’t worth bothering about in any literal sense, because the “no pause to think of proper word”... “if possible write ‘without consciousness” aspects of the program apparently were not adhered to very often. How “the object is set before the mind” is the point; and in any case it’s the results that matter--that is, do the words, labored over or not, manage to capture the feel of spontaneity? To a remarkable degree they do, less so in the raggle-taggle verse (Book of Dreams being much superior to the otherwise comparable Mexico City Blues) than in the best of the prose, where Kerouac does at least two things: he captures the sound of all kinds of jazz-related talk, from the hip, ingrown-toenail language of his Subterraneans to Cody Pomeroy’s manic, carnival-barker monologues. And having a wonderful ear for the speech of others, Kerouac also could hear himself, which is where his wish “to be considered a jazz poet” really rests. What kind of a jazz poet? That brings us back to Roger Beloit-Allen Eager and the other Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonists Kerouac seemed most fond of, the late Brew Moore (or, as Kerouac always spelled the name, “Brue” Moore). Moore figures most prominently in Chapter 97 of Desolation Angels, which has its moments of fan-like, romantic presumption (“Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time--besides he wants to play a new tune--I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he’s right”). But this dream of participating in the magical “IT” of jazz, “the big moment of rapport all around” (words given to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody) seems small alongside Kerouac’s ability to sustain the rhythm of a paragraph or a chapter on a series of long, swinging, almost literal breaths. Here Kerouac achieved his dream of a prose that shadows the chorus structure of an improvising jazz soloist. And it is the sound of men like Moore and Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture. “I wish Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct,” Kerouac writes in Book of Dreams, “but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of quietness.” Listening to Eager or Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation--as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy “Ah, me,” which would border on passivity if it weren’t for the need to move on, to keep the line going. Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman’s long line and Thomas Wolfe’s garrulous flow. And I wouldn’t insist that Kerouac’s prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn’t the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching--his “holy flowers floating…in the dawn of Jazz America” and “great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns” stuff--Kerouac’s desire to be part of “the jazz century” led to a prose that was, at its best, jazz-like from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground (as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen (as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac’s vision. “These are men!” wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore--and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter--a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story, too.

Bringing this back up again because I just got a copy and am knocked out by what I'm hearing. Have always respected Harrell as a player, without being overwhelmed by him, but his writing here is exceptional and quite personal -- great range of "colors," but Harrell doesn't wallow in the paint box; there's a strong rhythmic and harmonic drive to his writing, with a very attractive IMO touch of acidity in the latter realm. Also, Harrell is unafraid to use the sections of the band as unified sections when that suits his ear; some writers these days break things up so much, and/or in such a "bitty" manner, that one wonders (or at least I wonder) why 16 or so players were assembled in the first place. All the more impressive that some of the more adventurous charts and/or pieces here were written by Harrell in the early 1960s -- e.g. the dance of seven veils setting of "Dream." Also, it shows that, as David Weiss said, the band played several gigs before recording. Lovely, very together performances.

I agree. The media and computers blow everything out of proportion, and with tremendous speed and repetition. It makes the abnormal appear to be the norm, or as if times are a-changing. There's no stability. We're drowning in our excesses too boot. I think I'll go hide under the bed until all this blows over. You're going to have to be pulled out from under that bed and "re-educated."

Jim's Trane versus Wynton model is interesting. What should not be forgotten there is that the thinking/feeling that ran through Trane's relationship to the rest of the scene from, say, 1961 to the end was inherently expansive, would-be spiritual, and, perhaps above all, full of belief (and/or belief and hope) that a new musical era was afoot. We all know (or think we know and then can argue about) how all that worked out -- musically, socially, econmically, etc. -- but that was the thinking/feeling involved. By contrast, the thinking/feeling that has fueled the almost three-decade-long Wyntonian episode has been more or less reactionary/exclusionary and aggressive/defensive. First, both within the Wynton camp itself, within the corporate, instititutional and media support group(s) that so effectively marketed him, and within that portion of the jazz community that responded positively to all this, the upfront assumption was (and in many ways still is) that without some such appealing figure to rally around (then later on, without an institution like Jazz@LC and its offfshoots to radiate status, quality, and stability/verifiability) jazz itself was or might be cooked. The problem here, for people such as myself, is that even if these things were true (and for reasons that Marty Khan went into, I don't think that they are), anll this depends on Wynton himself being the major creative figure as a trumpeter and a composer that he is said to be (and based on more than 50 years of listening experience, I certainly don't think he is). And if he is not, then the whole darn edifice is built upon sand, no? In that vein, I recall a conversation I had a few years back with a prominent venerable figure in the jazz community who is a firm supporter of Jazz@LC and Wynton on a "They're vital to the practical survival of the music" basis. Then in the next breath he volunteered, "Of course, Wynton is not a jazz musician." Then he asked me never to repeat that remark, at least not as having come from him. I still remain amazed that an intelligent decent man could live with that paradox. And if, as I would guess, he's far from the only one who does, then how could that be a healthy thing?

Excerpt from a 2005 interview with knowledgeble good guy Marty Khan, about his book “Straight Ahead: A Comprehensive Guide to the Business of Jazz (Without Sacrificing Dignity or Artistic Integrity).” Comments on the pernicious somewhat sub rosa economic effects of Jazz@LC on other jazz artists are particularly noteworthy. I have heard similar detailed accounts from musicians-bandleaders on how the marketing of Jazz@LC ensembles and the very large fees those ensembles command have knocked the crap out of the touring scene for other artists/bands who used to be able to play the sort of college and art center venues that Khan refers to at one point. Complete text here (SR is Steve Rowland): http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=16904 SR: That's a pretty bleak picture you're painting, man. MK: Look around. The economic environment and the music itself are in complete turmoil. No touring, no record sales, no vibrant scene, no new leadership, no innovative directions, no public visibility, no new audiences. And schools are spewing out legions of new musicians into the mix with little opportunity to express their art and get paid. It's a mess, man. SR: But there are groups touring—and getting really well paid. How does that factor in? MK: Sure. All-star aggregations doing tributes. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and some Marsalises—don't get me started—a few other big names sucking down enormous fees. Look at the Great Depression. The general illusion is that everybody went broke. But the reality is that all that happened was a major shift in the distribution of wealth. All the money that was lost by the multitudes went into the hands of the few. Let's just look at Tucson, for example. In the 2003/4 season, our monolith facility, The University of Arizona presented three jazz artists on their series. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Branford Marsalis and Wynton Marsalis—and that guy for the 7th time in the 10 years we've been here. Don't get me started! (laughter) The lowest paid of them was Branford at $17,000. The next jazz gig in town pays around $1000—if you can get it . Mostly they're door gigs or under $100 per man. No economy can thrive in such a polarized environment. This situation is being replicated all over the country, and actually being fortified by the various funding initiatives that are primarily benefiting presenters and leaving musicians out in the cold. It's tragic. SR: There seems to be a feeling among many of its critics that everything wrong with jazz today is Lincoln Center's fault. Is that your view? MK: This may surprise a lot of people, but no, I don't. It's a symptom of the problem. Just like Bush isn't the problem in politics. He's a symptom of the problem. A malaise of ignorance, indifference, greed and whatnot that poisons the atmosphere and allows these damaging organisms to thrive. When Lincoln Center was first conceiving its jazz program nearly 20 years ago, everybody was saying to me “Isn't it great? This is going to put jazz in a great position.” Yeah, bent over and spread wide. I told anyone who would listen that it would polarize funding, undermine touring and zombie-fy jazz. I said they'd find some mediocre technician to ordain as visionary and we'd all be paying for it for decades to come. And no, I don't own a crystal ball (laughter). SR: But you don't blame them for polarizing funding, touring or making the music a museum piece? MK: Look, I blame Bush and his cronies for destroying our economy and environment, disenfranchising most of America with their “starve the beast” philosophy of government, and making us all complicit by our tolerance of “pre-emptive” war, while making us all more vulnerable to terrorism. But I blame us for letting them do it. That's how I feel about Lincoln Center. Musicians have allowed a man who's never gained the true respect of his fellow musicians to be sold to the public as an Ellingtonian visionary. Funders have poured millions of dollars into a boondoggle that only delivers a tiny fraction of the booty in meaningful returns. Fine Arts sponsors pay its stodgy orchestra one-night sums that could underwrite a great jazz artist's entire tour, and then force that tripe down the throats of audiences unfamiliar with the art form, who would be infinitely more enriched by listening to any Duke Ellington album than hearing the LCJO. Worst of all, jazz “advocates” point to it as some great model that proves the acceptance of the art form and an economic ideal to which other musicians and facilities should aspire. SR: Let's examine that last statement. Couldn't an argument be made that Lincoln Center is an example of the potential for jazz? MK: Empirical evidence says otherwise. The music is being marginalized in every walk of life. Not just in major media, but even in the industry realm. Virtually non-existent on television, even cable and satellite—Yeah, I know BET; don't get me started (laughter)—disappearing on radio, where even the few NPR stations that have been playing it are dropping or cutting programming. Invisible in mainstream magazines and sharply trivialized in music magazines. Even jazz rags are turning their focus to artists who are only marginally valid as jazz artists. The same can be said for many festivals that claim to be jazz, and are increasingly bringing more and more artists of other popular genres into their programming. The Ken Burns extravaganza didn't even cause a blip on the radar screen—except for his own CD marketing. Don't get me started here either!—and in the eyes of Public Broadcasting, Wynton is virtually portrayed as the last living jazz musician. SR: But he draws audiences wherever he plays. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra sells out all over the country. Why is that? MK: Marketing, man. They thrive on the strangling of the scene, and that's what's happening all over. Facilities draw audiences, not necessarily the artists who perform at them. In Tucson, Wynton and the various big names and all-star aggregations that almost exclusively make up today's touring jazz artists can draw 1500-2500 people at the University of Arizona, our arts monolith, at ticket prices of $24-50. Other internationally-acclaimed jazz artists playing here at $12-20 a ticket will draw as little as 60 people, at best 300-400. This isn't just true of jazz, but all of the performing arts. The Buena Vista Social Club has played here every year for the past four or five years, selling out two or three shows each time. 5000-7500 people at $25-$60 a head. Another excellent and reputable Cuban group comes to town and draws 75 people at $10. We saw the Blind Boys of Alabama at the U of A with 2200 people in 2000. In 2002, we saw them at a beautiful, intimate hall with about 80 other audience members in a 500 seat facility. This situation is being replicated all over the country. We recently traveled to Albuquerque to see Randy Weston in a wonderful theater. There were less than 100 people there. Two weeks later Wynton sold out 1400 seats at the same theater in two shows—and another 1400 in two shows in Santa Fe, about 60 miles away. Of those 2800 people in that single market who attended Marsalis' gig, not even 100 were interested in one of the true jazz greats? Doesn't make sense. Funders perpetuate this situation through facility-based funding. People like Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg and Willie Nelson contribute their efforts to fundraising events for Lincoln Center. These are concerned and generous individuals who think they're contributing their efforts to a worthy cause. If there was an entity in country music or society in general that was doing the equivalent damage that Lincoln Center is really doing to jazz, Willie Nelson would be in the front line of protestors. SR: It sound like you do blame Lincoln Center. MK: Yes, as I'd blame any predator. Any beast that must consume to feed its out-of-control imperative. But again, it's the syndrome that's really at fault not the symptom that thrives on it. Let's look at their recent fundraising campaign to build three halls in that big Columbus Circle boondoggle. $150 million dollars was raised—all to build a club in a city filled with clubs and concert facilities. Do you have any idea what $150 million dollars could do for jazz? Health care, pension funds, product distribution and marketing, establishment of artist-driven c3s and the professional training programs needed to make them work, and so forth? Even a fraction of that money could go a long way in addressing those issues. And what does Lincoln Center do with that scratch? Real estate! I hear they're nice facilities. I mean, how nice can they be? And all these concerned funders, fans, celebrities and so forth plunk down their money to contribute to this, when there's so much need on the jazz scene? Then there's the collateral damage as other facilities try to replicate Lincoln Center, but aren't doing all that well. Just as other festival promoters emulate George Wein, but nobody has ever been able to replicate his empire. Just as no jazz musicians are going to be able to replicate Wynton's empire—as “BeatDown” Magazine recently referred to it. But lots of mini-versions of all of the above are springing up. Little fiefdoms of exploitation, with their various spins that offer a distorted whiff of actual progress and systemic improvement. SR: Is this only occurring in the area of live performance? MK: No, it permeates everything. It's the American way, which until around 20-25 years ago was not prevalent in the world of fine arts and non-profit dedication. Now the fine arts and funding world have bought in completely. Let's look at the Ken Burns mess. A filmmaker of dubious quality—pretty much exclusively a product of Public Broadcasting—and with no previous knowledge or even interest in jazz, gets millions of dollars to create the biggest film extravaganza on the history of jazz. A great opportunity for the art form, right? True recognition across the land in untapped areas, right? Huge new audiences of consumers who will buy concert tickets, fill clubs and make those CDs fly off the shelves, right? You know what sold? Videos and DVDs of the series. Copies of the book connected with the series. CDs compiled to be marketed with the series. That's it. Not a blip on the chart for the artists portrayed, not even for Wynton, who was lionized by it while almost everybody but Pops and Duke were smeared. Those Ken Burns Jazz—think Sherman and Atlanta when you hear that—CDs dominated the jazz charts. I contacted over 30 record stores in 15 cities to ask if people were buying any of the artists' own CDs along with the Burns compilations. The answer was always a resounding no. Marketing, my man. Mass marketing. That's what made Burns. That's what's made Wynton. That's what we're up against. It's an empty promise of potential success to which not one in 10,000 will actually have access.

The De Valk biography establishes quite clearly, based on lots of physical evidence, that no one did or even could have pushed Baker out of that window; rather, he fell from it all by himself. Also, De Valk provided James Gavin with all of this information and Gavin chose to perpetuate the pushed out the window story in his "Deep In A Dream" because it was more dramatic.

Given the date of that footage, the "one missing tooth" would fit De Valk's "Chet didn't 'lose all his front teeth,' as some journalists have claimed, or even just one tooth -- but only a part of one tooth," if that partial broken off tooth later led to the loss of the whole tooth, then to the eventual removal of the whole deteriorating mess.

Bennett's connection to jazz, such as it is, goes back a long way. In his teen-age years in Queens he sang at sessions with Al Cohn, who remained a musical associate over the long haul, and on Bennett's very first album, "Cloud 7," from 1954 he was backed by a small jazz group led by his friend Chuck Wayne, with Dave Schildkraut on alto. That's not to say that Bennett is a jazz singer; he's not. Rather, his singing is compatible with jazz accompaniment, and he's usually stimulated by it. The best example of this IMO are the two albums he did of Rodgers and Hart songs with Ruby Braff for his own label Improv, later collected on Concord.