Christiern

MartyJazz: "Dustin Hoffman, of course. Hey, he played Lenny Bruce, that casting was equally as " As someone who was around Lenny, I have to tell you that I was stunned at the accuracy with which Hoffman portrayed him. Hoffman was Bruce--it was brilliant casting--so I hope you're joking.

Show me an engineer who would not let inferior work be issued with his name on it and I'll show you Rudy. To think that Rudy would comply with an artist/producer's wishes if the result was a recording "almost cut off at the knees by the horrible sound," is, IMO, nonsense. I have said it before, I think the delayed beatification of Blue Note is 90% crap. Not to say that the label didn't issue many extraordinary recordings, but I think there is much myth and a dash of hero worship involved here. Rudy was a professional, a damn good one, who took pride in his work. What I am hearing here is that he would sacrifice quality and his good name as long as a tin-eared client paid him. Crap!

Terence looks nothing like the young Ellington, but I guess he's the black actor de jour.

As we saw when Early appeared in the Ken Burns Jazz abomination, there isn't much substance here, but I thought someone might wish to read this.--CA 28 Days Categories: Black History Month We have arrived once again at Black History Month, that time of year devoted to the remembrance and celebration of all things African American as something like a public duty or civic penance, depending on one’s view. PBS is rolling out African American Lives, a four-hour special by Henry Gates; Turner Classic Movies will devote a day to Sidney Poitier, Ethel Waters and Paul Robeson; public service announcements on many radio stations will remind us about the lives of great black Americans – an inventor or a civil rights lawyer – who most of the public has never heard of; bookstores will prominently display books by black authors or about black people in their windows; school children will be told about the glories of the civil rights movement. For 28 days the red, white and blue will be swathed in the red, black and green flag of black liberation. And here I am at The New York Times. Is it all passé, having separate space on the calendar about blacks? Does it all smack of a kind and gentle form of Jim Crow? Or, looked at another way, why celebrate this particular minority group without celebrating others? Why not a Chinese American History Month, a Filipino American History Month , an Italian American or Irish American History Month? Why are blacks the exceptionalist group among American non-white and European minorities? When I was a boy my Irish and Italian friends reminded me that their ethnic groups did not try to have Columbus Day or St. Patrick’s Day extended into week-long celebrations. (This was in the 1960’s, before Negro History Week became Black History Month.) I always replied by saying, “Why not? There are a lot of weeks in the year that aren’t doing anything.” Detractors of various political persuasions argue variously: 1) Black History Month is assigned to the shortest month of the year, a sign that our nation does not really take it seriously. 2) African American history ought to be discussed throughout the year, not just during one month. 3) Black History Month reduces African American history to “contributions” made to a larger history of the nation. It becomes a sub-history, a history contingent on the larger narrative of white history. 4) Black History Month is divisive, part of the fragmentation and multiculturalization of American history, where every group must have its own version of history and cannot share a common one. Taking these objections in turn: the creator of this commemoration, Carter G. Woodson, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and became one of the most prolific African American historians ever (though, with his crabbed writing style, never the easiest to read), chose the second week in February for Negro History Week in 1926 because of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12, which, when I was a kid, was a national holiday) and Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14), although, of course, Douglass never really knew when he was born. Lincoln’s birthday was clearly the more important because it tied African American history to the one white person who could make it a transcendent topic of human importance to both blacks and those whites who cared about this issue at all. Could he have chosen a better month? Thirty one days hath July and August but Negro History Week was primarily for school children and most didn’t go to school during those months. In December, it would have been overshadowed by Christmas. In March or April, Easter might fall. January may have been good: the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on the first day of 1863. But Woodson didn’t want the week tied to a particular historical act. He wanted instead to emphasize the larger historical issues of the Union and the process of social transformation that Lincoln as a historical figure made possible. In short, he wanted to place the week in such a way that blacks would seem “present at the creation” of a new society, indeed, their condition being the cause of it. As historian Paul Johnson has asserted, the Civil War made the United States a nation. So why not tie it to Lincoln? The week was expanded to a month in 1976 and there seemed to be little reason to change it at that point to another, longer month. The argument that Black History Month in fact segregates black history misses two points: first, that blacks, on the whole, rightly or wrongly, feel their history is sufficiently precarious — actively suppressed as it was for a good part of the 20th century — to merit a guaranteed space on the national calendar to ensure discussion of it. The very nuisance quality of the occasion, which some disparage, is the very element that makes it of some cultural and historical importance to blacks. They have always had to assert themselves as a nuisance group in order to achieve much of anything in this country. For some, to say that black history should be integrated into the fabric of American history in some way denies the power of black history as a political polemic. Second, it can also be argued the segregation of the month only serves to remind the nation as a whole about how segregated blacks have been in our national life, a point that should not be forgotten. Most nationalist or Afrocentrist types disparage any vision of a history built on “contributions.” This perspective asserts that black people have a whole, organic history independent of any purely “American” context or “American” understanding. As a radical friend told me in the 1970’s, “There are no ‘sub’ realities. There are only competing realities.” “Minority classification fatigue” is understandable, but it also takes on more than a little of the quality of “majority envy.” It is hard to say whether Woodson saw Negro History Week as “contributionism,” it is unlikely, judging from “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” Woodson’s most popular and accessible book, which legitimated for many blacks the idea that history is nothing more than political propaganda that either works for or against one’s self-interests. But “contributionism” is obviously only a strategy, a way for an outside group with relatively limited power to work its way toward intellectual and emotional ownership of the majority’s history. A sense of ownership of America and of its institutions, something blacks were denied for most of their history in this country, is essential for their future here. Some conservatives have argued that Black History Month is divisive, part of the leftist pluralist vision of American history. There is actually very little to support this view. Black History Month is part of a push for inclusion, not separation. Its “pluralist” bent was only a recognition of the racism that forced the study of black people to be a separate academic and civic enterprise. There have been separatist moments among American blacks: during the 1850’s, for instance, and again during Marcus Garvey’s heyday in the early 1920’s (a holdover from the 1890’s), and later during the Black Power era of the late 1960’s. But African Americans on the whole have displayed far less of a separatist temperament than the French in Canada or the Basques in Spain or the Koreans in Japan after World War II or many other groups around the world. The creation of Negro History Week and, later, Black History Month, has probably done a great deal to ensure a sense of black civic pride and commitment. What I think irritates some conservatives is not that the occasion is separatist but rather that blacks, through it, make a persistent claim to a form of exceptionalism as both a minority group and historical victims. But what makes them exceptions is slavery. And some would argue that if Black History Month reminds the nation of slavery, it is doing a good service, for that is a topic most of us would rather forget. It might be thought from all of this that I am, on the whole, favorably disposed to Black History Month, and that this piece is a defense of it. But actually, I am not. As a boy, I remember Negro History Week as pain and embarrassment: Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a few other historical blacks were trotted out by stern black teachers in what seemed to be nothing so much as a fit of racial piety that lacked both conviction and purpose. And, alas, there was the subject of slavery, which no one could make sense of except that for some mysterious reason white folk enslaved blacks and for an equally mysterious reason, a few hundred years later, decided to free them. As a boy, none of this seemed heroic, interesting or even intelligible. It only made me wonder how I was supposed to relate to black people and why. That is, what did this past, such as it was, have to do with me? Black History Month, or Negro History Week, was the institutionalization of uplift, which I hated, as I was subjected to it almost daily in some form or fashion. The preoccupation with uplift seemed to prove to me that blacks had swallowed their own sense of inferiority. Why was I being burdened with that problem? The tale of people obsessed with their inferiority, with being “cured,” was no kind of historical narrative that was going to do me any good as a kid. So, for a long time, I associated Black History Month with a kind of two-bit therapy that tried to turn guilt into pride, that only the persecuted could fashion. I was, on that score, always a skeptic.

Unless one has never heard Ted play, I don't see how one can not remember him. When I knew him, he and his wife lived in New Jersey.

or Helen Hayes

I recently found two unauthorized uses of my Chase debit car. One was for a purchase made at "Freaky Bikers," the other something even more bizarre. It turned out that both purchases were made through Paypal and Paypal apparently admitted to Chase that it was their mistake. I have only used Paypal twice, once for a software license purchase and once to make a contribution to the Big O.

Sad news, but at least she will be spared the ugly family in-fighting over money that now has been brewing for some time.

Judging by the label's recent output, I think BN has lost its relevance to jazz, but that happened before, when United Artists used it to cash in on the "soul jazz" flurry. BN came back through Bruce Lundval, but he now seems to have succumbed to whatever it is that makes people lose their integrity. BN now stands more for Bank Note than anything else and--given the sad state of the corporate-run record business--I really doubt if we will see another comeback. So, BN will probably continue to coast on past achievements.

"...you of all people, Chris, ought not, by intention or inane (thus far) flippancy underestimate the difficulty of being of black woman ARTIST, not "just" an entertainer... i can see (but scoff at) disregarding BC like people do Braxton, Roscoe, Leo Smith, Joe Maneri etc but to misapprehend & misstate what it is they did (which you've not even bothered to do: saying it was an "abomination" reallz sez... whuh?), as opposed to what you want(ed) 'em to do... " Huh? Who is underestimating the difficulty of being a black woman? Now that, IMO, is nonsense. Carter's painful distortions of songs had nothing to do with her being a black woman. It has, as I see it, everything to do with wanting to get away from being labeled a Sarah Vaughan imitator, and making that escape in too much of a hurry. Styles and approaches have a wonderful way of evolving naturally, they cannot successfully be forced. I think Betty Carter is a prime example of someone who came up with a contrived approach for the sake of expediency. I may, of course, be wrong, she may really not have had much taste, but then, how does one explain her early work? It didn't show much inventiveness, but it was tasteful. Who knows? Having songwriters spin in their graves may be good for the soil.

I automatically bring up the extended headers and forward all junk like that to: webcomplaints@ora.fda.gov, spam@uce.gov, uce@ftc.gov and, when appropriate to pfizer, lillie, microsoft, adobe, etc. The important thing is to include the long headers.

I betr he said that before she entered her grotesque period. When she recorded with Charles, she was a good Vaughan emulator--I think she should have stayed there until a natural development moved her into her own style. That forced I'll-be-different style she created was, in my opinion, an abomination. But, of course, Ray Charles seems to have been talking about the woman, not the singer.

Allen Lowe: "we might say that that Belfast guy is the white Scott Yanow" ...who, in turn, is the male Leslie Gourse.

Here's a 1954 photo of drummer Elaine Leighton taken in Copenhagen, when she was with Beryl Booker's trio. She was having some beer and snaps (akvavit) while playing at a jam session I arranged. The trio was a part of the Jazz Club USA Leonard Feather tour that also featured Billie Holiday, Buddy DeFranco, and Red Norvo. I think this was also Red Mitchell's first trip to Europe. I am also attaching a picture of Bonnie Wetzel, who was Beryl's bassist. These two ladies drank their snaps as if it were water--I still don't know how they managed to maintain their composure! That's Elaine on the right...

GUEST COLUMNIST January 29, 2006 And Now, a Word for Our Demographic By TED KOPPEL Washington NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television. After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance: The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television. They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are. The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality. A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today. Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC's dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress. Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis. This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause. Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know. With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them. Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around. Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors. Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers. Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance. Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions. You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over. No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy. The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see. Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care." Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment. Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers' unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic. What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks' greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage. Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40's and 50's and entering their 60's who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic. If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It's regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That's the way it is." Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.

Hey, you guys wanna go hear Martha and the Vendettas at the Bad Blood Bistro next week?

couw: "Look, you guys obviously have some vendetta going on behind the screnes." Sure, this is all about a vendetta, not a poster who consistently gets out of hand and insults his fellow posters. That--if you'll pardon the analogy--is like saying that criticism leveled at America's first appointed "president" must reflect some sort of personal hatred, thereby implying that it could not possibly be well founded. Oops, so help me Gould, I may just have banished this thread to the nether region of O.

ARF!

We are all blessed by your open-mindedness.

OP-ED COLUMNIST January 28, 2006 Oprah's Bunk Club By MAUREEN DOWD We should have known the guy was not really a bad-boy, tattooed "It's time to throw down" brawler when he had to bring his mom on the Larry King show to protect him. On Thursday, the unmasked memoirist's proud mother was replaced by a punitive national matriarch. Watching Oprah flay Frey was riveting. At The Times and at Doubleday, staffers were glued to their TV sets. It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying and conning — and embarrassing her. (Though she and her producers should have known questions were raised early on about the book.) In a society obsessed with sin and redemption, this was the superfecta: Oprah admitting her flawed judgment and rescuing her reputation, while carving up James Frey for sinning in his book about sin and redemption. Oprah interviewed and showed taped clips of her media critics (including me) and credited her turnaround to the essay by The Times's chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, who wrote: "It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth." When President Bush cut into Oprah's show with a press conference, perhaps he was trying to get the focus off truth. It was truly weird to see the twin live TV moments: A disgraced author, and a commander in chief who keeps writing chapter after chapter of fictionalized propaganda. After Nan Talese was shamed by Oprah, Doubleday said it would add two notes — one from the publisher and one from the author — before printing any more books. But it's not enough to stick on little disclaimers. The book should be recategorized, just as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" should have been reclassified as fiction once John Berendt acknowledged all the liberties he took. "A Million Little Pieces" and "My Friend Leonard" — the Frey "nonfiction" best seller that begins with the now-debunked jail term — should be sold as novels or fictional memoirs, the term Frederick Exley used for the great book "A Fan's Notes." Will "A Million Little Pieces" move to the fiction category on The Times's best-seller list? The editors told me that the list was simply in the business of counting the books sold, not checking whether memoirs — from stoned rockers or spinning politicians — were mostly true. But The Times's list will indicate that Mr. Frey has admitted fabricating parts of the book. The Frey effect chilled publishers and agents, some of whom have encouraged authors to turn novels into hot-selling memoirs. "The decision to take on a memoir was always based on how good is the writing and how good is the story," said Christy Fletcher, a New York literary agent. "That's not enough any more." Mr. Frey said in an interview broadcast yesterday on Oxygen that he and his agent had given the book to some publishers as a novel and some as a memoir. In the insular world of publishing, that didn't tip anyone off — because no one really wanted to be tipped off. There was a bit of a panic among publishers this week. St. Martin's Press hurriedly put a warning sticker on Augusten Burroughs' latest memoir, "Possible Side Effects," due out this spring: "Author's note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well." Ballantine announced it would no longer ship two memoirs by Nasdijj, supposedly an inspiring Native American writer from the Southwest who said that as a child, he was "hungry, raped, beaten, whipped, and forced at every opportunity to work in the fields." The L.A. Weekly learned that Nasdijj was really Timothy Barrus, a white middle-class man from Michigan who had written gay porn. Booksellers were also puzzling over how to proceed. "I think it should definitely not be on the nonfiction best seller list," said Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. Roxanne Coady, owner of RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., said she'd "probably reclassify it as fiction," and she thinks Doubleday should do the same: "Either it's a memoir and someone's doing their best honest job to recall things and this is how they remember it, or it's not true and it's not a memoir." What about a third category? Non-nonfiction? Self-help and self-dramatization? Pure bunk?

You got it, Aggie. Specifically: He who first is aware of the fart fathered it.

This a rather odd thread. If you have read numerous books on Miles, as you indicate, I have to wonder why you are asking so many elementary questions.

What a dumb article! Leander Kahney (the author) seems to have problems. He comes off sounding like a disgruntled Windows-using Republican.

As I said on another BBS that carried this article, it provides a refreshing balance to the ass-licking crap Ben Ratliff invariably comes up with when writing about Wynton's corporate-sponsored encapsulated jazz emulations.

None taken, Dave. The keyword here is "just." Have you ever heard a recording and thought "it's just Miles"?