Christiern

I remember the album well. The press kit was elaborate, an attaché case filled with pertinent stuff, including, of course, the album. There were truly funny tracks on there--Martinis and Miltown is a slow song that comes to mind--but I wonder how much of the humor has dissipated with the passage of some 45 years.

Veteran Comic Louis Nye Dies at 92 By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer Comedian Louis Nye, who created a national catchphrase belting out "Hi, ho, Steverino!" as one of the players on Steve Allen's groundbreaking 1950s TV show, has died. He was 92. Nye died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles after a long battle with lung cancer, his son, Peter Nye, told The Associated Press on Monday. Nye had worked regularly in nightclubs and on television until only a couple of years ago, his son said. He had a recurring role from 2000 to 2002 in the HBO comedy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as the father of Jeff Garlin's character. When he joined Allen's show in 1956 he was already well established as one the era's hippest comics, appearing regularly on radio, in clubs and on early TV shows. "He has a great business card from that time that lists something like 15 accents that he could do," his son recalled with a chuckle. On "The Steve Allen Show," which ran until 1961 under various names, he quickly endeared himself to audiences as Gordon Hathaway, the effete, country-club snob who would welcome Allen's arrival with the "Hi, ho, Steverino!" salutation. "I'm not sure if he improvised that or if it was given to him and he just ran with it as a catchphrase," Nye's son said. Other regulars on the landmark show included comedians Don Knotts, Tom Poston and Bill Dana. After the show's run ended, Nye appeared often on TV game shows, in films and as a regular on "The Ann Sothern Show." He was often cast as the second banana, never the lead. This picture was taken in Harlem (Silver Rail Bar) in 1963. That's William B. Williams on the left and, kissing Louis, Tom Tracy, whose birthday we were celebrating.

The death toll keeps mounting--CA EARTHQUAKE October 9, 2005 Pakistan Quake in Remote Area Kills Over 1,600 By SOMINI SENGUPTA ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 8 - A powerful earthquake centered in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan on Saturday morning sent tremors across South Asia, killing at least 1,600 people in remote northern Pakistan, hundreds across both sides of disputed Kashmir, and shaking houses and high-rises throughout the region. No firm numbers of casualties were available. Details are not expected to emerge until the military reaches the far-flung villages in the North-West Frontier Province, where the quake was centered. More than 1,600 were believed to have been killed in that province alone, the provincial police control room reported Saturday night. That toll includes an estimated 650 children who were killed in the collapse of three different schools. Estimates of the quake's magnitude varied from 6.8 to 7.8, with the United States Geological Survey putting the number at 7.6. Its epicenter was roughly 60 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, where 20 "significant aftershocks" measuring between 5 and 6.2 magnitude were felt throughout the day, Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of the Meteorological Department in Islamabad, said by telephone on Saturday evening. Officials warned that serious aftershocks could continue for two days. The earthquake, which sent tremors as far east as New Delhi, the Indian capital, and west to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was the biggest to strike the country in a century, Dr. Chaudhry said. The top police official of the North-West Frontier Province, Riffat Pasha, said Saturday evening that the death toll there continued to rise and that relief efforts had been stymied by blocked roads and broken communication channels. "The situation is very, very bad," he said. "There are bodies lying everywhere. Those who have survived are lying in the open without food, shelter or medicine. "The situation has been made worse by the rain and hailstorm that followed the earthquake," he continued. "There is no way we can reach out to them." Private television stations showed images of leveled houses in the Pakistani side of Kashmir. Telephone lines remained down, and roads were blocked because of landslides. Torrential rain on Saturday evening was likely to impede relief efforts. In the Indian-held section of the disputed Kashmir region, the death toll climbed to more than 240 by Saturday evening, including more than 30 Indian soldiers standing sentry at the disputed frontier. An untold number of houses were flattened, telephone lines and electricity were disrupted, and several roads were blocked by landslides, cutting the Kashmir Valley off from the rest of the country. The quake also destroyed a number of religious shrines, mosques and temples. The death toll in Pakistan included 200 soldiers in the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao said in a CNN interview. In Rawalpindi, a school for girls collapsed, killing one child and injuring six, said Sheik Rashid Ahmed, the information minister. In eastern Afghanistan, four children were crushed to death and a woman was injured as the mud walls of their homes collapsed. News from remote mountainous areas near the border with Pakistan could take days to reach the provincial capitals. Islamabad was in panic, and people spilled onto the streets. Traffic jams clogged roads, and residents huddled in groups outside houses, shopping plazas and government buildings. The cellphone network collapsed for at least 90 minutes. Margalla Towers, an upscale five-tower apartment complex, took the city's biggest hit from the quake. One tower collapsed, and part of another fell. Army and civil authorities reached the site within 30 minutes. Rescue workers estimated that at least 150 people, mostly women and children, were stranded under the rubble of the building. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan visited the apartment complex in Islamabad with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. General Musharraf expressed satisfaction with the rescue operation. "It is a test for all of us," he said in an interview on state television. "We are sure we will pass this test." In Washington. President Bush expressed his sympathies for the victims of the earthquake. "Our initial deployments of assistance are underway, and we stand ready to provide additional assistance as needed," he said in a statement. "My thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this horrible tragedy." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also issued a statement, saying she had spoken Saturday morning with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and India to offer American help. "At this difficult time, the United States stands with its friends in Pakistan and India, just as they stood with us and offered assistance after Hurricane Katrina," the statement said. The quake occurred along one of the earth's great collision zones. The Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, rides on a separate tectonic plate that was attached to Antarctica until 150 million years ago. It broke away and moved north. About 50 million years ago, the plate slammed into Asia, and the buckling of earth created the Himalayan mountains. The Indian subcontinent continues to move north at more than an inch a year. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake in the same area in December 1974 killed 5,300 people. Because the quake on Saturday was shallow, 6 to 10 miles underground, the shaking on the surface was probably more intense than other quakes of its magnitude, said Waverly J. Person, a seismologist with the United States Geological Surveys National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. "These are the most damaging earthquakes," he said. Because it occurred inland, there was no danger of it setting of a tsunami, as happened after the huge Indian Ocean quake in December. The deadliest recent quake in the region was in January 2001. It was centered in Gujarat in western India and killed about 20,000 people. As for the earthquake on Saturday, no foreshocks gave any sign that a large quake was imminent; several large aftershocks, up to magnitude 6.3, came afterward. At Margalla Towers in Islamabad, army troops and paramedics searched the rubble for survivors and made a human chain to clear the debris. Heavy cranes lifted slabs of concrete from the site. A man who identified himself as Masood and said he lived on the ninth floor of an adjacent building said he was asleep when the tremors rocked the building. He said he ran down all nine flights of stairs. "It's a miracle that we survived," he said. Tasawar Kamal, 29, who lives a half-mile from Margalla Towers, said his family rushed to the rooftop of a nearby apartment complex. "From the rooftop, we saw the tower collapsing and immediately rushed here because our maternal uncle lives here," he said. Tents were set up for people who had been evacuated from the nearby apartment blocks. Officials said they planned to bring dogs and heavy machinery to rescue people stuck in the basement of the collapsed building. A state of emergency was declared at hospitals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. In Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, two buildings collapsed in Shah Alami neighborhood. No casualties were reported. In the North-West Frontier Province, Balakot, a picturesque tourist town, was among the communities that were leveled. In another town, Mansehra, officials said 70 percent of the houses had collapsed. Mushahid Hussain Syed, a senator, said, "It is such a disaster, at such a big scale, that the whole nation has to be mobilized." Reporting for this article was contributed by Kenneth Chang from New York, Carlotta Gall and Aziz-u-Rahman Gulbahari from Kabul, Yusuf Jameel from Srinagar, Mohammed Khan from Peshawar and Salman Masood in Islamabad.]

This makes it really difficult to program your listening in recording order unless you are working from some "unlimited" wheel 'o' discs. I say leave them at the end of each disc and give the take numbers so specialists can recreat the real deal. ← And make the release available without alternate takes--at a more affordable price. Why should people pay extra for Schaap's (to use a gross example) psychotic needs?

The apartment next door is about as close to Trump as I would wish to be.

Not a peep out of you, Dan, for this not being in the political forum, It's about bird flu, not Byrd -- CA EDITORIAL October 8, 2005 Bird Flu and the 1918 Pandemic There are both frightening and promising implications in this week's announcement that research teams have deciphered the genetic sequence of the devastating 1918 influenza virus and have synthesized the lethal germ in a high-security laboratory. The feat is a scientific tour de force that should provide important insights on the best way to respond to the avian influenza strain now circulating in Asia. The worrisome news is that the 1918 virus appears to have jumped directly from birds to humans, and that the genetic changes that allowed it to do so are already beginning to appear in the avian strain, known as H5N1, which has killed large numbers of birds and about 60 people in four Asian countries. The two most recent global pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, were caused by human flu viruses that picked up some bird flu components. Now it turns out that the far more lethal 1918 virus, which killed perhaps 20 to 100 million people, was most likely an avian strain that jumped directly into humans. That gives today's avian strain two routes to wreak havoc among humans. It could either mix some of its genes with human influenza, like the 1957 and 1968 viruses, or it could mutate on its own to become easily transmissible among humans, like the 1918 virus. So far, the avian virus has rarely jumped from birds to humans and seldom spread from one human to another. But it may be traveling slowly down the same evolutionary path as the 1918 virus. Two top federal health officials said that the H5N1 virus has already acquired five of the 10 genetic sequence changes associated with human-to-human transmission of the 1918 virus. That does not necessarily mean that catastrophe is imminent. Nobody knows how likely it is that further mutations will occur or how long the process may take. The avian virus has been around for decades without turning into a monster. The new findings offer promising leads to health officials who are concerned about preparing for a possible pandemic. Scientists should be able to prepare a checklist of the most worrisome genetic changes so they can monitor the evolution of the avian flu virus and rush medical help to any area where it looks as if the virus is becoming more transmissible. They may also be able to develop drugs and vaccines aimed at the most important genetic targets, thus allowing them to treat or even prevent influenza more effectively. Nobody knows whether the avian strain now under the spotlight will become a big threat to humans. But some day a potential pandemic strain will arrive. The new findings could help develop tools to contain it.

I have no idea, either, what pasta is talking about. I apologize for not having found anything Pasta posted to be offensive.

And here's one that will make Weizen stand up ...

Here's a better one.

Well, not a bad place to live, Tiffany is little more than an elevator ride away, and Bergdorf's is practically across the street (see below)

You have to look carefully to spot me, but that's me this morning, snapping a picture on the 65th floor of the Trump Tower.

As you welcome alternate takes, please bear in mind that the performers were routinely not paid for that music. According to union contracts (this may have changed, for all I know), a session consisted of 3 hours in the studio or 15 minutes of usable recording. Going over the 3 hours put you into overtime, ditto releasing more than 15 minutes. Albums were usually done in 2 sessions (1/2 hour of music), which is--of course--less than most albums contained, but I think most jazz labels fudged a bit rather than go into a 3rd session. Chuck can correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, what that means is that musicians were not compensated for unissued alternate takes. Releasing reissues is a better bargain for the record companies than you imagined, I guess. Do you think there would be so many alternates and "bonuses" if they had to pay the musicians/singers? Not!

I have already confessed to splicing together all the alternates of Christian's "Breakfast Feud" solo. I'm afraid that I am also inadvertently responsible for the Billie Holiday 40-42 session alternates. The reason they survived at all is that they were recorded on 16" transcription acetates (w. wartime-compliant glass base, BTW). Using acetates, everything was preserved, including a lot of studio talk-back, false starts, etc. I found these discs at Columbia while producing a Billie Holiday LP reissue. This was also when I came across a track with Billie and Lester that had been discarded only because it was too long to fit on a 10" 78 rpm disc. I issued it, because it was a fine performance that wasn't discarded for artistic reasons. Anyway, I ran a tape of the Holiday (and, likewise, Ida Cox) sessions for myself. When I gave a bunch of tapes to my friend Karl Knudsen, these were accidentally among them. The Swedish guy whose label, Jazz Unlimited, issued them obviously picked them up from Karl (who later apologized to me).

Let's face it, most of them belong in the vault or on the degausser. Perhaps some should be preserved (unreleased) for scholarly study, but the advent of CDs (prompted by psychotic collector madness and record co. greed) has generated a release of alternate and partial takes that is totally out of hand, IMO.

All recordings are mastered before they can be manufactured for release. What do you mean by mastering? Mixing is something else. In the early years of stereo, there wasn't much one could do with two tracks. By the end of the 60s, before digital recording, we were using 24 tracks and there was separation, which lent itself to mixing. Sure beat overdubbing, but I always preferred catching a performance when it was made rather than tweaking one. A clinker or two in an otherwise spirited performance is, IMO, preferable to a super-polished everybody's-tired one.

I recall that he was cranky back in the '60s.

Is Zwerin losing it? Is he simply attempting humor? Is he correct? What do you think? --CA New Orleans Jazz Passed Away Long Before Katrina: Mike Zwerin Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- It has taken a few weeks for me to drum up the courage to write this but, while nobody is happy about the drowning and the death and destruction in the birthplace of America's only native art form, the fact remains that the prehistoric jazz music New Orleans is noted for had already been under water for nigh on to half a century. The music was hit by tragedy a long time ago, and the modern- day flood might even be good for it in the long run. Any sensitive person who has recently visited that ruin of a Preservation Hall to hear the moldy jazz being played there cannot have been able to ignore the sadness of the doddering, arthritic, musical dry rot. A more realistic preservation program from here on in might include a program to build bright, airy nursing homes with out-of- tune upright pianos, tinny crash cymbals and a groove-handled broomstick of a one-string bass for those who still feel the need to play and/or listen to that caveman stuff. Please do not consider me flippant. It is my say, it is certainly not objective. The way I look at it, there is little jazz culture to rebuild in New Orleans. Except the tourist jazz culture, that is. By all means, let's rebuild it. Tourism provides gigs for musicians, and jobs for everybody. Rebuild tourism, just don't kid ourselves and get it confused with music. Lively Masters This is not by any means to say that all elderly jazz musicians dry out. ``Au contraire, mes amis.'' The one big change in the nature of jazz in recent years is that the masters live longer and that they play better and deeper. Remember Elvin Jones, who died last year at 76. And you can still listen to Roy Haynes, Clark Terry, Buddy De Franco, and Marian McPartland, or for that matter Woody Allen, who retain great creativity and are blossoming in their seventies and even eighties. No, it is not the players who have dried out in New Orleans, it is the style of music. There was no more juice there. This is not being said in bitterness or hostility. It must, though, be clear that as far as I am concerned, the prospect of not hearing any more artificially preserved New Orleans jazz is not a total downer. ``Let it come down,'' as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, equating rain and ruin. There are no more dinosaurs for a reason. New Music Plenty of good music came out of New Orleans in the latter half of the 20th century -- the Marsalis brothers and Harry Connick Jr., to cite some good examples -- but, like so many provincial cities, the valuable new music in New Orleans is only appreciated when it comes out of the city. It goes to New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Amsterdam or Paris. There are plenty of good people in provincial cities who choose to stay with their families and play their horns for local Saturday night parties while working a day gig at the post office. That is an honorable choice, it reveals solid family values. But it is not putting music first. New Orleans maintained the fiction of a center. The celebration of the so-called ``birthplace of jazz'' became an industry in itself. There is nothing wrong with memorializing the music of jazz's start, so long as I do not have to listen to it. Here's a suggestion for renewal: New Orleans is going to be reborn one way or another. Why don't the city fathers try to get a new slant on 21st century jazz by renaming ``Louis Armstrong'' International Airport ``Satchmo International''? (Satchmo is a shortening of Satchelmouth, Louis's nickname.) Flying With Pops Maybe they can build a cyber version of Preservation Hall in the terminal building. The looser nickname certainly sounds truer to the spirit of the music. (Another nickname. Pops International Airport ain't too bad either.) People might start dancing new dances. Obviously, some new thinking is needed here. Even better, maybe the birthplace of jazz should be moved to Paris, which is dry, and full of young musicians who love New Orleans music. New Orleans jazz has for years been more alive in Paris, where the clubs are full of young Scandinavians and Germans dancing to French Dixieland bands playing New Orleans music as though their lives depended on it. In Paris, New Orleans jazz is young, creative, and commercial. Long live Old Orleans.

I have Goo Gone (with Citrus Power) and it works very well--the problem is that it stinks, and the unbearable smell lingers all day. I do not recommend it to anyone except the nasally challenged. Regular rubbing alcohol works just as well. Apropos bothersome labels, I am even more annoyed at the small labels we find on fruit these days. It's a bother to have to remove them and is is sometimes impossible to do without ripping off a piece of the fruit. I understand that some kind of edible tattoo is in the works, but do we really need to ID each pear, plum, or mango?

Dan, you actually ignored an AMG review?

October 2, 2005 August Wilson, Playwright, Dies at 60 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 7:08 p.m. ET Michelle McLoughlin/Associated Press Mr. Wilson was known for chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America through plays such as "Fences" and "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." NEW YORK (AP) -- Playwright August Wilson, whose epic 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America included such landmark dramas as ''Fences'' and ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' died Sunday of liver cancer, a family spokeswoman said. He was 60. Wilson died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson's personal assistant. The playwright had disclosed in late August that his illness was inoperable and he had only a few months to live. ''We've lost a great writer, I think the greatest writer that our generation has seen and I've lost a dear, dear friend and collaborator,'' said Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway production of ''Gem of the Ocean'' as well as Wilson's most recent play, ''Radio Golf,'' which just concluded a run in Los Angeles. Leon said Wilson's work, ''encompasses all the strength and power that theater has to offer.'' ''I feel an incredible sense of responsibility on walking how he would want us to walk and delivering his work.'' Wilson's plays were big, often sprawling and poetic, dealing primarily with the effects of slavery on succeeding generations of black Americans: from turn-of-century characters who could remember the Civil War to a prosperous middle class at the end of the century who had forgotten the past. The playwright's astonishing creation, which took more than 20 years to complete, was remarkable not only for his commitment to a certain structure -- one play for each decade -- but for the quality of the writing. It was a unique achievement in American drama. Not even Eugene O'Neill, who authored the masterpiece ''Long Day's Journey Into Night,'' accomplished such a monumental effort. During that time, Wilson received the best-play Tony Award for ''Fences,'' plus best-play Tony nominations for six of his other plays, the Pulitzer Prize for both ''Fences'' and ''The Piano Lesson,'' and a record seven New York Drama Critics' Circle prizes. ''The goal was to get them down on paper,'' he told The Associated Press during an April 2005 interview as he was completing ''Radio Golf,'' the last play in the cycle. ''It was fortunate when I looked up and found I had the two bookends to go. I didn't plan it that way. I was able to connect the two plays.'' Wilson was referring to ''Gem of the Ocean,'' chronologically the first play in the cycle, although the ninth to be written. It takes place in 1904 and is set in Pittsburgh's Hill District at 1839 Wylie Ave., a specific address that figures prominently, nearly 100 years later, in the last work, ''Radio Golf,'' which premiered in April at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Pittsburgh, Wilson's birthplace, is the setting for nine of the 10 plays in the cycle (''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'' is set in a Chicago recording studio). Although he lived in Seattle, the playwright had a great deal of affection for his hometown, especially ''the Hill,'' a dilapidated area of the city where he spent much of his youth. Wilson, a bulky, affable man who always had a story to tell, usually returned to Pittsburgh once a year to visit his mother's grave, but he said he couldn't live there: ''Too many ghosts. But I love it. That's what gave birth to me.'' Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, he was one of six children of Frederick Kittel, a baker who had emigrated from Germany at the age of 10, and Daisy Wilson. A high school dropout, Wilson enlisted in the Army but left after a year, finding employment as a porter, short-order cook and dishwasher, among other jobs. When his father died in 1965, he changed his name to August Wilson. Wilson was largely self-educated. The public library was his university and the recordings of such iconic singers and musicians as Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, and the paintings of such artists as Romare Bearden his inspiration. He started writing in 1965, when he acquired a used typewriter. His initial works were poems, but in 1968, Wilson co-founded Pittsburgh's Black Horizon Theater. Among those early efforts was a play called ''Jitney,'' which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle. In 1978, he moved to Minnesota, writing for the Science Museum in St. Paul and later landing a fellowship at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center. In 1982, his play, ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' was accepted by the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. It was there that Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who also ran the Yale School of Drama. Their relationship proved fruitful, and Richards directed six of Wilson's plays on Broadway. The first was ''Ma Rainey,'' which opened on Broadway in 1984. Wilson's reputation was cemented in 1987 by the father-son drama ''Fences,'' his biggest commercial success. The play, which featured a Tony-winning performance by James Earl Jones, ran for more than a year. It was followed in New York by ''Joe Turner's Come and Gone'' (1988), ''The Piano Lesson'' (1990), ''Two Trains Running'' (1992), ''Seven Guitars'' (1996), ''Jitney'' (2000), ''King Hedley II'' (2001) and ''Gem of the Ocean'' (2004). Wilson's plays gave steady employment to black actors, not only in New York but in regional theaters, where most of his plays tried out before coming to Broadway. Besides Jones, such well-known actors as Laurence Fishburne, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Stokes Mitchell, S. Epatha Merkerson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Leslie Uggams appeared in his plays on Broadway. ''August's work is like reading a rich novel,'' says Anthony Chisholm, a veteran Wilson performer in such plays as ''Gem of the Ocean'' and ''Radio Golf.'' ''It conjures up vivid images in the mind, and it makes the actor's job easier because you have something to draw upon to build your character.'' Later this month, a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will be renamed for Wilson, a rare honor also bestowed on such theater greats as Eugene O'Neill, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes and Al Hirschfeld. Wilson, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero; their daughter Azula Carmen, and another daughter, Sakina Ansari, from his first marriage.

I have never asked anyone to autograph an album or book, but a few have come my way unsolicited. I have always thought that those were the only kind that counted--along with personal letters and cards.

I have to report that the New Yorker set is more of a bargain than I first thought--it's a delicious time capsule and I am not getting any work done, because of it. I am still in 1925 and the New York that was then comes alive as one reads the little snippets by Dorothy Parker, et al. The gossip, the stories, the ads, the cartoons--just wonderful!

The Ave Maria Foundation (founded by Domino's founder Tom Monaghan) is a strictly Catholic charity that is building a Catholic community and university in Naples (Florida). Nothing wrong with that, per se, but I saw a couple of features on it and, yes, it is indeed anti-abortion (no surprise there), but what really bothered me was the Bush-like myopia. Monaghan (he recently sold most of his Domino's stock) is a religious fanatic and the way he and his people were talking, this sounded very much like another cog in the wheel of progress. Anyway, I was sufficiently turned off by this guy and his regressive plans to not want any of my money (a pittance though it is) going in that direction.

Think twice before you buy that butt. Phil Schaap is suing Gary for ownership--says he picked it up on West 77th Street, and claims to have the largest collection of jazz butts this side of the Atlantic.

Check out the Ave Maria Foundation.