Christiern

If you read the interview Brownie links to, you will see how Bill Grauer gets no more than a brief mention, and then only because Don Heckman (the interviewer) brought up his name. More glaring, however, is the fact that Orrin makes no mention of Randy Weston, who was instrumental (no pun intended) in Monk signing with Riverside. Also, Orrin makes no mention of why Monk left the label. He refused to go into the studio with Orrin, in spite of a remarkable offer from Bill Grauer, who wanted to do a series of Monk albums that graduated from a solo set to a duo, a trio, and all the way to a big band. When Robin Kelley's Monk biography is published, I think Orrin's gaps and exaggerations will be cleared up--at least as far as Monk is concerned. I was hoping this would not turn into a Orrin bash, so this is all I will say about him, but I had to bring him up in my original response, because Bill Grauer (about whom this thread is, after all) cannot speak for himself.

and here is a look at one of Francis Wolff's auction pages...

Bill Grauer founded Riverside Records and was its driving force. I know that Orrin would like us to think that was Riverside personified and, indeed, he was the visible one in that partnership, but Bill generally had the last word. He was related to broadcaster Ben Grauer (NBC, I believe) and he was an avid record collector, a slightly overweight, good humored man who bore a resemblance to the Charlie the Tuna cartoon character. In the late 1940s, Bill started a magazine called The Record Changer and Orrin Keepnews, a friend of his contributed to it Bill was the Editor-Publisher, Orin the Managing Editor). The magazine focused mainly on traditional jazz, which is what Bill and Orrin preferred at that time, and it was a sort of bible for record collectors; the last 20 or so pages were lists of records put up for auction by the day's most stalwarth collectors (including Francis Wolff, BTW).The two of them did a series of RCA-based reissues (10"LPs) for a supermarket promotion (I think it was a supermarket), and Started Riverside Records in 1953. Orrin functioned mainly as session producer (A&R) and album annotator, while Grauer kept things going (quite creatively, I might add). Bill did not have a fraction of Orrin's ego, he was a down-to-earth guy who loved the music and everything connected with it. He was someone around whom the musicians could relax, which was not the case with Orrin. As I said, it was Bill who kept Riverside going--I find it sad that Orrin rarely brings up his name, because he owes so much to Bill, and many of the deals, the signings, that Orrin takes credit for were actually Bill's decisions. I was not at all surprised to see Riverside go down the drain soon after Bill's death. The Armstrong 50th Birthday issue was a keeper....

Rachel, I'd spend a lot of time in that living room.

Bev, your back yard photo had me looking for a dog in the wreck of a car, a small fence that hangs on one hinge.....and Hyacinth Bucket. Sorry, Bouquet!

and here's the other photo... why do I sit at this computer on a day like this???

This (July 11, 2004) is a beautiful day in NYC. Here are a couple of photos I took on my way to the supermarket. This is Central Park, diagonally across the street from my building.

Try this link.

July 11, 2004 FRANK RICH Spidey Crushes 'Fahrenheit' in 2004 THE Michael Moore explosion is now officially unbearable. It's not just that you can't pick up a Time Warner magazine without seeing his mug on the cover. Or turn on a TV news show without hearing another tedious debate about the accuracy of "Fahrenheit 9/11" — conducted by the same press corps that never challenged the Bush administration's souped-up case for invading Iraq. What's most ridiculous is the central question driving the whole show: might a hit documentary swing the November election? Both political camps seem to be convincing themselves that the answer is yes. Either that, or they are overstating the movie's power to overcompensate for their worst fears. The right is sufficiently panicked about George W. Bush's slippage that it's trashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the absurd extreme of likening it to a training film for al Qaeda (according to MoveAmericaForward.org) and a defense brief for Saddam Hussein (Ann Coulter, who else?). The left is so worried about John Kerry's lackluster candidacy that it is overselling the success of "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill that vacuum, as if Mr. Moore could serve as a surrogate for the vague and charisma-challenged nominee. (That job will now fall, and not a moment too soon, to John Edwards.) "It has the potential of actually affecting the election, and if it does, it will change the world," said Rob Reiner of "Fahrenheit 9/11," echoing Eli Pariser of MoveOn, who said his members regarded the film as "the `Star Wars' " of its genre. "We literally sold out Peoria, Illinois," bragged the movie's distributor after its opening weekend. So what? Illinois is a safe Democratic state already, and even Peoria is not particularly Republican: Bush-Cheney beat Gore-Lieberman by a mere 251 votes there in 2000, fewer than the 544 votes siphoned off by Mr. Moore's candidate at the time, Ralph Nader. "The sky's the limit on this movie," Harvey Weinstein, a co-owner of the film and a prominent Democrat, told The New York Times. If so, the sky is falling. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is, as we keep being told, the most successful non-IMAX documentary of all time. What that means is that its ticket sales are whipping the bejesus out of "Winged Migration" and "Spellbound." But by any other Hollywood standard this movie, while a bona fide surprise hit (especially in relation to its tiny budget), is not a blockbuster or must-see phenomenon (except to its core constituency). Of course, it is pulling in some Republicans, and you can be sure that the sighting of each and every one will be assiduously publicized by Mr. Moore. ("There was a Republican woman in Florida unable to get out of her seat, crying," he told Time.) But with a take of $61 million by the end of its second weekend, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will have to sweat to bring in even a third of the $370 million piled up domestically by the red-state polemic to which its sectarian appeal is most frequently compared, "The Passion of the Christ." If voting at a multiplex box-office constitutes any kind of straw poll, then Mr. Bush has already won re-election. By a landslide. But he hasn't, of course. The latest actual polls show the president with an approval rating below (in some cases well below) 50 percent. The election is both too far away and too close to call. And that's why a movie like "Fahrenheit 9/11," with its relatively narrow sampling, may be no more a reliable index to the mood of the country than the Literary Digest poll of 1936. It was so skewed by the demographics of its similarly self-selected participants that it gave Alf Landon a 14-point spread over F.D.R. If you want to find a movie that might give a more accurate reading of the national pulse, it isn't hard to do: just take a look at "Spider-Man 2," which is now on a pace to outdraw Mr. Moore's film and maybe every other film this year — in every conceivable demographic. It may not be on the radar screen of the Washington pack busy misreading the electoral tea leaves of "Fahrenheit 9/11" 's box-office receipts. No one is shouting about it on Fox. But with an opening five-day take of some $152 million — next to $128 million for the most recent Shrek, $125 million for Mel Gibson's Christ, $124 million for the last Frodo, $109 million for the last Harry Potter — "Spider-Man 2" is front-and-center for most everyone else. It deserves to be on its merits, by the way. It's hard not to fall in love with "Spider-Man 2." It's not only better than any other movie based on a comic book — not the highest bar to reach — but it's also superior to all the other so-called franchise movies, in which colossal budgets, presold brand-name characters, computer-generated effects and oppressive merchandising conspire to make the product at the center of the marketing blitz often seem as disposable as that new razor concocted to sell you a new line of blades. "Spider-Man 2" is a product of that egregious process and yet it has a delicacy almost never seen any more in the big-ticket juggernauts sent our way by media conglomerates. It thrives on nuance. It's human even to the extent of replacing the standard-issue camp villain of the first "Spider-Man" movie (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin) with Alfred Molina's brooding Doc Ock. Its characters live in a real world that is recognizably America, not the landscape of a video game. Unlike the sunnier first "Spider-Man," which was released two summers ago but conceived before the terrorist attacks, the new one carries the shadow of 9/11. As the story shifts from Queens into Manhattan, the city becomes a much more vivid presence. The director, Sam Raimi, dotes on both the old (the Empire State Building in silvery mode) and the new (the Hayden Planetarium), on both the dreamily nostalgic (a fairy-book Broadway theater seemingly resurrected from an Edwardian past) and the neighborhood of our freshest wound (the canyons of Lower Manhattan). The movie is suffused with a nocturnal glow of melancholy that casts its comic-book action in an unexpectedly poignant light. The writers who set the story against this backdrop include the veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose credits go back to "Ordinary People," and the novelist Michael Chabon, who memorialized the Marvel Comics gestalt in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." They're grown-ups, as is not always the case with this kind of Hollywood product. (Mr. Sargent is in his 70's — an almost unheard-of anomaly among employed screenwriters these days.) In "Spider-Man 2," they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in "The Importance of Being Earnest." They are both watched over by Aunt May (the transcendent Rosemary Harris), whose every utterance bespeaks literature and history. This is a world worth saving, but the superhero who can save it is no Superman. He's a bookish nerd racked with guilt and self-doubt. "With great power comes great responsibility" is the central tenet of his faith, passed down not from God but from his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). He takes it seriously. Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn't want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative. He wouldn't mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can't. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York. The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year's political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of "Top Gun." There's nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare "Mission Accomplished" after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry's vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography. Whatever light "Spider-Man 2" may cast on the dueling, would-be heroes of our presidential race, however, it is not going to change the dynamic of the election any more than "Fahrenheit 9/11" will. As far as I can determine, there's only been one national election in which a single piece of moviemaking may have made some slight difference in a close campaign. That was in 1948, when Hollywood studios, eager to curry favor with Democrats who might have been offended by a previous pro-Dewey film, banded together to exhibit a 10-minute pro-Truman documentary (in the guise of a Universal newsreel) in all the nation's movie theaters. The stunt was pulled off in the last six days of the race and, with no real competition from television, reached a captive audience of some 65 million Americans at a time when the entire population was only some 146 million. Not even "Spider-Man 2" can gather a crowd that large in the fractionalized American cultural marketplace of 2004. But if it or any movie cannot move an election, its box-office triumph shows us something about those who will be doing the voting. "Spider-Man 2" is an escapist movie that serves as a rebuke to what its audience wants to escape from: a pop culture that is often too shrill and an election-year political culture that increasingly mimics that pop culture. It takes us away from cable news screamfests and toxic campaign ads no less than it delivers us from "Dodgeball." It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness. This year that appears to be the heretofore missing formula for capturing a landslide mandate in red and blue states alike.

I think Miss Cleo has found a new scam.

This is an AP item: Triple homicide discovered at N.M. ranch owned by Sam Donaldson Wednesday, July 7, 2004 Three bodies were found on a New Mexico ranch owned by ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, and authorities said Wednesday they were treating it as a triple murder. Sheriff Tom Sullivan said Donaldson went to the house of his ranch manager on Tuesday and discovered an "obvious crime scene." Once sheriff's deputies arrived and searched the area, they found the bodies of a male and two females, he said. Their identities were being withheld pending notification of next of kin. Sullivan said Donaldson was not a suspect and was cooperating with the investigation. Donaldson owns three ranches between Roswell and Ruidoso. Sullivan would not say which ranch the murders occurred on.

Rainy is wrong, I do not hate Cosby and Jones, I just have no respect for them as artists or persons.

Nil s Hen ing Err staed Pe ther sen That's as close as I can come, but I guess I could send you an audio file. BTW Apropos audio, I'm looking around for Billie.

These are the images I get...no gravestone.

I, too, wish there had been greater focus on performance, but I think the concept was to capture the essence of the festival, the atmosphere. If that is the case, I think Bert Stern did well. I also think one tends to apply different values to the film now than was the case a half century ago. The artists we see are people whom we no longer can catch in live performance, so we tend to see the sail boats, the ice cream eaters, dancers, and chauffeured old ladies as intrusive fluff rather than a part of the whole.

lp said: sounds like the interview that albertson is sitting on will be lost just like the christmas carol and the Bob Laurence interview. Let's hope not. I know that my tape is in the closet, Someone bought all of Linda's research material after she committed suicide. I feel certain that the disc is in one of those boxes. This guy is charging exorbitant fees for access to Linda's work, so I don't think it is being used constructively. Bob Laurence's tape is probably lost, but one never knows.

Larry, I was not familiar with the specific examples you mentioned, but I find that kind of thing unacceptable. I do remember Michael making a very big mistake, IMO, when he produced a reissue of Armstrong's Handy album and substituted alternate takes (which were alternates for good reasons). I criticized Michael for that and his explanation was that the original tapes could not be found at Iron Mountain. I did not but that, because even if they were no longer to be found there, the raw tapes from the sessions should have been--also, CBS's overseas affiliates (Japan, for example) would surely have the album master tapes in their vaults. Frank Driggs was guilty of deception when he put together the Henderson A Study in Frustration album--as I recall he presented as an alternate take one that in actuality had been altered. George Avakian eventually corrected the Armstrong issue and I think (hope) Michael learned from that mistake. As for Orrin, I think one of the worst thing he did was to cut out Duke's piano intro on "Take the 'A Train." I am still not sure that I did the right thing when I came across acetates containing several takes of "Breakfast Feud" and spliced together all the Christian solos, in order of performance. It was interesting to hear how he developed the solo, but the average record buyer might not have seen it that way. I have since come to the conclusion that reissues ought not be produced with the collector in mind, unless it is for a dedicated collector's label.

I interviewed her in 1959, during a gig at Pep's in Philly. I have been meaning to dig the tape out from my Fibber McGee closet. That is quite a task, so I procrastinate. In the interview, she--knowing that I was a local DJ--urged me to play records by Annie Ross. I was quite impressed by that, coming from another female singer. During the interview, the door burst open and her disgusting husband, Louis McKay, announced that Billie had been booked for a rather nice European tour. She took off one of her shoes and threw it at him, shouting, "Get out of here, mother fucker, I'm talking to Chris!" He put himself in reverse and slammed the door shut. I recall hearing another interview from the late 1950s. A colleague, Bob Laurence conducted it and played it for me. I think Bob is long gone, but I hope that tape still exists. As far as I remember, my friend, Linda Kuehl, who did a lot of research on Billie for a book, never came across an interview, but she did find a remarkable recording. It was one of those small plastic discs that one could record in coin-operated machines on 42nd Street. It is Billie, rather inebriated, singing a Christmas carol ("Come All Ye Faithful," I think) and wishing everybody a merry Christmas. Very sad, very moving.

I realize that many of you are not into early jazz, but I was delighted to see the following piece. He is a quiet (sometimes wonderfully mischievous and funny) man, but Michael Brooks's work at Columbia has enriched that catalogue tremendously--he deserves everything good that can be said of his work, and I am very pleased to share the following with you: Music Archivist Gives New Life to Lost Recordings by Bill Holland Reuters/Billboard, June 26, 2004 WASHINGTON -- Michael Brooks is a living encyclopedia of pre-1950 pop and jazz recordings. For 30 years, the music archivist has been the go-to guy at CBS Records and, later, Sony Music. He tracks down dusty acetates and metal parts, then turns them into award-winning heritage releases and boxed sets that are the hallmark of Sony's Legacy division. Among the historical reissues he has produced are boxed sets of the works of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Lester Young and Bing Crosby. Brooks can toss off the histories of musicians whose legacies have been clouded by time -- and the matrix numbers of their 78 rpm recordings -- like a sportscaster reeling off the batting averages of long-dead baseball giants. Jeff Jones, senior VP of Columbia Jazz and Legacy, says of Brooks, "We reap the benefits every day from his work on historic collections to finding us lost 78s from his own collection that help fill the holes in our vaults or provide source material for movie soundtracks TV spots. He is one of a kind." Steve Berkowitz, Legacy VP of A&R, adds, "He's like Merlin the wizard. To try and find an obscure master or acetate, you sometimes go to the vault or try the Internet -- or you can just go to Michael. Because he knows this huge network of collectors, he'll say, 'Oh, we don't have it. It got tossed during the war. But I think there's a chap in Manchester who may have one.'" Q: It's been well-documented how Columbia Records producer John Hammond discovered Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan, among others. How did he discover you? A: I used to buy records from Bob Altschuler, who was then VP of publicity at Columbia. One day he said John Hammond was looking for someone to do a Count Basie retrospective, would I like to do it? I gasped and said yes. This was 1971. John took me to lunch at the Automat on 57th Street. You know, food in slots? You push a button and out it shoots? I still remember the bill for the two of us was $3.77. With a lordly gesture, Hammond said, "Don't worry. This is on me." Q: Were you familiar with the workings of a recording studio? A: Oh, no. Didn't have a clue. Hammond asked me, and I lied and said yes, of course. Luckily, the recording engineer I worked with was extremely supportive. And Chris Albertson, whom I'd replaced on the Basie project, called me up and offered advice and helped me tremendously. It was a double album called "Super Chief," and I also wrote the liner notes, and it got nominated for a Grammy. So I was John's boy after that. I worked for him until he retired in 1976. Q: What's it like listening to and trying to identify mystery recordings? A: We're sitting on probably 100,000 metal masters. There used to be more. We have paperwork on a lot of it, but some of the discs are just numbers. So in 1995, I asked if I could bring some of that in, and got the OK. We began getting in about 10 or 12 boxes a day -- about 100 sides in each daily shipment. A lot of them were negatives, so we had to play them backwards with a special stylus that rides atop the groove. I was familiar with certain things, but some of it, especially ethnic music, we'd just say, "possibly Hungarian." We also found old demos of artists' unreleased material, like the Earl Hines Band from 1932 doing a song they never recorded. The demo simply said "33 1/3 Test." Things like that make the project worthwhile. Q: You recently handled an ambitious Cuban music project. What special challenges did that present? A: In 2000, I was allowed to do a reissue called "Cuban Music: 1909-1951." I didn't know much about the idiom, but I really like getting a project in which I am a novice. I played through literally several hundred Cuban titles we have in our vault and selected 25 that I thought were good. We asked a gentleman who's an expert on Cuban music to do the liner notes. He told me he thought it was a wonderful collection and there was only one title on the set he wouldn't have selected. I was delighted. Some of the music didn't sound Cuban as we know it. In 1928, Columbia went to Cuba with portable equipment and recorded about 300 sides. We still have most of them. Absolute treasures. There was one that began with bagpipes and went into a beautiful a cappella choral thing. Someone who heard it told us it was the music of a tribe from Galicia in Spain that somehow got to Cuba and went into the hills... and never came down again. They might still be there! We also did a double-CD of Yiddish music called "From Avenue A to the Great White Way." Again, I knew little about the music, but we worked with a Yiddish scholar -- we got along famously -- and I found him some things he didn't think existed. So he was jumping up and down. It also showed how Yiddish music influenced jazz. Q: What kind of opportunities do you see for the Internet to bring attention to undiscovered material? A: My own philosophy is, we should try to expand the catalog rather than shrink it like what's happened on radio. Certain record companies seem to reissue the same old thing over and over again. Now, there's nothing wrong with putting out greatest-hits packages, but there should also be reissues with material the public hasn't heard yet might pique their interest. We're sitting on a vast store of material we own. Most of it was never going to come out on CD form; it wasn't economically viable. But if it's available online -- people are exploring, people are curious. We can not only generate revenue but educate people in the best way to this music. So much of it is good. ___ Michael Brooks: Career Highlights 1987-present: Producer/archivist for CBS Records and Sony Music. Winner of six Grammy Awards as producer, co-producer or liner-note author. 1981: Became chief producer for Time-Life's mail-order record division. 1977: Returned to CBS as reissue producer for its Columbia special products division. 1976: Left CBS to work for Hammond at his short-lived music company, SNUM. 1972: First Grammy Award nomination, for liner notes on Count Basie reissue "Super Chief" (CBS). 1971: Legendary producer John Hammond hired Brooks to work on jazz reissues at CBS Records. 1960: Began career as book trade editor and advertising executive.

I think I wrote the liner notes for George Russell's "Stratusphunk." Also for a couple of Joe McPhee albums.

AMG is to be taken with a grain of salt, actually, because the data distribution id computer distributed--thus, for example, I am credited with producing 1920s sessions (wish it were so).

Go here and enter Larry Kart in the search window.

Who gives a damn where Tom is or what he is doing?

Congratulations!