Christiern

Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 4:50 PM EST (1450 GMT) iPod Used In Domestic Homicide MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (HLN) - A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod. Arleen Mathers, 23, was arrested Thursday morning after she called Memphis Police and said she had killed her boyfriend, according to a Sheriff’s Department report. When deputies arrived at Mathers’ apartment at 528 Poplar Avenue, Mathers led them to the body of her boyfriend, Brad Pulaski, 27. Brad Pulaski had died of blunt trauma to the head after being repeatedly bludgeoned with an iPod, a popular MP3 player produced by Apple. Police said no motive has been confirmed, although evidence suggested the murder was the result of a domestic dispute after Pulaski erased the contents of Mathers’ iPod. According to law officers, Mathers was hysterical when police arrived and told them that she killed her boyfriend only after he accused her of illegally downloading music and erased about 2,000 of her MP3s. Mathers complained that it took 3 months to build her music collection. An autopsy performed Friday afternoon at Methodist Hospital showed that Brad Pulaski had been beat multiple times in the face and chest by a blunt metal object, and died of internal bleeding, said Dr. Felix Klamut, deputy coroner. According to Apple’s website, the iPod is partially made of a hard metal plate that’s been praised for it’s resistance to regular wear and tear, like drops and coffee spills. “It took him a while to die,” Dr. Klamut said. “She must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death was not instantaneous, that’s for sure” Arleen Mathers was arraigned Friday night by a video hookup from the county jail. Municipal Court Judge Simon Lambert set her bond at $600,000 and scheduled a preliminary hearing for March 9.

Try "We Like to Party" by Vengaboys.

Guess he found out that this doll wears GroperGuard™ and is thus unaffected by his GrOPes.

Perhaps it will account for Bill Gates' whereabouts in recent days.

Steve Groebner, alias "The Groper," wrote the liner notes for his army buddy (7th Infantry Division Band, 1966-67) Danny D'Imperio's last CD.

I am very sorry to report Gene's death. I worked with him and his partner, Finch, at WNEW in the early 1960s--in fact, one of the characters Gene used to do was Chris Albertson, a somewhat dim-witted Scandinavian with a Swedish accent. I guess most of you will not recognize Gene's name, but older New Yorkers should. A great guy with a fabulous sense of humor.--CA April 9, 2004 Gene Klavan, Radio Show Host, Dies at 79 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Gene Klavan, who first as half of the radio show "Klavan and Finch" and then as a solo performer, brought slicing wit, a knack for voices and peppery irreverence to New York morning radio audiences for 25 years, died yesterday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 79 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, his son Ross said. From 1952 to 1968, Mr. Klavan was the comic half of Klavan and Finch, heard on WNEW, then one of the leading AM radio stations in New York. With Dee Finch as straight man, Mr. Klavan changed into the voices of wacky characters like Trevor Traffic, Mr. Nat, Sy Kology, Victor Verse and Emilio Percolator. The sound of a slamming door signaled a character's arrival. Mr. Klavan's shows were an integral part of the personality of a station known for its polish and for standards by America's great songwriters. He, however, became famous for zaniness and a comic irreverence that sometimes extended even to his sponsors. His success as a pioneer shock jock, tame by today's standards, was suggested by an article in The New York Times in 1971 that reported that a third of that 24-hour station's revenues were generated by his four-hour show. When he threatened to fire the fictional Trevor, the station was deluged with calls. "Music was secondary," he said in an interview with The Times in 1983, referring to his show. "It was all ad lib." Eugene Kantor Klavan was born in Baltimore on May 4, 1924. He attended Johns Hopkins University, but quit to enlist in the Army. He served in the Pacific during World War II and later was an entertainer for the military. He began his radio career in Baltimore and Washington, but came to New York on the strength of an offer from Channel 11. A friend intercepted him and told him that WNEW's highly successful radio team of Rayburn and Finch was breaking up after five good years. Gene Rayburn was going to NBC. Mr. Klavan auditioned for the job on the theory, he told The Times in 1971, that "if I died up here on TV, I was really dead; on the other hand, if I died on New York radio, nobody'd be the wiser." Finch retired in 1968 and Mr. Klavan continued the show alone as "Klavan in the Morning." In 1977 he moved to WOR-AM and left radio in 1980. Mr. Finch died in 1983. Mr. Klavan later worked as a host for the American Movie Classics cable television channel, as a columnist for Newsday, a comic commentator for WCBS-TV and a semiprofessional photographer. He wrote two books, one on his years with WNEW and one on the news media. In addition to his son Ross, who lives in Manhattan, Mr. Klavan is survived by his wife of 57 years, Phyllis; his sons Scott and Laurence, of Manhattan, and Andrew of Santa Barbara; his brother, Bennett, of Chicago; and three grandchildren.

I think it would become illegal if Organissimo charged an access fee. But I'm not a lawyer.

I find that people who don't take it beyond playing "competently" are a bore to listen to.

He used to play jazz, but never well. The Mangione Brothers group was a miniature Cannonball quintet, which is what made Cannon bring it to Riverside. I heard the group then and it was ok, but it never went anywhere, and--in regard to jazz--neither did Chuck, IMO.

Hilarious. SNL's "news" yesterday announced that Norah Jones has turned 20, and her audience has turned 50. It will be intersting to see how far Bruce takes the label away from jazz--recent signings don't bode well.

You might have asked if he ever made public a bad photo. I think every photographer has a few of those.

I think he himself told us that he had died, but his credibility was kinda shot by then.

Remember, there were also EPs. 45s were often made for juke boxes, where shorter tracks were called for.

April 2, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST Smear Without Fear By PAUL KRUGMAN A funny thing happened to David Letterman this week. Actually, it only started out funny. And the unfunny ending fits into a disturbing pattern. On Monday, Mr. Letterman ran a video clip of a boy yawning and fidgeting during a speech by George Bush. It was harmless stuff; a White House that thinks it's cute to have Mr. Bush make jokes about missing W.M.D. should be able to handle a little ribbing about boring speeches. CNN ran the Letterman clip on Tuesday, just before a commercial. Then the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan came back to inform viewers that the clip was a fake: "We're being told by the White House that the kid, as funny as he was, was edited into that video." Later in the day, another anchor amended that: the boy was at the rally, but not where he was shown in the video. On his Tuesday night show, Mr. Letterman was not amused: "That is an out and out 100 percent absolute lie. The kid absolutely was there, and he absolutely was doing everything we pictured via the videotape." But here's the really interesting part: CNN backed down, but it told Mr. Letterman that Ms. Kagan "misspoke," that the White House was not the source of the false claim. (So who was? And if the claim didn't come from the White House, why did CNN run with it without checking?) In short, CNN passed along a smear that it attributed to the White House. When the smear backfired, it declared its previous statements inoperative and said the White House wasn't responsible. Sound familiar? On Tuesday, I mentioned remarks by CNN's Wolf Blitzer; here's a fuller quote, just to remove any ambiguity: "What administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically, that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting there are some weird aspects in his life." Stung by my column, Mr. Blitzer sought to justify his words, saying that his statement was actually a question, and also saying that "I was not referring to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged today." Silly me: I "alleged" that Mr. Blitzer said something because he actually said it, and described "so-called unnamed" officials as unnamed because he didn't name them. Mr. Blitzer now says he was talking about remarks made on his own program by a National Security Council spokesman, Jim Wilkinson. But Mr. Wilkinson's remarks are hard to construe as raising questions about Mr. Clarke's personal life. Instead, Mr. Wilkinson seems to have questioned Mr. Clarke's sanity, saying: "He sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden, and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of `X-Files' stuff." Really? On Page 246 of "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke bemoans the way the invasion of Iraq, in his view, played right into the hands of Al Qaeda: "Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed. . . . It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush." That's not " `X-Files' stuff": it's a literary device, meant to emphasize just how ill conceived our policy is. Mr. Blitzer should be telling Mr. Wilkinson to apologize, not rerunning those comments in his own defense. Look, I understand why major news organizations must act respectfully toward government officials. But officials shouldn't be sure — as Mr. Wilkinson obviously was — that they can make wild accusations without any fear that they will be challenged on the spot or held accountable later. And administration officials shouldn't be able to spread stories without making themselves accountable. If an administration official is willing to say something on the record, that's a story, because he pays a price if his claims are false. But if unnamed "administration officials" spread rumors about administration critics, reporters have an obligation to check the facts before giving those rumors national exposure. And there's no excuse for disseminating unchecked rumors because they come from "the White House," then denying the White House connection when the rumors prove false. That's simply giving the administration a license to smear with impunity.

If it's about that, don't you think Phil Woods' name should suffice--in a jazz publication? After all the teacher's name is in the body of the text. Still, the whole thing is outrageous and unwarranted.

Bang & Olufsen, a Danish company, has indeed been around for a long time (I became a customer in 1950) and its good reputation for being innovative goes beyond design. Fort $6,500 one is, I suspect, paying for the brand name, but there is also very good reason to believe that these speakers will deliver. Weizen, you will hear "Hail to the Chief" like you never heard it before, but--and here I go suspecting again--you might not enjoy it beyond November.

Readers should not be bothered by the inclusion of advertisement, and I don't think they are. It is when advertisers influence editorial policy that the ads get in the way. Unfortunately, that is often the case. Here, of course, we have a different cause for alarm: an editorial decision that excludes the mention of a man whose name they deem not to have sufficient recognition factor. Even if the writer had not been as accomplished as Phil Woods, familiarity should not be criterial.

I used to write for this tacky little mag before it became a bad joke and took aboard a number of clueless contributors, but even then (the 1960s) it was becoming one big advertisement with a whore-ish tendency. The jazz magazine that maintains noticeable integrity and a high editorial level is a rarity, especially in the U.S. There is no defense for the decision that prompted Paul Horn to write his letter.

This is sad news. I have admired Alistair Cooke's witty, perceptive observations for many years, not least of all his weekly "Letter From America," which many of us will miss. March 30, 2004 Alistair Cooke, British Eye on the American Scene, Dies at 95 By FRANK J. PRIAL Alistair Cooke, the urbane and erudite journalist who was a peerless observer of the American scene for almost 70 years, died at his home in New York, the BBC said today. He was 95. A BBC spokesman said Mr. Cooke's daughter, Susan, had contacted Mr. Cooke's biographer, a BBC reporter, Nick Clarke, to inform him of her father's death at midnight. Mr. Cooke was widely known to American television audiences as the master of ceremonies on the pioneer cultural program "Omnibus" in the 1950's and later as the mellifluous host of the long-running "Masterpiece Theater" series on public television. But his multifaceted career went well beyond the television screen. A veteran foreign correspondent and a successful and prolific author, he was celebrated for his "Letter from America," which was broadcast weekly by the BBC to more than 50 countries. Begun in 1946, the program continued with only an occasional break for 58 years, a record unparalleled in radio history. His final broadcast, No. 2869 in the series, was on Feb. 20. Mr. Cooke wrote out his intentions for the program in a memo to the BBC in February 1946. "It will be a weekly personal letter to a Briton by a fireside, I shall try to give a running commentary on topical aspects of American life, some of the intimate background to Washington policy, some profiles of important Americans," he said. "The stress will tend always to be on the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines, rather than on the headlines themselves." The BBC liked the idea and the first program was broadcast on the network's Home Service on March 24, 1946. Writing in The Sunday Times of London on the 50th anniversary of that first column, Paul Donovan said, "Amazingly, almost nothing about the program has changed in half a century; it still goes out on a Sunday, is still between 13 and 14 minutes long, is still composed on a manual typewriter and is still free, uniquely, from BBC editorial control." Mr. Cooke's weekly radio talks gained him a reputation as one of the most effective interpreters of the American way of life to the world. His observations were not only insightful but also gracefully written and often gently witty. This was his description of the defeat of the great middleweight boxer Sugar Ray Robinson at Madison Square Garden in 1962: "When it was over, Sugar Ray flexed his calves for the last time and did a little hobbling dance over to embrace the victor, who was pink and sweaty and very happy, identifiable on the scorecard as Denny Moyer of Portland, Ore., but on closer inspection was that bearded figure with a scythe Sugar Ray had dreaded to meet." Mr. Cooke first gained a large American audience as the elegant host of "Omnibus," the legendary magazine of the arts that appeared on all three major commercial networks over its lifetime, from 1952 to 1961. His long association with the public television series "Masterpiece Theater" began in 1971. He was proud that he personally wrote the succinct and often highly informative introductions to those British-made television dramas. Among his favorites were "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves (even though he found it "violent and pornographic"), "The Jewel in the Crown," "The Golden Bowl," "The Charmer" and especially that immensely appealing portrait of British society before and after World War I, "Upstairs, Downstairs." John O'Connor, the chief television critic of The New York Times, once observed: "The truly remarkable phenomenon for 'Masterpiece Theater' fans is how the memory of each of these productions is so firmly stamped with the personality of a single person: the soft-spoken fellow sitting with a book in his lap, looking up just long enough to tell us what it's all about." Mr. O'Connor, noting Mr. Cooke's urbanity and grace and his "unique" place" in upscale programming on American television, summed up his career: "Mr. Cooke became a distinctive television fixture, as immediately recognizable as Lucy Ricardo or Archie Bunker. The 'Masterpiece Theater' routine, with its armchair and, at midpoint, Mr. Cooke's swivel to a second studio camera, evolved into the irresistible stuff of parody. The sophisticated Mr. Cooke found himself fodder for 'Saturday Night Live.' Jackie Gleason turned him into Aristotle Cookie. 'Sesame Street' weighed in with Alistair Cookie (Monster). Harvey Korman came up with Alistair Quince, once more tippy-toeing into your living room.' Even . . . 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' let its haughty butler announce on a Sunday night, 'It's 9 o'clock, Master William, and you know what that means.' " Mr. Cooke not only interpreted America to the world, he also interpreted it to Americans. To mark the American Bicentennial, he supervised, helped write and then narrated "America," a 13-hour survey of American history presented on NBC. The series then became the basis for his best-selling book, "America: A Personal History of the United States." It was a tribute to Mr. Cooke's admiration for his adopted country that Congress chose him to give the keynote speech for its Bicentennial celebration in 1976. Alfred Alistair Cooke -- he later reversed his given names -- was born in Salford, a suburb of Manchester, on Nov. 20, 1908, the son of Samuel and Mary Elizabeth Byrne Cooke. His father was a metal craftsman and a Methodist lay preacher who founded a mission in the Manchester slums. His mother was an Irish immigrant. It was in Manchester that Mr. Cooke's lifelong fascination with America and Americans began. A group of American soldiers was billeted near his home during the First World War. They were, he later recalled, "inordinately kind and outgoing and quite devoid of the joylessness that, in my view, afflicted my own countrymen." The Cookes moved to Blackpool where the young Alfred attended Blackpool Grammar School and won a scholarship to Cambridge University provided to future teachers. At Jesus College, Cambridge, Mr. Cooke edited a literary magazine, put on plays and acted in them as a co-founder of the Cambridge Mummers, and pursued a rigorous social life. He was awarded a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1930 and an education diploma in 1931. It was at Cambridge that Alfred Cooke, with his pronounced accent of the North Country and vague plans for a teacher's life, quietly disappeared. In his place, his name legally changed, appeared Alistair Cooke, campus dynamo and newly minted sophisticate, with the inflections of Mayfair and his eye on the main chance. While still at Cambridge he began writing stage criticism and articles for Theater Arts Monthly, an American magazine. He was soon granted a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to study theater in the United States. He spent the 1932-33 academic year at the Yale University School of Drama "whipping down to New York to see all the plays and meeting literary types like Thornton Wilder and John Mason Brown." He also haunted the jazz clubs along 52nd Street in Manhattan where, as a talented pianist, he was occasionally allowed to sit in on impromptu jam sessions. Much later, he recorded a jazz album for Columbia Records. Mr. Cooke traveled extensively during his first summer in the United States. "That trip was an absolute eye-opener for me," he said. "Even then, even in the Depression, there was a tremendous energy and vitality to America. The landscape and the people were far more gripping and dramatic than anything I had ever seen. It truly changed me. You see, from then on my interest in the theater began to wane, and I began to take up what I felt was the real drama going on -- namely, America itself." The next year he was at Harvard, where a course in the history of the English language in America led him to H. L. Mencken, then winding up his career as the reigning American wit but still a respected authority on the American language. They corresponded, became friends and eventually colleagues. Together, they later covered the 1948 presidential conventions in Philadelphia, Mencken for the Baltimore Sunpapers, Mr. Cooke for The Manchester Guardian. It was that early exposure to Mencken, Mr. Cooke said, that eventually led him to newspaper work. He liked to quote Mencken's pungent observation that being a newspaper reporter was a chance to "lay in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife." He later compiled a series of critical essays on Mencken's writings titled "The Vintage Mencken," (Vintage, 1990). Under the terms of his Commonwealth Fund fellowship, Mr. Cooke was required to return to Britain for a time. In 1934, while still a graduate student in America, he read that the BBC had fired its film critic, Oliver Baldwin, the son of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He raced back to London and got the job. "I promise to abuse nothing," he said on his first program, on Oct. 8 of that year, "but sometimes my temper is liable to get the best of me." While reviewing films for the BBC, he took on an additional job with NBC, broadcasting a weekly "London Letter" back to the United States. He covered among other stories the abdication of Edward VIII and the Munich Pact. The program was a precursor to the "Letter From America" that he would begin a decade later. He even found time to write a critical biography, "Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character," which was published in 1937 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1937, after three years back in London, he returned to the United States for good, becoming a citizen in 1941. He settled in New York, where he continued to broadcast for the BBC and write freelance articles for various English newspapers and magazines. In 1945, The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) asked him to report on the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. "Each day for nine weeks, I filed 2,000 words for The Guardian and did three broadcasts for the BBC, usually at 2 in the morning," he once recalled. " It was immensely dull, but when you're young, nothing's dull." In 1947, he became The Guardian's chief correspondent in the United States. He earned $500 a year and was told not to cable if a letter would serve. He stayed with the paper for another 26 years. One of his first Guardian assignments was reporting on the espionage investigation of the former State Department figure Alger Hiss and the subsequent perjury trials that led to Mr. Hiss's conviction and imprisonment. Mr. Cooke turned his reporting into a best-selling book, "A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. vs. Alger Hiss" (Knopf, 1950). The New Yorker's reviewer, Richard Rovere, called it "one of the most vivid and literate descriptions of an American political event that has ever been written." "Letter to America" began in 1946 as a 13-week experiment. "With the recent ending of Lend-Lease, England was broke," Mr. Cooke recounted in 1999. "But they extended the program for another 13 weeks and then 13 weeks again. I didn't think it would last 5 years, let alone 53." In the introduction to his book, "America," Mr. Cooke gave some idea of the range of his essays. "I covered everything from the public lives of six presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers, from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood." He might have added Monica Lewinsky, whose relationship with President Bill Clinton he explored at length. Alluding to the president, he wrote: "Moral authority, as old man Aristotle pointed out 2,000 years ago, resides in a leader because he's a better than average character. Moral authority does not mean sexual behavior; it means the capacity for being trusted, to have the people believe the word of the leader in many things and be ready to follow him when he judges what is the right thing to do." Among his many friends, Mr. Cooke counted Charles Chaplin, with whom he collaborated on a never-filmed script about Napoleon; Duke Ellington, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and newsmen as disparate as James B. (Scotty) Reston, Murray Kempton and Westbrook Pegler. One of his best-selling books, "Six Men," was a collection of lengthy profiles of Chaplin, Bogart, Adlai E. Stevenson, Mencken, Edward VIII and Bertrand Russell. Privately, at least, he defined himself as "a sort of 18th-century libertarian." Of the 12 American presidents who have served during his lifetime, his favorite was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also respected Lyndon B. Johnson ("an appalling man, but a great president"). His political outlook was probably best reflected by Stevenson. In "Six Men," he compared him to "that estimable order of Americans -- Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, Norman Thomas, Learned Hand, perhaps Wendell Willkie -- who left a lasting impression by the energy of their idealism, but who were never quite strong enough or ruthless enough, in the pit of the political jungle, to turn goodness and mercy into law or policy." He wrote, "Adlai Stevenson remains the liveliest reminder of our time that there are admirable reasons for failing to be president." Mr. Cooke was often cited for his elegant prose. Among his admirers was The Times of London, which said: "Somehow he always manages to tell you something you have not heard before, however saturated the coverage. He is both a master essayist and a consummate broadcaster; spare, pithy, wry, the words flowing with seemingly effortless ease, the confiding chattiness never at the expense of authority." Mr. Cooke disclosed that he wrote his weekly "talk," as he called them, "by free association." He explained: "I just let it rip -- five pages or so on the old Royal manual and I don't correct anything. Then I go back and slash hell out of it and get it down to around 13 minutes." Along with Mencken, he liked to think he was influenced by Mark Twain and E. B. White. But he saved special praise for two Cambridge scholars, the historian D. W. Brogan and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who taught him English literature. "Brogan," he once told an interviewer, "could give you the most recondite sort of Harold Laskian analysis of something in government, but he would cap it with an anecdote from James Farley or some precinct captain or a lyric from Cole Porter. I think I realized from him how it could be done." Quiller-Couch taught him about writing. "I would turn in something filled with high-flown phrases of which I was inordinately proud," Mr. Cook said. "Q would cut them out. 'Cooke,' he once said to me, 'you must learn to murder your darlings.' " Over the years, Mr. Cooke published more than a dozen books, many of them collections of his "Letters." Mr. Cooke was the host of "Omnibus" from 1952 to 1961 and "Masterpiece Theater" from 1971 to 1992. He wrote his introductions to all the productions but he had his favorites: "The Jewel and the Crown"(1985), "The Golden Bowl" (1973), "I, Claudius"(1977), even though he considered it "violent and pornographic," and, best of all, "Upstairs, Downstairs" (1974-77), a portrait of British society before and after World War I. A cricketeer in his youth, he remained a sports enthusiast all his life. Each year he returned to England to watch tennis at Wimbledon. In his middle years, he turned to golf and was still playing in his early 90's. One of his books, "Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke," (Arcade, 1995) was about his golfing adventures and another, "Memories of the Great and the Good" (Arcade, 1999) included a profile of one of his particular heroes, the golfer Bobby Jones. His first, brief marriage to Ruth Emerson, in 1934, ended in divorce soon after a son, John, was born. He married again in 1946, and for more than 50 years, Mr. Cooke and his second wife, the artist Jane White, divided their time between an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a summer home on the North Fork of Long Island, and trips to London and San Francisco. Besides his wife and his daughter Susan, an Episcopal priest in New Hampshire, he is survived by John, who lives in Wyoming and writes Western novels; a stepson who grows wine grapes in California and a stepdaughter who lives in London. Reminiscing just before his 91st birthday, in 1999, Mr. Cooke noted that one the few activities he had given up in his later years was lecturing. For many years he spoke on what he called "A Short List of American Humorists, from Mark Twain to Calvin Trillin." "I gave it up," he said. "Fewer and fewer people knew who they are."

The following letter was forwarded to me by a friend who is a major tenor player. It was originally addressed to Marvin Stamm, and it says a lot about Down Beat's editors. From time to time someone here raises a question about the jazz press and why it often does not seem to get it. This, I think, illustrates the validity of such questions.--Chris A Dear Marv old buddy; I love your E-letter! You may be interested in this. Downbeat is running a piece on influences on saxophone players (it may have other instrumentalists-I am not sure). When they called me for interview a few weeks ago I told them that my first teacher, Mr. Harvey Larose, was of profound influence on everything I have accomplished. Under separate cover I am sending you an essay I wrote for Sax Journal about this outstanding teacher and friend. Ted Panken called yesterday and told me that the editor would not run my interview because nobody ever heard of Mr. Larose. They want me to do another one using a famous sax man, like Rudy Wiedoff or Ozzie Nelson. I told them to stick their tacky mag where the sun don't shine. How dare they!! The unsung heroes of our music are the local teachers who help us discover ourselves through their toil. I would like the IAJE to know about this cavalier approach to jazz education and let Deadbeat know how they feel. Could you pass this on to the members at large and tell them of this woeful neglect by a magazine that profits from the work of teachers like Mr. Harvey Larose? He turned me on to Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges and Charie Parker, plus taught me the American songbook and gave me advanced improvisation lessons when I was 13 years old! I am really upset about this! Please help spread the news to other jazz educators of this travesty. Thank you. Phil Woods

Please accept my deepest condolence. Chris

Historically important, musically so-so. There were good players in the ODJB (Larry Shields, for ex.) and, if nothing else, we should be glad that Bix found them inspiring, but this was hokey music.

When I first met Leon, for a drink and interview--at the Algonquin bar, about 30 years ago--he handed me his card, which I stuck in my pocket. When I got home, I saw that it was blank. Yes, Leon Redbone is not your run-of-the-mill guy. Very witty and quite knowledgeable, I recall that he was a big admirer of Jelly Roll Morton and that he knew his Jelly well, beyond his music.

On some of those very early recordings--inded even on the somewhat later Bessie Smith session--Hawkins is more a presence than anything else. One can't hear him play.

I watched half of the first episode, but I don't think even the roughest Wild West had people screaming motherfucker and cock sucker at each other every five minutes. It's Ben Hur with a wristwatch.