Christiern

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I have long ago lost track of how many concerts I have attended, but the loudest was without a doubt this New Year's event...

Sad news. It seemed inevitable from what I have been hearing lately, but it is the update one doesn't wish for. My thoughts are with the Steve and the family who can take comfort in the fact that Dave's music will continue to reward ears and minds.

Here's the obit from USA Today. Sad news, this was a great group and they left us some memorable music, the quality of which went way beyond nostalgia (but, for many of us, contains a lot of that, too).

Thanks, Marcello, I have no recollection of giving these guys permission. Is this, perhaps, a reincarnation of A Miles Davis Reader? I did give permission to Bill Kirchner for that compilation. Guess I'll look into this and see if I'm going senile.

I hope you are not saying that my Saturday Review piece is included in that book.

He could be working on a book.

Don't underestimate the power of fiber optics, Larry, but—having had in-person conversations with Ahmet—he did impress with his enthusiasm for the music, his candor, and general persona, and I guess one could call that an aura. Nesuhi had a somewhat warmer personality, but both were comfortable to be around. Thanks for the piece, it is as good as I expect from you—and I might add that my high expectations were also met by Jazz in Search of Itself. Did you ever meet Mayo Williams?

I probably posted this before, but what the hell! I dreaded having to make that call to Miles, to set up the interview, but I finally just grabbed the phone and dialed. To my surprise, he sounded very friendly and suggested that I come to his house that morning. It was not until later that I learned of his aversion to interviewers carrying a tape recorder—lucky for me, because my steno skills are not like Whitney B's (he was impressive with a pencil and pad). As it turned out, Miles not only accepted my recorder, he went so far as to pick it up and carry it with him when he crossed the room (his voice was whispery at that time) so that it would capture what he said. This is long, but I can't just link to it, which would be preferable. My main reason for posting it (again?) is to show that there was a good side to Miles, too. When we ran into each other at a party, shortly after the publication, Miles told me that my quotes took him back a bit, adding, "But I know I said all that." THE UNMASKING OF MILES DAVIS Cover story in the Saturday Review, November 27, 1971. When Miles Davis returns from a six week tour of Europe and takes his quintet into Philharmonic Hall this week, chances are that a good percentage of his audience will consist of young black people. This is not a writer's prediction based on a typical Miles Davis following—no one has determined just what that might be—but a request Miles made in a phone call from Paris four weeks ago: Jack Whittemore, his agent, was to take half of Miles’ fee, purchase tickets for the concert, and hand them out to young black people who otherwise could not afford to attend. “Miles has never done anything like this before, but nothing he does surprises me,” says Whittemore, admitting that he doesn’t quite know how to go about distributing over $2,000 worth of free tickets to the right people. Such unusual gestures are as typical of Miles as they are atypical of most performing artists; they come as a surprise only to those who know the enigmatic trumpet player from a distance. Since his first appearance on the music scene some twenty-six years ago, Miles Davis has ben the subject of controversy; endearing with his music, offending with his personality. That is to say, his personality as it is most commonly interpreted, for the forbidding mask of hostility that in many minds characterizes Miles is just that: an image fostered by his own, deliberate lack of showmanship, and sculptured by reporters who have failed to recognize a serious artist at work. We don’t, after all, expect Rostropovich or Casadesus to warm up their audiences with small talk, and Miles Davis is as serious about his music as were Brahms and Schubert. The music performed by Miles Davis today has undeniably evolved from that labeled “jazz,” which New Orleans pioneers played sixty years ago, but there are other elements contained in it, too, and if Miles’ music is jazz, then so is Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Twelve Instruments. He himself feels that jazz is “a white man’s word” whose application to his music is tantamount to calling a black person “nigger.” Accordingly, though he still must give performances in noisy, Smoke-filled night clubs, Miles approaches his work with the dignity it deserves. During club or concert appearances, he never addresses his audience nor announces his selections, generally wears clothing that reflect future fashion trends—Gentleman’s Quarterly named him, “Best Dressed Man” ten years ago—saunters off the band stand or to the rear of the stage when not playing, and occasionally turns his back to the audience while focusing attention on his fellow musicians. “I have been with him on several occasions when he left the stage during a performance,” says Robert Altshuler, Columbia Records’ publicity director, “he either crouches or ambles to the side of the audience and you realize that he is deeply concentrating on everything that his musicians are playing—he is digging his own band, digging it in a the way a Miles Davis fan would. He simply becomes a part of his own audience.” Club owners and concert promoters have been known to go into a rage over Miles’ seeming detachment, but conformity is not in his vocabulary and, despite the constant criticism, he has for twenty years remained the dark, brooding, wandering loner who doesn’t care whether he is regarded as an eccentric genius or a bellicose bastard, is long as people listen to what he says through his music. The son of a well-to-do dental surgeon, Miles Davis has never been poor, but money cannot cure the inherent stigma that society has attached to people of dark skin and, faced with prejudices that sometimes are so subtle that only their victims can detect them, he has always sought to fight back on his own. “I am not a Black Panther or nothing like that,” he explains, “I don’t need to be, but I was raised to think like they do and people sometimes think I’m difficult, because I always say what’s on my mind, and they can’t always see what I see.” One thing Miles never fails to see is someone taking advantage of him. “Back in the days when he was only getting a thousand dollars for a concert, Miles was booked into Town Hall,” recalls Jack Whittemore. “The tickets were selling very well, so the promoter suggested doing two shows instead of one. As was customary in such cases, Miles was to get half fee, five hundred dollars, for the second concert, but when I approached him with this he looked puzzled. ’You mean I go on stage,’ he said, ‘pick up my horn, play a concert, and get a thousand dollars. Then they empty the hall, fill it again, I pick up my horn again, play the same thing, and get only five hundred?—I don’t understand it.’ I told him that this was how it was normally done, but he was not satisfied. Finally, he turned to me and said he’d do it for five hundred dollars if they would rope off half the hall and only sell half the tickets. When the promoters heard this, they decided to give him another thousand for the second concert.” If Miles is “difficult,” it is because his honesty and candor are such rare traits in the show business world that few people know how to deal with him. His monumental disdain for the complimentary small talk and instant familiarity that entertainers are exposed to, and his absolute refusal to indulge in such trivia, has earned him the reputation of being unapproachable. “I have found,” observes Altshuler, “that when Miles meets someone new—people from the press I’ve introduced him to—he will check them out first. They don’t always know this, but Miles is actually laying down the ground rules for a totally honest exchange of questions and answers, and he will accept his interviewer only if he can be sure that his time is not going to be wasted with inane questions.” As one might expect, Miles is reluctant to appear on TV talk shows. “Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson don’t know what to say to anybody black, unless there’s some black bitch on the show and she’s all over them,” he told me while conducting a guided tour of his unconventional but comfortable Upper West Side residence. “It’s so awkward for them, because they know all the white facial expressions, but they’re not hip to black expressions, and God knows they’re not hip to Chinese expressions. You see, they’ve seen all the white expressions, like fear, sex, revenge. White actors imitate other white actors when they express emotions, but they don’t know how black people react. Dick Cavett is quiet now when a black cat is talking to him, because he doesn’t know if the expression on his face means ‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ or if ‘right on’ means he’s going to throw a right hand punch. So,” he continued, pointing out the oddly shaped, multi-level blue tile bathtub, “rather than embarrass them and myself, I just play on those shows and tell them not to say anything to me—I have nothing to say to them anyway.” Miles makes a good point, intelligent, relevant questions are rarely directed at black guests on TV’s talk shows, and the media’s handful of established hosts relate to his music about as well as Nixon’s “silent majority” relates to the problems of Bedford-Stuyvesant residents. We stepped down into the circular bedroom where a television set, dwarfed by a gigantic bed, silently radiated an afternoon ballgame. “I just put it on because I have nothing to do,” volunteered Miles as he waved his hand towards a long row of flamboyant clothes and boots in dazzling colors. “I have these made for me.” When CBS flashed the image of its night host on the little screen, it served as a cue for Miles. “Merv Griffin is embarrassing to me,” he said. “I felt like yanking his arm off last year.” He was referring to the 1970 Grammy Awards ceremony at Alice Tully Hall, during which, after a superb performance by Miles’ group, Griffin—the evening’s master of ceremonies—brushed him off with a remark that was disrespectful of his music. “The trouble with those cats,” said Miles, “is that they all try to come off to those middle-aged white bitches.” Such remarks don’t exactly produce invitations to guest on late night TV shows, but Miles aims his fire without such considerations. Even Columbia Records—with whom he has enjoyed a good and fruitful relationship since the mid-Fifties—has been victimized by his public candor. In a recent statement, published by a black weekly, Miles—who refers to himself as the “company nigger”—suggested that his label was not affording black artists equal opportunities in terms of exposure. As we seated ourselves comfortably in the round sunken living room, I asked if there had been any repercussions from Columbia. “No,” he replied, “Clive [Davis, Columbia’s president] asked me why I had said that, and I said ‘Was I telling a lie, Clive? If you can say I’m a liar, I’ll retract that statement.’ You see, all those records I have made with them have been a bitch, and they come out being rich behind all this token shit.” “You would think that he’s not grateful,” says Clive Davis, “but I just know he is. I’m not sure that it’s his mind that he speaks; I’m not sure that he just doesn’t tell people what they want to hear, because it takes a certain amount of research before you go off making such statements. I’m prepared for all of Miles’ statements, none surprise me. I do mentally treat him differently, not because he’s black—because we have such a tremendous number of black artists—but because he’s unique among people, and you expect the unexpected from Miles Davis.” Clive Davis admits that he is not totally unaffected by Miles’ criticism. “It bothers me because I think we have really done a tremendous amount to be creative along with him, and we work very closely with him so that we make sure that he sells not only to jazz audiences and to contemporary rock audiences, but to r&b audiences as well.” Despite his complaints, Miles readily admits to having an unusually close relationship with Columbia, which is borne out by his long tenure with the label, and the fact that the 45-year-old superstar of black music could easily find another home for his recording activities. “The Internal Revenue Service is always after me,” he says, “but I just send their bills on to Clive. I got one for $39,000, but he took care of it.” When asked to verify this, Davis gave a diplomatic reply: “Miles is treated very well by Columbia Records,” he says. “I think he’s really appreciative of it, too—we don’t get Internal Revenue bills from Chicago or Blood, Sweat & Tears.” The recent upsurge in Miles Davis’ popularity is mainly due to an album entitled “Bitches Brew.” Released in the spring of 1970, it was the subject of a well coordinated national promotion campaign aimed more at the young rock fan than at the established Miles Davis follower. Of the close to thirty Miles Davis albums that have accumulated in Columbia’s catalogue over the past fifteen years, “Porgy and Bess”—with sales figures approaching 100,000—had been the most successful; other albums have averaged around 50,000 and recent releases have barely crawled to the 25,000 mark, but “Bitches Brew”—a two-record set—-has sold over 400,000 copies in this country alone. The wide stylistic gap that separates “Porgy and Bess” and “Bitches Brew” is reflected in the sales figures, but it is not just the sound of his music that Miles has changed, for he has also updated the group’s appearance. Surrounded by a young inter-racial group of musicians sporting afros, long hair, headbands, dungarees and dashikis, Miles has transformed himself into a trendy, youthful figure. With his flared pants, leather boots, tasseled Western vest and love beads, he points his shiny horn downward and roams slowly amid the complex-looking electronic equipment. It is no coincidence that the current Miles Davis band has the look of a modern-day rock group—he is determined to win over a new generation of fans, and judging by album sales, the plan is working. Miles’ new music is an abstraction of everything he has played before; it is as if he were summing it all up for us, but we know that he won’t let it end here—this is merely the latest plateau. At the same time, it is a testimony to Miles’ artistry and forward thinking that none of his past recordings—going back to his revolutionary 1949 Capitol sessions—sound outdated in 1971. If rock groups are not envious of Miles’ musical accomplishments, they perhaps should be, for many of them have yet to approach the stage of development reached by Miles and collaborator Gil Evans in the Fifties. One can’t help, but wonder if, ten or twelve years from now, anyone will have more than a nostalgic nod for the current efforts of today’s musical pop heroes. There is bitter irony in the fact that Miles has to take second billing—as he did last year—to a group like Blood, Sweat and Tears, which sells records in the millions and turns youthful audiences into a frenzy of excitement with musical ideas borrowed from Miles’ past. “I can’t be bothered with these groups,” says Miles, recalling with some amusement how he turned down promoter Bill Graham’s request that he retract a negative statement about Blood, Sweat and Tears, “if they can’t stand constructive criticism, to hell with them. I’m honest in what I say, I don’t lie, so I don’t have to watch my words or take them back.’ There are those who feel that Miles’ attacks on rock groups are unfair and that he, in an odd sense, owes these performers a debt of gratitude. They see his appearances last year at the Fillmores East and West—Meccas for the rock cult—as a turning point in his career, but they seem to lose sight of the fact that these concerts, along with Columbia’s promotional efforts, would not have sold the public on Miles Davis if he had not had something substantial to offer. For over twenty years, Miles has pointed music in new directions, reaching unexplored plateaus, then forging ahead before others could catch up with him. “He has never been bound by convention,” says Teo Macero, who has produced virtually all of Miles’ recordings since 1958. “You wouldn’t expect Miles to go back and do something the way he did it years ago anymore than you would expect Picasso to go back to what he was doing in his ’blue’ or ’rose’ periods.” One tangible result of Miles’ recent commercial success his been the signing up by Columbia of several black musicians who last year would hardly have been able to get as far as Clive Davis’ eleventh floor office. Explaining this change in policy, Clive Davis makes one momentarily forget that he is running a highly competitive commercial business: “I am very eager to allow Columbia to be used by the most forward looking American jazz artists, to explore what kind of synergy can come out of jazz and rock. What do the jazz giants, the leading jazz figures of today have to say? What is their reaction to the fact that, in attempting to fuse jazz and rock, Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears have reached millions of people all over the world while they, without such an attempt, only reach a few thousand with their music.” He mentioned that the label has signed Omette Coleman, Jack De Johnette, and Weather Report—an offshoot of Miles’ group—and that it was recording Charles Mingus. “Just as Columbia sponsored a Modern American Composer series in classical music—not having any less reverence for Stravinsky, Mahler, or classical music performed by the New York Philharmonic or the Philadelphia Orchestra—so we are here exploring a very exciting now development in music, to see where it will go. I don’t know where it will go, but I think that by opening up the company to this kind of exploration of music by brilliant talent, we are providing a tremendous service.” Columbia’s aims are obvious and Miles is not fooled for a minute: “It’s smart to be with the niggers sometimes. I know what made “Bitches Brew,” but they need guidance: Mingus needs guidance; Omette needs guidance; nobody’s going to tell them what to do because then they might call them white bastards. They have to tell Mingus what to do, otherwise he’ll do the same shit all over again, and they have to tell Omette that he can not play the trumpet and violin. Motown shows you where it’s at, man.” It is difficult to imagine anyone telling Miles Davis what to do with his music, but he is just as receptive to constructive criticism as he is ready to give it. “Miles lets you be as creative as you want to be,” says producer Teo Macero, “as long as it doesn’t screw up his music. A lot of artists say ’Man, don’t touch my music, don’t do this, I don’t want any electronic sound, don’t use a Fender bass, and so forth, but Miles is so far ahead that he’s on the same wavelength as you are, which makes for a great deal of excitement. When he plays, he does it with such intensity that every note is a gem. He doesn’t make any mistakes, if he doesn’t like something he did, it is usually because it didn’t capture the right feeling. We never discuss the music or how things went in front of anybody else; he either calls me out into the hall or we sort of talk in the comer, and I try to refrain from talking about the piece over the studio talk-back system. That’s something I’ve learned by working with him over the years. Like his private life, he keeps it to himself; I never ask, because if he wants to tell me something, he’ll do it.” The physical aspects of producing a Miles Davis album are as unconventional as his music. As Macero explains, there are no takes one, two or three, “because there’s something new that pops into the music every time, whether it’s deliberate or just by accident—no one seems to know quite for sure. The group is constantly building toward a final goal and we don’t stop the tape machines like we used to do in the old days—they run until the group stops playing. Then we go back, listen, and decide between us what should be tacked to what—it becomes a search and find routine, and finally it’s all there, it’s just a matter of putting it all together. There are a lot of tapes for each album, but we may use only the material from two or three sessions.” Two albums, “Miles Davis at Fillmore” and the sound track for the documentary film “Jack Johnson,” have been released since “Bitches Brew,” but neither shows signs of doing as well commercially. This of course provides an incentive to make the next release particularly interesting, and it looks as if “Live and Evil” (one word is the reverse spelling of the other) will be just that. Scheduled for a December release, it is the distillation of ten to fifteen reels of tape, selected from an original working pile of thirty reels. “The album is partly live, and it has an ethereal evil, where the mind is clouded and all these things are happening,” says Macero, “it’s like a wild dream.” Artist Mati Klarwein, who was responsible for the unusual “Bitches Brew” cover, has been commissioned to give the new album a similar look. If “Live and Evil” becomes another “Bitches Brew,” there will undoubtedly be more demands on Miles Davis’ time, a commodity he values and likes to spend as a part-time pugilist working out in a midtown gym, swimming in some appropriate waters, sleeping in his oversized bed, or simply relaxing with friends amid the international decor of what has been termed “an architect’s nightmare”—his house on West 77th Street. Unimpressed by critics (“I don’t know any, because I never read what they say”) and disc jockeys (“If we didn’t make any records, they wouldn’t have anything to do”), Miles periodically threatens to quit the music business to avoid the exploitation which he admits is “the name of the game.” Some day, he will undoubtedly do just that, and then a smile the public never knew may emerge from behind the mask.

Larry Kart: "Thanks. I enjoyed that set for reasons akin to yours and also enjoyed talking to Ahmet Ertegun back then. He definitely had an aura about him." That would be Balm Vitale by Oscar De La Renta.

Sorry to be so late, Brad—somehow missed it... Wassup with the Mets?

Allen Lowe's old musical sidekick (well, so it was a one-night stand) now has his own show. It bows tonight at 10:30 Eastern on the Comedy Channel. Here a link to the trailer..

Thanks for these great photos, Michael. Having spent considerable time around most of these musicians when they and I were much, much younger, it is a bit of a shock to see them aged. Fortunately, they are all aging well, but when one carries around a certain image, it's kind of a reality check. Of course, I have undergone the very same changes, so I undoubtedly shock those who have not seen me in a few years—but, in my case, I saw it happening with each glance in a mirror—gradually, but all too surely. Ira looks the same to me, but that's probably because I see him periodically. Wish I had been there, but that's my own fault.

I once promoted an employee to a higher-paying position as switchboard operator. When I receive complaints from other staff members that she was listening in on conversations, I had a talk with her and made it clear that such invasion of privacy would not be tolerated. She said she understood and apologized, but her "monitoring" continued, and so did the complaints. I had no choice but to fire her. She went off, accused me of racial discrimination, I had fired her because she was black, she was going to report me to this and that organization, etc. I told her to go ahead. She did nothing about it and I'm sure that's because she knew she was wrong. I think that is probably also the case with your passenger, Joel, but you are probably right, she clearly has a problem and it's easy to simply blame everything on race. We have had people on this board who exhibit similar unreasonable paranoia. I think you did the right thing and I hope it gives her something to think about, but the boy—as you say—is her real victim and one hopes that he has teachers who can counteract mother's ignorance.

I think Dagens Nyheter nailed it!

Perhaps they finally banished themselves!

I ordered it, but mainly for the Mae Barnes tracks—she was always a pleasure to listen to. She also had some great stories to tell, and she was married to Leroy Walker, brother of Bessie Smith's niece, Ruby (who was said to have written "Jailhouse Blues.") From "Bessie": In an interview for this book, dancer/singer Mae Barnes, who married Leroy Walker shortly after his release from jail, could not confirm that her husband had written “Jail House Blues,” but she acknowledged it as a possibility, adding that Bessie had indeed facilitated his release. Ruby’s brother had obviously not learned his lesson, for soon after his release and marriage to Mae Barnes, he took on a business partner and embarked on a new career as a drug dealer. The drug partnership lasted only a short while, then came to an abrupt, dramatic end when Leroy learned that Mae had become romantic involved with his partner. The news sent him rushing off to his partner’s apartment at 129th Street and Eighth Avenue, where he was greeted there by his own wife. Enraged, he pushed her aside and barged into the apartment. He found his partner having dinner at the kitchen table, took aim and killed him with one well-directed shot. Mae fled the house, screaming hysterically, attracting the cop on the beat. “I couldn’t even talk,” she recalled, “because I was a wreck, so I just pointed to my house.” When the policeman got there, Leroy was no longer in the apartment, but he had not been seen leaving the house, so the police officer headed for the roof, where he found him and shot him dead. The policeman, a West Indian who had been assigned to the neighborhood beat for a few years, was no stranger to Leroy. He was known to be on the take and to have benefited from Leroy’s drug dealings. The two had a history of business-related run-ins, which may account for the swift justice carried out on the rooftop. “I think he did that so my brother wouldn’t blab on him,” said Ruby, and Ms. Barnes concurred, unable to think of another reason why her husband was killed rather than taken in. Just thought I'd throw that in here.

Don't forget, the man is also a double murderer whose arrogance has suffered a serious blow, that all adds up and gives him an even greater incentive to avoid jail.

Jay, thank you for giving my book more than a cursory read and for posing intelligent questions that reflect your broad interest in Bessie Smith and the dilemma faced by her. I included the Van Vechten account in order to give as many pieces as possible of the puzzle that one inevitably faces when trying to paint a picture from afar (in terms of time and, in my case, certainly background). Remember, I grew up in Iceland and Denmark, both of which are, in every respect, very far removed from Bessie's environment. I do find Van Vechten's description impossible to take seriously as a performance review, but I think we can look at it from a different perspective and conclude that he does give us, if not a front seat to a Bessie Smith performance, a good insight into how Bessie was perceived by a privileged white man who embraced the culture from the outside. I never doubted that Van Vechten's enthusiasm was genuine, but he was severely handicapped by the wall of social division that he apparently only peeked behind when having fleeting liaisons in his dimly lit Harlem getaway apartment. This is an impression I got from speaking to a number of people who knew and observed him in one social milieu or the other—or both. I think we really get a focused picture of where Van Vechten was coming from when we read his introduction to a 1950 reprint of Nigger Heaven, his 1926 novel that, understandably, was condemned before it was read. When I am asked how I happen to know so much about Negro character and Negro customs, I can answer proudly that many Negroes are my intimate friends. The Negro magazine Ebony once alluded to me as the white man who had more friends among colored people of distinction than any other white person in America. With a high degree of accuracy, I can still boast that many Negroes are still my friends. I'm afraid I never met Ms. Davis, but—especially since I was general manager of New York's Pacifica station during her most active years as a radical—I followed her activities closely. Many years later, she contacted my first publisher (Stein & Day) to obtain a considerable number of book for use in her classroom. It was required reading, I understand, which did not exempt it from criticism. I read Angela Davis' book and pretty much agree with her conclusions, but I have to admit that I think including all the lyrics (100 pages) served more as a filler than anything else. Having them there, all together, is convenient for people like me, but overkill, nevertheless. This is what I wrote about that session: Blues purists—who, oddly enough, don’t complain about Bessie’s 1923 recordings of lesser-known pop fare—have bemoaned her “commercial” repertoire for this session, and critics have rationalized it as an attempt to regain lost ground. But Bessie’s popularity was not threatened at the time, and her recordings reflected only a part of her actual repertoire. Her treatment of these songs offers delightful evidence of her talent for turning banal material into something special. As for Bessie's "Yellow Girl Revue", Davis fails to mention that—as I pointed out in my book—Bessie went against convention and did not hire light-complexioned ladies for her own show. She had a solution for theater owners who balked: put the girls in amber light. Here's what I wrote regarding Poor Man's Blues: It is of course pure conjecture, but Bessie’s lyrics may have been inspired by her memorable visit to Van Vechten’s salon four months earlier. A weave of social commentary, this is the most poignant of all her compositions, and although it is a plea for the “rich man” to open his heart to the “poor man,” the song may have been intended to convey a different meaning. The war had been over for ten years, but Wilson’s promise of democracy—if it ever included blacks—remained unfulfilled, and neither the Harding nor the Coolidge administration had made any progress in bringing racial equality to “the land of the free.” Bessie had no interest in politics, per se, but that did not place blinders on her; it was plain that the postwar boom favored the white man, and Bessie’s audiences knew that this song of social protest was as much about racial inequity as it was about economic disparity. Thus “Poor Man’s Blues” was, in fact, “Black Man’s Blues,” the words “white” and “black” being interchangeable with “rich” and “poor.” It was a fact that Bessie’s audiences understood. Ruby and others recalled that Bessie frequently made racial references, but she probably gauged her audience carefully before doing so, and she never approached the subject directly on her recordings. Her delivery straightforward and purposeful, Bessie sings “Poor Man’s Blues” with a minimum of vocal effects. She clearly felt deeply about the song’s message, and she transmits it with a profoundly moving intensity: Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind..... Davis misunderstood what I was saying about Bessie's interest (or lack of) in politics. I believe she was well aware of politics as they affected people, but there was no indication of her taking an interest (or even bothering to learn about) politicians of her day. FDR? Of course, but not much beyond him. Her awareness of the political climate, as it affected black people (and poor whites, for that matter) rules out apathy. She sang and wrote songs about social conditions. She made enough money to move well above the level she chose to live in. Have I answered your questions, Jay? If not, let me know.

I met him a few times when I was with Riverside, my impression of him was the same as Chuck's and not only was he a fine photographer, he also named his cat Alphonse Picou. You gotta love that.

Daniel, that links really says nothing. I know Phoebe Jacobs very well. She got me my job with Benny Goodman and she was a very close friend of Louis' last wife, but I cannot forgive her for the lies she told Burns re Lil Armstrong. This interview, the one you link to, is also full of inaccuracies and protective coating. If Cohen inherited the Associated Booking Corp, he is very likely not to be trusted. Joe Glaser was a little gangster who exploited many, many black artists and worked to repress the careers of others. This does not bode well for the film.