7/4

The kind of people who read the New Yorker, obviously. These are people who love the witty cartoons, the political writing, don't mind reading the long articles, who can afford the expensive crap that's advertised and want to explore Jazz. They probably also go to the Opera and subscribe to PBS. Maybe they'll even start listening to WKCR and hear some live Jazz in NYC. Maybe they"ll hear some Jazz that isn't being performed in Manhattan - off to Brooklyn!

restless, irritable and discontent. I say.

this has been floating around the net for a while.... Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments For Guitarists: 1. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS...That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere. 2. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR...Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one. 3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH...Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread. 4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL...Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub. 5. IF YOU'RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU'RE OUT...If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing. 6. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE...Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field. 7. ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY...You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That's your part of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song "I Need A Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he's doing it. 8. DON'T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT...You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music. 9. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE...When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it. 10. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE...Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow.

I'm not familiar with it. I wonder if this is new or a license?

solo Piano Phase .

100 Essential Jazz Albums by David Remnick May 19, 2008 While finishing “Bird-Watcher,” a Profile of the jazz broadcaster and expert Phil Schaap, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector. First, I asked Schaap to assemble the list, but, after a couple of false starts, he balked. Such attempts, he said, have been going on for a long time, but “who remembers the lists and do they really succeed in driving people to the source?” Add to that, he said, “the dilemma of the current situation,” in which music is often bought and downloaded from dubious sources. Schaap bemoaned the loss of authoritative discographies and the “troubles” of the digital age, particularly the loss of informative aids like liner notes and booklets. In the end, he provided a few basic titles from Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, and other classics and admitted to a “pyrrhic victory.” What follows is a list compiled with the help of my New Yorker colleague Richard Brody. These hundred titles are meant to provide a broad sampling of jazz classics and wonders across the music’s century-long history. Early New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, third stream, and fusion are all represented, though not equally. We have tried not to overdo it with expensive boxed sets and obscure imports; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. We have also tried to strike a balance between healthy samplings of the innovative giants (Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, etc.) and the greater range of talents and performances. Since the nineteen-seventies, jazz has been branching out in so many directions that you would need to list at least another hundred recordings, by the likes of Steve Coleman, Stanley Jordan, Joe Lovano, Jacky Terrasson, John Zorn, David Murray, Avishai Cohen, Béla Fleck, Eliane Elias, Roy Hargrove, Dave Douglas, Matthew Shipp, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Fat Kid Wednesdays, and many, many others. There is a suggestion below of the dazzling scope of contemporary jazz, but the focus is on the classic jazz that is Schaap’s specialty. 1. Fats Waller, “Handful of Keys” (Proper, 2004; tracks recorded 1922-43). 2. King Oliver, “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: The Complete Set” (Challenge, 1997; tracks recorded 1923). 3. Louis Armstrong, “The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Sony, 2006; tracks recorded 1925-29). 4. Louis Armstrong, “The Complete RCA Victor Recordings” (RCA, 2001; tracks recorded 1932-33 and 1946-47). 5. Louis Armstrong, “Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy” (Columbia, 1954). 6. Fletcher Henderson, “Tidal Wave” (Verve, 1994; tracks recorded 1931-1934). 7. Bessie Smith, “The Essential Bessie Smith” (Sony, 1997; tracks recorded 1923-33). 8. Bix Beiderbecke, “The Bix Beiderbecke Story” (Proper, 2003; tracks recorded 1924-30). 9. Django Reinhardt, “The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order” (JSP, 2000; tracks recorded 1934-39). 10. Jelly Roll Morton, “Jelly Roll Morton: 1926-1930” (JSP, 2000). 11. Sidney Bechet, “The Sidney Bechet Story” (Proper, 2001; tracks recorded 1923-50). 12. Duke Ellington, “The OKeh Ellington” (Sony, 1991—tracks recorded 1927-31). 13. Duke Ellington, “Golden Greats” (Disky, 2002; tracks recorded 1927-48). 14. Duke Ellington, “Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band” (RCA, 2003; tracks recorded 1940-42). 15. Duke Ellington, “Ellington at Newport 1956” (Sony, 1999). 16. Duke Ellington, “Money Jungle” (Blue Note Records, 1962). 17. Coleman Hawkins, “The Essential Sides Remastered, 1929-39” (JSP, 2006). 18. Coleman Hawkins, “The Bebop Years” (Proper, 2001; tracks recorded 1939-49). 19. Billie Holiday, “Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles” (Sony, 2007; tracks recorded 1933-44). 20. Teddy Wilson, “The Noble Art of Teddy Wilson” (ASV Living Era, 2002; tracks recorded 1933-46). 21. Lester Young, “The Lester Young/Count Basie Sessions 1936-40” (Mosaic, 2008; available direct through Mosaic). 22. Lester Young, “Kansas City Swing” (Definitive, 2004; tracks recorded 1938-44). 23. Count Basie, “The Complete Decca Recordings” (Verve, 1992; tracks recorded 1937-39). 24. Count Basie, “The Complete Atomic Basie” (Blue Note, 1994; tracks recorded 1958). 25. Benny Goodman, “At Carnegie Hall—1938—Complete” (Columbia, 1999). 26. John Kirby Sextet, “Night Whispers: 1938-46” (Jazz Legends, 2005). 27. Chick Webb, “Stomping at the Savoy” (Proper, 2006; tracks recorded 1931-39). 28. Benny Carter, “3, 4, 5: The Verve Small Group Sessions” (Polygram, 1991; tracks recorded 1954). 29. Charlie Christian, “The Genius of the Electric Guitar” (Definitive, 2005; tracks recorded 1939-41). 30. James P. Johnson, “The Original James P. Johnson: 1942-1945 Piano Solos” (Smithsonian Folkways, 1996). 31. The Nat King Cole Trio, “The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio: The Vocal Classsics, Vol. 1, 1942-1946” (Blue Note, 1995). 32. Charlie Parker, “The Complete Savoy and Dial Sessions” (Uptown Jazz, 2005; tracks recorded 1944-48). 33. Charlie Parker, “Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve” (Polygram, 1988; tracks recorded 1946-54). 34. Charlie Parker, “Best of the Complete Live Performances on Savoy” (Savoy, 2002; tracks recorded 1948-49). 35. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, “Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945” (Uptown Jazz, 2005). 36. Dizzy Gillespie, “The Complete RCA Victor Recordings, 1947-49” (RCA, 1995). 37. Thelonious Monk, “Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1” (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1947). 38. Thelonious Monk, “Live at the It Club, 1964” (Sony, 1998). 39. Thelonious Monk, “Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane: The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings” (Riverside, 2006). 40. Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh, “Intuition” (Blue Note, 1996; tracks recorded 1949 and 1956). 41. Miles Davis, “The Complete Birth of the Cool” (Blue Note, 1998; tracks recorded 1948-50). 42. Miles Davis, “Bags’ Groove” (Prestige, 1954). 43. Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” (Sony, 1959). 44. Miles Davis, “Highlights from the Plugged Nickel” (Sony, 1995; tracks recorded 1965). 45. Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (Columbia, 1969). 46. Bud Powell, “The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1” (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1949-1951), Vol. 2 (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1953). 47. Gerry Mulligan, “The Original Quartet with Chet Baker” (Blue Note, 1998; tracks recorded 1952-53). 48. Modern Jazz Quartet, “Django” (Prestige, 1953). 49. Art Tatum, “The Best of the Pablo Solo Masterpieces” (Pablo, 2003; tracks recorded 1953-56). 50. Clifford Brown and Max Roach, “Clifford Brown & Max Roach” (EmArcy, 1954). 51. Sarah Vaughan, “Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown” (EmArcy, 1954). 52. Charles Mingus, “Mingus at the Bohemia (Debut, 1955). 53. Charles Mingus, “Mingus Ah Um” (Columbia, 1959). 54. Charles Mingus Sextet, “Cornell 1964” (Blue Note, 2007). 55. Ella Fitzgerald, “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook” (Verve, 1956). 56. Sonny Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus” (Prestige, 1956). 57. Sonny Rollins, “Night at the Village Vanguard” (Blue Note, 1957). 58. Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, “Sonny Meets Hawk!” (RCA, 1963). 59. Tito Puente, “King of Kings: The Very Best of Tito Puente” (RCA, 2002; tracks recorded 1956-60). 60. Sun Ra, “Greatest Hits—Easy Listening for Intergalactic Travel” (Evidence, 2000; tracks recorded 1956-73). 61. Abbey Lincoln, “That’s Him” (Riverside, 1957). 62. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, “Moanin’” (Blue Note, 1958). 63. Ahmad Jamal Trio, “Cross Country Tour: 1958-1961” (Verve, 1998). 64. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Time Out” (Sony, 1959). 65. Jimmy Witherspoon, “The ’Spoon Concerts” (Fantasy, 1989; tracks recorded 1959). 66. Ornette Coleman, “Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings” (Atlantic, 1993; tracks recorded 1959-61). 67. Ornette Coleman, “Dancing in Your Head” (Horizon, 1973). 68. Freddie Hubbard, “Open Sesame” (Blue Note, 1960). 69. Jimmy Smith, “Back at the Chicken Shack” (Blue Note, 2007; tracks recorded in 1960). 70. Dinah Washington, “First Issue: The Dinah Washington Story” (Polygram, 1993; tracks recorded 1943-61). 71. John Coltrane, “My Favorite Things” (Atlantic, 1960). 72. John Coltrane, “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” (GRP, 1997; tracks recorded 1961). 73. John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme” (Impulse!, 1964). 74. John Coltrane, “Ascension” (Impulse!, 1965). 75. Eric Dolphy, “Out There” (New Jazz, 1960). 76. Eric Dolphy, “Out to Lunch!” (Blue Note, 1964). 77. Bill Evans, “The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961” (Riverside, 2005). 78. Jackie McLean, “A Fickle Sonance” (Blue Note, 1961). 79. Stan Getz and João Gilberto, “Getz/Gilberto” (Verve, 1963). 80. Dexter Gordon, “Our Man in Paris” (Blue Note, 1963). 81. Andrew Hill, “Smokestack” (Blue Note, 1963). 82. Lee Morgan, “The Sidewinder” (Blue Note, 1963). 83. Albert Ayler, “Spiritual Unity” (ESP, 1964). 84. Archie Shepp, “Four for Trane” (Impulse!, 1964). 85. Horace Silver, “Song for My Father” (Blue Note, 1964). 86. Wes Montgomery, “Smokin’ at the Half Note” (Verve, 2005; tracks recorded 1965). 87. Cecil Taylor, “Conquistador!” (Blue Note, 1966). 88. Betty Carter, “Betty Carter’s Finest Hour” (Verve, 2003; tracks recorded 1958-92). 89. Frank Sinatra, “Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie & the Orchestra” (Reprise, 1966). 90. Frank Sinatra, “The Capitol Years” (Capitol, 1990; tracks recorded 1953-62). 91. Nina Simone, “Sugar in My Bowl: The Very Best of Nina Simone, 1967-1972” (RCA, 1998). 92. Pharoah Sanders, “Karma” (Impulse!, 1969). 93. Chick Corea, “Return to Forever” (ECM, 1972). 94. Keith Jarrett, “The Köln Concert, 1975” (ECM, 1999). 95. World Saxophone Quartet, “World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington” (Nonesuch, 1986). 96. Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, “Steal Away” (Polygram, 1995). 97. Joshua Redman Quartet, “Spirit of the Moment: Live at the Village Vanguard” (Warner Bros., 1995). 98. Cassandra Wilson, “Traveling Miles” (Blue Note, 1999). 99. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Live at the Village Vanguard” (Sony, 1999). 100. The Bill Charlap Trio, “Live at the Village Vanguard” (Blue Note, 2007).

May 13, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist The Neural Buddhists By DAVID BROOKS In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident. In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God. Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists. Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it. The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world. And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible. Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is. In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism. In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Oh my...

It's about time...we were wondering what happened to you.

These are the days of our lives... .

Did Miles wear socks? .

Years ago I found him educational - on a basic intro to Jazz level, particularly the memorials & birthday broadcasts on WKCR. It's hard to listen to him now. He goes on and on and on and on....

Erased de Kooning Drawing 1953 © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006 Traces of ink and crayon on paper, with mount and hand-lettered ink by Jasper Johns 64.14x55.25x1.27cm

Photograph of Robert Rauschenberg seated on Untitled (Elemental Sculpture) with White Painting (seven panel) behind him at the basement of Stable Gallery, New York (1953). © Photograph: Allan Grant, Life Magazine © Time Warner Inc/Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006

Robert Rauschenberg at his home and studio in Captiva, Fla. in 2005 May 14, 2008 Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, NYT Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82. His death was confirmed by his gallery, PaceWildenstein in Manhattan. Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism. A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked. Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life. Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role. No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians. A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations. Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, Fla., these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on a project that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he believed, and risk sometimes meant failure. The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.” He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.” That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for these Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from the torn scraps of newspapers embedded in paint. But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers as flotsam in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases. Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 50’s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings. At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension. Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles, into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance. There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric, akin to bandages, from which paint dripped, like blood. “Interview,” which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photographs of toreros, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message. There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected places; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation. Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly. “So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.” Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who immigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a full-blooded Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste. For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing. He studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas in Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Gallery in California while stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, and it occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the GI Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her. Albers, a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg, was on the other hand recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.” “He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.” Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new media, which Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool. For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950, he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf. Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery. “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.” Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused. “We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.” Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, he began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. The artist thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,’’ he wrote to the critic. Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages like ‘“Monogram.’’ Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world. Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art. In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.’’ Living together in a succession of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960’s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones. Along with the combines, Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s ‘Inferno’,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secretive. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him combine images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas. Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing. His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963, he choreographed “Pelican,’’ in which he performed on roller skates wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination both with collaboration and with mixing art with technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster collaborations between artists and scientists. In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.’’ He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution. Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005. . When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was in Captiva, a slender island off Florida’s Gulf coast, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became Captiva’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village back in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island. “I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.” He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

How do you hold a conversation with someone who knows it all? .

Wooah! There's some screwball internet conectionion issues goin' on 'round here. Browser hangin' up. .

Did I post it twice? I did not know that. Sorry.

Bird-watcher Thinking about Charlie Parker, every day. by David Remnick May 19, 2008 Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of “Moose the Mooche” and “Swedish Schnapps.” For Schaap, Bird not only lives; he is the singular genius of mid-century American music, a dynamo of virtuosity, improvisation, harmony, velocity, and feeling, and no aspect of his brief career is beneath consideration. Schaap’s discursive monologues on a single home recording—say, “the Bob Redcross acetate” of Parker playing in the early nineteen-forties over the Benny Goodman Quartet’s 1937 hit “Avalon”—can go on for an entire program or more, blurring the line between exhaustive and exhausting. There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker, and sometimes there is no getting to the end of “Bird Flight.” The program is the anchor of WKCR’s daily schedule and begins at eight-twenty. It is supposed to conclude at nine-forty. In the many years that I’ve been listening, I’ve rarely heard it end precisely as scheduled. Generations of Columbia d.j.s whose programs followed Schaap’s have learned to stand clutching an album of the early Baroque or nineteenth-century Austrian yodelling and wait patiently for the final chorus of “I’ll Always Love You Just the Same.” Schaap’s unapologetic passion for a form of music half a century out of the mainstream is, at least for his listeners, a precious sign of the city’s vitality; here is one obstinate holdout against the encroaching homogeneity of Clear Channel and all the other culprits of American sameness. There is no exaggerating the relentlessness of Schaap’s approach. Not long ago, I listened to him play a recording of “Okiedoke,” a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker’s interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes’ duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title—of “Okiedoke.” Was it “okey-doke” or was it, rather, “ ‘okey-dokey,’ as it is sometimes articulated”? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a “great interest in this issue,” Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction “and a Bird associate,” had “stated that Parker used ‘okeydokey’ as an affirmative and ‘okeydoke’ as a negative.” And yet one of Parker’s ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used “okeydoke” and “okeydokey” interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a “rare recording of Bird’s voice,” in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: “Blow, dad, go!” Okeydoke, says Bird. Like an assassination buff looping the Zapruder film, Schaap repeated the snippet several times and then concluded that Charlie Parker did not use “okeydoke” as a negative. “This,” Schaap said solemnly, “tends to revise our understanding of the matter.” The matter was evidently unexhausted, however, as he launched a rumination on the cowboy origins of the phrase and the Hopalong Cassidy movies that Parker might well have seen, and perhaps it was at this point that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap’s behalf. At last, Schaap moved on to other issues of the Parker discography, which begins in 1940, with an unaccompanied home recording of “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Body and Soul,” and ends with two Cole Porter tunes, “Love for Sale” and “I Love Paris,” played three months before his death, in 1955. Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé. For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.” In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.” That’s one way of looking at the matter. Another is that Schaap puts his frenzied memory and his obsessive attention to the arcane in the service of something important: the struggle of memory against forgetting—not just the forgetting of a sublime music but forgetting in general. Schaap is always apologizing, acknowledging his long-windedness, his nudnik tendencies. “The examination may be tedium to you,” he said on the air recently as he ran through the days, between 1940 and 1944, when Parker might have overdubbed Goodman’s “Chinaboy” in Bob Redcross’s room at the Savoy Hotel in Chicago. (“His home was Room 305.”) Nevertheless, he said, “my bent here is that I want to know when it happened because I believe in listening to the music of a genius chronologically where possible, particularly an improvising artist.” The stringing together of facts is the Schaapian process, a monologuist’s way of painting a picture of “events of the past” happening “in real time.” “I just hope the concept speaks to some,” he said as his soliloquy unspooled. “It’s two before nine. I’m speaking to you at length. I’m Phil Schaap.” On a recent Sunday morning, I met Schaap at the WKCR studios, at Broadway and 114th Street. (The station is at 89.9 on the FM dial; it also streams live online at wkcr.org.) Schaap is tall and lumbering and has a thick shock of reddish hair. It was March 9th, Ornette Coleman’s seventy-eighth birthday. Schaap, his meaty arms loaded up with highlights and rarities in the Coleman discography, had come prepared for celebration. Nearly everything in his grasp was from his home collection. He does not consider collecting to be at the center of his life, but allowed that he does own five thousand 78s, ten thousand LPs, five thousand tapes, a few thousand hours of his own interviews with jazz musicians, “and, well, countless CDs.” Schaap, who was married once, and briefly, in the nineties, lives alone in Hollis, Queens, in the house where he grew up. He admits that his collection, and his living quarters, could use some straightening. “I’ve got to get things in order,” he said. “I’m determined to do it. This is the year. If I didn’t have a memory, I wouldn’t know where anything is.” The WKCR studios are a couple of blocks south of the main entrance to the Columbia campus, and they tend to look as though there’d been a post-exam party the previous night and someone tried, but not hard, to clean up. The carpets are unvacuumed, the garbage cans stuffed with pizza boxes and crushed cans. Taped to the wall are some long-forgotten schedules and posters of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. The visitor’s perch—a red Naugahyde armchair—was long ago dubbed the “Dizzy Gillespie chair,” after Gillespie, Parker’s closest collaborator, sat there for hours of conversation with Schaap. Usually, the only person around at WKCR is the student host on the air. Schaap is Class of ’73. He is fifty-seven. “Financially, I live, at best, like a twenty-five-year-old,” he said. He has been broadcasting on WKCR, pro bono, since he was a freshman. The Parker-Tiny Grimes collaboration “Romance Without Finance” could be the theme for his income-tax form. “Take a seat,” he said, plopping his records down near his microphone. “I gotta get busy.” Conversation with Schaap in the studio, especially when the program features the breakneck tunes of early jazz or swing music—the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet playing “The Sheik of Araby” followed by Benny Carter and His Orchestra on “Babalu”—does not allow for Schaapian reflection. “Deadlines every three minutes!” he’ll shout, throwing up his hands. “So many records!” When he’s working, Schaap concentrates hard, and not merely on his own solos. He takes pride in the art of the segue, paying particular attention to the “sizzling sonic decay” of a last cymbal stroke. (“You won’t hear that again in your lifetime!” he boasted after one particularly felicitous transition.) But with Ornette Coleman, an avatar of extended improvisation, Schaap had more time. The first number he broadcast was “Free Jazz,” Coleman’s 1960 breakthrough, played with two quartets; “Free Jazz” is the Action painting of American music and lasts thirty-seven minutes and three seconds. The sound started to build, the quartets began their dissonant duel. Schaap smiled off into the distance. “Eddie Blackwell’s right foot, man!” he said, then he remembered himself and turned the volume down. “So?” he said. When I asked Schaap about his childhood, he turned morose, saying, “I may have gotten all my blessings in life up front.” His parents, and nearly all his teachers and the scores of musicians he befriended from school age, were dead. “Everyone that raised me is gone.” Schaap was born to jazz. His mother, Marjorie, was a librarian, a classically trained pianist, and an insistent bohemian. At Radcliffe, she listened to Louis Armstrong records and smoked a corncob pipe. His father, Walter, was one of a group of jazz-obsessed Columbia undergraduates in the thirties who became professional critics and producers. In 1937, he went to France to study at the Sorbonne and work on an encyclopedia of the French Revolution. While he was there, he collaborated with the leading jazz critics of Paris, Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, on a bilingual edition of their pioneering magazine, Jazz Hot. He helped Django Reinhardt with his English and Dizzy Gillespie with his French. Back in New York, he earned his living making educational filmstrips, in partnership with the jazz photographer Walter P. Gottlieb. “They lived for music, and the rest was making a check,” Phil said. “Jazz was always playing in the house.” By the time he was five, Schaap could sing Lester Young’s tenor solo on the Count Basie standard “Taxi War Dance.” When he was six, his babysitter rewarded him for doing her geometry homework by taking him to Triboro Records, in Jamaica, to buy his first 45s: Ruth Brown’s “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and Ray Charles’s “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.” Phil soon started buying discarded jazz 78s by the pound. In his parents’ living room and then on his own pushy initiative, Schaap met many first-rank jazz musicians and came to consider them his “grandfathers.” Some, like the bassist Milt Hinton and the trumpet player Buck Clayton, lived around Hollis, which had become a bedroom community for musicians. Others came into his life, he said, “as if by magic.” “In August, 1956, I went to the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival with my mother, and we saw Billie Holliday, Dizzy Gillespie, and a lot of others,” he said. “At one point, we went backstage after the Basie band played. Remember, this is through the hazy recollections of a five-year-old, but I do recall someone trying to hit on my mother, and he asked her about Joe Williams, who was singing then for Basie. To brush the guy off, she said she preferred the earlier singer for the Basie band, Jimmy Rushing, and at that point another man, who turned out to be Basie’s drummer, Jo Jones, said, ‘Madame, I heard that—that was wonderful.’ The two of them got to talking, and Jo asked me if I knew who Prince Robinson was. I said that he was a tenor player for McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. I’d heard a Bluebird 78 that my father owned. Jo Jones was impressed. So he said, ‘Madame, you’ve got yourself a new babysitter.’ ” Jo Jones was arguably the greatest drummer of the swing era. When Jones was in New York, Walter Schaap would drop off his son at Jones’s apartment and Phil and “Papa Jo” watched cartoons and played records. Inevitably, other musicians came over and took an interest in the kid with the unusual immersion in jazz. “That was when Jo was living at 401 East Sixty-fourth Street,” Schaap said. “Later, he lived at 333 East Fifty-fourth Street and also at the Hotel Markwell, on Forty-ninth Street—lots of musicians lived there. He played a Basie record for me once in order to teach me about Herschel Evans, the great tenor player. It must have been ‘Blue and Sentimental.’ Jo called me ‘Mister.’ ‘Mister, what does that sound like to you?’ I blurted out, ‘It sounds friendly to me.’ And Jo said, ‘That’s right. The first thing to know is, Herschel Evans is your friend.’ ” In first grade, Schaap pestered his schoolmate Carole Eldridge (and, when that failed, her mother) until he got an introduction to her father, the trumpeter Roy Eldridge. When he was fourteen, he hitched a ride into Manhattan with Basie during the 1966 subway strike. “When I started hearing that Phil was going around meeting all the jazz greats at the age of six, I wondered if it was all fantasy,” his father told the Times not long before he died, two years ago. The family became accustomed to their son’s range of friendships. Phil once brought home the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who was known for his ability to play three horns at once and for his heroic capacities at the dinner table. Schaap challenged Kirk to an eating contest. The event came to a halt when they had eaten, in Schaap’s recollection, “one mince pie each baked by Herbie Hall’s wife. You know Herbie? A major clarinet player.” Schaap’s memory was almost immediately evident. He claims that at the age of two he recited the names of the American Presidents, in order, “while standing on a rocking chair.” He was the kind of kid who knew the names and numbers of all the New York Rangers of the nineteen-sixties and, whether you liked it or not, recited them. He was the kind of kid, too, who wrote to the manager of the Baltimore Orioles to give him advice backed up by statistical evidence. He routinely beat all comers, including his older cousin the late sportswriter Dick Schaap, in the board game Concentration. At school, this was not a quality universally admired. “I guess some kids may have found it annoying,” he allows. But musicians were generally fascinated by young Schaap. Count Basie was one of many who discovered that Schaap knew the facts of his life almost better than he did. “I think that kind of freaked Basie out,” Schaap said. “I’d talk to him about a record date he did in the thirties, and he looked at me, like, ‘Who . . . is . . . this . . . child?’ ” By the time Schaap was established on the radio, nearly every musician who passed through New York was aware of his mental tape recorder. Twenty-five years ago, the bandleader, pianist, and self-styled space cadet Herman (Sonny) Poole Blount, better known as Sun Ra, swept by a night club and, before having to give a speech at Harvard, “kidnapped” Schaap. Sun Ra claimed that as a young man he had been “transmolecularized” to Saturn, and thereafter he expounded a cosmic philosophy influenced by ancient Egyptian cosmology, Afro-American folklore, and Madame Blavatsky. In order to prepare for his audience in Cambridge, Sun Ra insisted that Schaap fill him in on the details of his existence on Earth. Schaap obliged, telling Sun Ra that, according to his musicians’ union forms, he was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914. “I could tell him things like what 78s by Fletcher Henderson he was listening to in the thirties and about his time playing piano for the Henderson Orchestra later on,” Schaap said. “He was vague about it all, but what I said made sense to him. I also knew that his favorite flavor of ice cream was the Bananas ’n Strawberry at Baskin-Robbins. It was a hot summer night, so I went up the block and bought him a quart, and we ate sitting in the car.” The urge to preserve, to collect, to keep time at bay, to hold on to the past is a common one. In this Schaap is kin to Henri Langlois, who tried to find and preserve every known film for the French Cinémathèque, kin to the classical-music fanatics who drift through thrift shops looking for rereleases of Mengelberg and Furtwängler acetates, kin even to Felix Mendelssohn, who helped revive the music of Bach for Germans. He is one with all the bibliophiles, cinephiles, audiophiles, oenophiles, butterfly hunters, fern and flower pressers, stamp and coin collectors, concert tapers, and opera buffs who put an obsession at the center of their lives. “There is no person in America more dedicated to any art form than Phil is to jazz,” his friend Stanley Crouch, who is writing a biography of Charlie Parker, said. “He is the Mr. Memory of jazz, and, as with the Mr. Memory character in ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps,’ the Hitchcock movie, there are those who think he ought to be shot. He can get on your nerves, but, then, you can get on his.” The day after Ornette Coleman’s birthday was the birthday—the hundred and fifth—of the cornet player Bix Beiderbecke, and Schaap returned to the studios for another marathon of close attention. Along with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, Beiderbecke was a pioneer of jazz as it moved from the all-in polyphony of the earliest bands to a form of ensemble playing that allowed for solo improvisation. The broadcast was a strange time-tunnel transition, from Ornette’s self-invented “harmolodic” experiments to Bix’s short solo flights on “Goose Pimples” and “Three Blind Mice,” but Schaap’s taste is broad. As he queued up his records, he said to me, “I remember March 10, 1985. I did 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. It was some birthday for Bix.” Schaap was unshaved, sleepy, complaining, as usual, of overwork. He felt as if he, too, were a hundred and five. Schaap is perpetually weary. He works hard: there are the radio shows, the classes he’s teaching now at Juilliard and at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and various producing projects. But it’s not the work, exactly. Schaap carries with him a burden of loss and a disinterest in the contemporary world. He is theatrically, adamantly, old: “I haven’t seen more than six movies since 1972. Three baseball games, maybe five. I think the last novel I read was ‘Invisible Man,’ when I was at Columbia. I haven’t seen any television after the first husband in ‘Bewitched.’ ” He never bothered to see “Bird,” Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker bio-pic. He does not own an iPod. And unless you have a spare afternoon it is best not to ask him what he thinks of digital downloads. Before long, he was off on a Schaapian riff sparked by the playing of “Wringin’ an’ Twistin’,” recorded, as Schaap said, “eighty-one years ago by OKeh records with Frankie Trumbauer on C-melody saxophone and Eddie Lang on guitar.” Eventually, through the surface scratches, one could hear a voice say, “Yeah, that’s it!” Schaap assured his listeners that there was “no doubt of the voice’s identity.” It was Trumbauer. But that was not enough to cool his curiosity. “Someone is also humming the passage,” he went on. “Is it Eddie Lang or is it Trumbauer? I wonder about it. It’s a test cut on the metal part before the passage begins. And then there’s another voice that you can hear say, ‘Yeah.’ That ‘yeah’ is not Eddie Lang. It could be unidentified. Or it could be Bix’s voice.” Schaap played the sequence again. Yeah. And again. Yeah. One more time. Yeah. Meanwhile, the earth warmed imperceptibly; glaciers plunged into the sea. Yeah. “There,” Schaap said. “There! That’s it! September 17, 1927. Not that it’s the most important thing that ever happened to you. But, still. I’d like to know, if possible, what Bix’s speaking voice was like.” These questions were of no less moment to Schaap than the Confederate maneuvers at Shiloh were to Shelby Foote. Such is the flypaper of his mind and the didactic turn of his personality. When, finally, Schaap played another Beiderbecke record—a twenty-minute string of tunes, to be fair—I asked him what possible interest he could have in the provenance of the ghostly “yeah”s of yesteryear. “What can I say? I make no apologies. I’m interested,” he said. “Did Bix have a Southern accent? A German accent? A Midwestern accent? Did he sound shy or did he speak with authority? I really do think it’s him, that it’s Bix who says, ‘Yeah.’ ” Schaap paused and listened to a passage in “Goose Pimples.” “O.K.,” he said, “it may not be a great mystery. But it’s a mystery, all the same. I do these things that are a turnoff, but it’s my dime. I try very hard to make sure that everyone gets something out of all this. I guess for the first twenty years I was on the radio I was concerned about telling you absolutely everything about every tune. Then, in the nineties, I started concentrating on small issues, one at a time. Like that ‘Okiedoke’ thing. These days, I’m going for a little balance.” As a broadcaster, Schaap is unpoetic. He does not have the evocative middle-of-the-night gifts of a radio forebear like Jean Shepherd. Or take Jonathan Schwartz, whose specialty for both XM satellite radio and WNYC, in New York, is American singers. Schwartz is as obsessed with Frank Sinatra as Schaap is with Parker, but Schwartz, a brilliant storyteller with a café-society voice as smooth as hot buttered rum, conjures Sinatra’s world: the stage of the Paramount, the bar at Jilly Rizzo’s. Schaap is an empiricist, an old-fashioned historicist. Facts are what he has. His capacity to evoke Charlie Parker’s world—Kansas City in the Pendergast era; the Savoy Ballroom scene uptown; Minton’s, the Three Deuces, and Birdland; Bird’s dissolution and early death—is limited to the accumulation of dates, bare anecdotes, obscure names. The emotional side of his broadcasts comes from his relationships with the musicians. His mental life can be spooky even to him. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think I know more about what Dizzy Gillespie was thinking in 1945 than I do what I was thinking in 1967 or last week.” The precocious obsessive is a familiar high-school type, particularly among boys, but the object of Schaap’s obsession was a peculiar one among his classmates. “The lonely days were adolescence,” he admitted. “My peer group thought I was out of my mind. But, even then, kids knew basic things about jazz. Teddy Goldstein knew ‘Take the A Train.’ But he kept telling me, ‘Don’t you know what the Beatles are doing? Your world is doomed!’ ” When he was in his teens, Schaap played the trumpet. He took theory classes at Columbia. “I even got a lesson in high notes from Roy Eldridge,” he said. But his playing, especially his intonation, was mediocre. “I put my trumpet in its case and that was it,” he said. “March 11, 1974.” Schaap learned to serve the music anyway. In the wake of the Columbia campus strikes in 1968, a group of students set out to get rid of WKCR’s “classroom of the air” gentility. “All of us were listening to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, but we knew that all of that stuff was available elsewhere,” Schaap told me over a burger near Lincoln Center. “Jimi Hendrix didn’t need WKCR.” And so the station began broadcasting jazz, including multi-day festivals on Albert Ayler (1970), John Coltrane (1971), Charles Mingus (1972), Archie Shepp (1972), and Charlie Parker (1973). During the 1973 Parker festival, Schaap did two forty-eight-hour work shifts, splitting his time between WKCR and his paying job, at the university’s identification-card office. “On Friday, August 31, 1973, I had to get to the I.D.-card office,” he recalled. “The last record I played was ‘Scrapple from the Apple.’ Recorded November 4, 1947. The C take. On Dial. But I think I played the English Spotlite label. Anyway, I entered the back stairwell and the record was still playing in my head”—Schaap interrupted himself to hum Parker’s solo—“and then I was out on a Hundred and Fourteenth Street and I could hear it playing from the buildings, from the open windows. That was a turning point in the station’s history. The insight was that Charlie Parker was at least tolerable to all people who liked jazz. If you idolized King Oliver, you could tolerate Charlie Parker, and if you think jazz begins with John Coltrane playing ‘Ascension’ you can still listen to Bird, too.” Musicians were beginning to tune in. During a Thelonious Monk festival, one of the d.j.s went on about how Monk created art out of “wrong notes.” Monk, who rarely spoke to anyone, much less a college student, called the station and, on the air, declared, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” In 1979, Schaap was at the center of a Miles Davis festival at a time when Davis was a near-recluse living off Riverside Drive. Davis started calling the station, dozens and dozens of calls—“mad, foul, strange calls,” Schaap recalled. Davis’s inimitable voice, low and sandpapery, was unnerving for Schaap. But then one day—“Friday, July 6, 1979”—his tone changed, and for nearly three hours the two men went over the details of “Agharta,” one of his later albums. Finally, after Schaap had clarified every spelling, every detail, Davis said, “You got it? Good. Now forget it. Play ‘Sketches of Spain’! Right now!” Just after starting as a d.j., Schaap began organizing musical programs, mainly at the West End, on Broadway at 113th Street. He managed the Countsmen—former sidemen for Count Basie—along with other groups made up of refugees from other big bands, and got them work. Older musicians, such as Jo Jones, Sonny Greer, Sammy Price, Russell Procope, and Earle Warren, who had known Schaap as an eccentric teen-ager now welcomed him as a meal ticket. “When I was a child, I lived under the illusion that these performers, who put on such an excellent front, dressed to the nines and acting like kings, made real money,” Schaap said. He lost that innocence about forty years ago, when he happened to glance at a check made out to Benny Morton, a trombonist who had been with the Fletcher Henderson and Basie bands. “It was for fifty-eight dollars, and it was for a gig at Carnegie Hall,” Schaap recalled. Jazz reached its commercial peak in the mid-nineteen-forties, but by 1950 the ballrooms had closed down. The postwar middle class no longer went out dancing; they were watching television and listening to records at home. The clubs on Fifty-second Street—the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Three Deuces—disappeared. Eventually, rock and roll displaced jazz as America’s popular music. World-class musicians were scrounging for work. Performers who had enjoyed steady employment took second jobs as messengers on Wall Street, bus drivers, and bank guards. For comradeship, they were hanging out at the Chock Full o’ Nuts at Fiftieth and Broadway and at a few bars around town. “Phil took these guys out of the Chock Full o’ Nuts and put them on the stage of the West End,” Loren Schoenberg, the executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, told me. “So for the young people who idolized them, and guys who’d never heard of them, Phil brought them to us.” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, an early rhythm-and-blues star, used to call Phil Schaap’s mother at home and beg her to get her son to do for him what he’d done for the horn players of the Basie band. As “Bird Flight” became a fixture of the jazz world, Schaap began to get jobs teaching, but, even with the rise of academic jazz programs, no one has offered him a professorship. Some of his students—including Ben Ratliff, who is now the main jazz critic for the Times, and Jerome Jennings, a drummer for, among others, Sonny Rollins—swear by Schaap as a teacher, but some complain that his displays of memory can be tiresome and aimed at underscoring his students’ cluelessness. This spring, I took Schaap’s Charlie Parker course at Swing University, the educational wing of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and could see both sides. In four two-hour evening sessions, he provided an incisive, moving narrative of Parker’s incandescent career, but he could also be oppressive, not least with his pointless occasional class “surveys.” “Who knows ‘Yardbird Suite’?” he’d ask. Then, moving from desk to desk, he’d poll the students, embarrassing those honest enough to confess their ignorance. As a teacher, Schaap is less concerned about the tender sensibilities of his students than with developing knowledgeable and passionate listeners. “The school system is creating six thousand unemployable musicians a year—from the Berklee College of Music, Rutgers, Mannes, Manhattan, Juilliard, plus all the high schools,” he said. “There are more and more musicians, and no gigs, no one to listen. So what happens to these kids? They work their way back to the educational system and help create more unemployable musicians. My rant is this: I’m not trying to teach you to play the alto sax. No. I’m trying to get you to learn how to listen to Charlie Parker. Louis Armstrong is the greatest musician of the twentieth century. But name twenty musicians today who really listen to Louis Armstrong. Go ahead: I’ll give you a week.” There are many excellent young (and youngish) jazz musicians around, including the pianist Jason Moran and the sax player Joshua Redman, to say nothing of the extended family of players around Wynton Marsalis. In February, Herbie Hancock won an Album of the Year Grammy for his arrangements of Joni Mitchell songs. But, generally, a hit album in jazz means sales of ten thousand. Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and a few other giants of an earlier time still roam the earth, but even they cannot reliably sell out a major hall. Coleman’s concert at Town Hall in March was as thrilling a musical event as has taken place this year in New York. The theatre was at least a quarter empty. “In the fall of 1976, when Woody Herman was rehearsing for a forty-year-anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, I was invited to watch,” Schaap told me. “A saxophonist wasn’t paying attention, and at one point Woody Herman crept up on him, put his face next to the musician’s, and said, ‘Son, what do you want to be?’ And the guy said, ‘I want to be the next Stan Getz.’ And Woody Herman said, ‘Son, there’s not gonna be another Stan Getz!’ In other words, people like Stan Getz and Woody Herman were pop stars! That’s not going to happen again.” In the spring of 1947, around the same time that Charlie Parker was playing the Hi-De-Ho club, in Los Angeles, a young Bedouin herding goats along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea discovered several tall clay jars that contained manuscripts written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. Wrapped in linen, the manuscripts were part of a much larger cache of ancient texts, which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. “For decades, there were rumors that jazz had its own Dead Sea Scrolls,” Schaap told me more than once. “One was a cylinder recording of Buddy Bolden”—the New Orleans cornettist and early jazz pioneer who was committed to a mental institution before the rise of 78s. “But this will probably never be found. The second, of course, is called ‘the Benedetti recordings.’ ” All of Schaap’s listeners have grown accustomed to his close attention to the “crucial” obscurities of the Parker discography: “the unaccompanied 1940 alto recording in Kansas City,” “the paper disk of ‘Cherokee,’ ” “the Wichita transcriptions,” and “the little-known Clyde Bernhardt glass-based acetate demo disks.” These recordings can be revelatory, but they also try the patience. Recently on “Bird Flight,” Schaap showcased a home recording of Parker in February, 1943—important because he was playing tenor saxophone, not his customary alto—and the sound was so bad that you couldn’t quite tell if you were hearing “Sweet Georgia Brown” or radio waves from the surface of the planet Uranus. The Benedetti recordings, however, occupy a privileged place not only in Schaap’s mental Bird cage but also in musical history. And Schaap helped bring them out of their urns. For decades, stories circulated in the jazz world that Dean Benedetti, a saxophonist of modest distinction, upon hearing Parker play in the mid-forties, threw his own horn into the sea and pledged himself to follow Parker everywhere he went, recording his hero’s performances. Benedetti was said to have obtained, through Army connections, a Nazi-era German wire recorder, and he carried out his mission at clubs, concert halls, and private apartments all over the world. In the meantime, he was rumored to be a drug dealer who supplied Bird, a longtime addict, with heroin. Many of the legends of Benedetti’s devotions came from “Bird Lives!,” an entertaining but iffy biography published in 1973 by a Los Angeles-based record producer, Ross Russell. Through the decades, no recordings surfaced. Ornithologists could not help but wonder: Had they been lost? Had they sunk, as rumored, along with a freighter in the Atlantic? Eventually, only the most committed, with their collections of 78s and back issues of Down Beat, spoke much of the matter. Like “the Bolden cylinder,” the Benedetti recordings seemed to have taken their eternal rest in the watery grave of jazz legend. But then, in 1988, Benedetti’s surviving brother, Rigoletto (Rick), got in touch with Mosaic, a small jazz outfit in Stamford, Connecticut, that specializes in reissues from the vaults of the major labels. It was true, Rick Benedetti informed the owner, Michael Cuscuna: there really were recordings. Was Mosaic interested? “The real backstory was incredible,” Cuscuna told me. On July 29, 1946, Parker was in desperate shape: depressed, drinking, strung out, broke, and lonely in Los Angeles, he had struggled through an afternoon recording session with the trumpeter Howard McGhee. His recording that day of “Lover Man” was a technical mess—Parker was barely able to make it through the song—but it is a painful howl, as devastating to hear as Billie Holiday’s last sessions. That night, at the Civic Hotel, Parker twice wandered into the lobby naked. Later on, he fell asleep while smoking, setting his mattress on fire. The police arrested him and a judge had him committed to the Camarillo State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. When he was released, six months later, he was off heroin for the first time since he was a teen-ager in Kansas City. His musician friends threw a jam-session party for him on February 1, 1947, at the home of a trumpet player named Chuck Copely. One of the guests was a handsome young man—pencil mustache, dark eyes, hipster clothes—named Dean Benedetti. Benedetti went out and bought a Wells-Gardner 78-r.p.m. portable disk-cutter at Sears, Roebuck and, in March, recorded Parker playing with Howard McGhee’s band at the Hi-De-Ho. (The historical bonus here is that Parker plays tunes from McGhee’s repertory, and so we hear him soloing, for the first and last time, on Gus Arnheim’s “Sweet and Lovely” and Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “September in the Rain.”) Later that year, in New York, Parker was back on drugs but still at the height of his musical powers. He formed what is now considered his “golden-era” quintet: Parker on alto sax, the twenty-one-year-old Miles Davis on trumpet, Max Roach on drums, Duke Jordan on piano, and Tommy Potter on bass. Benedetti recorded the quintet on March 31, 1948, at the Three Deuces, on Fifty-second Street, Parker’s primary base of operations. By this time, Benedetti was using heroin and had no means of support; when the management realized that he didn’t plan to spend any money, it provided him with what Schaap would call “the ultimate New York discourtesy”—it threw him out. In Schaap’s terms, it is a “tragedy” that Benedetti was unable to record the rest of Parker’s nights at the Three Deuces. And it is true that, of all the Benedetti recordings, these are the most significant. On “Dizzy Atmosphere,” Parker plays with dangerous abandon, a runaway truck speeding down the highway into oncoming traffic, never crashing; and even the twenty-six-second passage from the ballad “My Old Flame” is memorable, a glimpse of human longing in sound. Finally, in July, 1948, Benedetti recorded the Parker quintet for six nights at the Onyx, a rival club on Fifty-second Street. The sound from the Onyx sessions is the worst of all, mainly because Benedetti was forced by the club’s management to place his microphone near Max Roach’s drum kit. The effect is often like trying to hear a lullaby in a thunderstorm. The recordings are not for casual listeners. Disks and tape were expensive commodities, and to save money Benedetti usually turned on the machine only when Parker was soloing. Many recordings are no more than a minute long. One morsel lasts precisely three seconds. There are no fewer than nineteen versions of “52nd St. Theme.” But to the aficionado this is like complaining that the Dead Sea Scrolls were torn and discolored. One hears Parker on Coleman Hawkins tunes like “Bean Soup” and quoting everything from “In a Country Garden” to a bit from H. Klosé’s “25 Daily Exercises for Saxophone.” Cuscuna said that, faced with stacks of cracking forty-year-old tapes and ten-inch acetate disks, he realized that “only Phil Schaap was brilliant enough—and insane enough—to do the job.” Schaap took the materials to the apartment where he was living at the time—a record-and-disk-strewn place in Chelsea—and “just stared” at them for “many, many hours.” He felt an enormous sense of responsibility. “This increased the volume of live improvisations of a great artist by a third,” he told me one morning after signing off from “Bird Flight.” “Imagine if someone were to find a third more Bach, a third more Shakespeare plays, a third more prime Picasso.” When Schaap first tried to play a tape, it snapped. He tried hand-spinning the tape. It broke again. He realized that the tapes were backed with paper, not plastic. The paper had dried out, making the tape extremely fragile. The solution, Schaap decided, was to secure the most delicate spots with Wite-Out. And so he went through every inch of the Benedetti tapes—all eight miles—and did the job, the tape in his left hand, a tiny Wite-Out brush in his right. “I guess the only thing I’ve ever done in jazz that was harder was when we did an eleven-day Louis Armstrong festival on WKCR, in July, 1980,” he said. Schaap worked for more than two years on the Benedetti project. He and Cuscuna once figured out his remuneration. “I think it was approximately .0003 cents an hour,” Schaap said. “But who’s complaining?” Mosaic has so far sold five thousand copies of “The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker.” “That’s triple platinum for us,” Cuscuna said. For Schaap, the fascinations and mysteries of the discography are unending, even though Parker’s career lasted less than fifteen years. Parker died on March 12, 1955, at the Stanhope Hotel, while watching jugglers on Tommy Dorsey’s television variety show. A doctor who examined the body estimated that Parker was in his mid-fifties. He was thirty-four. On Easter Sunday, I met Schaap in the lobby of the Kateri Residence, a nursing home on Riverside Drive. He was there to visit one of the last of “the grandfathers who helped raise him.” We went to the twelfth floor and headed for a small room at the end of the hall. From the doorway, we could see a round old man slumped in a wheelchair, sleeping, a woollen scarf over his shoulders and a blanket on his lap. It was Lawrence Lucie. “I met Larry fifty-one years ago,” Schaap said. He was six. Lucie played guitar for almost anyone worth playing for: from Jelly Roll Morton to Joe Turner. He played in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, Lucky Millinder, Duke Ellington, and Benny Carter. When Coleman Hawkins recorded “Body and Soul,” Lucie was in the band. Lucie not only played with Louis Armstrong; he was the best man at Armstrong’s wedding. He is the last person alive to have played with Ellington at the Cotton Club. Lucie’s father was a barber in Emporia, Virginia; he was also a musician, and Lawrence joined his father’s band as a banjo player when he was eight. Now he is a hundred years old. No one alive is as intimately connected to the origins of jazz music as Lucie. His last gig, which he quit only a couple of years ago, was playing standards at Arturo’s, a coal-oven-pizza joint on Houston Street in the Village. “Larry, it’s me, Phil.” Schaap gently shook the old man’s shoulder. Lucie opened his eyes and, very slowly, looked up at his visitor. As he brought Schaap into focus, he smiled and his eyes brightened. “Phil! How nice!” Not many people are still around to visit. A grandnephew is the closest relative that Schaap knows of, and he lives in California. Schaap and Lucie were clearly thrilled to see each other. Nearly all of Schaap’s jazz grandfathers—Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, Buck Clayton, Doc Cheatham, Max Roach—are gone. Lucie had not lost his elegance. Although he had no reason to expect a visit, he was wearing a tie, a smart silk one with an abstract blue-and-red pattern. On the other side of his bed was a guitar in a battered case and, above it, a poster of the Lucy Luciennaires, a quartet that featured his wife, the singer Nora Lee King, who died eleven years ago. In the seventies and eighties, Lucie and King used to perform weekly on a Manhattan public-access cable channel. Lucie, who celebrated his centennial in December, was glad to hear Schaap talk about his days with Fletcher Henderson. And when Schaap asked him if he remembered the name of the song that Benny Carter opened with at the Apollo seventy-four years ago, Lucie said, “I know, Phil, but do you?” “Sure, it was ‘I May Be Wrong (But I Think You’re Wonderful).’ ” “That’s right.” Both men laughed. “And you played the first notes,” Schaap said. Indeed, they were the first notes played in the Apollo when, in 1934, the theatre opened under that name and began admitting African-American audiences. Schaap wheeled Lucie to the elevator and up to a solarium on the penthouse floor, where they could look out over the Hudson River and reminisce, a conversation that was more a matter of Schaap recalling highlights of Lucie’s career and Lucie saying, over and over, “Phil Schaap knows me better than I know me. Phil Schaap knows his jazz.” Finally, Lucie asked to go down to the fifteenth floor, where a volunteer was playing piano and singing show tunes. “You coax the blues right out of my heart.” Arrayed in front of the piano were fifty or sixty residents, some of them nearly as old as Lucie and many a great deal less healthy. A nurse passed out Easter cookies. Lawrence Lucie had heard better music in his time, but he was happy to stay and listen. “There’s always something going on here,” he said dryly. “The action never stops.” Schaap bent over and told his friend that he was off. “What a delight,” Lucie said. “It’s always so good to see you.” “I’ll be back soon,” Schaap said. “You know I will.”

Rite of Spring A celebration of Igor Stravinsky. by Alex Ross May 19, 2008 The festival provided an intimate encounter with a cool, circumspect composer. Miller Theatre’s Stravinsky Festival, a five-concert tribute to the undefeated champion of musical modernism, began with a witty and touching conceit that captured the composer’s impish spirit. At first glance, the opening concert, which took place at the Morgan Library, seemed to be an odd mélange of Stravinsky, early, middle, and late. Members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE, gave fired-up performances under the rhythmically vibrant baton of Jayce Ogren, but the sequence felt disconcertingly random, as if Stravinsky’s collected works were playing on Shuffle. First, the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto, from 1937-38; then the “Eight Instrumental Miniatures,” completed in Los Angeles in 1962; and the Concertino, “Ragtime,” and the Octet, all from the period 1917-23. Soon, though, I noticed that the number of music stands was diminishing, from fifteen to twelve to eleven to eight, and the organizing principle became clear. The concert might have been titled “And Then There Were None,” after the Agatha Christie novel, in which country-house guests are killed off one by one. Following intermission came the Septet; the Pastorale for violin and four winds; the Three Pieces for String Quartet; and various trios, duos, and solos. The last few items were heard without a break: two trumpet players positioned above the stage performed “Fanfare for a New Theatre” before handing off to two bassoonists at the back of the hall, who offered up the “Lied Ohne Name” and yielded to Joshua Rubin, who ambled in to render the Three Pieces for clarinet. By the end, only a piano remained. A stagehand placed music on the desk, and the piano, with the aid of Disklavier technology, executed the Étude for pianola, from 1917. In the mind’s eye, Stravinsky got up to take a bow. The first great virtue of the Miller festival, which, in a Stravinskyish journey of exile, abandoned its parent venue and unfolded variously at the Morgan, St.Bartholomew’s Church, and the Park Avenue Armory, was that it steered clear of the hits. Stravinsky hardly suffers from neglect—he ranked ninth on the League of American Orchestras’ most recent list of frequently performed composers—but his early ballet scores are the main engine of his popularity; much of his vast catalogue languishes unheard. After the opening cavalcade of rarities, ICE returned to participate in a program of Stravinsky’s songs, ranging from “Storm Cloud,” of 1902, to “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” of 1966. Two subsequent programs, in the chapel at St. Bartholomew’s, surveyed works for one and two pianos and for violin and piano. And, in the central offering, George Steel, the Miller’s director, conducted the Vox Vocal Ensemble and the Gotham City Orchestra in a mostly sacred program: the Mass, “Requiem Canticles,” the Variations, and “Symphony of Psalms.” The “Canticles,” Stravinsky’s hard-edged, tenderhearted farewell, has long been counted among his greatest achievements, and yet, by my count, New Yorkers have heard it only about once a decade. The festival’s second virtue was to free Stravinsky from the tyranny of style—the master narrative of his progression through various twentieth-century techniques, from late Romanticism to dissonant folklorism and on to musical surrealism, neoclassicism, grand opera, and twelve-tone writing. Seen from that angle, the composer resembles a canny cabinet minister in an unstable banana republic who maintains his position through successive Communist, fascist, and democratic regimes. Yet Stravinsky was also a painstaking artisan, whose fastidiousness often undermined his popular appeal. If fame had been his ultimate goal, he would hardly have spent so much time devising quirky confections for impractical combinations of instruments. The Miller festival, by jettisoning chronology in favor of formal groupings (chamber works, songs, and so on), provided an unusually intimate encounter with a man who habitually presented a cool, circumspect profile to the world. Most listeners, myself included, first encountered this repertory on recordings. Our view of Stravinsky has long been refracted through an electronic prism, in the form of the comprehensive survey of his work that appeared on Columbia Records in the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties. Funded in part with proceeds from the original-cast recording of “My Fair Lady,” the Stravinsky Edition remains a staggering achievement, yet it has its limitations; at times, you sense the musicians picking their way cautiously across what was then treacherous rhythmic terrain. Even the best recordings fail to capture the full physicality of this composer’s sound—the airy resonance of his soft harmonies, the sucker punch of his nastier chords, the non-stop tremor of his rhythms. Looking around at the audience during the Miller festival, I noticed how many listeners were bopping gently in their seats. Meanwhile, the best of today’s younger performers, more than a few of whom fill the ranks of ICE, find no difficulties in this music; whether they have studied Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” by day or danced to hip-hop by night, they are inheritors of Stravinsky’s rhythmic DNA. In all, the composer emerged as a less brittle, detached figure—more visceral, more emotionally revealing. In a famous aphorism—“I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything”—Stravinsky renounced emotionalism in art. But he said such things to discourage Romantic excess, not to call forth bloodless interpretations. The ideal Stravinsky performance is one in which emotion steals in unannounced. Exactly this happened in the Octet, when the players of ICE arrived at the sweet little dominant-seventh chord that lingers at the end of the introduction to the first movement; it was a shiver of eighteenth-century sentiment amid nineteen-twenties bustle. There was a similarly heart-catching moment toward the end of the Concerto for Piano and Winds, which Stephen Gosling and Eric Huebner, two formidable young pianists, played in its rarely heard two-piano reduction. In a finale otherwise given over to sardonic-sounding ersatz anthems, subdued dissonances open a door into some secret zone of wistfulness and regret. The trick in executing such passages is to keep the tempo steady and the tone pristine—as in those passages in Proust where the narrator threatens to collapse in an anguish of nostalgia before resuming his dry recitation of the guest list for one of Mme. Verdurin’s salons. The concert of religious masterpieces—works in which Stravinsky came closest to opening his heart—took place in the monumental Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory. This space hosted monster classical concerts back in the eighteen-eighties and nineties, but it mostly served other uses for much of the twentieth century. New management has made the hall available for performance once again; the Lincoln Center Festival will stage Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s gargantuan antiwar opera “Die Soldaten” there in July, and New York City Opera plans to use the site for a production of Messiaen’s “St. Francis” in 2009. The Drill Hall has the acoustics of a great cathedral, in both a good and a bad sense. Sounds reverberate for about five seconds; fast music tends to devolve into a blur; bass easily overpowers treble. Conductors will have to work hard on balances and keep their beat diagrammatically clear. The acoustics nearly drowned the Variations, an elaborate serialist piece that periodically breaks down into twelve rhythmically independent parts. But in the most intricately layered section of “Requiem Canticles”—the section in which vocal soloists chant the Libera Me while the rest of the chorus mutters the text at greater speed—the murkiness evoked the chaos of Judgment Day. And the epilogue of “Symphony of Psalms,” which Steel took at a daringly slow tempo, dissolved into a dream landscape, with brass chords ringing endlessly and timpani notes booming forth like low bells. Stravinsky wrote the work for the secular temple of Boston’s Symphony Hall, but it has the architecture and the atmosphere of a churchly space. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, about five minutes before the concert began, the motorcade of Pope Benedict XVI passed by on the street outside.

That was pretty much my reaction. I'm an old Crumb fan...33 years, I guess.

Recalling Miles Davis by Crossing Cultures

other discussion .

May 12, 2008 Music Review | 'Miles From India' Recalling Miles Davis by Crossing Cultures By NATE CHINEN, NY Times From left, Pete Cosey, Wallace Roney and Badal Roy were among the dozen or so players in a tribute to Miles Davis. During the second half of “Miles From India,” a boldly expansive concert at Town Hall on Friday night, the percussionist Badal Roy ventured a tabla solo, the sort of heroic exhibition that can end only in generous applause. He was annotating a composition called “Ife,” which he originally recorded with the trumpeter Miles Davis in 1972. Mr. Roy was the linchpin but not always the focal point of “Miles From India,” which generally featured about a dozen other musicians onstage. The concert grew out of an ambitious new double album of the same name on Times Square Records, conceived as a cross-cultural experiment by the producer Bob Belden. On the album assorted Miles Davis alumni appear along with acclaimed Indian musicians — Mr. Roy hails from both camps of course — to play music spanning several periods of Davis’s chameleonic career. It’s not such a stretch to seek affinities between Miles and India: as one of the chief proponents of modal improvisation in jazz, he occasionally reached in that direction himself. And a handful of his former sidemen, notably the guitarist John McLaughlin, went on to explore Indian music more deeply and directly. Mr. McLaughlin contributed the title track and lone original on “Miles From India,” but he wasn’t on the bill Friday. Not that there was much occasion to miss him. The concert, organized by Mr. Belden and the Indian jazz pianist Louiz Banks, heeded the same ethos of crowded collaboration that guided Davis during his first fusion epoch, in the late 1960s and early to mid-’70s. There were organizing principles to the program (a set list, even) but the prevailing spirit was free form, seemingly open to chance. On “Spanish Key,” which opened the second half, that method paid off handsomely. The trumpeter Wallace Roney, a leading disciple of the Davis sound and style, played with exacting purpose and unrepressed enthusiasm, carving up the song. And the melody, with its upward-tumbling arpeggio, suited the vocalist Shounak Abhisheki perfectly. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” another track from the post-Woodstock album “Bitches Brew,” played to the strengths of both Mr. Roney and the guitarist Pete Cosey, who soloed in serpentine tandem. (It also provoked plaintive commentary from the violinist Kala Ramnath, who held her instrument in the Carnatic style, with its neck sloping to the floor.) Just as potent was “It’s About That Time,” which felt right from the moment the bassist Benny Rietveld began the song’s signature vamp. At its peak the tune had Lenny White flailing at his drums as the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa sparred with Adam Holzman, on Fender Rhodes piano. Whatever fusion this implied, it was effective. The concert’s first half was less so, despite the stalwart contributions of the bassist Ron Carter and, on one song, the pianist Vijay Iyer. With a set drawn strictly from the album “Kind of Blue,” which uses modal concepts but predates “Bitches Brew” by a crucially important decade, the musicians had to work a lot harder at translation. It never quite came together, though their effort was worth hearing.