GA Russell

Chris, I'm not being heartless. My heart goes out to the poor without a means to escape who had to suffer those days in the heat without food or water, and without the knowledge of when help would arrive. My point is that New Orleanians are not like other people. They truly chose to make a bad bet. They chose to live in harm's way, unprepared. Maybe it's something that a New Yorker like yourself couldn't understand. Maybe you can't imagine that anyone would live like that, could be that foolish. By the way, I am referring to all the people of New Orleans, not just the poor whom we've seen on TV this past week. I just got off the phone with my best friend from high school, who has lived for the past thirty-three years in Ohio. He's more jaded than I am about it all. The incompetence from top to bottom in that city. New Orleanians are not victims of circumstance. They are not victims of an unforseeable disaster. They chose to live there, like I chose to leave. They didn't care that they were running a terrible risk, and now many of them from my old neighborhood have lost everything.

Glad to see Irma Thomas's name on the list. She had been reported as missing.

Ghost and Berrigan, thanks for posting those articles. They both ring true. Everyone in New Orleans, including the poor, understood that hurricanes and the flooding they cause are an annual threat to their homes, their incomes and their way of life including their life itself. As much as I think that the govt at all levels has done an unsatisfactory job, I believe that the ultimate blame should be borne by the people called the victims. They gambled with their eyes wide open, and they lost. Having left New Orleans for good 34 years ago, I have affection and concern for the people who stayed, but not a lot of sympathy for those who chose good times or familiar surroundings over their own safety and the safety of their loved ones.

Congratulations guys! I thought Tower had only one copy to sell.

Ron, someone instructed those people to go to the Convention Center, and that someone opened it up to them, and I suspect that that someone was the New Orleans city govt. There are 90,000 square miles of damage, and the federal govt can't be expected to know what is going on in every one of them if the local officials don't tell them. Someone from New Orleans dropped the ball and forgot to tell the feds, who in the person of Brown are operating out of Baton Rouge. But at least the New Orleans police are doing the best they can. What has the Louisiana state govt done? Not a thing that I am aware of. What contribution the governor has made to this I'm not aware of. At this point I would say that she has been completely useless. And speaking of New Orleans, why didn't they comandeer the school buses and the city buses to start getting people out? The mayor issued an evacuation order knowing that some people didn't have the means to get out on their own, and as far as I can tell he did nothing to help them.

Here's a sobering post from The Interdictor blog mentioned above: Now this is something that requires tact, and I do not have much experience with reporting, but I think the world needs to know how overwhelmed the police are out here: I have reports from 3 different police sources that 2 police officers have committed suicide. Out of respect for their families, I will not name them or go into detail. Truly tragic how bad things are. I sincerely hope I did the right thing in reporting this.

Minew, when it comes to Keystone Kops in govt, a New Orleanian would know one when he sees one!

I see this spammer has posted similarly at AAJ. http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=10889

Jazz Kat, I saw him in '68 with Eddie Miller, and Jack Sperling on drums. Great show! I also saw him leading his Half Fast Marching Band down Bourbon Street on Mardi gras about '92.

This is from The Times-Picayune's website at nola.com: Pete Fountain, the world-renown Dixieland clarinetist and New Orleans institution, may be among Katrina’s victims, his sister fears. Dolores Materne of Metairie, who fled her Metairie home for Lafayette, says she hasn’t heard from her 75-year-old brother and his wife Beverly, who have homes in hurricane-flattened Bay St. Louis and on Swan Street near Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, since Katrina turned towards the central gulf coast. She has not been able to reach his three adult children, who live in Metairie and New Orleans. Materne last spoke with Fountain on Thursday Aug. 25, and he said he planned to head to the city on Sunday. She said he sometimes rides out storms at his house on Julia Street and North Beach Boulevard in Bay St. Louis, or at Casino Magic, where he relocated his regular New Orleans gig a few years back. He’s also been known to leave the area when a storm is approaching. “At times over the years he’s gone out of town,” she said. “More or less lately, he seems to be staying closer to home.”

Ron, I agree. That's my point. The New Orleans and Louisiana govts should have informed FEMA of the status quo, and they didn't. It looked to me like Brown did in fact learn of the Convention Center crowd from television. That shouldn't happen. For that matter, the Convention Center crowd apparently gathered two days before the television people began to report about it. Why didn't the TV people know about it? Why did they devote 100% of their reporting to the Super Dome?

I didn't see that. Details, please. Mind-boggling... ← Jim, I watched NBC at 9:00 o'clock and ABC at 10:00 o'clock last night, and I can't say for certain which of the two shows it was on. I think it was the NBC Dateline. Anyway, a water company from I think he said Minnesota offered to donate the water and was refused, so he found a private agency, I don't believe the Red Cross I think it was someone else, who would accept it. So he was happy to report that the water was on its way to New Orleans. I just don't understand govt policy here. If Home Depot wants to donate supplies for rebuilding, why would the govt reject such an offer? Maybe there is paperwork involved that I don't know about, but it would seem to me that the govt should be prepared to be offered in-kind donations, and that if the govt has made the decision to accept only cash then it should already know which private relief organization will accept such in-kind donations, rather than requiring every donor to do the investigative work of determing who will accept it.

Chris, I have to disagree with you and maybe for the first time agree with Dan Gould. I don't get cable TV and can't say what they were reporting on, but I have been watching as much of NBC and ABC as I could, and they reported only on the Super Dome, never mentioning the Convention Center until the day that Brown said he had just learned about it.

When it comes to the management abilities of its civic and government leaders, New Orleans is the most pathetic American big city I'm aware of. White or black, doesn't matter. The old money, for example, is the most pathetic in leadership that I am aware of. I lived through Hurricane Betsy in '65. Everybody knew that New Orleans was vulnerable, but nobody cared. The leadership of the city rejected the Boy Scout motto of Be Prepared about everything. The infrasturcture is terrible, with the pot holes in the streets a disgrace. Now why FEMA and Homeland Seccurity are so slow, I don't know, but it doesn't surprise me that no one in the New Orleans govt informed FEMA that thousands of people are at the Convention Center. It doesn't surprise me that New Orleans policemen are quitting rather than doing their job. At least the Mayor stayed in the city. When the going gets tough in New Orleans, the civic leaders leave for Mandeville or somewhere. The emigration of the old money has been going on for decades. I saw last night that a bottled water company wanted to donate its product, and FEMA refused, saying it only wanted cash donations. What sense does that make? Perhaps one good thing that will come of this is that more people will prepare for a disaster, as they did for Y2K. The idea of stocking bottled water shouldn't seem funny to anyone anymore. By the way, I'm surprised that the thousands of people at the Super Dome stayed as calm as they did. It was 90+ degrees, no food or water, and probably worst of all, no information regarding what was going on. THE TV liked to show those who would lose their temper and express their dissatisfaction, but I noticed that such people weren't leading a crowd of followers. Nearly everyone was calmly suffering. By the way, I also noticed how many people, both TV reporters and hurricane victims, mentioned prayer. When times are tough, people aren't reluctant to mention their belief in God.

Thanks for this. Very informative. Most of what I have seen on TV has been of the Ninth Ward, which is old and poor, mostly black. Also particularly low-lying. Because of disease concerns from the sweage in the water, I imagine that those old homes will have to be razed. I have here an email from a high school classmate which concerns the middle class suburb of Metairie: the East Bank of Jefferson Parish has fared better than Orleans-- the pumps in Jefferson are almost all working and water is being cleared . The area around the Metairie Road to Labarre Road railroad tracks still has several feet of water. They will not let anyone back into Jefferson Parish until at least 6 AM Labor Day morning--and that is not for certain. No one anywhere has lights or running water. There is no gasoline available around New Orleans for up to 70 miles. There was a report just on that Salvation Army and Red Cross people have reached Causeway and I-10 and officials are using that as a staging area for rescues ( helos are landing on the Interstate roadways). One of my three sons at Jesuit contacted Fr. Fitzgerald via email in Grand Coteau. Brother Dardis, Fr. Hermes and three or four other Jesuits were in the Jesuit residence at school. They estimated 13 feet of water in the building and Gym. They were going to try to get out of there somehow today and evacuate the city. They had about a week's worth of food and water. No word as to their success in getting out today. Needless to say, the school year is uncertain. On a personal note, my neighborhood in Old Metairie is supposedly OK, but my medical office in St. Bernard is under 8 to 12 feet of water and will likely be so for a few weeks. So much for work........ I grew up in New Orleans, in Lakeview where Minew now lives. It has been 35 years since I've lived there, so I don't talk about it much. I visted there for a job interview in December, and it was like being in an episode of The Twilight Zone - the streets were all the same but the buildings were different. Although the past six months have been difficult, I know that I should be grateful to the Lord today that I did not get the job.

Our lowest priced sation, a BP, went from $2.52 to $2.95 last night.

I have very little pre-bop jazz. I recently bought three Duke CDs which raised my total to four. From the poll I gather I have a lot of company, although they are not showing their faces! I am enjoying what I have, and will probably get more sometime, maybe the 1956 Newport.

Blue Note Monk and Mulligan with Baker. Still have them all.

My database says 85. I had no idea it was so many. But that is counting a five-CD box as five CDs.

Jim, on vinyl I have a 2-LP set from MCA from the mid-80s entitled The Hi-Lo's Collection, and on CD I have the Varese Sarabande CD from '96 entitled Nice Work If You Can Get It.

Jim, I have The Hi-Lo's Spotlite sides on both LP and CD. Great music! However, The Hi-Lo's aren't recording anymore.

Abraham, because he had a lot of descendants (issues).

Sidewinder, yes I saw that. Thats a great deal, about $9.50 per CD. For the past few years EMI in Britain and Collector's Choice in the US have been issueing 2 LPs on 1 CD of the Freshman, and I have picked up four albums that way. So I think the only 50s albums I don't have are the first, Voices in Modern, which has relatively recently been issued on CD for the first time, and In Person, which I don't believe has been made available on CD except for the Mosaic box. About 1990 I wrote Mosaic a long letter with my suggestions regarding sets they should issue, and one of my ideas was The Four Freshmen. I was glad to see them take me up on it, but by the time they did I already had almost everything in the box.

I grew up with The Four Freshmen in my house. When I was little, my older sister had two of their albums, Five Trombones and Voices in Love. Then in high school there was no escaping The Beach Boys, who put the Freshmen harmonies over a rock beat. (In fact, I remember bringing home a re-release of the Freshmen's Best Of album back in '74, and my roommate asked, "Who is this group? They sound just like The Beach Boys."(!!)) In '77 I was delighted to find a re-release of their second album Freshmen Favorites. In the mid-80s I found that Pausa had re-issues many of their 50s Capitol albums, and I picked up the four that I could. But I found that unfortunately the group did not age well. I picked up a re-issue of their '69 Liberty album In a Class By Themselves, and it wasn't very good. About that time, I saw them on TV on a PBS show, and they weren't very good at all. About 1990 I saw them in concert at a club in Atlanta. By that time the group was lead singer Bob Flanagan and three young guys. It was a real treat to see Flanagan and to meet him afterwards as he worked the crowd, but the other three guys were pretty weak. In '93 I bought their Christmas album Freshmas, and it was awful. I never listen to it. So I came to the conclusion that the Four Freshman were a thing of the past. Flanagan retired in 1992. Imagine my surprise when I saw in 2000 that they won the Downbeat Readers Poll for Vocal Group of the Year. There was a comment by the editor indicating that Downbeat had exchanged correspondence with the Four Freshman fan club, apparently suggesting that they were stuffing the ballot box. And I can imagine the fan club replying that all the votes were legitimate, and it wasn't up to the editors to disqualify the group because they didn't like them. Last January I received an email from someone I didn't know who had seen something I wrote about the Freshmen at AAJ, telling me of the group's new album In Session, and how the group was maybe the best lineup ever. I figured that the writer was a fan club fanatic, and didn't take it seriously. Then just a few weeks ago I saw Doug Ramsey on his Rifftides blog say some kind words about the album, so I decided to give it a try. I respect Ramsey's opinion a great deal. I'm glad I did. It turns out that my correspondent from January was right. In Session is a great album, and the current lineup may indeed be the best the group has ever been. The album has eleven songs, nine of which are standards, and of the two new to me one is by Michel Legrand. My favorite is You've Changed, but It's All Right With Me, Skylark, If I Only Had a Brain, Early Autumn, Something Gotta Give, September Song and If I Had You are all great. The selection is a good mix between uptempo and ballads. The group plays its own instruments - trumpet, guitar, bass and drums, with a little trombone and piano thrown in. For a vocal group, they are surprisingly good on their instruments. I don't know how widely the album is distributed. It was issued by the fan club, not a record label. I have found it for twenty bucks at Amazon and the www.fourfreshmen.com website. Highly recommended, and a very pleasant surprise!

Of the older sets, the Gerald Wilson box. Of the newer sets, the Johnny Richards Select. Of the future sets, the McCoy Tyner Select.