ghost of miles

This week on Night Lights it's "Songs of Peace." We'll hear instrumental themes using "Peace" as a title from John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Horace Silver, as well as Louis Armstrong's 1970 take on John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance," Bill Evans' improvisation on Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" that came to be known as "Peace Piece," Mahalia Jackson's a capella version of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday," and more. "Songs of Peace" airs Saturday, April 15 at 11:05 p.m. EDT on WFIU-Bloomington and at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNIN-Evansville. The program will be posted Monday afternoon in the Night Lights archives. For more jazz for the Easter weekend, you can listen to our archived March 26, 2005 program "Mary Lou's Mass: Music for Peace." The show is devoted to the 1960s sacred jazz of pianist Mary Lou Williams, whose instrumental "Miss D.D." is the opening theme for Night Lights. Next week: "Full Nelson." Oliver Nelson's 1960s big-band studio recordings.

Certainly compared to folks like Bogart, Gregory Peck, or even Alan Ladd. I guess that's what he gets for dying relatively young (not to mention being under contract at Fox, usually considered to be the corny, hick studio in comparison to the other majors). 83 is relatively young??? He made some damn good films in the 40's, too bad he wasn't given the same quality of roles later on....Did ya know his brother is Steve Forrest of S.W.A.T. Fame???? My mistake. I somehow assumed that the fact that he wasn't in a noteworthy film after the 1950s meant he died early. I read up a bit on Andrews when I was on a kick for him a year or two ago... he had a pretty bad drinking problem that may have contributed to his commercial decline. He did manage to eventually stop completely through AA.

Wow--when did this come out on DVD? I was looking for it a year or two ago... I do think that Andrews is just a tad underappreciated. (Just saw LAURA yet again, this time at our oldtime downtown theater--one of those films I can watch over & over again.)

Good jazz writing demands a high degree of integrity, insight, and (I would argue) respect for the musicians about whom one is writing. That respect works both ways--the writer needs to call 'em as he or she hears 'em. I guess I don't understand your complaint, FT; was Larry's remark too clever a summation of what he heard in Brookmeyer's playing? Gratuitous slams against artists are uncalled for, whether they come from a Bob Brookmeyer or some poor sap who can't blow "I Got Rhythm" on a kazoo. Having read much of Larry's book, I'd say he is one of the least likely jazz writers to ever indulge in such a practice. Far better worthies than me (including Jim Sangrey, who surely is one of the best barometers around for measuring snide fallacies and general b.s.) seem to think so as well.

I'm going to call Mosaic tomorrow & see if they have a semi-specific shipping date estimate... website now says mid to late April.

JAZZ MASTERS OF THE FORTIES and SWING TO BOP contain a fair amount of references to NYC, since so much was going down there... not quite exactly what you're looking for, though. Ann Douglas is working on a book about NYC in the 1950s that will cover jazz as well; hmmm, how many other near-misses can I come up with? I'd be fascinated to read such a book as well, and one may well exist that I'm overlooking.

Sounds great! I'll definitely check this out--thanks for posting it, Lazaro. Love reading about Chicago jazz history... The author of the first plug, Sascha Feinstein, did his graduate work here at IU. His journal BRILLIANT CORNERS is a good read for those interested in jazz essays, fiction, and poetry.

A nice early Cole trio version of "Lush Life" on that W. Herman 1949 CD--also used the second half of that COAST TO COAST disc (the WNEW broadcast) for a recent Afterglow. Rumor is that there may be more, similar unissued Cole that we'll get to hear some day.

Whew... I'm an ex-smoker, but now I remember what it was like to go without a cigarette for six hours.

Brighter days are on the way! Keep on postin'....

"We'll Keep Loving You: Jackie McLean" is now archived.

Glad you liked that one too--hey, re: Jeri & "Haunted Heart," you sure you're not thinking of Jo Stafford, who had a hit with it, and who was married to Paul Weston? I don't think Jeri recorded it, though I don't have all of her albums/singles and can't be absolutely sure. I played a little bit of Jo & Paul on the "Even White Girls Get the Blues" show. Maybe I should do a Jonathan and Darlene Edwards show...

I didn't realize that Isoardi was doing a book on Horace. (He helped Horace with SONGS OF THE UNSUNG and also had a large hand in the CENTRAL AVENUE SOUNDS box-set.) Will definitely seek it out.

From the L.A. Weekly, posted over at JC:

BTW, I'd also agree that jazz musicians who've dismissed rap out-of-hand, whether in the 1980s or the present, are doing much to consign themselves to the ol' dustbin of history. Same with electronica. The whole notion of the jazz ensemble, I think, will possibly end up changing as a result.

sumptuous as all get out. could not have been better done....see why you had to do it now. THANKS Hey, thanks, I'm really glad that you liked it. It should be archived by tomorrow afternoon.

Well, yeah, I feel his pain too. But the specific music he's dogging on is a syptom, not the cause, and I can't help but feel that he's not "getting" the fundamental musical changes (perceptual changes, really) that rap/hip-hop (and lots of other musics) were foreshadowing/reflecting long before the gangsta element came to the fore. Like I said earlier, bemoan the moral decline of society all you want. I'll be there with you (withihnn reason and up to a point). But frame it as such and don't come out with all this "this ain't what I was taught that music was in school" bullshit. You can't teach nuthin in school until it's already happened, so if what's happening right now ain't what you taught in school, best that you draw upon a principle that you should have been taught in school but probably weren't - namely, that today is tomorrow's history - and take it from there, not get all wigged out that the neat road map that you thought was going to unfold suddenly just got blown out the window. Look - I'm old enough (two can play this game!) to remember the early days of rap's first commercial peep throught the cracks. The shit was fun (and it swung like mofo), and the social commentary (when it existed) was delivered with a sense of righteousness. I also well remember the intrigue I felt by the musical methods being used - the sampling, the sequencing, the layering, the collages, all that stuff. This was a new way of looking at and feeling time and one's relationship to it, and it was (and still is, I think) an inevitable perceptual shift in the wake of both the increased power, scope, and omnipresence of electronic communications and digital "reality", where anything can be (or give the illusiona of being) literally anything, at any place, at any time. You can't fundamentally alter the nature of "perceptual reality" like this and expect people, especially young people, not to change as a result. You just can't. Absolutely, the toll/fallout of Reaganomics on the inner-city was immense (and in my mind, morally criminal). But since we're not in the Po;itical Foeum (yet), I'll drop that and go here instead - where inner-city culture goes, the tastes of mainstream American youth culture inevitable follows (the more things change...). And where the mainstream popular American culture goes, Madi$on Avenue inevitably is there to sniff their a$$. That's the weigh of the world. And here we are. Mr. Drew's decency as a human being comes through loud and clear in his article, but like so many jazz musicians, their impotence is at least partially their own fault. Rather than being in sync with their times, they've set themselves apart and/or above them. Jazz has never been a teen-age music (the Jazz Age & the Swing Kids notwithstanding), but it has always had its finger on the pulse of what was happening within its "native" community. Other than the M-Base crew and a few others, who among the "jazz community" was looking at the Hip-Hop Revolution from a perspective of it being the Next Step In African-American Musical Evolution? And how many were following the Jazz Reagan (WM) down his road of claiming the glories of the past as triumphs that they were somehow entitled to claim as their own? What are we suppose to do, Save The Children by taking them to hear a recreation of Fletcher Henderson at Lincoln Center? Give me a fucking break... Shit just don't work that way. Never has, never will. You wanna change the streets, you gotta have street cred. You want street cred, you gotta earn it. You wanna earn it, you gotta get down in it, not preach down to it. It may or may not be too late to save the children. God knows I hope it's not. But it sure as hell is too late to think that ii-Vs and such are the key to doing so. Mr. Drew better wake the fuck up. We're in agreement more than you seem to think, but I think simply saying that gangsta rap is a sympton rather than a cause is dangerously close to the sort of thinking that Mr. Drew Jr. is exhibiting. I mean, c'mon, how many stories have we read about Bird lamenting that he felt he'd had a hand in furthering the use of heroin among bebop musicians? I'm NOT judging Bird for that, or saying that Bird was somehow therefore a "bad" person... simply saying that the part of Mr. Drew Jr's screed that attacks the glorification of crack and cocaine culture is something that anybody who's spent any time living in the inner city may not dismiss so easily--and also saying that the message of artists can shape culture as well as reflect it. I probably have about a dollop of street cred compared to some, if not many, of the folks here, but what I saw in Indpls.'s "Dodge City" neighborhood was pretty awful (and what I saw working one summer as a door-to-door surveyor). It's a complex problem that's going to require complex responses... but part of the answer IS in pushing role models such as Malcolm X and hell, even the much-maligned Wynton, over the guys you read about in QUEENS REIGNS SUPREME (recent book about the hiphop industry), where surviving a barrage of gunshots is indeed seen as a great aid to commercial success. You're right, Drew Jr. should have come at this from a different angle. That's basically what I said in my post... and I've heard musical merit in a lot of the gangsta rap I've listened to. But last time I checked, it's not (or shouldn't be) so square to be upset about an ideology that glorifies sexism, hypercapitalism, hard-drug culture, and murderous violence. Whether it's a crafty, insidious political leader or a musical messenger propagating that ideology, I'm going to oppose it. There are plenty of rappers who oppose it as well. To somehow absolve an artist of any responsibility for his or her message because they are merely "symptoms" or reflections of the culture... coming full-circle here to say it's just as wrong as Mr. Drew Jr.'s scattershot assault on hiphop.

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

Up for broadcast in 20 minutes on WNIN-Evansville and one hour and 20 minutes on WFIU. Because the August 21, 2004 Night Lights show already focused exclusively on McLean's collaborations with Grachan Moncur, I didn't include any in this program. Ditto for a certain hardbop hero (show already planned and now postponed). Speaking of Moncur, I just picked up the BYG CD reissue that came out this week. No chance to listen yet--anybody else get it?

I had planned to do a different McLean program this summer, but that's been postponed... This week on Night Lights we offer a special tribute to the late alto saxophonist, Jackie McLean, who passed away on Friday, March 31, 2006. McLean came up in the Harlem jazz scene as a teenager in the late 1940s, befriending and playing with bebop progenitors Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. In the 1950s he worked and recorded with Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Art Blakey, in addition to making his own records as a leader for Prestige. A struggle with drug addiction slowed his development, but it also aided his convincing portrait of an addicted musician in the play and movie The Connection. His recordings for the Blue Note label in the 1960s are considered to be some of the finest examples of the era’s hardbop and avant-garde jazz. McLean was also one of the pioneers of the jazz-education movement, developing a jazz-studies program for the University of Hartford in Connecticut. I have always told people that Jackie McLean is one of the “patron saints” of Night Lights; his sharp, bittersweet sound had an intensity that seemed to reflect a passionate apprehension of life in all of its aspects. As one jazz fan said to me regarding his death, “Jackie has always been what this music is all about, to me. He was a man that always put his guts on the line when he played.” “We’ll Keep Loving You: Jackie McLean” will air this Saturday evening at 11:05 on WFIU and at 9 p.m. Central time on WNIN-Evansville. The program will be posted to the Night Lights archives Monday afternoon. Next week: "Songs of Peace."

Tonight on Afterglow we're featuring music from a new Mosaic collection of Gerry Mulligan's 1957 recordings, highlighting the baritone saxophonist's collaborations with Annie Ross and a reunion date with trumpeter Chet Baker, as well as the extraordinary Gerry Mulligan Songbook (with an all-star cast of saxophonists that included Lee Konitz, Allen Eager, Zoot Sims, and Al Cohn) and a date made with a string quartet. We'll also hear music from Mel Powell and Peanuts Hucko's 1945 meeting with Django Reinhardt in newly-liberated Paris, Ray Nance's haunting version of "Take the A Train" from his 1969 album Body and Soul, Buddy Rich's take on "This Time the Dream's On Me" from Buddy Rich Sings Johnny Mercer (yes, Buddy sang, too... who knew?!) and more. Afterglow airs at 10:05 p.m. tonight on WFIU and at 10 p.m. Central Time Saturday night on WNIN-Evansville. The program will be posted to the Afterglow archives Monday afternoon.

Katchor's name actually came up recently in a thread about Horace Silver's autobiography (as a result of a joke having to do with the Forward, if I recall correctly). JULIUS KNIPL blew me away when it came out as a book... liked the BEAUTY SUPPLY DISTRICT followup quite a bit, too. There's actually a Katchor illustration on an old R.E.M. album--in the booklet for OUT OF TIME.

I'd think and hope that jazz fans would be even more sensitive to this kind of crap, esp. given the backstory we've encountered once again on Jackie McLean's woes in the 1950s and early 1960s. Look, everybody who has a self-destructive problem with anything--drugs, alcohol, gambling, whatever--has the onus upon themselves to turn the corner on it--every day, for the rest of their lives. But throwing them in the slammer generally doesn't help. Suspending them from playing doesn't help, either. (In fact, I think Strawberry struggled most when he wasn't playing... most of his publicized relapses happened in the off-season or while he was suspended. I always felt that playing made it easier for him to get on with life.) Rather than say, "F*&% Dwight Gooden," I'd say, "F*&% this culture." It practically breeds addiction these days, if you ask me.

Right on. Most addicts relapse in recovery, many quite a few times. Some never make it. People like Gooden & Strawberry may have had all sorts of resources that a guy on the street or a middle-class housewife might not have, but they also had unrelenting public scrutiny... and still do. God help every addict out there if every relapse they ever had was broadcast all over the freakin' world.

Clem, at this point I feel fairly safe (though maybe I shouldn't) as our station has a pretty tight relationship with the IU School of Music, and such a format change here, if attempted, would all but spark a riot. (I'm only half-kidding.) Therefore we're a bit cocooned from the merciless radio landscape that's evolved... but I was just reading Current on my lunch-break, and public-radio audiences declined slightly from 2003 to 2005--first time that's happened, evidently, in a long time. Listener & underwrite $$ were up, but they can't foresee that trend continuing if the audience keeps dropping. Certainly programmers and station managers have a big responsibility to come up with compelling programming--I think in the past there was a somewhat lazy "you need to support us because we are a good thing" mentality, and an expectation that people would support public broadcasting. We can't do that; we need to give reasons for listeners and underwriters to support us, to EARN that support. "Here's what you're getting," etc. However... big however... OTOH, if public radio is simply going to act like commercial radio, albeit slightly more educated, than we'd better go back & rip up the mission statement. I have a good friend who's worked in this biz for 20 years, in a number of capacities, and I have enormous respect for his take on things; but he & I divide somewhat over this. All I can say is that I really feel for the folks at WBEZ who do music programming, and that it only makes me want to work harder.. not just out of anxiety, but out of a desire to keep jazz on the airwaves--to some degree, anyway--and to draw both jazz lovers and casual jazz "likers" alike. Part of the problem is that the core audience for jazz is graying, and younger listeners have to be drawn in, in a culture where jazz is rapidly turning (in my perception) into a museum music in most people's eyes (or ears). Addressing that issue is a whole 'nother ballgame.