ghost of miles

Any of our Michigan members in touch with him? He hasn't posted since mid-June, although he appears to have been online recently... Just hoping that all's well with him.

Thanks for the heads-up--I have two bonus-point freebies still coming to me through Columbia House.

"Teddy Charles: the Early Avant-Garde" is now archived.

Excellent news, Frank! Thanks for the update.

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT, pass on Anita and J.J., whatever one does!

charlesp More on LULLABLUEBYE here, including a couple of posts from Mr. Kimbrough himself. Hope that new trio release is still on schedule for this fall--very much looking forward to it.

Double the birthday pleasure!!

Kinuta, Some earlier discussion here. To a large extent it inspired the show--Late's suggestion plus garthsj's term. There are a lot of talented, interesting artists like Charles from the 1945-1990 era (the era that Night Lights covers, for the most part) that seem to have gone almost unnoticed. Playing their music is one of the reasons why I started the show--trying to be a Mosaic-like radio program, I guess, in some ways. The article by Noal Cohen (Mike Fitzgerald's co-author on the Gigi Gryce biography) is well worth checking out.

This week on Night Lights it's Teddy Charles: The Early Avant-Garde (with thanks to garthsj and Late). In the early 1950s vibraphonist Teddy Charles made a series of records with Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, and others, that still escape easy definition today--were they Third Stream? Were they West Coast? Were they cool jazz? We'll hear selections from his albums New Directions and Collaboration: West, as well as his 1956 Atlantic LP The Tentet, and appearances as a sideman with Wardell Gray and Miles Davis. For more information about Teddy Charles, see Noal Cohen's Coda article. The program airs Saturday night at 11:05 p.m. (9:05 California time, 12:05 NYC time) on WFIU; you can listen live, or wait until Monday afternoon, when the program will be posted in the Night Lights archives. Next week: "Late Lee." The late & last recordings of Lee Morgan.

Is that a new or recent book, Randy? I'm interested in Shepherd esp. because of his Hoosier roots.

Chuck, that's great news! I'd bet on the Arts section rather than the magazine... great exposure for the CD. I'll be sure to pick up a copy that Sunday (esp. now that I have weekends off, for the first time in my adult working life... I fully intend to sit around drinking coffee, listening to jazz, perusing books and the paper, and doing my blessed American-male best to avoid house or yard work of any kind).

uhhh, have you actually heard it?? It's nothing compared to America's!! ← I sure have... "O Canada," right? Heard it whenever I watched a baseball game played in Montreal or Toronto. Much preferable to Francis Scott Key's bombast. Look, if we'd gone with "America the Beautiful," I'd agree with you... that's a lovely tune that I wish were our national anthem.

Good for Canada! You've got a better national anthem, too.

Somebody really needs to write this CD up--the NY Times, for instance, and certainly the jazz media. Bracket it with the Monk/Coltrane and you've got two major finds coming out within months of each other.

What's on tap for this fall/winter other than Mosaic? The Coltrane Half Note is going to be two CDs, according to Alan's site... anything else?

I'll try to check it out--thanks for the rec.

I worked her version of "I'll Look Around" into Afterglow, our weekly ballads-and-American-popular-song program, a couple of weeks ago, and followed it with Gerry Mulligan's "If I Fell" off the infamous IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM... seemed to work quite well.

Yes. Currently playing: "In What Direction Are You Headed?" from THE LAST SESSION.

Found it at the Music School's library and copied it--thanks much again, Jim. Michael Bourne wrote the piece--right around the time he started as the daily jazz DJ here at WFIU.

No, I haven't... early '72, I'm assuming? I'll bop over to the music library and check it out after I'm done taping The Big Bands. Thanks for the lead! Thanks also for the Rahsaan reference.

Mike, I found it online while looking for articles about the Merv Griffin incident, because Lee Morgan was a participant. It ran in the NY Daily News (hence, I imagine, the motivation for the article, since it was the Daily News that received the phone call back in 1970). I didn't post it here because of its dazzling scholarship, but merely to start a discussion about the strange confrontation between white middle-class TV and the world of jazz circa 1970. Why does it matter that the piece was published a year ago? The incident itself happened 35 years ago.

Is it just me, or do some of the instrumental passages from DANCE SESSION (such as the trumpets on "Bubbles") sound way back in the mix? Was that deliberate?

Stopping the white wash Rahsaan Roland Kirk on TV By DAVID HINCKLEY Just about the time the cameras started to roll for the regularly scheduled nightly taping of Merv Griffin's show on Friday, Aug. 27, 1970, the phone rang in the television department of the Daily News. An anonymous woman said that a group called Black Artists-Musicians of New York, of which no one had previously heard, was planning a nonviolent disruption of the Griffin taping to dramatize its demands that black artists get some of the television exposure given so copiously to derivative white artists. Had someone made a similar call to Griffin, perhaps he would have been less startled when about 35 minutes into the taping at the Cort Theater on W. 48th St. a group of between 60 and 80 demonstrators sure enough did stand up and make it quite impossible for Griffin to continue. The demonstrators, who included well-known jazz artists Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Lee Morgan and Andy Cyrrile, blew wooden whistles and played various sounds on flutes and other instruments they had smuggled in under their coats. Soon they moved forward to take over the stage, waving signs that read "Stop the Whitewash!" and "Tom Jones rose to fame singing black songs!" Griffin, who had just introduced Larry Kert, star of the Broadway show "Company," shook his head and walked off. The CBS cameras continued to roll as the studio audience sat fascinated, wondering what would happen next. As it turned out, not much. When the protesters announced they would remain until they could talk with someone in authority, Griffin came back and announced that taping was done for the day. Since this Friday tape wouldn't air til Monday night, it had been decided to finish the last hour over the weekend. By now a dozen police had entered the theater. As the only apparent damage was to the taping schedule, no arrests were made - and, even as the audience was starting to trickle out, producer Walter Kempley and associate producer Andy Smith were talking with Black Artists-Musicians of New York, who had suddenly changed their name and now told reporters just to call them Lovers of Music. Their complaint, heard for neither the first nor last time in the music world, was that the "roots" artists of American music - jazz, blues, gospel and so on, a disproportionately black group - deserved mainstream media exposure on national shows like, say, Merv Griffin's. While jazzmen played 200-seat clubs, they argued, white "jazz-rock" musicians who had clearly gone to school on those jazzmen's records were cleaning up from recordings and concerts in much larger places - abetted immeasurably by all that free media exposure and promotion. The protesters also warned that paying all this attention to later-generation white artists distorted history because it crowded out the real, undiluted music. These complaints echoed arguments made by respected musicians in many fields, though the Griffin demonstrators got something of a "fringe" tag largely because of the prominence of Kirk, a brilliant musician who distinctly marched to his own muse. Blinded in a childhood accident, Kirk formed his first band at 14. In his early 20s, he began to experiment with his sound, at first by playing several horns at the same time, then by rediscovering forgotten instruments, like the stritch and the manzello, then by inventing others, such as the trumpophone, which was a trumpet with a saxophone mouthpiece. He was well respected for his skills, and his presence guaranteed that the Griffin protesters would be heard, not merely tossed out on their ears. When they did leave, after talking with the producers, they said they expected a spot for jazzmen on a prime time CBS show. They also mentioned they might visit other shows on other networks. Sure enough, on Oct. 13, now calling themselves the Jazz and People's Movement, they dropped in on Dick Cavett at ABC. This time the disruption lasted about an hour, ending when the Cavett people agreed Cavett would have Movement spokespersons on his Oct. 22 program. Meanwhile, they had also worked out a deal with CBS: Kirk would be a guest on "The Ed Sullivan Show." A widely circulated story has it that Kirk was the last guest on the last Sullivan program, and that this final segment ended with Godfrey Cambridge sneaking up behind Sullivan and putting an Afro wig on his head, crowning him an "honorary Negro." Actually, Kirk played the show Jan. 28, 1971, two months before Sullivan stopped doing live shows. Nonetheless, it was a memorable night. Kirk invited Charlie Mingus and Archie Shepp to play with him and announced they would play Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour." In fact, they largely improvised for 5 minutes, weaving in and out of Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song." It was instantly controversial: fascinating to jazz fans and widely considered impenetrable to almost anyone else. "The purpose of the Jazz and People's Movement was to make everyone aware there wasn't enough jazz on television," said critic Dan Morgenstern, "and now they clearly proved the reason why." But many fans said that even though the Jazz and People's Movement soon drifted into history, it had at least made major TV networks aware of an important issue. Still, there was a long way to go. Another widely circulated story has Kirk asking Sullivan backstage why the late John Coltrane had never played his show, and Sullivan replying, "Does John Coltrane have any records out?" As for the Merv Griffin incident, it wouldn't be many more years before TV producers realized disruption isn't a problem. Packaged properly, it's a commercial gold mine. Originally published on April 13, 2004

Friend of mine (who's a Cardinals fan) observed at breakfast this a.m. that the AL East is the most interesting race in baseball this year--that the Yanks, Bosox, and Orioles all have significant flaws/problems that will prevent one from pulling away from the others.

Got this in an e-mail--posted elsewhere? This one's on Thursday night...