Brownian Motion

Draw the curtain. And don't buy the book when it comes out. Or watch the movie.

Up, with additions, and price reductions. All are in at least very good condition. Hank Jones. Urbanity. 16.50 The Genius of Coleman Hawkins. Herb Ellis Oscar Peterson. 6.00 Scott Hamilton. After Hours. Tommy Flanagan Bob Cranshaw Lewis Nash. 6.00 Keynoters With Nat King Cole. Essential Keynote 9. Charlie Shavers, Budd Johnson Jonah Jones Willie Smith 12.00 JSP Jazz Sessions Vol 2. Al Casey, Hal Singer, Eddie Durham, Cleanhead Vinson, Mighty Flea Connors, Bud Freeman. 2 CDs 5.00 Laurindo Almeida & Charlie Byrd. Latin Odyssey. 5.00 Ruby Braff and Scott Hamilton. A First. Chris Flory, John Bunch. 6.00 New Orleans Creole Jazz. 1940s airchecks. Kid Ory, Jimmy Noone, Barney Bigard. 4.00. Phineas Newborn. Stockholm Jam Session. Benny Bailey, Oscar Pettiford 12.00 Billy Butterfield. The Issued Recordings 1944-1947 6.00 Rene Toledo. The Dreamer. 3.50 Ben Webster & Buck Clayton. Henry Chaix. 12.00 Duke Ellington. Portrait. Past Perfect. 10 CDs, box, booklet. Recorded between 1938 and 1946. 27.50 Jimmy Witherspoon and Jay McShann. (late 40s recordings). 5.00 Classics. Dexter Gordon 1943-1947. 10.00 US shipping included. Paypal or check

EDITORIAL OBSERVER NYT Turning the Music of the South and the Shtetl Into Bluesy Sophistication By ADAM COHEN Published: February 11, 2005 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dropped "Over the Rainbow" from early prints of "The Wizard of Oz," in part because it sounded too sophisticated. It slowed down the picture, the doubters argued, and in any case, if a young girl in a Kansas farmyard suddenly broke into a song, it would not be one as philosophical and wistful as this one. "Over the Rainbow" stayed in the picture, of course, after some heated studio infighting, and became an instant classic. The world-weary tone may have sounded odd coming from the Kansas cornfields, but it was typical of its composer, Harold Arlen, who is best remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for composing the music for "The Wizard of Oz." But that score - particularly the lighter fare, what Arlen called the "lemon-drop songs" - was a departure from the bluesy, urbane style of most of his big hits, like "Stormy Weather," "Blues in the Night" and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Arlen, who was born 100 years ago next week, was one of the great composers of the 20th century, as well as an unusual kind of cultural alchemist. Long before Elvis or Eminem helped blues and hip-hop cross over into the white mainstream, Arlen fused his own Eastern European Jewish musical traditions with African-American blues. The music that emerged - the product of two groups whose members, at the time, could not check into a hotel in much of the country - went on to assume an improbably large place in American popular music. Arlen was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, the son of a cantor who had moved north from Louisville, Ky. He showed an early interest in music, singing in his father's synagogue choir and listening to the "race" records of his day, including Dixieland jazz and Bessie Smith. As a teenager, he and some friends formed Hyman Arluck's Snappy Trio and performed in vaudeville houses. Later, he was part of a larger group, the Buffalodians, that achieved some regional renown. Arlen's big musical break came after he moved to New York and made his way up to Harlem, where he listened to the jazz legends who performed there late into the night, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. One day when Arlen was tinkering at the piano, he wrote a tune of his own. The blues-infused song he came up with was eventually matched with words by Ted Koehler to become "Get Happy," whose lyrics - "Shout Hallelujah, c'mon get happy/We're goin' to the Promised Land" - evoked the story of Exodus, which held special meaning for both Jews and black Americans. "Get Happy" was an enormous hit, and Arlen and Koehler soon found themselves on staff at the Cotton Club in Harlem, writing songs for its popular reviews. A show they scored in 1931 included the now-classic "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," and another in 1933 featured "Stormy Weather," sung by Ethel Waters to 12 encores. She would later say that "Stormy Weather" perfectly captured her own blue mood, calling it "the story of my misery and confusion, of the misunderstandings in my life I couldn't straighten out." Arlen's music was not all misery and confusion, but his finest songs are far from happy. He and his lyricists found poignancy not only in thwarted love ("This Time the Dream's on Me"), but in barroom talk ("One for My Baby, and One More for the Road") and even show business ("It's Only a Paper Moon"). Frank Sinatra's classic renditions of Arlen and Ella Fitzgerald's "Harold Arlen Songbook/Volumes 1 and 2" capture his music in all of its sophisticated despair. Like many artists of his time, Arlen felt the call of Hollywood. He moved West and began writing for the large studios. That allowed him to compose the "Wizard of Oz" score and a few other classics, along with a lot more forgettable contract work. Many of his best songs are from his Harlem days. His biographer, Edward Jablonski, argues that a main reason Arlen's reputation is not greater was "his choice of well-paid obscurity in Hollywood" rather than trying to stick it out in New York. Arlen was hardly the only Jewish composer of his time to draw on African-American music. Jerome Kern wrote "Show Boat," his musical about life and racial oppression on the Mississippi River, and George Gershwin tramped through the Gullah region of South Carolina to do research for "Porgy and Bess." But of all of them, Arlen seemed to have the deepest feeling for African-American culture, and the warmest personal relations with black musicians. Ethel Waters is said to have once called Arlen the "Negro-est" white man she knew. Cultural critics, like Jeffrey Melnick, in his book "A Right to Sing the Blues," point to a variety of reasons Jewish composers may have been drawn to African-American music. Jews, particularly recent immigrants, may have seen a history of exclusion they could relate to. And they may have adopted the rural South as a metaphor for the small European villages, and simpler way of life, their own families had left behind. But racial crossover is fraught today. These same critics point out that there are inevitably questions of exploitation whenever, as in this case, the group doing the borrowing has more power. Arlen, though, was not just appropriating. He was mixing several kinds of music to create something new, and wildly successful. Arlen songs like "Stormy Weather" and "I've Got the World on a String" made it to the top of the charts, and remain central to the popular musical canon today. Yip Harburg, the Lower East Side-born lyricist who wrote the words for the Oz songs, once described Arlen's musical formula: he used "a combination of Hebrew and black music" to create something "typically American."

I love this photo of Pops from 1961. It originally appeared in the New York Times. Not sure of the photographer. You can order a copy, presumably printed off the negative, at the NYT web site for about 200.00 (gasp!). That's Lucille, by the way.

Are you ticklish?

A few old timers. Bernie Privin Don Goldie Artie Bernstein

LONDON, Feb. 8 - After a circumnavigation of the globe lasting 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, Ellen MacArthur, a 28-year-old Englishwoman, cruised in triumph into Falmouth harbor today to claim a new record for sailing nonstop and solo around the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/sports/o...l?oref=login&hp

Pearl Bailey, a wonderful singer.

Lovely story, Chris. Thanks for that.

Limited edition books with original graphics. I also have a small collection of original prints, most dating from the 1930s.

Congratulations, Johnny!

Cal Collins was Carl Jefferson's house guitarists back in the 70s and 80s. I always liked his style--sensitive and sure-footed. His early recordings for Concord Jazz are, alas, out-of-print. One of his best latter-day efforts is Bob Barnard's "New York Notes", which features Cal extensively.

Best jazz guitar face.

We're having red beans and rice, Louis Armstrong-style, and collard greens.

Good Bill Hardman on this Blakey album from 1956.

Paul Nash, Jazz Composer Who Set Music in City Spaces, Dies at 56 By BEN RATLIFF Published: January 28, 2005 Paul Nash, a composer and guitarist who created orchestral jazz works, site-specific compositions for New York public spaces and educational programs for New York public school students, died on Thursday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said Julia Reinhart, his business associate and the director of the Manhattan New Music Project, the ensemble Mr. Nash led. Mr. Nash grew up in the Bronx and played in rock bands during his high school years. He attended the Berklee College of Music and, after graduating in 1972, headed to San Francisco, where he earned a master's degree in composition at Mills College in 1976. In the San Francisco area, he formed his first large group, the Paul Nash Ensemble, and went on to help form the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, which included a string quartet that used public grants to commission new works from contemporary composers. After he returned to New York in the late 1980's, Mr. Nash went further in that direction, forming the Manhattan New Music Project, a group with up to 16 members, depending on the circumstances. (It is still functioning and plans new concerts.) Since 1990 it has presented 35 new works in Manhattan, by Neal Kirkwood, David Taylor, Bruce Williamson and other composers. Five recordings of Mr. Nash's music have been released. The most recent was "Soul of Grace," issued on the Soul Note label in 2000. That album contained music that fit somewhere between the hushed, streamlined palette in Gil Evans's work and the defiance of Charles Mingus's. In 1997 Mr. Nash began writing site-specific compositions. One of them, "Still Sounds Run Deep," has been performed 20 times; in it, musicians arrange themselves around large public areas like Battery Park's Castle Clinton or Central Park's lake, keeping together via stopwatches and instructions from the score, and occasionally interacting with ambient sounds. Mr. Nash is survived by his wife, Marta; his sister, Margo Nash, of Manhattan; and his mother, Anne Nash, of the Bronx.

Covarrubias

And that's why they're called "lurkers".

http://tinyurl.com/5vd9b

Some claim to see the image of the Virgin Mary is this fish's skin. To me that's just another fish tale.

Well, there is that. Of course some might argue that in this regard leaving ebay might be a case of jumping from the fire into the frying pan, since ebay seems to tacitly encourage scamming through such devices as "private auctions", 'hidden feedback", and "hidden bid historys".

....but we still have quite a way to go.

Sorry to burst your bubble here but this sounds an awful lot like the ideas people get in trying to topple Wal-Mart. Boycotts are rarely effective unless they are complete. People love to bitch about Wal-Mart.......usually on their way home from Wal-Mart. Seems like the same thing here - I doubt there would be enough people willing...or able to give up eBay. And that is the exact rationale eBay has in upping their fees. Just as most folks in the BNBB diaspora wound up at Organissimo, so too could disgruntled Ebayers set up a permanent home at another auction site. The most vexing problem would be making sure that everyone migrates to the same alternative site. That is why organization would be necessary.

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?ebayfee The above links to an online petition asking eBay to not increase its fees, as the company plans to do in February. Although at last count 16918 people had signed, many of them also threatening to quit eBay should the fee increases not be rescinded, smart money says that both increases and most of the dissatisfied will still be with eBay 6 months from now. What is particularly interesting about this, to me at least, is that this is a battle that ebay sellers could win and win handily: all they would need to do is organize a union ( a relative snap with the internet and email at their disposal) so that they could bargain collectively. Arrogant ebay could be made to crawl, and sooner rather than later. But unions are foreign to the American culture we have constructed over the last quarter century, and they are no longer seen as engines of equalization between corporate power and employee power. So the ebay sellers will continue to whine and plead and beg, and ebay will continue to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.

Thelma White, 'Reefer' Star, Dies at 94 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 18, 2005 LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 - Thelma White, an actress best known for playing a drug addict in "Reefer Madness," a 1936 antimarijuana propaganda film that resurfaced decades later as a cult classic, died here last Tuesday. She was 94. The cause was pneumonia, said Michael Homeier, her godson and only survivor. She died at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in the Woodland Hills section. Advertisement Ms. White played a hard-boiled blonde named Mae who peddles "demon weed" to unsuspecting young people in "Reefer Madness," a low-budget cautionary tale written by a religious group. In the film, she lures high school students to her apartment for sex and drugs, turning them into addicts who shoot their girlfriends, run over pedestrians and go insane. A musical and comedy actress who made more than 40 movies, Ms. White was horrified when RKO Studios picked her for the antidrug film. But because of her contract, she had little choice but to accept the role. "I'm ashamed to say that it's the only one of my films that's become a classic," she told The Los Angeles Times in an interview in 1987. "I hide my head when I think about it." Born Thelma Wolpa in Lincoln, Neb., in 1910, Ms. White was a carnival performer as a toddler before moving on to vaudeville, radio and movies. "Reefer Madness" was destined for obscurity, but in 1972, Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws, discovered it in the Library of Congress archives, bought a print and screened it at a New York benefit. Robert Shaye, founder of New Line Cinema, saw the film and recognized its appeal as an unintentional parody. He re-released it through his then-fledgling company, holding midnight showings. Ms. White twice saw an off-Broadway musical that spoofed the movie. The musical "was campy and over the top, and she loved it," Mr. Homeier said.