Adam

Someone put this in a lecture recently that I attended, and I agree with it, but I'm blanking on the person who said it. The idea is that if we agree to live in a land with free speech, then we essentially have to agree to accept that we will be offended by someone or something. Just because something offends us does not provide a reason to ban it. In this particular case, I don't see it so much as a disclaimer. Instead, thorough notes for the song should discuss the nature of the lyrics, because that's what good notes should do. No need to apologize for including it, but the notes should acknowledge the dated & racist nature of teh lyrics, identify the source, and identify why the song is being included. But I am also white, so can't fully feel what any African-American might from a reading of those lyrics.

It doesn't list the city as Detroit. The AP story was filed in Detroit, but it never identifies him running in Detroit. That's all the city label before AP means at the start - that the story was filed there. That said, I'm surprised more people don't jog nude.

I don't think it's hard to track down. I think Jazz Loft had it.

Wow, you found over 400 foundations that support Arts & Culture? Well done! We've swapped emails about the music, but perhaps we can talk? I'm a documentary producer as my livelihood, and would be interested in working on your film if you need people. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0405152/ Best, Adam

If true, that is really egregious, as they clearly went way out of their way to make it look legit. You've talked me out of the box, but how is the sound on the individual jewel case versions vs. the mini-lps? Yeah, I saw it last night at Amoeba, and it looks like a legit ESP release. Anyone have a link to where Bernard (Stollman?) says that it is unauthorized, please?

I believe so - Free at Last. Looking forward to teh Maupin & Redman - again, I know them both only by reputation.

I was just given that for my birthday, but my SACD player is in teh shop. Well, of course I can listen to the CD layer, but I want the first time to be SACD. Today I just bought the Onzy Mathews Mosaic Select at Amoeba in Hollywood. They had 2 copies for $29.99 each. Strange, since all teh other Selects that they are selling are $45-50. I also bought a Perez Prado Mambo LP that looks like a fun time. Has a nice cover at least.

An example of life imitating sentimental and unbelievable art. They both treated Hamilton badly, BTW, which kind of bugs me. Yes, don't cry for Hamilton. Besides, the country we live in today is closer to his vision than it is to that of Adams or Jefferson. The three of them - can you imagine having a triumvorate of people that smart in politics today? Can you imagine having one person as smart as them in politics today? Hamilton also had the first political sex scandal of America while in office.

I've never heard of any of these people. What field of endeavor are they in?

The link is no good - no longer posted on You Tube due to a complaint from Viacom.

Why would he want to include a golf tournament as part of the jazz festival? Besides that, it would be nice to have a jazz festival named for a musician.

Yeah, Klezmatics

Sounds interesting to me. How are the other books mentioned in the review? Alec Wilder's "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950" and Max Wilk's "They're Playing Our Song." http://www.latimes.com/features/book...me-middleright 'The House That George Built' by Wilfrid Sheed An affectionate celebration of the supremely talented American songwriters — Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen et al — who flourished in the first half of the 20th century. By Charles McNulty July 1, 2007 The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty Wilfrid Sheed Random House: 336 pp., $29.95 Every time you turn around these days, another golden age is being celebrated. Nostalgia gilds the past, bad hairdos and all, and the present, to which we are wedded for better or worse, never quite seems equal to the glorious times we keep compulsively half-remembering. Some sentimental journeys, however, are justified — even vital, if we're ever to benefit from traditions inarguably richer than our current efforts. Such is the case with the era celebrated in "The House That George Built," Wilfrid Sheed's bouncily written, impressionistic history of American songwriters from the first half of the 20th century. These are the composers, lyricists and composer-lyricists who found their sound in the Jazz Age and spread it from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to Hollywood and the Hit Parade. Golden ages inevitably call for a bit of calendar fudging. History doesn't stop and start on a dime. Sheed's range of dates — "from the birth of radio circa 1922 until its death by TV and reruns in the mid-1940s" — serves to a certain extent as a narrative convenience, whose flexibility varies with the author's interest. Burton Lane and Cy Coleman are in; Leonard Bernstein and Kander & Ebb are out. And despite having made his name by the end of World War I, Jerome Kern gazes down from Sheed's "personal Mount Rushmore," a monumental gathering that also includes Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The rationale: Kern's quietly revolutionary, jazz-inflected score for "Show Boat" in 1927 puts him smack in the center of the groundswell. Glad to have all that settled. "The House That George Built," as the author himself points out straightaway, isn't a book for hairsplitting academics, though only the most dunderheaded PhDs would question Sheed's breadth of knowledge. A musicologist he admittedly is not, but he knows the tunes as well as any armchair expert, and he has interviewed a few of the songwriters he loves (as well as surviving friends and family members) and read the available criticism — notably Alec Wilder's "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950" and Max Wilk's "They're Playing Our Song." He blends it all together with a literary sensibility that mixes biographical anecdote, cultural history and high-wattage moonbeams of critical insight that light up the old standards. If the discussion can at times seem as circuitous as the patter of a cabaret artist recapping the pedigrees of numbers before performing them, Sheed, a veteran novelist and wide-ranging critic, doesn't appear to worry one bit. As he puts it, "The proper medium for studying the American song is, after all, neither the lecture nor the library but the sing-along and the rap session, or as it used to be called, the bull session, with its overtones of the tall story and the overconfident assertion." The more distinct the personal character of the songwriter, the better Sheed's method works. Berlin and Gershwin, who are the bedrock of his study, spring to life in a way that less easily caricatured personalities, such as Rodgers and Kern, do not. But then, Sheed writes, "You can subtract any other great name from the story, and it would be basically the same story. Without Gershwin, or his godfather, Irving Berlin, it would be unrecognizably different." "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Berlin's unstoppable 1911 hit, though not technically ragtime, introduced a fascinating syncopated rhythm that would revolutionize pop. "Whatever he'd heard as a boy in Harlem was part of him now," Sheed writes, claiming that this Russian-born, New York-bred son of a cantor did more than anyone "to secure the beachheads of the dance floor and the music rack" with his "semi-black and faintly Jewish melodies." Not bad for an "unschooled immigrant kid" who, though no world-class piano player, was heralded as a genius even by as high-minded a musical theorist as Igor Stravinsky. Gershwin's breakthrough — if you had to pick one — was plausibly "The Man I Love," which Sheed says "cleared the way not only to George's own best, but to other people's best too, like 'My Funny Valentine' and 'Night and Day.' " The upshot of this 1924 song was "a single pipeline between Carnegie Hall and Broadway" — and ultimate proof that "sophistication sells." But it's the avuncular nature of Berlin and the genial genius of Gershwin that make the "House" of Sheed's title a home. Whether they were self-consciously part of a "movement" synthesizing jazz and classical music into a new form of pop is debatable, but Gershwin — sociable, gracious and competitive in all the right ways — was the de-facto leader in a musical constellation that demonstrated "a level of uncomplicated niceness unique among the arts." One towering figure who isn't portrayed with the same affectionate gusto is Porter, whose sexual orientation elicits a brusque session of old-school psychoanalysis. Sheed has tremendous respect for Porter's accomplishment (not for nothing is he given subtitle credit) but seems less taken by the scintillating public persona of a wealthy Indiana boy transformed into the epitome of the urban dandy. Still, there's no denying Porter's status as the toast of Broadway. Nor does Sheed — whose fandom is evident in his incessant reaching for superlatives — deny that the dapper Yalie who sought to write "Jewish songs" was, along with Berlin, one of our best "pure" songwriters — the sort whose output contemporary singers still love to sing. The secret? Porter and Berlin were their own perfect lyricists. Speaking of lyrics, if anyone should have a beef with Sheed, it's the wordsmiths who delivered them. In Sheed's universe, the eternal battle for glory waged by musical collaborators is unfailingly won by the composers; nearly all the book's chapters are devoted to them. As Sheed sees it, if it were not for George, "the odds seem good that Ira would have become an English teacher with a sideline in light verse and an unassuming wife to match." And while Porter's "chronically undervalued tunes" may not have come as easily to him as the alliterative dominoes "It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-lovely," the music is what makes them memorable. Johnny Mercer, however, receives his due as an artist whose "lyrics [did] more than anyone's to split the difference between Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Outback, between Broadway and Hollywood." But how can you not love the guy who wrote the words for both "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home" and "That Old Black Magic"? The music, of course, was written by the great Harold Arlen, who is today perhaps best known for the songs he composed for "The Wizard of Oz." Yet his flowing stream of hits ("Stormy Weather," "It's Only a Paper Moon" and hundreds of others) precisely defines for Sheed what "the vague but necessary phrase 'jazz song' " means. If you're sure you know Arlen but can't quite call up the catalog, you'll probably have similar trouble with the composer to whom Sheed dedicates his book — Harry Warren, an astonishingly fecund genius who had two strikes against him in the pursuit of immortality. The first was his decision to change his name from something difficult to remember (Salvatore Guaragna) to something almost impossible not to forget. The second was that he wrote music mostly for Hollywood, where the pay was enviable but the fame tended to get lost in the roll of credits. One can argue with Sheed over facts and opinion, preferably with the stereo in the background. But anyone who has ever hummed "I Only Have Eyes for You" or one of the songs from "42nd Street" without wondering who conjured them into existence should be compelled to read his fine chapter on Warren. As for George, Irving, Cole and the rest of that timeless crew, Sheed's chummy book happily reconnects us with old acquaintances. charles.mcnulty@latimes.com Charles McNulty is The Times' theater critic.writers

Although it's hard to see what that series is doing on the History Channel. History Channel just wants to compete with Discovery now. And you can have a documentary series. There are lots of them. Or am I missing a joke?

yeah, I can't get that one to stay in bed.

Some say that the best version is still the original laser disc - especially those who don't like any of Ridley's Director's cuts.

I picked up this one recently on used LP. It's good fun. I think it's on my turntable right now; will go listen again.

Hey, tomorrow's my birthday too. Happy birthday! Heck, min e is today. What's with all the Geminis?

Yes, try Hard Talk and One-upmanship next.

All valid points back. Except "not particularly rare" still doesn't make it easy to find. But I still think they might be overridden by the fact that if no one can discuss the actual Album of the Week, then does it make for a very good AOTW? But feel free to ignore me, since I'm not a good participant in the AOTW discussions anyway. And you will probably get more discussion on Bobby Watson-era Jazz Messengers albums beyond this one.

I've never heard of it either. Might it be good to have an AOTW that people either have or can actually get?

Amazon seems to have one available as an import, vol. 2.

Wow, I'd really like to check those out!

I think you are misreading the image, and that Voldemort is doing something to Harry, and Harry is dealing with another distraction.

I just received an announcement of Horace's autobiography coming out on Univ of California press in paperback. Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver Horace Silver "Silver, now 78, has an astonishing recall of every musician he ever encountered, prompting plenty of anecdotes amid the solid self-insights."—Publishers Weekly Horace Silver is one of the last giants remaining from the incredible flowering and creative extension of bebop music that became known as "hard bop" in the 1950s. This freewheeling . . . For more information, click on Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty Subjects: Music; Jazz; Autobiographies and Biographies; American Studies Market: General Interest 978-0-520-25392-6, new paperback edition $16.95 New 2007 Title it says. Many more details here: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10278.html