Dr. Rat

Only recently has it hit the dump, though. --eric

Hey Jim, Could you do Monte Irvin next. He memory needs some pub, but I'm committed to rats.

An album cover by Russell. The music must have been pretty strange, --eric

Wow, that's pretty cool. Pee Wee Russell apparently was also interested in painting for a while. They have some of his stuff at the Institute for Jazz Studies in Newark, NJ. There's some nice prints in an old box set I've got. I'll see if I can't scan one. --eric

I have this one. Haven't listened in a while (it's buried in a moving box somewhere), but I remember liking it pretty well. Poncho Sanchez likes it (from http://www.descarga.com): Cal Tjader Monterey Concerts CD (Prestige 24026), Reviews: "Not only was Willie Bobo a great timbalero, but this album showed that he was also a great jazz drummer. This album inspired me to pick up the timbales. The sound that Mongo gets on the congas is something that you can't hear on records today. I wonder how they did that. If you want to hear some great sounding congas, listen to this." (Poncho Sanchez and Ramon Banda 96/97 Catalog) Song titles include: Doxy Afro Blue Laura Walkin' With Wally We'll Be Together Again 'Round Midnight Love Me Or Leave Me Tu Crees Que S.S. Groove A Night In Tunisia Bess, You Is My Woman Lover, Come Back To Me Tumbao Musicians include: Paul Horn Lonnie Hewitt Al McKibbon Willie Bobo Mongo Santamaria

Also worth picking up for the pictures: Albert Murray's Stompin' the Blues. They're in B&W and not even glossy, but a nice collection of 20s and 30s photos and phonograhic art. The words not recommended for the more excitable amongst us, even if you do have time on your hands. --eric

That was a money issue, I'm pretty sure. He asked for X. They thought he wasn't worth it. I think they were wrong.

And Don Byron, Brian Blade, Mark Shim... The thing is, while Blue Note has these artists on their "roster" (i.e., back catalog) I'm afraid VERY LITTLE CAPITAL has been allocated to their projects... despite the Norah-generated cash infusion. Yeah, I wonder what the circumstances of a typical recording project are like now caompared to, say, 1960? How much time is there? How much expertise on hand? What choice of sidemen? How long does it take? How much time to write or select or rehearse material? I also wonder how much of the differences come down to up-front money and how much come down to broader changes in the business. --eric

I just can't beleive anyone thinks anything on TV to be worth recording. Get a DVD player! --eric

That's the spirit. I got into college radio when it was deep into the "so bad it's good" thing and I can remember getting into intense arguments about Creed Taylor. But, you know what? I actually like some Creed Taylor stuff now. I can do without the condescending "so bad it's good" attitude, but the surprise I've had is finding a lot of hyphen jazz is just plain good. I think Dusty Groove does a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in an area of music that has plenty of chaff. I've never been so misled by their reviews that I bought something entirely hateful (even when they praise something I think is horrid, I can usually read between the lines and see that they're praising it for the wrong reasons in my book). --eric

I don't know how you meant that, but I thought Blue Note really lost out on an opportunity with its last Dorough release--my sense is that this is a guy who can sell records with the right promo. I thought they should have made him into a project. --eric

If what you liked on More than Mambo was the more lush exotica-sounding stuff, go for his Verve catalog. If you liked the great Bill Fitch solo on Insight, You might be more pleased by his earlier work for Fantasy. Ritmos Calientes is a good one. Black Orchid and Live at the Blackhawk are also highly recommended. At this time Tjader was hiring and heavily featuring some of the best Cuban and Cuban style percussionists: Mongo Santamaria, Armando Paraeza, Willie Bobo, etc. Some very nice rhythm workouts. Guy that plays sax on some dates, Chombo Silva, did a fine job of soloing on tenor. --eric

I think I'd have to agree with Dan. Artists like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones do represent a risk as they involve a certain reposition of the company in the consumer's consciousness. But I suppose with the reissue program having a separate identitiy and integrity in the minds of the jazz die-hards, and the contemporary artists in the "serious" jazz realm selling rather poorly, they felt secure in moving in this direction. BUT, I would say that the Blue Note tradition is mostly in music that is decidedly UNprobing. The records that made the label's reputation (the reputation they are now in the process of altering) were mostly pretty straightforward. There were some progressive records, of course, but I think "Lee Morgan" or "Hank Mobley" when I hear "Blue Note," not "Andrew Hill," and I think that's pretty much the case with most people who think anything at all when they hear "Blue Note." And I think Blue Note's stable is pretty risky. Osby, Moran, Lovano--I doubt any of these guys are ever going to make them EMI's idea of ROI. --eric

Does anyone know what Rufus Reid is playing on these dates? Speculation flying in the studio on Friday: Close-mic bass? Electric? Ampeg baby bass? --eric

Been rereading your post. I am as much against competing lies as a model for discussion as anyone. You see this a lot in science debates right now--in topics touching on health and environmentalism, especially. I regard people who publish without regard to truth with contempt. But on the other hand there will be no direct access to truth in these matters--there will always be doubt. One simply should not publish things and call them truth, because six months later someone overturns your truth and you've done nothing but confirm just the sort of feckless skepticism you decry. The scare quote serve a purpose: they guarantee a healthy doubt. Something I feel that is absolutely necessary. And I'll say again, people have been publishing baldfaced lies and bullshit forever, since long before the death of unscarequoted Truth. They do it because they can get away with it, not because they do or don't beleive in unscarequoted Truth. Are there shockingly low standards in some areas of academia and publishing? Yes, indeed. But I just don't think it has anything to do with people not beleiving in truth, mostly because I haven't met anyone who doesn't operatively beleive in truth yet and I've met few people who OK with the competing lies syndrome outside of politics. Standards get ignored and dummified because people are overburdened or lazy or afraid to exercise their judgement. In publishing and academia, I think we have more of that today than we have had, but I think that has a lot more to do with the economics than philosophy. --eric

You obviously are more deeply read than I in this field, so I'll defer to your judgement on these issues. I think, partly because of Living Blues and the people surrounding it, the state of blues scholarship is well ahead of where Wald might like it to be. A lot of his disputes seem to be with the legends that still seem to have a lot of popular currency. But I'm thinking on the country/city issue, he might be referring to Sam Charters' early work? There seemed to be a pretty strong current of thought in John Hammond/Alan Lomax day that in the country (or the prisons) there was to be found some kind of purer, ur-music. But then it turned out that the delta region had had a lot of in-migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was about as far from Lomaxian hopes of a "Land that Time Forget" as you could get in the rural US. But again, I'm sure the scholarship is well beyond this. Thanks a lot for the very interesting post. --eric

Not up on the obit page, but available by searching. Also an AP obit. --eric

Walter Perkins, 72, Drummer, Is Dead; Played With Top Jazz Artists By BEN RATLIFF Published: March 1, 2004 Walter Perkins, a jazz drummer who played with major artists including Ahmad Jamal and Carmen McRae, and was part of a band in the early 1960's called the MJT +3, died on Feb. 14. He was 72. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Barbara Perkins. A busy sideman with a strong and light sense of swing, he left Chicago, his hometown, for New York in 1965. He is probably best known for a hard-bop record on which he was one of the leaders, "Walter Perkins' MJT +III," released on the Vee-Jay label in 1959. The group's name stood for Modern Jazz Two; Mr. Perkins and the bassist Bob Cranshaw were the two, and the three others were the trumpeter Willie Thomas, the alto saxophonist Frank Strozier and the pianist Harold Mabern. After moving to New York, Mr. Perkins played and recorded with Gene Ammons, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and George Shearing, among many others. In 2002 he made a comeback on a William Parker record, "Bob's Pink Cadillac" (Eremite). From the 1970's to the late 1980's he taught drum-corps classes at Girls and Boys High School in Brooklyn. He later conducted classes and workshops in many New York City public schools, performing for young people through the arts-education group Young Audiences New York. In recent years he often played in Queens, where he lived, at clubs like Carmichael's, Brandy's and the Skylark Lounge, and he started his own drum corps at the Merrick Park Baptist Church in Jamaica. In addition to his wife he is survived by his daughters Rochelle Mask of Baldwin, N.Y.; Denise Perkins of Brooklyn; and Marilyn Turns of Queens; 13 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Speaking as somebody who recently spent quite a while in a desperately hip graduate department, I don't really see this. In fact, I think it's pretty remarkable how little effect all the high-falutin theory talk has had on scholarly practice in fields like history. Most folks whom anyone pays any attention to learned the lesson pretty quickly from the hash Edward Said made of Orientalism. In historical analysis, no standard of truth means no basis for complaint. I specialized in 18th-century periodicals, and I can assure you, putting truth in quotes didn't get me out of one bit of dusty book reading or out of one monograph on 18th-century historical and social context. And, of course, I want to be right, too. (Making the big assumption that I actually finish this damn thing--highly doubtful) It would be wonderful to just bring an end to some of the sociological debates I work around with some truth that will strike everyone like Paul on the road to Damascus. That'd be super. But I doubt very much that'll happen. What'll probably happen (if I do very well, and making the further assumption that anyone gives a damn) is that what I write will have a big effect, it'll have to be responded to, and those who wish to beleive something other than what I believe about how social and communicative processes work will set to work, find other facts and sources, find mistakes and blind spots in my work, and transform the picture to fit their set of assumptions and cherished beliefs about the contemporary world. That I take to be about as true as true can be. That'll represent a bit of progress, no doubt--arguments will be honed, certain ways of seeing things ruled out. But the big important questions will remain open. Now there are probably ways of transcending this process, but it won't be through historical fact-gathering. The route to truth is just too long and winding in that direction. Well-thought-out scientific approaches to fields like contemporary sociology, psychology and ideology suggest themselves, but they aren't quite on the horizon yet, I don't think (at least not all of them). --eric

12. Accident in Hawaii The Brubecks had been living in an apartment near San Francisco and wanted to buy a home there, but Dave got a gig at Zardi's in Los Angeles, and they moved into a rented two-room house on the beach in Santa Monica. Then they put a down-payment on a house in San Francisco and drove all night, Iola slapping his face all the way, to make the closing in the city, but when they got there the deal had collapsed. They now had no place to live, and their things were in storage. In the spring of 1951 a job came through at the Zebra Lounge in Honolulu, so it was off to Hawaii. They were so hard up they had to buy cut-rate cases of baby food which had been in a fire. But the children wouldn't eat it, so Dave wound up eating the burnt baby food himself in Honolulu. The first week there he dove into a wave which suddenly disappeared, struck a sand bar with his head, and twisted his body. He sustained serious nerve damage, and ended up in traction in the hospital for 21 days. The Brubecks had to return to San Francisco, where Dave couldn't work because of his injury. Now he needed Desmond, since he was no longer capable of carrying off a trio by himself. He played fewer lines and more chords during his recovery, which lasted several years but did not tell anyone the reason at the time. from http://www.jssmusic.com/brubeck_bio.html

I agree with you, and I am not so sure we ought to suppose that this book has none of that attention to detail and context that you mention. In fact, jettisoning the Robert Johnson Legend, I think, is an important step in getting to a point where we CAN properly contextualize the story here. Thing is: in important respects the cultural past we're looking at isn't looking anywhere at all: it isn't anymore. All we've got are remnants and memories and consequences. To make it live again requires our imaginative intervention, and here is where things get complicated. Then when you throw in already received retrospective interpretations, things begin to get really complicated. NOT to say that the detail doesn't matter. It does. And the people who preserve it are crucially important. But there are stories we know much better from the standpoint of detail and context: the late 1960s, say. But if I ask you to give me the story of the 1960s, what are you going to tell me that is "True?" When it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what Armstrong said when he landed on the moon (detail), what matters is what that moment meant. Soon, we are reduced to some level of tendentiousness. Personally, I'd prefer to keep things reasonably civil. But, as I've said, that's not how things have been of late in this business. --eric

It has nothing to do with "post modern drivel about there being no such thing as truth." That's just a bugaboo anyhow. It has to do with the fact that books get written and published in institutional and social contexts that impinge in pretty big ways on the project of finding "truth." Truth may be out there, but what you write is an interpretation, not truth, and your interpretation is liable to be influenced by things like what'll get you tenure, or what will get your book reviewed, or what your peers (who may be pretty casually interested in your topic of specialty) are going to think is cool. These things have demonstrably influenced scholarship, even that written by men (used advisedly) who were quite effusive in their dedication to truth and beauty. Today, I may say I am absolutely dedicated to getting to the truth of the matter. In twenty years someone will come along and show just how distorted--and by what distorted--my idea of truth was. The generation of social critics and musical historians who built the Johnson myth had agendas (aside from uncovering truth) that are pretty obvious to me in retrospect, and at times they were pretty unabashed about putting these agendas forward (unlike their immediate predecessors). Well, that tendentiousness set a standard. That's the fact of the matter. Getting rid of that tendentiousness will make things work a bit more pleasantly and smoothly, I think. And it has gotten very old. But if you think returning to a dedication to truth will get us closer to it, I propose reading some scholarship from folks trained in the Victorian era or in the early part of the twentieth century. Their effusions on behalf of truth are rhapsodic. But of course they considered people like Robert Johnson to be veritable apes. Zero-tolerance for "outiside influence" on scholarly interpretation is just naive and misleading. Better to acknowledge it where one sees it with whatever equanimity one can muster and acknowledge there may be plenty of places where one doesn't see it. And this whole argument goes to style rather than matters of fact anyway--whether or not and how quickly scholarly disagreement ought to descend to ad hominem attack. Personally, I'd rather it be a slow descent. But that hasn't been the style for 30 or 40 years. Doesn't mean there haven't been lots of scholarly advances: there have. Just means that one generation always tries to trash the last. This is unjust, but the generation getting trashed now did it themselves. My sympathy for them is limited. Meanwhile, the book's thesis is interestingly suggestive.

Have you tried before? I read about 80% of it once and have regretted stopping ever since -- I can't get myself to start over! --eric

Unfortunately, that's how you make your way in academia and academic publishing. But critics who built Johnson's reputation were part of the generation who established tendentiousness (accusations and implications of racism abound in this literature) as a modus operendi for cultural critics. It may be tiresome, but I suppose it's only just that their tools should be turned against them. --eric

Have read through the Stowe piece and feel enlightened! A well-researched little piece. I think the theoretical aparatus (public transcript/secret transcript, etc.) might well have been jettisoned, but I guess that's just a sign of the times. He's very fair-minded on the leftist connection, I think: it seems probable, but we just don't know. I have to say I am still capable of being horrified by J. Edgar Hoover stories like: Now, I don't beleive the government has no right/duty to protect the democratic process, but this is Kafka-esque, in both the black-humorous and horrifying senses. Imagine Josephson really is playing from a Soviet script and that he really did use money raised by the Communist Party (no doubt domestically). This is reason to have him deported? This is reason to erase his real name from your records? Unbeleivable. Immediately starting casting Ashcroft in the role of Hoover. Not hard to do with all the Joe McCarthy apologias coming out from the right of late. --eric