fasstrack

You have named three of the very few on WBAI's air who wouldn't have been misfits back when the station had a brain. Now, of course, their intellect and talent sticks out like a sore thumb amidst all the mediocrity. There is a lot of name-calling, back stabbing and throat cutting going on inside WBAI and the Pacifica Foundation right now. It cannot last much longer. The late Ibrahim Gonzalez told me a week before he died in June that the station was either on the verge of a breakthrough or extinction. Let's hope the former is still possible.

Eye of the beholder and also the hurricane.....

I was talking about Beverly Kenney when I said it was a selfish act to commit suicide---problems notwithstanding---and thereby deprive the world of the beauty her artistry offered.

I mean you're killin' me here. I'm an artist too. If I didn't feel the world needs beauty.......

I think I'll regret saying this because the woman was clearly troubled, but suicide, especially by gifted artists, is so selfish in a world that needs beauty.

And Gene Bertoncini, aged 76, sounded beautiful last night.

Guardian review: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/10/malcolm-x-reinvention-review-manning-marable

Thanks!

I just listen selectively: Shmid, Irsay, Loekle. They seem to have survived the bloodbaths. If intersictine warfare kills the station they'll get what they deserve and these fine talents will turn up elsewhere, as will the rest of the BAI staff.

For anyone interested in the NY area or with access to the Smalls webstream I'll be a guest tomorrow night with the Dwayne Clemmons quintet (which includes Josh Benko, Sashca Perry, Murray Wall, Jimmy Wormworth). Sometime between 6 and 9 I'll be called to the stand and the group is well worth hearing. Happy listening.

That last statement of mine bears clarification: Of course it doesn't matter the ethnicity of the author if the book is good. Black folks reading it ought to trust the veracity as long as the work is truthful and well-written. However, we're talking about a major black icon here, and there has always been a certain insularity in the black community, a tendency not to want to publicly criticize one of one's own where the white man can see it. There's the desire to have one of one's own write the history. Understandable in view of history. This reminds me of Spike Lee's defense of having only a black director make 'X'. 'It's too important' said he. Then he made a film IMO gooey with sentimentality and serving up the myth with more smoke and mirrors than the autobiography. Go figure.

It matters to black folks who wrote it, let's be real.

They're not 'shocking' per se, but they give credence to the statement that autobiogrphies are lies. A reviewer in the N.Y. Times review of books opined that Malcolm may have exaggerated his criminal past to make his conversation seem more dramatic. Anyway it's good to have a book by an African-American author to counterbalance the Autobiography. Especially one so well-researched and written.

First mea culpa: I reversed the author's first and last names, not having it in front of me. Apologies to Mr. Marable.

And of course near the end of his life he added to his repertoire The Theme from Mash also known as "Suicide is Painless". Always wondered about that. You know a psychologist/psychiatrist would have had a field day with it. I find his penchant for "Emily" to be far more disturbing. Never saw the film it comes from and just checked the lyrics for the song itself. Can you give more detail on why for us young'uns? Because it too is by the Mandel and because IMO it's kind of a whiney/wimpy piece of music, as annoying in its own way as "The Shadow of Your Smile" -- though many talented jazz musicians obviously have felt otherwise. OTOH, the film itself is darn good IIRC, though I admit to having a soft spot for Julie Andrews -- as an actress, a singer, and as a person. Did an interview with her once -- a lovely experience. P.S. In general, I'm a Mandel fan. His Alban Berg-influenced score for "Point Blank" is something else. I'd like to file an official protest with the Organissimo Society for the Preservation of Pretty Tunes! Sure, everyone's entitled to their opinion on music, but when it comes to the aforementioned JM songs, the above opinions constitute a kind of blasphemy that must be dealt with by only the harshest punishments the OSFTPOPT has reserved for such affronts to its very core of belief. Certainly, the lyrics to said songs make one want to with their corn, but one listen to Kenny Burrell playing "TSOYS" on his "Night Song" LP, is enough to prove that sometimes you gotta say, 'screw the lyrics'. It's not just the lyrics of those songs that grate on me -- in "Emily" it's the almost whiney limpness IMO of the music that goes with the repeated title phrase. But obviously it is a song that has appealed to many talented improvisers. Emily is good to play on. I liked the movie from which it was culled: The Americanization of Emily. Call the repeated phrase motific development. Shadow of Your Smile is on my second tier of bossas, there being many nicer ones. But I pull it out once in a while. It has a minor 7th as a II chord in minor, which you don't hear everyday. Not unlike Benny Golson going from C Minor to A7 to start a cycle. Bends the ear just a bit.

Has anyone read this yet? I think it excellent. It unflinchingly punctures the legend (including the self-generated one) to reveal the man. Among topics broached: a possibly loveless marriage; a drubbing in a debate by Bayard Rustin; the revelation that Malcolm Little was purely small-time as a criminal. There are triumphs too. Comments?

And James Irsay is back! Mornings.

I like both Emily and, to a lesser degree, Shadow of Your Smile----OK the lyric is horrible for the latter. Anyway, so shoot me.

Braxton wasn't the only one. Joe Henderson got heat (from blacks) for digging Stan Getz. All I know is hanging around Chuck Wayne (a white man of Czech descent whose real name is Charles Jagaka) as a young man he said that one reason he originally got into music was that if you could play you were accepted no matter what your color or religion. I think the musicians have by and large been above the fray, even back then. The racial agitators have rarely been musicians. Reading Notes and Tones the first time I thought 'geez, these guys are really pissed at Whitey'. Justifiably, too, to an extent. But Art Blakely, who made a comment in said tome that 'Caucasians can only swing from a rope' hired Valery Pomanarov and Dennis Irwin a few years later. Why? B/c they could play. I think he also said something about being proud that Clifford Brown's message had reached as far as the U.S.S.R. As far as 'killing the music', (I saw Mr. Nasser on Like it Is saying similar things) etc.: anyone has the right to express themselves artistically as they see fit. But accept that if you end up on 'the fringe' it may be a lonely life. And don't cry about it. That goes for mainstreamers, too. Life is a bitch. But don't cry. It doesn't help. Playing does.

The late Lionel Hampton, I presume.

Sounds like a bogus story to me. I'd never read it before and If it were true, I'm sure that it would have made a lot of rounds before this. I believe I read it in a DB interview w/Red. Not 100% sure of that, but it was in print.

No, but I agree she was wonderful.

Leeway: Coltrane may have been caught up in the zeitgeist of the times, but it was others that made him a symbol. He would've said, if asked, that he was only searching for beauty.

There are 'revolutuionaries' in every era----just as there are fakes. The old test of time sorts it out. As far as people resistant to change of all kinds, well, I can point fingers but I'd only be denying what I Luddite I am.

'Post-Coltrane' jazz includes a lot more than 'free', don't you think? With that 40 year designation we're almost (yikes) back to the deaded Ken Burns Jazz imbroglio. I get your point, though. Still, I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for that Garland-Coltrane conversation.......