Corker of a Series

William Kent Krueger had turned 40 by the time his first novel was published in 1998. That book, Iron Lake, took the mystery world by storm, winning several major awards including an Anthony. Iron Lake also set the stage for a whole subsequent series (eight novels so far and all of them prizewinners, with more Anthony nominations and wins) featuring his lead character, Cork O'Connor, a sometime-sheriff of fictional Tamarack County and a devoted family man whose lawyer wife Jo and three spirited children are always figuring importantly in the novels too.

Cork is part-Irish and part-Ojibwe, and his Native American blood/spirit connections are a major force in each novel, situated as all are in the far Northwoods lakes region of Minnesota, near Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters wilderness area, with Ojibwe people (Anishinaabe in their language) always a part of the story, whether encountered on the Iron Lake Reservation or in Cork's town of Aurora.

Krueger is one splendid writer. His sturdy hero (both words seems particularly apt) is a decent, canny guy filled with love for the region and stubborn compassion for its people good or bad. The supporting characters all resonate. The plots are brilliant, with suitable twists and turns and agony as Krueger mixes upstate Minnesota humor, dogged detective work, and sudden terrible violence. He also exhibits a poet's touch in his descriptions of the natural beauty, the changing weather, the play of human emotions, and much more. (He has stated his own perceived indebtedness to Hemingway, Hillerman, and James Lee Burke.)

The review blurbs quoted on each book just keep getting better and better too as Krueger fine-tunes his unformulaic, evolving "formula"; and a reader who works through the novels in order can detect small, graceful improvements in his style. The later books, for example, seem to flow effortlessly through changing points of view whenever required, and the author's showing signs of a subtle, unexpected playfulness too.

His 2008 novel Red Knife, for example, has a heart-rending plot that draws on the AIM movement of the Eighties, rival gangs and drug wars along our borders, racial tension between Native Americans and whites, the hellacious school shootings in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere, as well as Krueger's ongoing examination of honorable behaviour and the complexities of love in all its forms. Yet there are small moments of grace offsetting the violence and hatred, including scene-ending passages like these...

(Sheriff) Dross looked toward the lights on the far side of the empty field. "When you had the job, Cork, did you ever wonder if you were doing the right thing?"
"When didn't I?"
"Yeah." She smiled, but even in the dim light, Cork could see how weary the gesture was.
They separated, heading in different directions, both stumbling in the dark.

* * *
He thought it must be hard having a father like Buck, a man unloving and unlovable in so many ways. Yet Cork had the feeling that love was the one thing Dave Reinhardt desperately wanted from his old man. Hell, didn't every son?

* * *
After the others left, Cork stood a moment in the gathering dark. It was quiet on the long straight stretch of empty highway that burrowed through the pines. He wished he believed the quiet would last.

Or this domestic moment in the O'Connors' kitchen:

"I'm going back to the Kingbirds' this evening with George LeDuc."
"Whatever for?"
"There's something we need to talk to Will about."
"What would that be?"
"It's between Will and LeDuc and me."
"Now who's keeping secrets?"
Cork slipped the spatula under one of the sandwiches and lifted it off the heat.
"I think the grilling is done," he said.

After the book's tragic climax, Krueger even takes the structural step of projecting some characters' lives years into the future. Of Cork's daughter:

Annie O'Connor didn't go to Madison to play softball for the University of Wisconsin. The shootings altered her course and directed her down a different path....
She would grieve, yes--in a way, never stop grieving--but Annie understood that for her there was a way through grief, through sadness, through hate and anger and all the anguish and confusion of the world. It was a path that in a strange way led through the hurting hearts of others, a path that she believed always led to God. And throughout her life Sister Anne would follow it.

Rather a subtle way to announce her religious decision! The novel soon ends with a beautifully bittersweet passage:

(Stevie) ran past Cork, his arms pumping hard, his small strong legs carrying him away. Cork slowed and, as he watched his son, his beloved son, racing way from him, he was struck with an overwhelming and inexplicable sadness. In only a moment, Stevie had sprinted out of the sunlight, entered the shadow of the deep forest ahead, and disappeared from his father's sight.

(I think one might add F. Scott Fitzgerald to Krueger's preferred list of writers. Think of the rhythms and movement as Gatsby ends.)

In a few months, the ninth O'Connor novel will be published. The trade paperback of Red Knife includes the Prologue to forthcoming book Heaven's Keep, and it's a grim, shattering preview that promises much. More hard terrain and harder, life-altering events--more terrible tragedy--await Cork and his family, his Iron Lake and Aurora friends.

I've ordered mine.

"Folks say he's a hero..."

One of the very best folk-rock/roots/Americana CDs of the last quarter century is one I didn't know of until three weeks ago; flat out missed it a decade back. But here's how I got enlightened...

Walking into a used CD store just as it was opening one morning, I said hello to the lone clerk, who remarked that it was time to put on his favorite early-in-the-day album. I paid no attention, went about the store browsing for nothing in particular, but gradually began to realize that something really exceptional was playing on the system--rocking, in-the-groove arrangements backing a fine baritone voice singing songs that were mostly originals but sounded instantly familiar, like folk tunes a hundred years old.

I went back to the counter, asked to see it, studied the cardboard packaging-- Blackjack David by Dave Alvin, released in 1998 on Hightone Records...

Well, dog my cats, as Walt Kelly might say. It was the cool and
way-hot, always brilliant lead guitarist of modern rockabilly/r&b giants The Blasters--whose brother Phil did all the singing in the days of that late-lamented, all-stops-out rock band. Known more for squabbles with Phil (shades of the Everlys!) than for speaking out, I knew Dave had carved out a solo career after he left The Blasters, and I even own a copy of Public Domain, his Grammy award-winning CD of traditional songs, but nothing had prepared me for this years-earlier, clarion-call announcement of classic greatness, using the old English folk ballad as his springboard theme--Blackjack Dave indeed, stealing the listener away to mysterious gypsy music!

The "gratitude" paragraph on the digipac ends with these words: "Thanks for waiting so long." Turned an instant believer, I wasn't willing to wait any longer. I asked the clerk if there was another copy, and if not, could I buy the store's? Reluctantly he agreed to sell me the one playing...

And I've been spinning it every day or two now ever since, with no let-up in enthusiasm. Anyone remember Self Portrait, the weird and disappointing two-record set Dylan issued in 1970, where he seemed to be trying to sing, even croon? Now imagine a first-rate baritone voice (sometimes raspy, sometimes as smooth as Elvis) singing a similarly eclectic array of songs, with a solid rocking back-up including slide and pedal steel, accordion and fiddle, dobro and banjo and drums, played by alt.country stalwarts like Greg Leisz, Bobby Lloyd Hicks, Dillon O'Brian, Chris Gaffney, and Brantley Kearns. That, my friends, is what awaits you on Dave Alvin's 1998 album.

Not only that but, aside from the beautifully reworked title track, the eleven songs are all Alvin originals, or co-writes with established pros like Tom Russell ("California Snow") and Gaffney ("1968"), worthy of Jimmie Rodgers' or Woody Guthrie's best. I'd forgotten or maybe never even noticed that silent Dave was the writer of all the classic Blasters numbers--"Marie, Marie," "Border Radio," "American Music," "So Long, Baby, Goodbye," "Red Rose," "Long White Cadillac," and plenty more.

As fans know, his lyrics for "American Music" handily summed up what The Blasters were about:

It's a howl from the desert
The screams from the slums
The Mississippi rolling
To the beat of the drums...
We got the Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues
We got country swing and rockabilly too
We got jazz, country western and Chicago blues
It's the greatest music that you ever knew.

For this solo album Dave eliminated the howl and the screams and his own amazing, flailing rockabilly guitar, but the rich Americana remains. These are truly story songs too, each one telling a tale worth hearing: the sorry woman trying to hold her life together, hopping a bus and hoping for the best ("Abilene")... the thumping lover's lament called "Evening Blues," with accordion bearing his sadness and a repeating chorus, "Oh I wish that I could hear/ The blues you sing to yourself"... The old-style murder ballad with the singer tricked and trapped by blind love ("Mary Brown")... the gentle lost-love, letter-that-won't-be-sent musing titled "From a Kitchen Table"... the haunting and beautifully composed "California Snow," with a border guard examining his life, recalling an illegal-immigrant tragedy in the treacherous, unexpected weather ("The California summer sun will burn right through your soul/ In the winter you can freeze to death in the California snow...").

And then there's the swaying, night-song solitude of album closer "Tall Trees," and the perfectly played (channelling Guthrie and the Carter Family), folk-rocking story of Johnny and Joe, country boys gone to "1968" Vietnam, with only one coming home, and him lost ever since in guilt and sorrow:

Tonight in this barroom
He's easin' his pain
He's thinkin' of someone
But he won't say the name
Folks say he's a hero
But he'll tell you he ain't
He left the hero in the jungle
Back in 1968..."

I'll bet anyone discovering this classic set, which some cite as Alvin's best album, will have as hard a time as I did resisting the just-right rhythms and extraordinary sound and Dave's got-to-sing-with lyrics. He and producer/player Leisz and all the other musicians really delivered the goods.

But I'm searching for Alvin's other albums. What if this Blackjack lightning struck twice?

From Light to Dark

Ian at the now-renamed Midriff jazz blog recently wrote a pair of posts devoted to the 50th anniversary of Duke Ellington's deceptively simple soundtrack music for Otto Preminger's classic film Anatomy of a Murder, starring Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick. Filmed in bleak b&w, this excellent close-on examination of a courtroom murder trial is set in the isolated Upper Peninsula region of Michigan, with Marquette and Ishpeming standing in for fictional towns "Iron Bay" and "Thunder Bay."

By a small coincidence I am currently reading a multi-prizewinning mystery series by William Kent Krueger--his "Cork O'Connor" novels, which are terrific character studies as well as beautifully written books. These are set in the far north of Minnesota on the shores of Lake Superior (the town is named Aurora), with forays into the Boundary Waters wilderness region, Michigan's U.P., and nearby Ontario--where there is a real Thunder Bay; one Krueger novel takes that as its title. Northern Midwest smalltown life features wonderfully in all of them.

This confluence of theme and place got me to thinking of my teenage years during the Eisenhower Era. Partly the result of all the uprooting and school changes my sisters and I were going through as military brats, I was a classroom "brain" but socially inept. So my lifelong escapist tendencies emerged in those years: preferring reading and music to real people; maintaining a lone-wolf, in-control attitude; having few close friends. And I began a lifelong love affair with the movies--sitting in the dark, dwarfed by a giant screen, the music and action carrying me away...

Four films from those years seem to encapsulate what movies meant back then, especially to one young teen: Boy on a Dolphin, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder, and Psycho; romantic adventure, suspenseful mystery, courtroom drama, and psychological scare fest, respectively. Only the first two were color films; stark black and white photography still seemed closer to "truth" back then. All four were graced with brilliant soundtracks that collectors still seek out today. And all had one other feature in common which will probably become clear as I write about each of them.

From 1956 to 1958 we were stationed in Izmir, Turkey, an historic port on the Aegean Sea, with the sun-drenched Greek Islands fairly close by. Boy on a Dolphin (filmed mostly on Hydra, released 1957) concerns an archeologist searching for Classic Greek artifacts, particularly the statue described by the film's title, with hero Alan Ladd immersing himself in the company of sultry sponge diver Sophia Loren (her first American film role). The plot was pretty silly, I imagine--can't remember most of it--but the Greek Islands scenery was spectacular, as was Ms. Loren dry or wet, but especially when she had just emerged from the sea. (One such moment left the director and crew thunderstruck and made Sophia a two-pointed star.) The music, by Hugo Friedhofer, was haunting and sort of familiar to us in Izmir, drawing as it did on Greek folk melodies--vaguely Middle Eastern; exotic, tuneful and repetitive; suitably mysterious for the undersea scenes.

That Ladd was only 5'4" while Sophia was a robust 5'8" meant that he had to stand on low boxes, or she had to walk in a special ditch beside him (all this came out much later, of course). Still, I had no trouble imagining myself in his, er, sandals and swimsuit.

Released a year later and a much better movie, Vertigo also played Izmir before we left, and it had a major impact on my psyche. I was already somewhat in thrall to the blond-bombshell beauty of sullen Kim Novak (thanks to Picnic and Pal Joey), so seeing her play two different characters--or the same character twice, actually--and watching her die twice (that clothed but curvaceous body!), was an unwelcome experience. (William Kent Krueger's novel Blood Hollow also has a young woman dying twice, but "she" is actually two different lookalike girls.)

Sure, it was only a movie, but detective Jimmy Stewart's fear of heights, his obsession with Kim, his anger and despair, plus composer Bernard Herrmann's complex and eerie music, and director Alfred Hitchcock's use of odd lenses and camera angles and long, slow, suspenseful tracking shots, all added up to a psychological hammer-blow of some sort that the film has never lost and that most viewers still experience even just screening it on DVD.

I'm jaded, cynical and 66, and it still affects me, anyway.)

By 1959 when Anatomy of a Murder was released, we had moved on to Tacoma, Washington. I had read the novel, and its plot and actor Jimmy Stewart are what persuaded me to try the film too, with then-little-known Lee Remick proving a beautiful bonus. I was too callow to appreciate Duke Ellington's music, but it wasn't used that much anyway. Director Otto Preminger seemed unsure what to do with the Duke's brazen, non-scene-specific themes, composed as pieces of music adding up to a suite rather than Hollywood's typical brief cues or "stings."

Besides, Preminger had other fish to fry. He loved to push the social envelope--think The Moon Is Blue, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm--and this story had rape, a revenge killing, and a rather amoral atmosphere, including snide battling lawyers and Stewart carefully coaching his client (defendent husband Ben Gazzara) while half-way falling for flirtatious Lee himself. (Not for nothing were two of Duke's pieces of music called "Flirtibird" and "Happy Anatomy"; Remick/Laura's youthful, careless sexuality and a pair of her panties entered in evidence were prominent features of the film.) The viewer is never sure whether she was brutally raped or was a somewhat willing partner, and whether her husband acted as a cold-blooded killer or a crazed man not fully aware of his actions.

The music, which can be heard in more depth and with more clarity on Columbia's official 1999 CD reissue, has its own smoldering sensuousness (Johnny Hodges' alto at work, plus the clarinets of Russell Procope and Jimmy Hamilton)--sophisticated, making no judgments, sometimes upbeat or shrill but more often tinged with sadness. The Midriff write-up uses the word "lugubrious," but I wouldn't go that far; instead I hear elements suggesting smalltown America, tired roadhouse blues, the sound of a dreary Fifties existence lived unadorned--in harsh black and white, as it were--in the desolate far North. (But of course that's me looking back 50 years later; in 1959 I was simply titillated by Remick and puzzled by the film's callous, casual amorality.)

Psycho was a summer 1960 release. Hitchcock fans (and I was one already, having been convinced by Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much) knew only that the film was b&w and reported to be intense and shocking, featuring name star Janet Leigh, best known for high-bodice costume drama. I was 17 and driving by then, and I got a speeding ticket zipping along some backroads route to the theater downtown, but nothing was going to keep me from that August midnight screening...

Well, the experience was literally life-altering. As we know now, viewers experienced definite nail-biting suspense leading to sudden shock violence. (This was the tame Fifties, remember, long before chainsaws and 13ths and excessive gore.) Screaming string music, again courtesy of Bernard Herrmann. Embezzler-thief Janet in her bra and half-slip as the film begins, and later watched by creepy Tony Perkins (and us audience voyeurs) as she undresses--and then standing naked and helpless in the shower as she is graphically knifed to death in 40 seconds of frantic quick-cutting (to coin a phrase). And this only a third of the way into the picture!

There were other jolting shocks ahead, yet they induced fewer post-screening nightmares; maybe unnerved viewers had become instantly inured. But for years afterward, no matter where I was, I felt a frisson of fear every time I closed any shower curtains, and I took to locking the bathroom door beforehand.

But I suppose these four films (one could add The Searchers earlier and The Apartment a bit later) also unlocked some intellectual capacity, induced some critical thinking, in me and other young people of the era. We saw that the world was rich and varied, beautiful and difficult, sexual and dangerous and sometimes deadly. That Krueger novel mentioned above has a pertinent passage:

Cork had been young once, in Aurora. He remembered the explosive feel of summer nights, when, at fourteen or fifteeen or sixteen your heart was big and your head was forgotten, when you believed you had it in you to do everything, when you felt like you'd never die, but if you did that was all right, too, because it couldn't get any better than this, or any worse.

And the unidentified feature that I mentioned above, found in all four films? Well, what's still guaranteed to claim the close attention of any curious teenage male? (Duke Ellington would likely smile. Duke Wayne as Ethan maybe wouldn't.)

Granz Scheme of Things

Yesterday I was idly wondering why I'd never seen a book about great Jazz impresario Norman Granz. The man was no shrinking violet, by any definition; instead he was firm and opinionated, a stubborn, in-your-face veteran of the concert/record wars for four decades, protective of his client artists, generous with the fees and salaries he paid them, quick to decry any signs of racism they encountered, determined on their behalf to accept nothing less than first-rate treatment. Industry people, meaning record company execs, rival producers, concert hall owners, critics, and even some fans, seemed to admire Granz and disparage him in equal measure. One imagines that he must have loved to be hated--at least, by those he deemed unworthy of respect.

So I checked the new/used on-line book sources (including the Abebooks data base of independent bookstores) and discovered one volume that piqued my curiosity sufficiently that I ordered a copy--Norman Granz: The White Moses of Black Jazz, published in 2003 by Urban Research Press. (With a worrisome $40 price tag, so I'm definitely hoping for the best.)

"White Moses"? Even those two words carry a whiff of controversy, suggesting Granz's Jewish heritage, and his out-front efforts at leading jazz musicians (especially black ones; the words seem to play off the Black Moses album by Isaac Hayes) into some holy land of prosperity and respect, and yet also implying that a white-knight "Stormin' Norman" was the only one who could make it all happen. Well, from 1943 through his retirement from active touring (1973) to his final withdrawal during the mid-1980s, the man did all that and more--producing and promoting, managing and demanding, creating and directing record companies, leading far-ranging international tours.

And it all grew out of his single idea--a fairly simple one, it would seem in retrospect, but he was the first and certainly the best at it--to stage concerts that allowed blacks and whites, musicians and fans alike, to sit down together and listen to exciting jazz created in a live, jam-session atmosphere. The first major event was held at L.A.'s Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944, and when the printer serendipitously omitted the last word of the venue's title, the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" name was born: first for concerts, then recordings capturing the excitement (and sometimes the clams) of live performances, then U.S. tours, and then "JATP" around the world, a landmark global phenomenon.

Along the way, he licensed 78s to labels owned by Moses Asch and, later, Mercury, and then in the early Fifties started his own labels: Clef, Norgran, shortlived Downhome Music for traditional jazz, Verve (begun as a vehicle for Ella Fitzgerald; he'd become her manager) with eventually hundreds of Long Play albums--great and not-so-great, but always historically significant, including major work by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, Stan Getz, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, John Coltrane (live albums released years later) and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald. (His fifth label, Pablo, was a latter-day effort, issuing scads of LPs--some fine recordings, yes, but many less compelling performances too, his stable of artists by then become as elderly as Granz himself.)

From the beginning, the Granz method on stage or in the studio was to bring together top "mainstream" jazzmen, make them comfortable, and then simply turn them loose to improvise with the tape running. This worked remarkedly well, often, but too many albums seemed scattered and loosey-goosey. (Were all those "Perdido/Mordido/Endido" jams anything more than raucous, excitable noise? Instead of solid jazz were they early precursors of rock 'n' roll, as some revisionists claim? Was Norman the Promoter prescient or just lucky?) Visual proof of the Granz system came in the ahead-of-its-time film Jammin' the Blues, produced in 1944 in conjunction with photographer Gjon Mili; and that was followed some years later by an unfinished and inadequately conceived sequal titled Improvisation, its pieces finally released a few years ago in a 2DVD set important mostly for footage of Charlie Parker and some Montreux performances led by Count Basie.

Even the packaging for his record releases became significant and collectable over the years--cover art by David Stone Martin for scores of albums; beautiful b&w and color photos by top lensmen like Herman Leonard and Phil Stern; and after Granz stopped writing his own brief and error-prone liner notes, scores of fine and elegant mini-essays by English jazz critic Benny Green.

While paying top dollar to his artists, Granz also managed to accumulate great wealth for himself; he made no bones about expecting to be well-compensated for all the hard work. Early on, he invested heavily in the varied art of Pablo Picasso, and he sold both Verve (in 1960) and Pablo (in 1987) for major millions. Between the works of art and all the jazz memorabilia accumulated, his home in Switzerland must have been a wonder.

As was the man--brusque and all-business, yet also charming and even witty when he chose to be; vain enough to hide his baldness with a comb-over/toupee, but also playful and canny enough to invent a non-existent, tongue-in-cheek, supposedly top-of-the-line "Muenster-Dummel Hi-Fi Recording" system (the words appeared on early Clef/Norgran labels); and most important, making great jazz happen for half a century...

Beyond all the JATP brouhaha, fans discovered Bird with Machito and Gillespie and (innovatively) strings; Diz with Stan Getz and both premier saxman Sonnys, as well as many gems from Getz as leader; solid releases aimed at keeping the names of Carter and Eldridge before the public; those three glorious duet albums of Satch and Ella, not to mention her "Great American Songbook" sets (jazziest with Duke); the later Basie band driving in high gear at full throttle, and Duke and his Ellingtonians staying as sly and tuneful as ever; unexpected classics by Lee Konitz and Jimmy Giuffre, Buddy DeFranco and Tal Farlow, bustling drummers Krupa and Rich; all the Anita O'Day albums needed to secure her reputation, and several that kept Billie Holiday alive if not well; the series of major sax LPs--alone or together--by Pres and the Hawk, Illinois and Ben the Brute, prickly Gerry Mulligan and laconic Johnny Hodges; plus more Oscar Peterson Trio LPs than the world could absorb, to put alongside the even more baroque series of albums recorded by Art Tatum, both alone and (almost) accompanied...

But enough already. There must be nearly two hundred true classics, and that's not counting the many career-revitalizing albums that appeared when Pablo got rolling in 1973. And they all owe their existence to the grit and grandiosity of Norman Granz.

I look forward to reading the more complete version of his amazing life story.

Postscript: The book arrived and is a disappointment, a sort-of vanity press collection of essays on jazz figures loosely associated with Granz, and with not much more on the man himself than I had already detailed above. Shucks. I guess the definitive book is still to be written.

Professors and Piano-Ticklers

(see text below pic)









Now that I'm no longer a part of Jazz.com, the project I most regret not completing is the Dozens I'd started on New Orleans Piano Players. Here's what I'd drafted as the unpublished introduction:

In the beginning, King Oliver's cornet and Louis Armstrong's trumpet were the instruments that "jazzed" the original fans of New Orleans music. But ever since that interlocking brass sound moved up the Mississippi to Chicago and then New York, it's been the rhumba-related beat of second-lining piano that's defined the Big Easy--from Tony Jackson to Eddie Bo, Jelly Roll Morton to Fats Domino, Tuts Washington to, yes, even Randy Newman.

One could argue that NOLA's grandmasters of the keys have really been drawing crowds and high-steppin' dancers since the mid-1800s concert career of young Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who absorbed and then carried Congo Square's African rhythms and local Creole melodies east to Europe and Cuba and south to Argentina and Brazil.

And beyond that, New Orleans' geographic location in general meant that South Louisiana and the Caribbean actually swapped music back and forth for a couple of centuries--the habanera arriving from Cuba, for example, to become Morton's "Spanish tinge," then mixing with local ex-slave dances and back-from-the-funeral parade-stepping to shape the hitch-and-shuffle second-line... and that Crescent City sound then soaring back to Jamaica over the airwaves from the late Forties on, helping to generate ska and reggae. It's a twisty story but one thing has been rockin' solid throughout... New Orleans piano.

Here are 12 of the musicians who played a part in that unbroken hundred-year history, this dozen delineating an entire tradition, several generations of masters and mentors, listeners and learners, professors and piano-ticklers--a few of them still not widely known outside "The City That Care Forgot," but all of them worth your while...

The half Dozens I did write covered the six leading and arguably most influential players:

1. Jelly Roll Morton (for my preferred versions of both Morton and Dupree, go here , then to the two italicized reviews in bottom third of the post)

2. Champion Jack Dupree (with Morton as above)

3. Fats Domino (go here)

4. Professor Longhair (here)

5. Allen Toussaint (here)

6. Dr. John (here)

I had also written a seventh, not-yet-submitted piece on the more obscure Huey Smith:

One measurably influential New Orleans pianist is only barely audible on most of his many regional hit records. While Huey "Piano" Smith wrote the tunes and established the groove, he chose to keep his vocalists and band the Clowns out front and his busy piano mostly buried. R&b fans didn't care because the Clowns usually included many local greats--vocalists Bobby Marchan and Geri Hall, guitarists Mac Rebennack and Earl King, saxmen Lee Allen and Alvin Tyler, drummer Earl Palmer, support keyboards by James Booker and Allen Toussaint, and so on. Loud, rhythm-driven, repetitious, the words often nonsensical and the vocals mostly chanted or shouted, Smith still managed to create some true classics, from "High Blood Pressure" and "Don't You Just Know It" to "Sea Cruise" and "John Brown" and his genius signature song "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu."

Smith's keyboard does resound in that last-mentioned tune--the arrangement still kept simple, mostly just staccato notes and chords, piano triplets repeating, the vocals riding on top, but followed by enough boogie-woogie stomp to satisfy the song title. It's a rare opportunity to hear Smith at work, edging closer (like most of his hits) to what later became identified with the Crescent City group called the Wild Tchoupitoulas--parade rhythms and beyond-sense chants about "flag boys" and "spyboys," big chiefs and fine funky fun. Listeners outside New Orleans back then just didn't realize that Huey's best work was giving the world a joyous, jump-up sampling of the Mardi Gras "Indian" tribes in street-fest mode--"don't cha know, jockamo?"

Others awaiting similar brief scrutiny were jazz pianists Ellis Marsalis (pater of the famous familias) and Harry Connick, Jr., r&b master Art Neville (his keyboards anchoring both The Meters and later Neville Brothers groups), and can't-be-pigeonholed players James Booker and Henry Butler.

I guess they'll all have to find some champion other than me--or two-fisted Jack, for that matter--to bring the piano story up to date. Me, cher, I got other catfish 'n' hushpuppies to fry...

Eurasian Impressions... and Mine

I was sick with the flu recently--a strain first diagnosed as Swine but eventually adjudged by the CDC as a different Type-A virus. But it reminded me that back in 1957, when my family was living in Izmir, Turkey, I actually contracted one of the first recorded cases of what came to be known as Asian Flu. This then-mystery illness gave me a hellacious fever, and I ended up dehydrated and then hospitalized, with a tube feeding me liquids.

I survived the new-found bug, obviously. What had a more lasting impact was the curious music I could hear playing somewhere down the hospital corridor... When I recovered enough to wander around, I went searching for the source--which proved to be the room of an airman cooped up with hepatitus, using his portable phonograph to play Dave Brubeck records.

Pretty much clueless at 14, I was at the time a total goner for r&b and rockabilly; Little Richard, Elvis, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, the Johnny Burnette Trio, were some of the cool cats whose discs I owned. So this weird, floating sax-and-piano stuff was a definite stretch.

But I couldn't get the sounds out of my head, and from then on I was a solid Brubeck Quartet fan, first the Fantasy albums I'd heard the airman spin, and thereafter all the popular Columbia releases too. As an AF dependent living overseas, I was especially intrigued that the Quartet had become Jazz ambassadors, regularly visiting many countries around the world. Dave's compositions "Blue Rondo a la Turk" (from Time Out), "The Golden Horn" and possibly "Nomad" (both on Jazz Impressions of Eurasia) were Turkish-inspired; and I felt an unlikely pride of kinship.

What the college fans had experienced when the early Quartet showed up in concert was what I was getting too, a taste of the excitement of improvised Jazz, which gradually led me to explore the recordings of other artists who became mainstays of my listening: Monk, Miles, Bill Evans, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, the MJQ, colossal Sonny, Stan Getz--pretty much all the usual suspects--and eventually Diz and Bird, Duke and Louis and Basie-Pres, from the earlier days as well.

But I never lost my love for Brubeck during the ensuing decades, and when I started writing for Jazz.com late last year, I made a point of reviewing plenty of tracks by Dave, Paul, Eugene, and Joe (and the Quartet's earlier rhythm guys too). You can read a sampling by going here; a search for "Dave Brubeck, Ed Leimbacher" yields a page of published reviews, with seven or eight pertinent to this story.

I tried to convince the boss--critic and author Ted Gioia--that an unexpected and distinctive Brubeck Dozens could be compiled from his innumerable originals, inspired by 60 years of global travel. But Gioia thought the idea too limited and frivolous (or maybe I just didn't convey the possibilities convincingly). Just as critic Doug Ramsey of Rifftides is an expert on Paul Desmond, so too Ted is a major proponent of Brubeck, from years of playing piano himself and of conducting interviews with Dave; and he is somewhat protective as a result.

But I managed to write several pieces that hinted at the possibility of a Brubeck-Around-the-World Dozens. (Maybe someone else will take up the torch.) Meantime, here's the first of two reviews I started but didn't finish--unused variations on that travels idea (with the intended tracks named in the copy):

As the Brubeck Quartet circled the globe--from India to Indiana, Austria to Australia, the USA to the USSR, and with more tours crisscrossing Europe than even he cares to recall--Dave composed dozens of tunes derived from the joys and ills the genial four encountered. A stop in India, for example, produced "Calcutta Blues," a moody piece that actually seems less gloomy than Dave's liner notes propose. (Let us note a passing irony in the nickname Paul Desmond bestowed on Dave--"The Indian"--acknowledging the pianist's part-Native American ancestry.)

Dave's Calcutta is a place of mystery and sinuous sax and cobra-setic drums...

And the second incomplete intro:

From its featured place in The Real Ambassadors, which never got much traction, the tune "Travelin' Blues" emerged as a theme Brubeck returned to occasionally. (Even a seasoned traveler like Dave gets the weary blues sometimes.) This live version recorded with one of his later groups shows a still energetic pianist who keeps on ticketing...

(Okay, so I never pass up a chance for an improvised pun. Maybe I was too frivolous for Jazz.com and its document-the-music mission.)

A Fiftieth Anniversary/Legacy version of Time Out has just been released--offering no outtakes from the studio sessions, but adding a long CD of fine, previously unissued live tracks from that approximate period. I bought a copy immediately, and was especially pleased by the bonus DVD with interview and on-camera solo piano by Brubeck (taped in 2003)--ol' Indomitable Dave, nearing 90 and still playing for people anywhere he can manage to travel to... and touring this summer as "Time Out--Take Fifty."

Beyond Brubeck, what matters finally is that I still crave the ever-renewing "sound of surprise" (as Jazz critic Whitney Balliet named it) that I first heard flat on my back in a Turkish hospital over 50 years ago--and which still lifts me up, sometimes, today.

Spivey Brothers Barbecue

Thinking of Kansas City and New Orleans and other cities known for spicy food as well as jazz, I concocted some barbecue baked beans a few nights ago for friends, creating a sauce on the fly from whatever was handy. They were a success (just as often not, when improvised). But if I weren't so lazy about it, I might could bake up some serious beans...

My mother's family was named Spivey. Her ancestors generations back had been plantation and slave owners but by Mom's time they were minor farmers in southcentral Georgia. She had a slew of brothers, many of whom left the farm to settle (for reasons I've forgotten) in Shreveport, Louisiana, followed eventually by Granny and Granddaddy too.

One thing the guys took with them was the Spivey love (and recipe) for barbecue, nurtured I suppose by the farm's mysterious smokehouse shed. Though the brothers held regular jobs in Shreveport, they also opened a small barbecue joint and took turns running the day-to-day operation: brewing up sauce, making amazing hot sausage, cooking the various meats, fixing heaping plates of barbecue. The "Spivey Brothers" shop became a local hit, and soon the guys were bottling and selling their popular sauce--which packed some serious heat but kept a bit of sweet there too--out of the shop at first, but then straight to Shreveport food stores, and slowly spreading out across the wider area too.

By the mid-Fifties, Spivey Brothers Barbecue Sauce was available throughout most of Louisiana. The shop was still there, but the volume of wholesale business would soon require a move to a big sauce-making plant. The brothers had also added a hot red-pepper sauce that was starting to challenge Louisiana-mainstay Tabasco (which had not yet become the worldwide phenomenon it is today). I remember riding with Granddaddy in a small silver-metal truck, delivering the sauces to stores from northwest Louisiana on down to Cajun Country.

By the early Sixties, the business had expanded further eastward, becoming a small Southeast Region success. But like many small businesses, Spivey Brothers got in debt trying to get too big too fast (by then my parents had some money invested in them too); and when Kraft Foods came sniffing around, the best financial decision--taken with much regret--was to sell the sauce business to Kraft. The brothers signed documents promising not to relaunch and never to manufacture or sell their barbecue sauce again.

This should be where the story gets even bigger, right? Kraft spreading the Spivey name across the nation? Sadly no--instead the conglomerate just killed the Spivey product line, eliminating the competition completely. I fantasized that maybe Kraft's own sauce would take on a hotter Spivey Brothers tinge, but no chance; the Kraft brand sauces have always been too sweet for my taste, at least until recently. (Present-day barbecue fans may be dictating a wider choice of heat; I haven't checked.)

And so Spivey Brothers Barbecue Sauce was lost to the world...

Well, not completely. Some of my Spivey cousins have kept the original recipe alive; and I have Mom's youngest brother Bobby's partly handwritten directions--makes serious stuff, nearly three gallons of sauce at a time, uses one good ol' Southern source for sugar (bottles of Coca-Cola!), might curl your toes and spice up your nights if you ever got to sample it...

Sorry, can't tell you any more. My sauce-singed lips are sealed.

Missing the Bus

Marc Myers at jazzwax.com had an intriguing post the other day (here), regarding Charles Mingus and his sometimes controversial jazz compositions (at least those exhibiting a boldly political slant). Marc focussed particularly on "Fables of Faubus"--its angry lyrics and churning music.

Yet we know that Mingus had a way of revising his pieces on the fly, again and again, his tunes and arrangements evolving continuously. And Sue Mingus says he never fixed on any one text when words were part of a composition too. "Definitive" Mingus performances aren't often that, but instead just a matter of a moment in time and of tape running in a studio.

Mingus was not alone, of course, in addressing racism and events of the Civil Rights era. Satch spoke out; Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone sang out; Duke wrote carefully; Rollins and Roach, Coltrane and Shepp and others issued their "freedom suites" and tributes with other titles. Marches and sit-ins and freedom rides, mounting tension in Selma and Little Rock, bombs in Birmingham, murders in Mississippi, the later assassinations of the Kennedys and King... the list of horrors and astonishing acts of bravery is endless and likely timeless, and jazz musicians have chimed in often over the decades.

But contemplating the albums and tracks and titles, I came up with none honoring the 1955-56 Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, when weary Rosa Parks was too tired to move to the back of the bus yet again, and a young church leader named Martin Luther King was soon decisively taking charge. (The Neville Brothers' "Sister Rosa" remains a fine r&b tribute.)

I was living in Montgomery for that one year (father in the USAF, stationed at Maxwell). Though I was a thoughtless pre-teen cowed by the South in general, I can well remember black people walking everywhere, and a few white drivers including my parents giving them lifts to work or the grocery or across town to some other destination.

The Brown v. Board of Education court decision of 1954 had opened the door to integration, but not many folks tried to walk through till Parks sat down and King stepped forward. Maybe the action was too diffuse, the racial tension largely absent, because those Montgomery folks were refusing something and not yet demanding, absenting themselves rather than getting in the face of the white establishment. Even so, surely the boycott merits some remembrances in jazz too...

It's likely such compositions exist and I just haven't come across them, or have forgotten titles once known, but until someone enlightens me further (and please do), I remain puzzled by such loud silence.

Beware the Jazzerwhack

My time at Jazz.com has ended with a sorry thud. I resigned a few days ago. Here's why:

For the first several months whatever I wrote was carefully read and occasionally improved by an editor named Alan Kurtz, one of those gents who works to better the writer's submission by asking questions, suggesting slight rewrites, finally polishing a bit if still necessary--shaping a better Ed-piece, as it were.

A month ago I was reassigned to a person I will now call Frumious Bandersnatch. He is the opposite sort of editor--the sort who slashes and rewrites to make the piece fit a prescribed length and sound more like the editor than the source writer. He asks no questions, gives no information, edits to suit himself, and then submits the finished product without allowing the writer a chance to read or object. Frumious has mangled eight or ten of my reviews now, and I finally got tired of bitching and getting nowhere, either with him or with Jazz.com mainman Ted Gioia, who quickly tired of my complaints.

So I quit. No loss to the website; a small, proud-but-useless gesture on my part. Too bad. I liked what Jazz.com was and is doing, just not what they were doing to me.

Probably only another writer will appreciate the rest of this story, but I have stubbornly now decided to post several of my last efforts in the original versions, here at my blog, along with links to the reviews as rewritten by Frumious. Readers are welcome to compare and decide for themselves if I am just oversensitive and egocentric, or maybe actually justified.

First exhibit is Gil Scott-Heron's "Winter in America," one of 12 Americana Jazz pieces I was compiling for a feature called The Dozens. (Ironically, this is the one review Frumious actually wrote me about, asking me to lengthen my original by 50 words or so, which I did. He then proceeded to cut the whole thing!) Here's the version I submitted:

Poet, vocalist, and proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron has experienced something of a career revival during the last decade. Eclipsed in the Eighties and early Nineties, he is now acknowledged as a major influence on several developments in Black Music and today's soul jazz as well. (It's easy to imagine that Cassandra Wilson, for one, considered Gil and the Midnight Band before finding her own path.) One of Scott-Heron's finest statements is "Winter in America," an image-driven portrait of the icy stasis gripping the nation in the early Seventies--after the assassinations and riots, after Watergate and Vietnam.

First there was an album of that name on Strata-East but no song (Scott-Heron considered the three words simply an evocative image, not a subject for music), then he composed an actual "Winter in America" for his Arista debut, The First Minute of a New Day. But this studio effort didn't really jell until tour performances (and some live recordings) crystalized its powerful message. Still, one version looms distinct. A bonus track on the New Day CD reissue, the "Winter" of 1978 is both cooler and stronger as Gil works alone, his voice and electric piano only. The keyboard work is basic, the rhythm mostly staccato, the melody slightly flattened out, yet a cold beauty and several hard truths obtain: "...a nation that just can't stand much more... democracy is rag-time on the corner, hopin' for some rain... peace signs that melted in our dreams... all of our healers have been killed or betrayed... ain't nobody fighting because nobody knows what to save."

The picture is bleak but the music haunts and compels, and the verbal tropes still resound today, 30 years farther (or maybe no farther) on...

And here is the link: http://www.jazz.com/music/2009/5/14/gil-scott-heron-winter-in-america

Next is the final entry in the Americana Dozens, which I wrote carefully to end a certain way (the unnecessary rewrite adds poor grammer there instead):

After the sturm und drang of 80 chaotic years--wars and demonstrations, riots and space walks, Depression and recession and more, all of them reflected (and sometimes rejected) in the sound of jazz and the souls of musicians of each era--it's a momentary grace to come upon Charlie Haden's "American Dreams." In the Liberation Music Orchestra albums his political activism remains a resolute force. But here the statement is simply peaceful, a piano trio performance by Haden, Brad Mehldau, and Brian Blade, embraced by a 34-piece string orchestra. (Co-billed tenor man Michael Brecker lays out on this track.)

Low strings announce the heartbeat thuds of Haden's stately lift-and-settle-back melody, then the strings fall away and in a light 4/4 Mehldau plays lovely variants of the theme, Charlie staying quiet and Blade flicking and switching around Brad's resonating notes, till the bass and strings resume their calm, earth-coming-to-rest pulse. Both rise then in a slow crescendo... followed by a swift dying fall and Haden's deep time going silent. His song-without-words has conjured images of the shifting clouds and colors of a sunset under Western skies, and somehow an America once more worthy of the dreams of its people.

And the Bandersnatched revise: http://www.jazz.com/music/2009/5/20/charlie-haden-american-dreams

Now the opening of a planned new Dozens devoted to New Orleans piano masters over the century of Jazz:

New Orleans piano didn't start with Jelly Roll Morton, who paid his own respects to such earlier Storyville habitues as Sammy Davis and Tony Jackson, but the self-styled "Inventor of Jazz" was first to record, and his subsequent decades of success probably helped inspire other Creole pianists like Joe Robicheaux and Armand Hug. Meanwhile, Morton's 1940 Library of Congress recordings (filling seven CDs) make for fascinating listening as he plays and sings and recounts the long and winin'-boy history of NOLA music.

The track titled "New Orleans Blues" serves double duty. It's a syncopated number with traces of ragtime and the sporting parlor amidst a flowing series of variations that eventually lead to a restrained stomp-it-off finish. Jelly Roll states that he pulled the tune together about 1902 (helped by older players Joe Jordan and Frank Richards), but on this recording he uses it to introduce a multi-part dissection of "the Spanish tinge" in jazz, that taste of tango/habanera rhythm that may actually date back to pianist-composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Yes or no, the "tinge" has been the bed-rocking foundation of New Orleans music ever since. Morton talks and plays, demonstrating how the semi-Latin beat needed to move from the right hand to the left, to create a solid base/bass for jazz (as the new music would come to be named), which would then allow the piano in the right hands to be brisk or bluesy or ballad slow.

As Jelly rolls on, we get to hear him interpret "La Paloma" as well as his own Spanish-tinged tunes "Creepy Feeling" and "The Crave." He may have been a braggart, but Morton was also a brilliant pianist (and singer) and prolific composer who lived his life con brio, and the LoC tapes are proof positive.

The Frumious link: http://www.jazz.com/music/2009/5/20/jelly-roll-morton-new-orleans-blues-the-spanish-tinge

And finally the second piano review, this one of boxer-turned-bluesman Jack Dupree:

A New Orleans favorite since never-recorded pianist "Drive 'Em Down" (Willie Hall) played it in the streets in the Twenties, "Junker's Blues" was finally put on disc in 1941 by Hall's two-fisted protege, Champion Jack Dupree. Jack's rough barrelhouse style fit the down-and-dirty, drug-user lyrics to a T, and NOLA musicians have been casually borrowing lines or tune ever since that first 78 was issued (Fats Domino's debut single "The Fat Man," Lloyd Price singing "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," even "Tipitina" by Professor Longhair, plus umpteen versions reworked as "Junco Partner"). But the Dupree cut is still rawest and best.

"They call me a junco, 'cause I'm loaded all the time"--that's his cheerful opening line, and Jack keeps up the bouncy, pounding, percolating blues piano while he namechecks wine, reefer, needles, cocaine, and other junk, not to mention jail time. Your mom's melody and words this isn't, but the lines eventually find Jack's mother and father, even his grandma, trying to warn him off the stuff...

There's no happy ending, just some final flinty barrelhouse chords, and a blues song that became a hit and a template. The irony is that Dupree supposedly never used anything stronger than liquor, and not much of that. He just loved to clown and play the boogie and make "the peoples" smile. Startling as the subject still may be, "Junker's Blues" does just that.

And the rewrite that broke the camel's back (and notice the word and sentence deletions--why scrap "two-fisted," for instance, a perfect adjective for boxer/barrelhouser Dupree?): http://www.jazz.com/music/2009/5/20/champion-jack-dupree-junker-s-blues

So there's the stuff. One might argue that the revised versions still keep the meat and potatoes of each review. But the gravy is gone; that's how I see it--"It is a poor thing, but mine own." No doubt I over-reacted, but I just don't think any editor should treat a writer like chattel, some pest to be ignored. And I don't back down until persuaded of some error or ineptitude.

Editors...can't work with 'em, can't delete 'em.

Jazz's Missing Links Discovered

Hello, world! After several months of silence here, I am stopping by just long enough to mention where I have been writing... www.jazz.com--one of several first-rate on-line sites devoted to Jazz Music of all eras. For jazz.com I am writing reviews of (mostly) classic tracks of the past 50 years, from Louis to Duke, Brubeck to Getz, Ella to Tony Bennett, with major efforts even covering Muddy Waters and Jazz versions of the music from West Side Story!

Anyone curious about these can visit the site and search "Ed Leimbacher" to find the 30-40 mini-reviews I've written so far.

And let me also recommend a similar and most excellent site (the work of a single amazing guy blogging almost daily), offering interviews, album recommendations, and scores of great photos. That one's at www.jazzwax.com--and I'll bet you find lots of interesting stuff to ponder, and even listen to, at either site.

Our world may be in a shambles, but I'm pleased to state that... Jazz lives!

ObaMagic!

Glory Hallelujah, he did it! This is one event definitely worth my taking notice of here too. The Man, of the hour and the year too, was rather sober and uncelebratory in his thank-you speech last night, but he faces hellacious problems in this divided country that would stagger any of us. Good that his friends and supporters could laugh and cry across the land. Now let's all pray the new President and his beautiful family can find some joy and laughter as well as the impossible headaches and heartaches in the years ahead.

I particularly valued his quiet nudges in the direction of Martin Luther King's famous speech: "... uphill climb... we may not get there right away... but YES WE CAN!"

My political cynicism took a hit last night. God help me lose it altogether, and God help President Obama. The whole world is rejoicing.

My Secret Blues Life

I was born on an Air Force base in Texas in 1943, my father a young Captain from Illinois. But my mother came from a Southcentral Georgia farm family named Spivey, and all through the later Forties and early Fifties we routinely paid visits to the Spivey tobacco farm (in Mystic, a 300-person village outside Ocilla and somewhat farther from Fitzgerald).

My playmates were young black children mostly, and one summer visit I even worked in the tobacco barn, the only white boy there. Race wasn't an issue I knew anything about, but visiting local sharecropper farms with my Uncle Henry (who was an area Farm Administration bureaucrat of some sort), and listening to the older white guys talk, I later realized I was seeing and hearing white paternalism, and mild racism, in action. If I was hearing any Black Music then, it's missing from my memories.

The Spivey family had in earlier days moved from further north in the state, where Spivey forebears had been plantation folk owning over a hundred slaves (or so I was told); and years later I wondered if somehow I was slavery-connected to the Classic Blues singer Victoria Spivey, but I've never done any research to answer the question.

Meanwhile, as an AF family, we kept on the move--Oklahoma, Texas again, then a few years in New York and Virginia. I remember riding the New York Central railroad a couple of times in those years, treated with kindly attention by black porters, one of whom I swear looked like Son House as he appeared when rediscovered later--he'd been a porter working out of Rochester for many years by then. In Virginia, my Southern belle mom experienced some years of migraine headaches that laid her low and left us kids routinely in the care of a big black woman named Rhoda, our part-time maid who soon became much more.

Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama; the year was 1955-56... which means I soon saw firsthand the results of the Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember my parents actually giving rides to the black people walking along the roads; and for years afterwards I imagined they were displaying their liberal attitude, but I suppose it's more likely they were just helping maids and gardeners and other domestic workers get to their day jobs.

Seventh grade in Montgomery was a shock to me, chubby and awkward and socially inept--and astonished by all the blatant racial remarks I'd hear every day from poor-white and upper-crust adolescents both. Boys planning to pile into a car and go "nig'-knocking." Slurs against black women. Special vituperation reserved for King and the others "interfering in our local business."

But the regional radio was amazing! Elvis and the Memphis Sun guys got air play, and more importantly so did Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all those numerically named black rhythm groups. I was getting my first taste of versions of Blues music as well as seeing harsh aspects of black life and black/white relations. (I started buying records seriously then, adding to the Harry Belafonte 45 set I'd bought back in Virginia.)

Then we were shipped overseas for two years, to Izmir (old Smyrna), Turkey, where I unknowingly heard--drifting from doorways and open windows--the outcast Aegean Greek equivalent of the Blues, that haunting Piraeus-to-Smyrna music known as rembetika. Meanwhile, the local PX did bring in a few 45s and albums by Domino and the Burnette Trio and then Bo Diddley and Johnny and Joe, not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. Yet by the time we got back to the States, the first rush of rock 'n' roll was already over, and the softer pop guys had started their ascension, along with the Kingston Trio and other folk.

It was the latter that interested me most, even though I soon began hearing too the music coming out of Detroit and Chicago, meaning Motown and a bit of Southside Blues. The nearby AF base teen club played popular r&b discs, and I danced with young black women at some teen functions--had a minor crush on one, as I kept denying the racial reality of America. (I don't know what happened to Gwen later, but her younger brother went on to a solid career as Jazz pianist and Music Dept. college prof.)

I went off to Chicago for college in 1960, but still wasn't hip or brave enough to go investigating the area Blues clubs in their heyday. I did catch a concert by Ray Charles and his amazing revue (sing it, Margie!) in a strange warehouse-like venue, but the one album that galvanized me most was this weird-sounding debut LP by a kid named Bob Dylan. I loved "Song to Woody" and enjoyed some other numbers, but was most intrigued by Dylan's covers of songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson (who?) and Bukka White. I immediately wanted to know more about the original performances and singers. (Dylan's music, of course, ranged far and wide during the ensuing decades, yet he never forgot the Blues; his Blind Willie McTell song is one of the great works of 20th Century music of any kind.)

About then, Columbia issued its first albums resurrecting the Blues of Robert Johnson and Leroy Carr... and I was a goner. Suddenly it was all Blues all of the time. Back in Seattle for the second half of college, I went regularly to thrift and junk stores and obscure Central Area disc shops in search of 78s and 45s (eventually sold the small collection I amassed to Bob the Bear Hite, lead singer for Canned Heat). And I started buying every Blues album I could find, especially the mesmerizing reissues of then-still-obscure older Bluesmen, on OJL, RBF, and then Arhoolie Records (thank God for Chris Strachwitz!), followed by Belzona (soon renamed Yazoo). I was in heaven for a while; it was actually possible in those days to keep up with all the Blues LPs being issued.

One of my favorite early buys, though, was a Vanguard set, Blues at Newport 1963, with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt, and others, including a young white guy named John Hammond (son of the famous a&r man and artist discoverer with the same name). Hearing young John's amazing reworkings of Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry--some said slavish copying, but I disagreed--cheered on by the great black elders on stage, convinced me that a white boy could play and sing the Blues. (And he was soon followed on record by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, and other creditable white players.)

This revelation encouraged me to dig even deeper into what I could learn about the Blues. So I subscribed to England's wonderful collector mag Blues Unlimited, kept an eager eye out for Blues articles in DownBeat, scoured bookstores for histories by Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters and eventually others, and also attended what in retrospect were unique, and luckily captured on videotape: the mid-Sixties performances by John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and maybe Skip James too (I missed that one), brought out to Seattle by the Folklore Society.

I also started writing rock criticism, both locally and for newly minted Rolling Stone and then other rival publications. Among my proudest moments at Stone were key reviews of Clifton Chenier, the Memphis Swamp Jam set celebrating some of the rediscovered elders, and a major Chess Records reissue program. I also covered some interesting events for the magazine that brought me into direct contact with Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, John Mayall, Ike and Tina Turner, John Hammond, and one or two other Blues performers. An amazing couple of hours was me as "fly on the wall," backstage at a festival listening to Bo, Collins, Ike, and some of their band guys shoot the shit, talkin' smack and doin' the dozens on each other!

At the same time I had decided by 1967 that I was going to write a screenplay about Robert Johnson (somebody should, was my thinking); and I spent a couple of years researching, writing, re-writing, and finally copyrighting my fictionalization of his then-obscure life, which I titled Hellhound on My Trail. By 1970 it was beginning to circulate in Hollywood and elsewhere. A couple of agents took it on briefly, and then some fledgling producers tried their hand, but urban Blaxploitation pictures were what the studios wanted, and my script was definitely a mix of the film Sounder and some genre not yet filmed, call it maybe (excuse the pun) Blues noir.

On my own I tried to get copies to Eric Clapton and the Stones (via Jerry Wexler as I recall), but I never heard anything back. I did succeed in reaching Taj Mahal's management but not Taj himself; he told me much later that he'd never seen it. And I mailed a copy to actor-director Ossie Davis, who sent back a nice note saying he liked it and would agree to direct the picture if I could get a production going. Nothing along those lines materialized, but I did see the last portion of Hellhound published in Boston magazine Fusion.

In the late Sixties I was also writing educational films, a couple of them with race-conscious content and titles like Black Thumb and The 220 Blues; and I wrote lengthy treatments for proposed films called Betty and Dupree (more Blues) and The Arletha Jones Show (meant to be a television comedy series featuring a black pop star). But by the mid-Seventies I'd mostly become a writer-producer in marketing and advertising, and the inventive radio/TV work we did for Rainier Beer allowed me to write affectionate and successful pastiches of Blues and r&b numbers and also actually record an ale commercial with Bo Diddley. But my Hellhound screenplay languished on the shelves of Hollywood studios or wherever, and I basically forgot about it.

Over the next two decades, though, every five years or so some producer would discover a copy, call me up to praise it and ask my permission to try to get something going, and I always just said, "Okay, fine." Obviously, no movie got made. But I never stopped loving that down-child, uplifting music and I kept buying hundreds of Blues and r&b albums, new and old, and seeing the odd concert or club date by B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, the Meters, Taj Mahal, Gatemouth Brown, the Neville Brothers, and whoever else came to Seattle.

Around 1986 I remember telephoning Columbia Records' John Hammond (famous father, this time) in New York to ask what had become of the long-promised box set offering the complete Robert Johnson on record; he said there were hurdles and delays caused by conflicting financial and copyright interests, but it would appear some year soon... and when it did emerge at last, in 1990, the set went on to become a hugely successful bestseller, making Johnson a modern music hero all over again. I kept hoping for action on Hellhound too, but still nothing happened. So more years passed...

... And they just keep accelerating. I love that rich music as much as ever, even if Chicago-derived Blues by white artists has become something of a cliche. I play scores of Blues and related records and CDs weekly if not daily. And from the early Seventies on I added the Caribbean version, reggae, to that on-going, soundtrack-for-life mix. In fact I program Blues and reggae at home so much, one daughter recently commented that I must have been born a black person in some previous incarnation.

Could be, I suppose... or maybe it's just the South Georgia Spivey blood--luckily, in my case, resulting in an admiration for African-American music and culture (meaning artists Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, writer Ralph Ellison and those of the Harlem Renaissance, and a host of other black figures) rather than a Southern white racist antipathy.

I'm nearing 66 now, and that screenplay has been a well-kept secret for almost 40 years. Time to let it be known. That's why I've posted it now at http://robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com (use the connecting button down at the bottom of this page), in its warts-and-all entirety, for anyone curious to read.

My secret's out.

Chasin' the Devil's Trail

Improving on information in the previous post, I've now added a shortcut/button to send you straight to the Hellhound on My Trail script. Just drop down to the bottom of this page to find it listed among sites worth visiting. The behind-the-scenes backstory will be posted here soon...

Blues 101

I'm back just long enough to say, yes, this blog will stay dormant. But if anyone wants to read my screenplay about bluesman Robert Johnson, just key-stroll on over to robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com --it'll occupy my time and attention for many weeks to come, and some of you may find it of passing interest too...

Goodbye to All This

Happy July Fourth, all!

When I started writing this I Witness blog, I had no real notion of what I'd write about or what the format might require--length, frequency, subject matter, certain computer skills. I'd been egged into considering it by several friends and neighbors who thought I had interesting stories worth sharing. I thought maybe a blog mixing opinion, reviews, pop music history, and personal stuff would revive my lost or dormant verbal skills (after too many years of writing little more than descriptions for eBay and Abebooks listings), and enable me to generate a lazy, meandering autobiography of sorts along the way.

Nearly 14 months ago, I imagined maybe I could get to a hundred segments, given the wide-open range of subjects and possible stories. It took me a while to settle into a rhythm, but after a while I was happily producing a new... something every few days as memories surged within me. I even picked up some regular readers who would occasionally leave comments.

Well, this is posting #96, 14 months later, and my enthusiasm has waned. The number of readers has dropped off too, I believe--at least, almost no one's offering comments, and the counter at the bottom of this page takes longer and longer to register a new hundred. So, as the Kingston Trio used to say on stage, "in response to a diminishing number of requests," I'm skipping the last few chapters...

(Just imagine: you are now spared "96 Tears," a witty catalog of the great one-hit wonders of rock; "Wreck of the Old 97," a look at the story-songs of Blues and Old Timey music; "The Splendid Little War of '98," my support for the theory that U.S. foreign policy, and our subsequent disgraceful history of interventionism, including in Iraq, got its start in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War; "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," a tirade against the pharmaceutical company drug-pushers who show up hour after hour after hour on television, and in spam after spam after spam on your computer; and "100 Years of Solitude," well... that may be what I'll experience next; as Shakespeare put it, "The rest is silence.")

Yes, I'm skipping the last few chapters and shutting up. If there's any reason to continue--important memories resurfacing; something I really am compelled to write about; or (the least likely scenario) I Witness fans clamoring for my return--then maybe there'll be more. But for now...

Stick a fork in me; I'm done.

Salad Days

The bookstore we ran throughout the Nineties in Seattle's tourist-driven public market (still known as Pike Place Market even though it meanders over portions of several streets) was a small example of what the 100-year-old site had evolved to--expanded from its earliest stands of fresh-picked vegetables and just-caught fish, to a mega-mart offering new and used books, records and CDs, fresh and dried flowers, Asian and European groceries, bakeries and cheese shops, handmade jewelry and crafts, knickknacks and antiques, teashops and second-hand clothing, old magazines and ephemera, myriad eats and much more. You could, for example, pick up walkabout snacks or finger food, stop at a cheap eatery, enjoy an expensive sit-down restaurant, or get happy in a bar or tavern.

But tourists and locals alike still think of the Market as fresh vegetables and flying (i.e., thrown) fish; and when I'd arrive most mornings back then, I'd see the "highstalls" being set up for the day--carefully arranged arrays of oranges and lemons, scallops and shrimp, asparagus and mushrooms, salmon and cod, peaches and peas and tomatoes and all... and I'd routinely remember my own single high-school summer spent working the produce line in a USAF commissary:

Produce Man

At seventeen I sprouted—
stringbean-like, lean—
thought I knew my onions, but my salad
days grew as mixed greens…

The air base commissary
hired me to stock
bare shelves, then straightaway transferred me
into the grip of Jack,

the old-hand produce man.
In his white cap
and lime smock, Jack was lord of his domain,
and made me suit up.

The green assistant, I
crowbarred orange crates,
polished apples, top-chopped old celery,
tried to keep the beets;

but racking those stacked tomatoes,
fondling ripe melons,
softened pear-shapes, I felt small potatoes.
Bananas lacked appeal. Un-

sold truck wilted my heart.
The art was missing—
no magic in mushrooms, and none per carrot—
till Jack gave me a dressing

down and one fruitful lesson:
“Life’s a food crop;
some grow, some shrivel. Some eat with passion;
others we coax to sup.”

He said, “You think we’re swindlers?
Skimming what’s best,
trimming the rest to sell? Wrong. We’re handlers;
edibles kept right fresh.

“Yer mug would sour grapes.
Juice up there, mate,
or make yer good buys.” I stopped with the mopes,
tried harder to fake—

selling old bargain jokes,
whistling out back,
coping with cauliflowers, artichokes,
using the hose like Jack,

keeping things slick, cool, quicker
wetting the lettuce—
till the day he winked and said, “We’ll make yer
right produce man yet.”

But I quit Jack soon after.
Gave no excuse,
but lacked his touch and tact, his true gift for
minding life’s peas and queues…

Likely I spoiled my chance.
I know at best
I’ve holed up, vegetating, ever since,
with nothing fresh produced.

Tennis, Anyone?

Never been much for tennis. I admire the skill and stamina of the major players, and watch matches on television once in a great while, but my own few attempts at learning the game were painfully ludicrous. I was and am more fascinated by the language associated: love, ace, fault, etc., not to forget game/set/match. (Those last words figure in the titles of Len Deighton's best trilogy of spy thrillers, by the way.)

And I did actually get to Wimbledon one year for the familiar late-June/early-July matches, as this brief excerpt from my 1986 travel journal attests:

July 4

Happy Birthday, Miss Liberty. My London fourth was considerably more subdued than the party going on back in New York (per clips shown on the BBC Late News). I read, started a new light poem in my present euphoric mood, and then went with some friendly collegiate hostellers ("Shall we invite the old fart along?" "Sure, why not...") out to Wimbledon, which lies just a few Underground stops southwest of Kensington.

For three pounds I got to watch Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver take on two young Brit upstarts who pushed them hard for a time, then knuckled under, 6-3, 6-4. And it was great fun to sit out in the sunshine with the tennis set, stroll among fancy tents and snooty socialites, savor the tha-wock, tha-wock of balls and the genteel greenery of Wimbledon.

But afterwards I was wishing I'd had some firecrackers to drop in amongst 'em all, a bit of Revolutionary rude-boy behaviour to rattle that stiff-upper-lip composure!

******
So: a journal entry as brief as my interest in tennis. But some years later, I did manage to find a way to express some possibly amusing thoughts, partly stemming from Robert Frost's famous remark (said of William Carlos Williams, maybe), "Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net":

Poets Playing Tennis
(Frost vs. Roethke, Kenney vs. Kinnell)

The game requires a minimum of racket,
especially if one is tightly strung.
Play will be serious, yet play—
and as offhand as life.
Judgment of the court is all.

(As this twosome shows, however,
it is not always clear to what
or whom a player’s
service has been directed.)
The Linesperson does allow a certain latitude.

In fact, many of the best shots fall
beyond the line, revealing
a mastery of the graceful backhand
compliment. And a well-matched volley—
that sweet-spot mix of smash

and return, of ace and silence—
may come to seem some dazzling juggler’s
arc of many balls aloft at once.
After a time, you may distinguish styles.
One, inclined to rush

the net with a whelming yet elegant flurry,
always risks ending
tangled in waffling imagery and stretched circumlocution.
The other tends to lay back
along the baseline, taking the defensive;

still, that one sometimes can be caught flat-
footed, leaning the wrong way.
They play from love
to momentary advantage,
with neither ever managing to gain

control of this deuce of a game;
again and again the sense of it returns
to love and service. In the end, a foot
slips, or a trope; and the result?
A standard entry in the annals of the sport.

Whichever of them leaps the net
lands in territory both have known before
and will again. Theirs is the game
you are not set to match,
you novice of the

line, with your weak-
kneed lobs and stumbling
feet, insensitive
to a fault.

Rainier Beer Lookalike

The recent post devoted to movie-marketing adventures called up some other memories--of Hollywood films I watched in the making, and of some parodies I later wrote and helped produce...

Back in 1962, Seattle staged its hallowed-in-history World's Fair, called "Century 21" (look, Ma, we made it!). This extravaganza created the Space Needle, several theatrical venues--the entire urban-park Seattle Center in fact, including the Monorail connecting it to the city's downtown--and put Seattle successfully on the world map. I was going-on-20 that year and definitely jazzed by the sudden cultural opportunities; fondest recollections are for a brilliant staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot (still relatively unknown back then), a rollicking concert by Erroll Garner, and the chance to watch Elvis Presley make a movie, It Happened at the World's Fair by name.

Not one of his best by any means, but the filmed-on-location viewing opportunities were excellent. I remember two scenes in particular, relatively simple stuff that took the crew hours to set up and then actually "get in the can," as the director would say. One had Presley going into the entrance to the Space Needle, but needing all extras coordinated and the light and camera angles just right. And the other was more important, Elvis and the movie's darling little Oriental girl (his unwelcome sidekick, sort-of, but a plot-crucial character in fact) getting on or off the Monorail at its downtown station, the extras even more important and visible. The girl was cute as a button, and he was lean and tan and fit as a fiddle, "The King" in all his splendor, even appearing in what turned out to be a so-so film.

Sadly the next time I saw Elvis almost-live was at a concert in the Seventies, when he'd successfully come back, conquered Vegas, and then gotten fat and druggy. That particular evening his joking with the back-up singers was strained, even verging on racial-stereotype humor, and his ever-perfect musical timing slightly off--his pathetic decline acted out right before our eyes.

But before that, in 1972 I was hired for a major freelance-writing gig that required me to move to Georgetown, that upscale part of D.C., for a month to research, partially write, and also edit, proofread and then publish a 24-page one-issue tabloid newspaper called Fresh Water Journal or some such, its layout and typefaces mimicking Rolling Stone, which was just then making a splash (er, so to speak).

Why? Well, the Potomac River was in disgraceful condition, and the three states involved (plus D.C.) had united to persuade the public to vote support for water treatment upgrades--possibly even going so far as what was then called "tertiary treatment," meaning basically giving the polluted river wastewater (including sewage) enough chemicals and sunlight and filtering to make it truly potable again. A radical idea back then, but one that has been gradually taking hold around the water-rationed world ever since.

The newspaper I saw to publication was distributed free and was actually fun to read, filled with news and views and editorial cartoons, convincing science and political analysis too, making the whole river-purifying idea as palatable as possible. But free paper or not, the citizens weren't buying; the measure failed at the ballot box. Clean-up of the Potomac had to wait several more years...

At any rate, while I was inventing a newspaper, that ghastly-green horror film The Exorcist (a different sort of pollution) was also in town, filming on location in Georgetown; and the crew and I happened to be staying at the same Marriott across in Arlington. Sitting at the hotel bar in the evenings, once in a while I'd get into conversation with crew guys. They had good Hollywood gossip stories, and a general disdain for the film's director, William Friedkin. The main complaint seemed to be that Friedkin was not focussed on the daily filming; instead, he'd spend hours on the phone (pre-cell days) working to line up his next directorial jobs, neglecting the current work that was costing a whole heap every day.

I was invited to drop by the location shoot and watch, so of course I found time to flee the typewriter. One cloudy day I tracked the crew to a scene of tree-shrouded concrete steps--shooting day-for-night, I think--and watched a couple of actors go through the motions; I was hoping to spot Max Von Sydow (admired from the great Ingmar Bergman films) but no such luck. Friedkin was there but didn't seem to have much to say; I couldn't tell if his bad rap was justified or not. Pretty boring day, actually, and I chose not to view the finished film.

But I couldn't escape the movies (or television). Back in Seattle, I was soon working for the Rainier Beer creative group, and in no time involved in, and then producing, commercials that parodied Casablanca, Cole Porter, The Twilight Zone, "Indian Love Call," Lawrence Welk, Garland-Rooney musicals, TV's Archie Bunker, Star Wars, and much more. But I want to mention two projects I'm especially fond of, company sales films the public basically never saw...

The first was a collection of brief movie parodies created for a firm selling tax-deferred annuities, using familiar movie scenes to tout different investment aspects; the length of each varied from 30-60 seconds up to 2-3 minutes, with the short ones meant to be lifted out and used as TV spots. So I got to write variations on a "Pearl Pureheart" silent (using title cards, our heroine tied to the railroad tracks); the murderous Hal computer in 2001; Gene Kelly dancing and Singin' in the Rain; Robert Preston delivering his "trouble in River City" fast-talking spiel in The Music Man; Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not (the classic "just put your lips together and blow" scene); and more.

Moreover, since this was one of our typical shoestring-budget shoots, I got tapped to do more than observe and approve (or critique--the agency producer job). It was my voice picked to deliver, flatly, without emotion, the speech of our "Hal" computer; and later I got to wear a hat and raincoat--"rain" drenching the Pioneer Square set courtesy of firehoses--and be briefly accosted by our singing Gene replacement. (Unpaid and anonymous, as ever!)

Anyhow, my best sales-film script was a job for Rainier. Each year we'd create some meant-to-be-comical setting in which to embed or at least introduce the coming year's beer commercials. One year, for Rainier Light, the boss dreamed up a TV spot meant visually to "marry" a beer bottle filmed in close-up with the famous silhouette (and voiceover) of tubby director Alfred Hitchcock. I wrote the words, and the production company found an L.A actor who could "do" Hitchcock. And he was so convincing (visually rounded too) that we quickly decided to expand his role--that is, to write the whole sales film around Hitchcock's familiar droll, on-camera introductions, seen each week on his popular television series. I read a couple of books of Hitchcock interviews to get the gist of his longer speeches and stated ideas about film, and then translated these into sales pitches for Rainier spots, discussing taste, freshness, the element of surprise, and so on.

Our actor did a brilliant job mimicking Hitchcock, talking to the camera in the various set-ups introducing each beer commercial (making my script sound more clever than it was), and we had a good visual trick going throughout too: what appeared to be a bomb taped under a desk, the timer dial ticking down to zero as the sales film went on and on, Hitchcock talking about suspense and "McGuffins" and other matters while the movie-viewers were watching a bomb about to explode... At the last second, the actor reached down and pulled the wires or something, as he continued to talk about denying the audience's expectations, always keeping the surprises coming.

It was a banner year for Rainier spots and sales, maybe the peak year, somewhere around 1978-1980. After that, well... subsequent sales films have vanished from my mind. I do remember scripting a fun Archie Bunker spot for Heidelberg Beer (also owned by Rainier) involving a kilted Scotsman confronting the astonished Archie, but generally (as I believed then and now) Rainier's much-honored commercials started their slow decline around then. The writer-producer (me) was bored, anyway, and ready to abandon reel world for real World.

Which I did.