Under Western Skies

A. Mann and Budd B., Randy Scott and Jimmy Stewart... four names to conjure with if you love Western movies.

Actually, folks do still, everywhere in the world. Westerns seem to represent a still-welcome manifestation of the rugged-individualist, last-frontier attitude that once drew immigrants and much admiration to America's shores, but which in the later 20th century sadly deteriorated into sneers at the "cowboy" mentality of certain Presidents. But the recent success of films like Appaloosa and 3:10 to Yuma suggests that those rode-hard horses can be rid some miles fu'ther--there's life in the old nags yet.

Lately I've been on a Westerns binge, working my way through the great "A" and "B" pictures of ex-bullfighter Budd Boetticher (no bum steer there) and master of cine noir Anthony Mann--in particular the core five or six by each director, which means lots of square-jawed, rock-of-Gibralter-straight Scott and lean, tough, and angry-intense Stewart, the films richly focussed (so to speak) as each actor works hard to expand and/or solidify his image.

The best ones by Budd and Scott creating in tandem--later-Fifties "Ranown" productions The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station, plus the earlier, separate BatJac production Seven Men from Now--have the slim and simple directives of the old second-on-the-bill B's: make the plot straightforward, minimize the number of locations and actors, and then shoot fast (in both senses). Except these are all in gorgeous color and two even in CinemaScope, filmed by genius cinematographers like Lucien Ballard, William Clothier, and Burnett Guffey, so they look like several million dollars on the hoof, with the ruggedly picturesque Old West lensed beautifully. And with tight and terse scripts by the likes of Borden Chase and Burt Kennedy (soon a director himself), the only things obviously cheap were the shots taken by snobbish critics back East. These bouyant, we-can-do-anything flicks were not to be denied.

The scenery is mostly rocky and expansive, and Randolph Scott moves confidently through it as a true "man of the West" (to borrow a title from Mann) whom you can count on to rally the troops, rescue the woman (Gail Russell, Maureen O'Sullivan, Karen Steele, or Nancy Gates), sort out the bad guys, and save the day, usually in less than 80 minutes. The fast guns and nasty schemes of amazin' Lee Marvin, mouthy Richard Boone and Claude Akins, plus Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, and James Coburn, just can't compete with Scott's reticent decency and steely resolve. (Craig Stevens and Pernell Roberts, before their television stardom, appear separately as other good-bad guys.)

With enthusiastic on-screen commentary from Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Taylor Hackford as an added treat, the five-DVD Boetticher set is a real bargain, and a revelation for any Westerns aficionado who's forgotten or never known the glory days of Scott and Budd. And the stand-alone reissue of Seven Men completes this fascinating flurry of under-the-radar independent filmmaking.

More famous and more troubled in comparison are the earlier-Fifties "A" Westerns shaped by Mann and Jimmy Stewart. At 40-plus, the actor decided he needed to expand his horizons and his longstanding good-guy image. The right Mann for the task seemed to be Anthony, solid action director of several tough noir flicks plus the recent Indian rights' feature, Devil's Doorway. And the five Westerns they made together proved him right, as Stewart became a haunted, sometimes hunted character, a man driven by anger or vengeance or his own guilty past.

Winchester 73, a brilliantly scripted "round" and the sole black and white film among the five, puts Jimmy hard on the trail of his own murdering brother. Bend of the River next presents him as a post-Civil War, Missouri-Kansas border raider trying to escape the residual scars (made real by noose marks around his neck). A charming, laughing villain (Robert Ryan) then works to elude bounty hunter Stewart, but triggers mounting nastiness, including the unexpected weapon of the title, The Naked Spur. In yet another, Jimmy as The Man from Laramie searches for whoever sold rifles to the Apache and thus contributed to the death of his brother; nothing can deter him, including the brutal maiming of his gun hand. And even in the rather more light-hearted film The Far Country, Jimmy is driven as much by gold-rush greed as friendship, involving himself in Yukon Territory problems only reluctantly.

You can easily conclude that a nice guy he isn't. Yet Stewart is less anti-social than the villainous characters who fill the frames of all these films--although the fierceness, even madness, gleaming occasionally in Stewart's eyes warns the viewer that there's more to this stranger, these multiple secretive Jimmy's, than first meets the audience's eyes. (Recall too that Alfred Hitchcock soon appropriated the grim-fellow Stewart of Mann's films for his own mid-Fifties trio of classics, with Jimmy becoming the wheelchair-bound voyeur peering out his Rear Window; a panicky driven father in The Man Who Knew Too Much; and the dizzy, manic detective--psychologically even a bit sordid--shadowed by dual Kim Novaks and a perfect case of Vertigo.)

Though production values and cast size for the Mann five reflect the bigger sums of money available to "A" pictures, they don't negate the budget-challenged heroics of Boetticher's cheaper films. Still, Mann's are ultimately meaner and more interesting, something new under the Western sun, their plots demonstrating that so-called "adult" Westerns in all their callousness and complexity were well-launched at last...

Sadly, Scott and Boetticher had run out their string. The tall actor chose to exit his career with a last gasp of glory titled Ride the High Country, but Budd lost out as director to crazy Sam Peckinpah. And Mann and Stewart quarreled so heatedly early in their next film (Night Passage) that the director bowed out--wisely, if one judges by what resulted without him. (The movie does answer the trivia question, "What became of young Brandon de Wilde after Alan Ladd/Shane rode away?")

By 1959-1960, the glorious decade of emotionally convoluted--but carefully budgeted--Hollywood Westerns was over, and the gunslingers and gamblers of television had become the replacement rage, no matter how diminished the grandeur of the West appeared on that electronic small-screen.

Like gunman Shane, the Four Horsemen of the adult flicks just rode away.

Watering Holes of the West

Been gone for almost a week, first to boring old new Las Vegas, the massively ridiculous entertainment mega-complex, surrounded to the horizons by water-gobbling mile-upon-mile housing developments and trailer parks. The sin-in-the-sun city is seriously not meant for walking, the tram system is a private-ownership joke, the 100-degree heat is oppressive, and the casinos all look and scream alike. But other than that, we had a fine time (nice dinner at a French restaurant called Alize), as we prepared for the real reason we were there--to take a late-season rafting trip down the Colorado River through the lower Grand Canyon.

For that happier event, we flew on by small plane for some hijinx at the Bar 10 working ranch, and then helicoptered down into the Canyon (a swooping, suitably exhilirating ride) to waiting pontoon craft, for two days plus on the river. As we drifted along, shooting a few rapids, I thought about ranching and cowboys, water rights and Native Americans, and the countless millennia of visible geology--the history of the West in other words--all of which tied in just fine with a blog post that's coming soon.

From that Comanche station near a bend of the river, the man from Laramie took out his Winchester 73 for a decision at sundown... Say what?

Yes, I'm talking Fifties Westerns starring Jimmy Stewart and Randolph Scott... next time.

Indian Summer for Brubeck

There's always something to set the Jazz world a-buzzing. Right now, many commentators are praising the welcome announcement that Dave Brubeck, at age 88 and counting, will become a Kennedy Center honoree on December 6--the very day he turns 89, in fact. Others are tossing in some tart grapes: why has it taken so long for Dave to be recognized? why 13 years between Jazz inductees? and the colossal question, why no Sonny Rollins yet, for tenor's sake?!

By coincidence, I caught Brubeck with his current quartet performing at Seattle's Jazz Alley just last night. The first thing the elderly, somewhat frail-looking leader did was reminisce about his rhythm section as having been together many years longer than the classic foursome. And after 30-plus years, Bobby Militello, Randy Jones, and "new guy" Michael Moore (only eight years) are certainly aging in place, all of them looking 60 and up.

Fortunately, they also have the blessed, life-enhancing energy of working musicians, playing with the piss and pizzazz of guys just starting out. Moore had a couple of intense, far-ranging plucked solos; Jones drummed Joe Morello right out of town when he took charge of "Take Five" and produced the only drum solo I've stood and cheered for in decades; and Militello was a study in, well, heavyweight altosaxing. This guy moves in a note or two from Paul Desmond lyricism to Art Pepper's outside screams. I admire his stubborn, shifting style, but the ascerbic, even acidic, tone he favors so often made me think of this one-liner: "Who'd have guessed that Dave would replace Desmond's dry martini sound with Bobby's bicarbonate of soda"?

As for indomitable Dave, you can see that bouts of illness have taken their toll. He needs to be helped up and down the stage steps, and his playing, while still pounding angularly and countertempo when so inspired, lacks much of the old power that once could reduce keyboards to kindling. When he spoke, even the piano mike couldn't make that quaver come up loud enough to be easily understood. But his selections were a hoot: "Margie," "Show Me the Way to Go Home," a crowd-pleasing Ellington medley, and a beautiful Classical (or maybe movie) theme for which I just can't pull up the name, but would love to have on disc to hear again and again.

All said, the pianist and his pals were totally charming and winning, well worth the $65 club entry fee and the packed-to-the-rafters scene. So hat's off to Dave Brubeck; and here's hoping December 6th can come soon enough.

Aftermath: I see from Doug Ramsey's Rifftides review that the composition I couldn't name was Brubeck's own "Dziekuje," his Chopin-sounding thanks to Poland, written back in the early touring days. I plead diminished capacity! And I promise to play some version at least five times to revive my failing Memorex...

Barney's Blues

Leave it to the French... and the Belgians and Dutch, and the Germans, and the Italians and, well, most other mainland Europe nationals--all of whom revere not only American Jazz, but also the notion of comic books (another American creation, dating from the late Twenties). But these countries also publish comics for adults, full-length stories drawn in chunks and published serially in monthly magazines and hardback comics anthologies.

The French call them bandes dessinees, and in the Eighties U.S. publishers finally took notice of this huge phenomenon. (Hence the still ever-burgeoning spate of vapid, superhero-dominated graphic novels from American comics companies.) Yet around the world, and in the U.S. as well, there are a few worthy efforts published each year too; the problem is wading through the dreck to find the diamonds.

These not-so-comic thoughts came to me as I watched an embedded video created by Steve Cerra over at the JazzProfiles blog. He does these splendid historical tributes to various musicians, assembling photos and album jacket art to encapsulate entire careers; and a recent one was devoted to Barney Wilen.

"Who?"--I can hear many readers and even knowledgeable Jazz fans ask. Tenor saxist Barney Wilen (1937-1996) was essentially the Stan Getz of French jazz, a hardbopper and ballads man good enough to play regularly in clubs and on discs and movie soundtracks with distinguished visitors Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Kennys Clarke and Dorham, both Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk, John Lewis and the MJQ, and others, plus great European jazzmen and little-known locals alike, from the Fifties until his death in the Nineties.

And Wilen has the peculiar distinction of having been (I believe) the only living jazzman to "suffer" a graphic-novel, fictional retelling of his life. Now, many European artists (and a few American ones, from R. Crumb to William Stout) have drawn semi-documentary sequential stories about bluesmen and sax players and famous rock musicians; but matters of factual accuracy and lawsuit-avoidance usually dictate subject and tone and incidents depicted. The standard trick is to draw someone deceased. Yet Wilen somehow became the unwitting subject of a fictional strip published in 1985-86, 70 pages divided into six chapters running in consecutive issues of the excellent, now no-longer-extant, bandes dessinees magazine titled "(A Suivre)"--parentheses included--meaning approximately "to be continued."

Barney et la Note Bleue is a moody classic of modern comics--lots of Existential angst and ennui--written by Philippe Paringaux and drawn sketchily and unforgettably by Jacques Loustal. The fictional Barney is a first-rate tenor man but an aimless kid who'd rather shoot up or screw with no commitment; and when the sax-and-sex life catches up with him, he dies from an overdose (in 1962). The real Wilen, in contrast, was a half-French, half-American expatriate hipster who looked like a mix of Buddy Holly and the young Bill Evans--a somewhat forgotten musician who survived the vicissitudes of a career in Jazz by sometimes playing offshoots (jazz-rock, African pygmy music, even punk), before returning to bop for his last decade. (That brief punk connection helped generate the interest in Wilen among comics artists.)

But the unexpected attention accorded Barney led to some ironic developments. First, Wilen reacted a bit testily to the early chapters' apparent misrepresentation of his life in the late Fifties--until Loustal and Paringaux convinced him that this was a fictional "Barney" only vaguely related to him at all. Then the complete serialized story garnered such acclaim that Wilen was quickly booked into a recording studio to cut a ...la Note Bleue album, a sort of soundtrack to accompany the comics novel (due to appear in book form some months later), and to capitalize on the welcome resurgence of interest in the living Barney. And the success of that record helped persuade the tenor to re-focus his playing on hard bop once more.

I happened to be travelling in Europe during the months the story segments were appearing. I was a bandes dessinees fan, routinely buying each issue of (A Suivre), and the quietly compelling story of some sad jazzman named Barney just seemed an unlikely bonus at the time. I knew of the real Wilen, his Fifties career that is, but I assumed he had died and then been chosen by the artists as some sort of representative figure of the era. My rudimentary French missed the story's subtleties, but I could follow along with the somewhat controversial behind-the-scenes stuff that developed in the comics press. Clearly Loustal and Paringaux had created a graphics meta-fiction that shook things up in the comics world and beyond.

I don't know if other real, still-living people have been depicted in graphic novels since then (that is, other than the typical brief parodies of politicians everywhere), but seeing a couple of samples of Loustal's art reprinted in the Wilen tribute video was a happy reminder of an interesting half-year in France and of a fine jazzman deserving wider recognition.

And by an excellent coincidence, I discovered that Barney is due to be reissued by Casterman (Paris) at the end of September, if anyone is curious to see more. (The related CD seems not to be available except perhaps as a download.)

Barney's blue notes are still resounding.

Don't Look Back...

A while back, I posted a comment on Doug Ramsey's jazz blog Rifftides in response to his brief rant against misuse of certain words (in particular, "sophomore" as vaguely indicating the second item in a series). I thought I was being alert and clever when I identified one sentence of his complaint--"You could look it up"--as a quote from Ring Lardner's comical baseball stories of the 20th century 'Teens and Twenties.

Doug emailed me that he didn't mean to be quoting Lardner (or anyone else, maybe), and so I Googled the words to get a precise source... and found that I was wrong; the line is the title of, and a repeated refrain in, a James Thurber story from 1941, though critics do agree that Thurber was consciously mimicking the slangy, colloquial style employed earlier by Lardner.

My curiosity was piqued by then, so I drank deeper in Google's Pierian Spring and learned the following...

Thurber's story involves a baseball trainer recounting a 30-year-old yarn about some manager unexpectedly sending a midget up to pinchhit in a crucial game, needing him to draw a walk. But the midget ignores orders and grounds out. As the narrator insists, it really happened: "You could look it up."

Well, it also turns out that a couple of decades later--in our own beyond-fiction world--a couple of possibly related things happened. First, in 1951 then-new St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck (pronounced Veck as in "wreck"), a canny expert of sports promotion, did exactly that, sending a little person named Eddie Gaedel to the plate (with strict orders not to swing) and thus causing quite a well-publicized ruckus when, the opposing pitcher laughing so hard, Gaedel drew a walk on four straight balls. Supposedly, Veeck always denied he got the idea from Thurber, claiming instead to have been inspired by old New York Giants manager John J. McGraw, who had a diminutive team mascot named Eddie Morrow. (No, not Edward R.)

Then in a 1965 interview, Casey Stengel, manager of a certain other New York team and a well-known master at word-mangling, used Thurber's phrase in passing (probably without intending the source), in such a comical, quoteworthy way that the five-word sentence from then on was associated with Stengel, and eventually even became the title of a 1979 book about the manager and his malapropisms. (Asked about his future in baseball, evidently Casey had replied, "How the hell should I know? Most of the people my age are dead. You could look it up.")

Over the next decades the Thurber/Stengel phrase cropped up frequently, used by historically minded baseball fans, sabermetrics enthusiasts, English professors making a point about dictionaries, and diverse others. (The five words show up in a slew of Google entries.)

And finally, in 2004, on-line baseball commentator Steven Goldman began offering regular blog essays at www.baseballprospectus.com taking that for his main title--"You Could Look It Up" indeed. Dozens of these commentaries are available because his column has been appearing weekly ever since.

Meanwhile of course, as the 21st century staggers on, thanks to the Internet in general and Google in particular anyone can now easily look up almost anything--Lardner or Thurber, Veeck or Stengel, fun sports quotations from a Negro Leagues pitcher or scurrilous political rumors about a beleaguered (American or National, take your pick) President.

And in a fine self-referential irony, as soon as I post this blog chapter, you can look it up too!

(Move over, Lardner, Barber, Angell, Boswell... by accident and over your well-founded objections, I've joined the ranks; it seems that stunted writers have a place in the line-up too.)

Book 'im, Folio!

This post dedicated to all the faithful fans and curious customers of MisterE Books...

I became a bookseller by default 20 years ago. See, I had always argued (initially placating my first wife almost 50 years ago) that I could always resell the books and records I was regularly ekeing out the funds to buy. But for decades, married or unmarried, I kept buying.

Then, back home again after the two-year world adventure in the mid-Eighties (recounted in many previous blog posts), when I couldn't find a solid writing job or generate enough freelance income, I unexpectedly had the chance to work in a bookstore--and soon had the opportunity to buy it. No need to revisit all that subsequent history, except to observe that I suddenly had to disconnect my gotta-have-it collector mentality and learn to part with stuff old and new.

One aspect of that was my membership in The Folio Society, England's premier source of elegant, literate, specially produced books. I had joined to buy what I wanted for myself, but then had to change my thinking to focus on what good'uns I could get at a cheap enough price to resell thereafter through the new and wonderful MisterE Books (a definite trick on the dollar front given Folio's often deluxe prices).

Now every late summer I have to decide once more if I'm staying in the Society, which requires buying four new selections that I must also hope to resell. Over the years I've accumulated 20 or 30 volumes that are collectable first printings of Folio's beautifully illustrated editions but which have failed to find a buyer, at least at the (barebones-profit) price I'm asking.

So what to do? The latest catalog arrived a day or two back, and was then buttressed by email, and as usual there are at least four new editions that are calling out to me: LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kerouac's On the Road, Chatwin's classic The Songlines, Watson's fascinating story of The Double Helix, maybe Peter Hopkirk's India/Afghan history of colonial incursions, The Great Game... But who am I kidding? Really there are up to a dozen worth owning/selling--new editions of Lord of the Flies, The Age of Innocence, William Trevor stories, gardening books by Vita Sackville-West, Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, a special Folio poetry anthology, a history of Robin Hood, and more.

The trick this year in particular is the, er, unreadable commercial marketplace. Books continue to sell, including collector editions, as dedicated readers continue to read even in this time of Grim Regression. (In contrast, sales of LP records on eBay are way down.) But the Folio volumes cost enough that they continue to pile up, however slowly.

I had just about decided to skip renewing this time around, but then I got a $60 order just this morning, someone wanting a Bill Bryson book. If Bryson can sell, well, what about my great unread copies of Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, Joyce's Dubliner stories, O'Brian's Master and Commander, Ford Maddox Ford's near-forgotten classic The Good Soldier, plus Anne of Green Gables, The Pink Fairy Book, Shakespeare's First Folio, beautiful box sets of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, not to mention the really expensive deluxe limited editions of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and Grahame's Wind in the Willows? Surely someone will want those too.

If I sell just two more good ones, I'll have made enough to buy some brilliant four from this year's new offerings. And so what if they stick around for a year or three? As I said 40 years ago, "I can always resell them."

Right...

"In the Midst of Life..."

I've developed a tremor in my right arm, and it seems to mark the onset of Parkinson's Disease. But please don't sound the death knell just yet. As Mark Twain didn't quite say, "The reports of my imminent demise have been faintly exaggerated." I expect to hang on for some years yet.

But there's no escaping increased intimations of mortality. One manifestation has me pondering the enhanced late works of certain jazz musicians, who "knew" they were dying and chose to go out in a rush, cramming in all the playing (or composing) possible, creating right to the uncertain end--among them, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Art Pepper and, maybe, John Coltrane. The white guys' untimely deaths were likely catalyzed by earlier drug addiction, while Trane and Strays developed killer cancers. (Getz too, but between smack and smokes and pills, he was already living on borrowed time from early on.)

So how did each man face his unmaking?

Before I examine that, let's look at some alternative situations. Most musicians just go on about their business, getting older, maybe less innovative but still in the game, right up to the moment of their departure. Some of them are longlived and wonderfully creative, like Benny Carter, Ray Brown, Gil Evans, Max Roach, John Lewis, Duke (and some are stubbornly still at it like Dave Brubeck and Hank Jones). Others' deaths come suddenly and unexpectedly--Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Eric Dolphy--severing that unique creative flow precipitously; even junk-riddled Chet Baker had some years ahead of him (maybe) were it not for that high window in Amsterdam.

Old age and bad health remove some gradually (Satch, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Dexter Gordon, Miles and Mingus), and others drift away on their own--Monk, Red Garland, Ella--choosing to retire from the fray for whatever reason. Still, there are the few who know they are dying too early, and who insist on playing, recording, writing, travelling, making plans for the future, ignoring that lurking, leering grim reaper for as long as possible.

Consider Billy Strayhorn, then a youngish man in his fifties. Once diagnosed with cancer, Strays chose to keep composing and arranging, continuing to produce material for Ellington and the orchestra, even dictating new music straight from his hospital bed as he weakened. Some of those tunes were brilliant instant classics, "U.M.M.G." and "Blood Count" among them. (And perhaps there were one or two others that Duke didn't get to which finally appeared a few years ago on the series of CDs by that Dutch Jazz Orchestra dedicated to recording unknown Strayhorn.) Ellington's great album And His Mother Called Him Bill was a fitting tribute to the unceasing courage and creativity of dying-too-young Billy, who truly did have "Something to Live For."

One of the numbers that Stan Getz made his own as he was slowly checking out was Strayhorn's harrowing "Blood Count." Like the junkie musicians of the Fifties who cut extra sessions to gather cash more quickly for their habits, one senses that Stan over his last few years (one album says "enjoying a respite from declining health and in the throes of personal transformation") decided to record as often as someone would pay him: some Concord sessions, Herb Alpert with a couple of albums for A&M, several miraculous dates for international Verve; quartets captured live and wonderful tenor/piano duets with late mainstay Kenny Barron, performances autumnal but not early. Recorded at Copenhagen's Cafe Montmartre, the CDs titled Anniversary, Serenity, and the two-disc People Time are albums alternately prickly and placid that enlightened listeners at the time and deservedly continue to be spun, constituting a multi-part epitaph to ol' blue-eyed, multi-personae Stan ("A great bunch of guys," drolly remarked Zoot Sims).

As Doug Ramsey wrote recently at his Rifftides blog, Getz never phoned in a solo. But sometimes, as in these late albums, he transcended his own ineradicable greatness. The amazing cri de coeur that marked his best playing is heard everywhere.

Much more controversial were (actually they still are) the late albums of pianist Bill Evans. Introversion, sensitivity, heart-rending ballads, a thin ravaged body curled over the keyboard... those are the images that usually attend Evans. But not his late trio sessions, multiple-CD sets recorded live at the Village Vanguard and the Keystone and elsewhere. Bill smites the keys and pounds out chords and races through the arrangements, his mind leaping ahead of his fingers at times, the rhythm section hustling hard to keep pace. It seems he knew his days were numbered and he took every performance opportunity to "say" as much as he could in a shortened stretch of time, even as the numbers sprawled out at length. (Methadone in his madness? The false, compelling shimmer of cocaine?)

Evans' attendant muse/lover/nurse for his final year or two was a young woman named Laurie, so there must be some sort of irony in the fact that it was another Laurie who supported, organized, and drove cleaned-up saxman Art Pepper in his late, post-junk, post-jail career. Not that he needed that much of a push; "pent-up" is definitely the adjective for ex-prisoner Art, whose emotional, intense music literally exploded out over his final half-decade comeback. Quartets, bigger groups, strings, prescient duets with pianist George Cables, even raging solo tracks: Pepper played them all. And this onetime master of the short and pithy solo, from his Stan Kenton days through the long years of addiction, suddenly was ranging inside, outside, and all over performance stages from Japan to the Vanguard, his alto statements much impelled by the sound, and fury, of ascendant John Coltrane. So many faltered at the feet of Trane... but Pepper somehow burned on through, in the process becoming the dominant alto on the late-Seventies jazz scene. And then he too was dead.

Coltrane, of course, was always a special exemplar, uniquely and incessantly pursuing the ultimate tenor solo, whether it required hundreds of 32nd notes, dozens of shifting chords, or a couple of hours of overblowing. But rather than a madman he was a spiritual leader and gentle, if driven, explorer--a saint of the sax. Yet as his liver and inner light struggled more, perhaps all unknowing he simply played all the harder and longer, determined to get... there... wherever "there" was. The Live in Seattle album, stellar excursions, "interplanetary" duets with Rashied Ali, and late bootlegged concerts together reveal a musician poised on the edge and ready to leap off. With nowhere else to go, he did.

Ah well, excuse the overwriting. Trying to grasp and explicate a talent like Coltrane's is maybe like grappling with Stephen Hawkings' explanations of the universe--perfectly lucid but still unfathomable. Was it Samuel Johnson who remarked that "The prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully"? Death does have a way of taking charge whether you are a great musician reaching for the unknown or a straggling, trying-to-catch-up fan. (Maybe it's pertinent that Coltrane admired Getz and once said, "We'd all sound like that if we could.")

As one late, exhausted bass sax player was heard to gasp, "Time to rest my case."

Remnants of Rembetika

Turks and Greeks have warred with each other for millenia... Many battles were fought and lands occupied back and forth, but WWI finally brought an end to the Turkish Ottoman Empire's clear domination of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Believing that the Allies would provide support, a large Greek army invaded Western Turkey in 1922, but Kemal Ataturk (soon to be dictator/president and so-called "father" of modern Turkey) and his forces drove them back, along with hundreds of thousands of fleeing resident Greeks who'd lived there in relative peace prior to the incursion, the two rich cultures having intermingled significantly. But thousands of Turkish Greeks were massacred--though not on the scale of the (still denied today) genocidal killing of Armenians in Eastern Turkey some years earlier. The surviving Greeks fled to the region stretching from Athens back to the sea, which was soon housing maybe a million refugees as a result of the ethnic/religious settlement treaty which decreed that Orthodox Greeks had to vacate Turkey while Muslims and/or Turks had to leave Greek territory.

And that series of brutal actions is memorialized, right at the epicenter, in the Turkish port of Izmir (likely more familiar in its original Greek name Smyrna) where a grand harborside statue poses Ataturk heroically atop his horse, pointing west, driving all Greeks before him.

In the summer of 1956, on the day we Leimbachers arrived in Izmir/Smyrna scheduled to live there for two years, the U.S. military officer who met my family as welcoming chaffeur made us kids avert our eyes as we drove by one sunny wall where (I was told later) the bodies of two dead Greeks were hanging!

Yet, as we came to learn, in the usual complex way of Asia Minor and the old Mediterranean Near East (think Lebanon), Greeks and Turks continued to live in some places side by side, albeit uncomfortably, even while their national governments refused to talk to each other and the divided island of Cypress remained a smoldering powderkeg. Izmir was the home of SEATO (NATO in Southeast Europe and Asia Minor), and I recall at least one Greek army officer assigned there. Although the number of resident Greeks left in Western Turkey--along the Aegean coast so close to the Greek Islands--must have been small, some Greek influences remained in the food and architecture and clothing and, the point of this story, even the Smyrnaic music.

Originally the tunes played by those Greeks living in Constantinople (Istanbul) and southward before WWI sounded quite oriental, played on violin and accordion and lute-like stringed instruments--the lengthy instrumental intros (taximi) and keening songs sometimes accompanying tsifteteli dancing (familiar oriental belly-dancing, seen for example in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love). This elegant soundtrack for the cafes and coffeehouses--a music of sadness and erotic longing and lamentations for lost homelands (often sung in Turkish)--was considered (looking back later, anyway) as being in "the Smyrna style," and it was carried west through the islands to mainland Greece by those displaced residents. Some referred to it as rembetika (the "mb" combination without much "m"), an unknown word evidently of Turkish origin.

But there the style of the rembetis musicians collided with rougher music already being played in tavernas and underground drug dens (known as tekedhes)-- and from the 1920's on, a remarkable rocking, grumbled, quasi-blues music developed, a rowdier rembetika that held sway in the hashish hangouts and jails and underworld dives to be found from Western Turkey on up the coast and around as far as Salonika and back down into Athens and, especially, in the grubby port of Piraeus.

For nearly 40 years then (until government censorship interfered), thousands of 78s were recorded and released, in cities from Istanbul to Athens and on to New York, celebrating the rembetika sound and lifestyle--featuring lyrics immortalizing thieves and prostitutes, fat policemen and emaciated prisoners, knife-toting men (petty criminals known as mangas) and grieving women, alcohol abuse and drug dependence, and all performed on Eastern Mediterranean instruments as typical as the baglama (tiny lute), santour zither, and bouzouki (the dominant instrument after the mid-Thirties) and as rare as the stringed saz and oud, with the performances usually incorporating jazzy improvised passages.

A haunting example of the rarer, earlier rembetika is "The Song of Exile," recorded in the mid-Thirties by yearning emigre Efstratios Payioumidzis--or the strikingly beautiful instrumental titled "Halkias's Minore." But the tougher mangas style filled disc after disc after disc. One landmark underworld song was "The Junkie's Complaint," written and sung in 1934 by the already-dying young man known as Artemis:

From the time I started to smoke the dose
The world has turned its back on me, I don't know what to do.
Wherever I stay, wherever I go, people bother me
And I can't keep my soul together--it cries out for a fix.
From sniffing it up I went on to the needle
And my body slowly began to melt.
Nothing was left for me to do in this world
Because the drugs have led me to die in the steets.

But ordinarily such griping was subdued, even comical, and the commentary subtler, as the manges reveled in their doper lives; this merry piece (by Batis) namechecks some of the major musicians lazily smoking a water-pipe:

Secretly, in a boat I went
And came out at Drakou's cave,
I saw three men who were all quite high
Stretched out on the sand.
It was Batis and Artemis
And Stratos the Lazy One:
Hey, you Strato! Yes, you Strato,
Fix us a fine narghile.
So old Batis can smoke
Who's been a dervish for years
And Artemis too
Who brings us stuff wherever he goes.
He sends us hashish from Constantinople
And all of us get high;
And fine Persian tobacco.
The mangas smoke it in peace.

A song by Tsitsanis strikes the more typical balance:

Such youth and goodness
The black earth will eat.
That's why I enjoy my life now
And come what may.
I live it up in the tavernas
And so get rid of sorrow.
In this false world
We're just passers-by.
Before we know it we've lived our life
And hurried through it.
I put everything behind me
And now I live the Bohemian life.
When I've got it I spend it
And keep nothing in reserve.

Even in Izmir in the Fifties I could still hear some of those exotic sounds drifting from open windows and coffeehouse doorways, and I can remember stopping in the street to listen. But I never thought much about any of it... and the family moved on, and I forgot about the strange music... until 20 years had passed, and a mail-order import-records company I was buying LPs from (DownHome Music) began carrying records straight from Greece documenting the rembetika era and underworld mangas style, much like the reissue labels dedicated to American blues of the Twenties and Thirties. The catalog descriptions were tantalizing, and I ordered a half dozen albums and a small book (Road to Rembetika by Gail Holst) and began learning about these "songs of love, sorrow & hashish"--and even revisiting a few forgotten memories.

Soon I could recognize the rembetis masters--female vocalists Sotiria Bellou, Roza Askenazi, and Rita Abadzi (the music's Billie Holiday figures), basso-voiced bouzouki powerhouse Markos Vamvakaris (think Howlin' Wolf), other bouzouki and baglama whizzes such as Stratos (Payioumidzis), Yiorgos Batis, and Vassilis Tsitsanis--all three mentioned above. But there were scores more who remained mysterious names only; and the flurry of U.S. interest that had briefly opened a door for me and others proved sadly short-lived, over by 1980 or so.

The revival waxed and waned back in Greece too, and it wasn't until computers and the Internet significantly shrank the world and knocked down old cultural barriers that rembetika resurfaced beyond Europe. Lo and behold, suddenly one could find CDs galore, and most importantly a four-CD box from JSP Records. Released in 2006, Rembetika: Greek Music from the Underground proved so successful that a second box set was issued this year. Both are available cheaply through Amazon's sub-sellers, so anyone with the slightest curiosity can easily test the waters now... revisit the tekedhes, so to speak.

But it will always bother me that in the mid-Fifties I was living right at the center of the Smyrna style and the historical beginnings of rembetika, but--an ignorant young teen--wasted that rare opportunity to experience some major research in ethnomusicology, not to mention exotic and downright daring fun.

Oh well, light up that narghile and press Play.