Shakespeare in the Attic

After finally finding a copy, I was 20 or so pages into Ron Rosenbaum's hefty tome with the startling title The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (published back in 2006), enjoying it immensely and wondering why... and then, thinking out loud, I realized, "This is as strange and wonderful and oddly exciting as Confederates in the Attic!" (Tony Horwitz's critical smash published in 1998 is still one of my favorite books of the past quarter century.)

My thoughts sped on, racing and tumbling over one another: The characters are quirky and sometimes fanatical, the stories told are wild and woolly and weird, the writers get right down in the trenches with the participants (Bard experts and crazed "reenactors"), the imagery and actions center on history and warfare real and imagined, the subjects are perennially important (England's Man from Stratford and America's Civil War), and the books deliver edifying information, life-changing experiences, and sheer entertainment... both books just damn-fine fun to read.

Like the reconstituted Armies of the North and the South, the "bardolators" and scholars reconnoiter, skirmish, and attack. Raids behind enemy lines are common, whether staged out in the open, or secretly within ivied walls. Electronic messages fly back and forth. Schemes are hatched, plans made and made again; feints and retreats mark postmodern theories stated, held for a time, then revised. Papers--whole books--are published then quickly superceded. Dedicated souls risk their reputations, their futures, indeed their very lives...

Okay, okay, it's true I've exaggerated the melodrama (and our Will always abjured such, of course!); I've abused Rosenbaum's metaphorical title and conflated the activities described in both books. And yet... The Yanks and Rebs fire blanks, languish through battlefield pauses, fight over which soldiers among the units have garbed themselves most accurately; the experts argue blank verse, end-line pauses, New Historicism and "original" intent. The reenactors dress up, sleep on the ground, march hither and yon; the scholars assume the mantle of 16th-century transposing scribes, attempt to pin down the identities of type compositors, leap back and forth from Quartos to Folios to unascribed fragments. Rogue warriors from all camps venture radical innovations, maybe gain headlines for a time, but ultimately win no battles as the vested interests and stickler-for-accuracy historians reassert the not-yet-defeated status quo.

Such were my admittedly romanticized notions as I kept reading the Shakespeare book (and remembering Confederates). So imagine my delight when I reached page 249 and found a brief but possibly vindicating passage. After a chapter devoted to scholarly debate over the rhythms and brief pauses built into, and in between, Shakespeare's pentameter lines, Rosenbaum takes up the academics' arguments over differing spellings of words:

I had initially sought to avoid the unmodernized spelling argument like a plague. From my initial, superficial knowledge of it, I didn't see how it could be of interest to any but the most antiquarian-minded of scholars. I thought of it as analogous to the mindset of Civil War "reenactors" who are so concerned that the threads stitching the buttons on their uniforms be "authentic" or "original."

But those soldiers and certain experts on Shakespeare find the fate of battles and the actual meaning of entire plays to be sewn from such threads. And that is the evident intent of Rosenbaum's book, to explain in light-hearted, first-person prose the far-ranging, complex minutiae driving the scholars in their search for what "Shakespearean" means or, indeed, is.

The Bard's biography is impossibly meagre--yes, all those "Life of Shakespeare" volumes are 99 per cent invented!--so the plays must be the thing wherein to catch the conscious of the country man. Certain deniers want to prove that other, better-educated aristocrats did the writing rather than Will; others are fixated on his revisions--however small, however great--if Will actually made any, rather than the copier scribes and print typesetters engaged by his theater companies. Indeed, entire different versions are known, found in the various Folios, Quartos, individual playbooks, cue sheets and such (three versions of Hamlet, at least two of Lear, and so on). All the plays we think we know actually represent conflations of selected words, spellings, lines, speeches, whole scenes, entire plays that have been cobbled together by earlier Shakespeare editor "experts," not to mention actors, directors, publishers, and anyone else with an axe to grind or an act to engrain.

Now whole armies of modern scholars are attacking the received wisdom on several fronts, and Rosenbaum wants us to know about them, and how Will's works in their infinite variety really are unfixed--or re-fixed every succeeding generation, changed by new academic theories battling established schools of thought. So the Shakespeare industry thrives, and tenure marches on.

I'd forgotten that Horwitz's book had the subtitle "Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War"--an accurate description of the mock battles staged (not deadly but serious, as though all the world were at stake), and the comical reenactor fixations and adventures like the marathon multi-battlefield trek called the "Wargasm." But the harmless stories take a sharp turn when Horwitz covers Ku Klux Klan rallies on behalf of the executed-as-traitor ex-commandant of Andersonville Prison and in support of the Confederate flag in that continuing bastion of racism and stupidity, South Carolina. His 15 chapters in fact detail encounters across nine Southern states, and while Northerners (or Northwesterners like me) might find the whole shooting match amusing/bemusing/disturbing, those Rebel believers in "the Lost Cause" or "the War of Secession" or "the War Between the States" (but never that Yankee phrase "Civil War") are as serious as a heart-stopping cannonade...

But hold; enough with the stretched comparisons. Read about our unfinished war to be amused and appalled. Rosenbaum amazes in a different way. And though the 15th century Wars of the Roses--the source for Shakespeare's History Plays--were "civil wars" of a sort, the actual English Civil War came two centuries later in the 1640's.

Some of the scholars interviewed do actually talk of battles and victories and destroying their rivals, and doubting Ron was himself threatened by the poltroon who used computer analysis to "prove" successfully, for a few years anyway, that Shakespeare wrote the "Funeral Elegy," a pathetic long thing completely devoid of poetic merit, probably the work of Will's rival, John Ford. (The word-count attribution fooled too many other experts for a time, until those outcast souls who still believe in "close reading," in imagery and language and style, were able to banish the pretender, his SHAXICON computer program, and the bastard text.) In general, however, the academics only fuss and feud, snipe and snarl, vying for career advancement and envying each other's research findings.

Though the arguments over minutiae are surprisingly interesting, at least as Rosenbaum tells the stories, certain chapters resonate more deeply; I would nominate Ron's discussion of the extra and unexpected dimensions of Shakespeare on film; the potentially seismic manuscript of unproduced play Sir Thomas More, a round-robin multi-playwright dud which just may house 147 lines handwritten by Will (identified among the scribes as "Hand D"), which would be the first ever found; the mysterious concept of "the secret play," whether hidden within each individual work, or perhaps existing as a single coded master secret, the key to all things Shakespearean.

Best of all are Ron's encounters with theatrical director Peter Brook and his famous, life-altering 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream--and related to that, Rosenbaum's intuitions about the character named Bottom, the weaver and self-appointed leader of the "Rustics," the village's "rude mechanicals." Bottom becomes oddly central to things, and the misread "Fairy Play" a work central to all things Shakespearean. The weaver's words (some of them quoted below) come to suggest the infinite "bottomlessness" of true Shakespearean themes/thought/theater.

It's not that Will willed humanness into existence--the claim trumpeted by Falstaffian Harold Bloom, one of Ron's few betes noirs (the virulent anti-semitism infecting The Merchant of Venice is another)--rather that Shakespeare was the most human. Peter Brook explains the man's exceptionalism thus:

I think the uniqueness inheres in his generosity. I think there's no one else who manages to insert himself totally in such a wide range of human beings... That he could have, in the act of writing, instead of using them partly to express what he himself wants to say, lets them say what they want to say... to be such a highly developed, highly acute servant of other people's truths is unique.

Yet Shakespeare remains anonymous too, "quite simply because he does disappear, dissolve, parcel himself out to his characters..."

This person walking through the streets of London must have lived each single moment with an incredible richness of awareness. So many levels, infinite levels of meaning... He can overhear and notice two kinds of things: all the life and noise pouring out with great excitement. Yet at the same time, even though he's a very practical man, he can evoke in words faraway worlds, strange tales, astonishing ideas, and develop and link them to an intimation of meaning in society, in regard to the gods, a sense of cosmic reality--these were all pulsing through his mind, all these levels at the same time...

Shakespeare managed to link the highest levels of metaphysical thought with political thought, with a social sense of life, with a sense of human comedy, with a sense of human tragedy. A joy in human vulgarity, a likeness for human likeness and a joy in human grossness. And all of these put in their place, combined, make up the whole of his works...

[E]ach line of Shakespeare is an atom. The energy that can be released is infinite--if we can split it open.

The mentions of infinity--and Brook is just one among the many actors, directors, and scholars so enthused--returns Rosenbaum's musings to Bottom and his spell-induced "radiant dream," during which he is transformed into half-man, half-donkey, consorts with the under-a-love-spell Queen of the Fairies, and eventually awakens:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t' expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had--but man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called "Bottom's Dream," because it hath no bottom...

Of course the speech is often singled out for its multiple levels of punning humor, the bewilderment and wonder, confused synesthesia, and echoes of 1st Corinthians ("The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard..."). But Ron learned during his research and interviews that the same passage in the 1550's Geneva Bible ended with these words: "For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the bottom of God's secrets." ...Which can never be fathomed.

Bottomlessness, the Abyss, the Void--these words are often employed to invoke Shakespeare's limitless language and wisdom, depths of meaning and character, encompassing love and endless sorrow, tragic foolishness and comic, even cosmic, cruelty... speaking the complexity of every human emotion ad infinitum. He took what his imagination bodied forth--the forms of things unknown--and turned them to shapes, giving "to aery nothing/ A local habitation and a name."

The rest is silence.

Uncompromising Kurtz

Alan Kurtz, former writer/editor for on-line blog Jazz.com, and then a regular commentator/essayist for Blogcritics.org, has now published a brief but significant book with the defining title Stereotypes in Black Music: The African-American Crossover Compromise (available via Amazon). Mentioning his book in a comment elsewhere, I suggested that Alan's intent was a "rigorous examination of race records old and new, racial stereotypes black and white, and race-baiting by any and all." Ranging over more than a century of music, Kurtz traces the not-very-hidden continuations of minstrelsy, the post-Civil War "coon shows," in the changing disguises they acquired decade after decade all the way up to the present.

Minstrel shows began with whites demeaning blacks by blacking their own pale faces, then exaggerating perceived Negro characteristics and diction. (I'd say "denigrating" except the root syllables suggest denying blackness, when the opposite was intended.) But black people got "even" by creating their own minstrel shows, reclaiming whatever cash was to be made and maybe slipping in some coded language--ebony Ebonics perhaps?--that only other blacks would understand. (Kurtz doesn't make that point, but I believe minstrelsy history would show certain skits and jokes as having hidden layers of meaning.) And this formed the platform for much of the entertainment and then recordings produced thereafter, black performers allowing similar racial stereotyping to go on, casually working for the white agents and managers, record labels and venue owners, in order to gain broader (meaning white) audiences and any resulting "big money" possibilities.

Kurtz looks at a variety of examples, from Louis Armstrong singing "Shine" and dressing as "King of the Zulus," to the Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway orchestras playing "jungle music," to Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie and Slim Gaillard speaking hipster slang and clowning on stage (though Young was too Pres-identially cool for such antics), to the anger, adamant noise, and bruited Africanisms of the so-called Free Jazz players, to the disturbing and disreputable yet astonishingly popular rappers of the past two decades. Drug addicts and draft dodgers, doowoppers and barwalkers, greedy deejays and seedy ofays, malcontents and militants, tattered Toms and cats named Fats... they're all here. Whatever their stories, the black artists Alan chose as examples (even the raw-sex gangsta rappers) played on perennial white stereotypes concerning black "primitiveness" and sexuality in order to win white listeners (buyers) while retaining their core black fans.

What this may say about the subconscious bigotry, gullibility, even masochism, of white folks... well, Kurtz leaves that as a message inherent between the lines. He has covered a creditable amount of material in 27 trim and pithy chapters--quoting lyrics, excerpting related academic folderol, describing the major characters, presenting each tale in his stringent, sarcastic, acerbically witty, stubbornly intellectual yet sometimes intentionally rude style. Compressing and telescoping major developments and eras, he offers concise examples rather than expansive concepts shaped through time. Inevitably this requires him to excise (or give short shrift to) the parallel developments that might complicate his focussed perspective.

Some sample omissions... Ellington played jungle music, yes, but he also required his band to appear on-stage as gentlemen scrupulously garbed in tuxes or suits, the Duke's droll elegance having rubbed off on them too. Yes, Marvin Gaye got down and slightly lewd with "Sexual Healing" (and the Let's Get It On album before that), but he had already created What's Going On, one of the most thoughtful, socially conscious, yet entirely musical albums of all time, essentially a Soul symphony. And some rappers keyed in on political and ghetto issues rather than chanting violent or abusive threats; think of the amazing single releases of Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and that crew ("The Message," "New York New York," "White Lines").

What bothers me some as reader is Alan's heavy emphasis on rap, half of his book devoted to way too many crude and offensive lyrics of the past 30 years quoted at depressing length. His own comments deservedly make a mockery of this unfortunate era in black music, but I'd rather have read more about the ragtime years or the Roaring Twenties, or how black music deflected the Depression, all of which he clearly could have made serio-comic and fascinating. Author Alan picked his own exemplars of course, but conspicuously absent nonetheless are important artists as raw or clever or brilliant as Millie Jackson, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron--even popular Soul performers like Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes--all of whom would have helped flesh out the pre-rap portions of Kurtz's thesis and book. (Maybe he'll get to do an expanded second edition.)

At any rate, many amazing sections are too X-rated for me to quote, but here's a passage that might suggest the mischief Kurtz gets up to:

For all its innovativeness, then, bebop was little more than the plaything of a handful of eccentric geniuses whose stereotypical posturing more than their abstruse art appealed primarily to white audiences. In particular, the outlaw persona of Charlie Parker briefly rekindled the allure of the savage to ofay primitivists such as the Beats, who pretended to dig jazz but didn't know a bongo from a bassinet. One such was Beat godfather Jack Kerouac, who in his slapdash essay "The Beginning of Bop" has Dizzy screaming, pianist Thelonious Monk crashing and nonpareil saxophonist Charlie Parker squealing as "off they whaled [sic] on Salt Peanuts jumping like mad monkeys in the gray new air."

In another excellent paragraph, Kurtz conflates President Bush's post-9/11 advice that Americans go shopping, with a then just-released, blithely hedonistic album by rapper Jay-Z, which coincidentally enjoyed brisk sales:

Yes, Mr. President, it's true: as part of us knelt in prayer, grieving for the victims and their families, or gaped numbly at the TV and tried to comprehend this assault on our collective identity, another part of us went shopping and came home clutching The Blueprint. But I ask you, sir: What better proof could there be that murderous martyrs flying hijacked airliners in hot pursuit of their 72 virgins and a camel (the mythical desert equivalent of 40 acres and a mule) had failed to penetrate our spiritual airspace? The enemies of liberty might take love out of the City, damn them, but they'll never destroy our quest for a pair of chicks on X, menaging in the car before we reach our garage. God bless you, Mr. President. And God bless Jay-Z.

Additional "rappercussions"--from Hurricane Katrina, the AIDs epidemic, street violence, N's and B's and ho's, rival posses and brutal po-lice--are spot-lit one by one and then skewered by Kurtz. He even uncovers a 2006 regional hit version of a 19th century minstrel-show tune, which brings the bitter survey full circle. But he ends the book by quoting some scatalogical lyrics from The Notorious B.I.G. (one of several murdered rappers) and then remarks, straightfaced as ever, "Leave it to Biggie Smalls to make us nostalgic for the quiet dignity and grace of 'coon shows' and blackface minstrelsy."

Strong stuff, and an impertinent, imperfect, but important book.

Shufflin' Off...

The winter months on Vashon Island aren't quite this eventful usually (snow foolin'), but it doesn't take a Brahmin to realize that Global Horning might displace migrant aliens along the Northern Tier too. As we head into 2011, our Bisontenniel year, I wanted all you roving I Witnesses out there--shufflin' and scufflin' and hoofin' it Malaysia to Thalia, Pamplona to the Pampas--to know I have a stack of buffalo chips that I'll be sharing with you over the months to come. And that's no bull.

But enough yak from me. Happy Gnu Year!

(And thanks to Steven Fuller for the photo.)

Pennies for the Old Guys

I was on the road for several days, with time to contemplate the fitful hours, and the major events of several months...
Bud Shank, 82, sailing his alto into the variegated sunset. Elegant Hank Jones tiptoeing away as well, ending at 91 the brilliant Jones Bros. era. Dave Brubeck celebrating his 90th birthday for a week or three. Genial James Moody uncommonly silent and withdrawn, succumbing to cancer at 86--then days later, nearly unnoticed, Clark Terry tootling quietly past his 90-year mark. Tony Bennett easing back a bit, 84-years-young and still radiant with Astoria-Italian soul. Randy Weston standing tall at 84, for Duke and Monk and stride and, always, Africa. Benny Golson, a spry 81, blues-marching on with slick chick Betty and funky Killer Joe. Sonny Rollins and his sax blowing more angularly year after year--a mere kid of 80...

I look around imagining I might well discover centenarian Benny Carter still composing and conducting and playing his tempered alto, with Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker taking note(s)! The stalwart giants of Modern Jazz are still leaving tracks, still making their marks. I'm very happy to add that the above rollcall of musicians represents Jazz masters I fortuitously got to see and hear live (all save Golson and Weston), whether in concerts or clubs--or in the case of Moody and Terry, in separate performances with the fine Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra (add Jimmy Heath to that select group), during which the featured gents all showed themselves to be moving more slowly but staying cheerful and witty, still able to get around on their horns--even two at a time in Clark's inimitable fashion. (And the only mumbling was intentional.)

Long-lived and alert, secure in their individual approaches to playing, without becoming slaves to their own styles... I think of poet William Butler Yeats aging into greatness, writing better and better the older he got, as opposed to the more typical range of artists who make a splash when young but cannot progress much beyond that (Hemingway and Faulkner, Eliot and Frost). Which values growth (or change at least) and staying power over instant, flash-in-the-pan success--Matisse or Picasso, say, instead of Warhol and Pop Art, or most of the Abstract Expressionists. (I actually revere all the names I've dropped here, but who would dispute the locked-in, long dying fall of many artistic careers?)

But getting back to Jazz, every one of the musicians mentioned above released praiseworthy albums in the 21st century's first ten years. Bud Shank was a whirlwind, recording almost yearly, challenging himself right through to his final CD, Fascinating Rhythms. Every Hank Jones album was a blessing, but especially his separate tributes to brother Thad (with brother Elvin assisting) and to their father. Brubeck alternated quartet projects (London Flat, London Sharp) and solo piano treats like the grace-filled Indian Summer and his unique reminiscence of WWII music called Private Brubeck Remembers. Moody went out with a dual bang, gifting us with sax-and-rhythm sets featuring Kenny Barron and stripped-down titles 4A and 4B. (Hank and Moody also teamed up for Our Delight, which I had missed but now have on order for some suitable seasonal cheer.)

Perennial off-the-radar brass man Clark Terry had two CDs I'm on the trail of, too (grammatical or no), his Porgy and Bess using the Miles/Gil Evans charts but with Clark on flugelhorn, and One on One's duets between Clark and 14 different pianists. Tony sang Duets too, soundly trouncing the feeble Sinatra sets, and more recently joined the current Basie "ghost" aggregation for some Christmas Jazz--while Benny recalled Art Farmer and Curtis Fuller for a near-Jazztet album, then gathered a tight new crew for his New 'Tet CD. Randy took us back to Africa with The Storyteller, and Sonny took us out on tour with his Road Songs, not to mention the harrowing live set recorded in Boston a few days after 9-11. And I'm ignoring all the reissues and special compilations and retrospective box sets each of these gentlemen merited.

Yes, it was a decade of grandeur for the great elders of Jazz...

Yet as a flailing 67-year-old who has survived (survived so far, that is; and knock wood for me, would you?) too-early prostate cancer and now the shaky onset of Parkinson's, I can only marvel at the excellent genes and general good health of so many of the music's distinguished seniors. As 2010 shudders and fades, I'm haunted by shabby, two-cents-worth "Intimations of Mortality" (no Immortality per Wordsworth seems likely), bumping up against Jazz's continuing... call it "Integrations of Improvising," the brain and the fingers staying agile, the breath available, each player's place in the scheme continually being discovered and claimed, and all present then "articulating sweet sounds together."

Yeats got it wrong, you see: Our best retain all conviction, full of passionate intensity right to the end. All unknowing perhaps, these aged Jazzmen have held to their roles and played their parts:

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

No musician, I pray that I too may be--dying young or old--another such foolish, passionate man.

Thrush Hour

Consider this a sidebar to my previous posts on Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, with Part 3 still in the works...

Lately I've been reading two newish Jazz books, and I recommend both--Stan Kenton: This Is an Orchestra! (University of North Texas Press) by British Kenton specialist Michael Sparke, and the massive tome titled A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (Pantheon) by canny and witty collector-critic Will Friedwald. Sparke plays it straight, telling the long and convoluted Kenton story through dozens of interviews with band members and others, while Friedwald's two hundred essays are opinionated, rich with anecdotes and the occasional pun, and usually offer complete career overviews as well as detailed analysis of individual discs (whether 78s, 45s, LPs, or CDs). Both works are excellent, invigorating reads, and that's true whether you dip in or plow straight through, though Friedwald's 800 pages might take a while!

Anyway, I mention them together thanks to the small overlap of the Kenton organization's famed threesome of female vocalists--Anita O'Day, June Christy, and Chris Connor, the great "band thrushes," as Friedwald calls them in retro slang--each of whom gets her due in both books. And here's the fun coincidence, one of those serendipitous events you just have to embrace. The other day, idly thinking about Jazz vocals, having read Will's first 25 pieces which included both Christy and Connor, I wandered into a local used CD store and found that some fan had just unloaded a slew of female vocal albums, and sure enough there were several fine Jazz items I didn't already have, by the Kenton three plus Blossom Dearie, Ella and Billie live at Newport, and more. When I read in the booklet notes that O'Day's 1959 Sings the Winners had Kamuca and Perkins side by side on tenor, well, it seemed like some cosmic alignment.

(But I soon noticed major discographical confusion. The reissue CD from 1990 says the 12 original tracks feature a Russ Garcia Orchestra, arrangements by Russ and Marty Paich, Perk and Richie present... but the comprehensive O'Day Mosaic set book from 1999 lists a whole different cast for The Winners sessions, and the mistaken personnel instead correct for 1960 sessions led by Bill Holman. There are other discrepancies too--for example, Barney Kessel is credited as "coordinator" for the Garcia orchestra, but his name does not appear in either list of personnel playing; and the facts of some other session dates are also in dispute. Assuming the 1960 date correct means that Perkins and Kamuca aren't here after all.)

Before discussing any one album, let's deal with the silly matter of, as some Kenton dissenters are wont to say, "they all sound/sing alike"--a canard as baseless (and bassless) as the belief that Kenton's recordings "never swung." Just as the latter statement is demonstrably false, with his mid-Fifties ensembles and some later groups too all working the brilliant charts by Bill Holman, Gerry Mulligan, and others, and swinging their collective assets quite convincingly, so too are the women distinct and distinctive. That's not to deny their similarities, but to give each her particular due.

Anita O'Day was reputed to be mentally tough, aggressively independent, a risktaker (drugs and all); and that's how she sounds: like a real character, and with acquired extra character in her voice, ranging higher than the other two (though I'd guess them all to be approximately altos). Here was a white chick able to sing a ballad with a Holiday lilt and whine (gorgeous takes on "Whisper Not" and "Early Autumn"), scat nearly as freely as Ella ("Sing, Sing, Sing"), and show as much sass as Sarah ("What's Your Story, Morning Glory"; would you please "Peel Me a Grape"?). Anita could speed the beat or shift across it at will, take almost any lyric and play with it--or even play it straight, her pipes another instrument in the arrangement, trading fours with the other horns; check her great version of "Four Brothers" for one example among many.

So Anita shone most brightly when her interest and playfulness were engaged (caught in the light O'Day, so to speak); but with an indifferent lyric or a tame tune ("Ivy," anyone?), she might just sound bored ("The Rock and Roll Waltz," perhaps?), a thoroughbred irritably going through her paces. From The Winners it's the difference between her fumbling of "Frenesi" and her cheeky mastery of "The Peanut Vendor," which you might expect her to sneer at instead. And on her Pick Yourself Up album the listener goes straight from an awkward and mannered "Sweet Georgia Brown" to the smile-on-her-face total fun of "I Won't Dance," the very next track.

By my lame and limping analogy, June Christy in contrast--though a well-groomed filly indeed--was more workhorse than racehorse, laboring in the Kenton stable for six or seven years, from Tampico all the way across the alley to the Alamo. June sang more gently, maybe lazily, always a bit back of the beat, and often sounding as though she might happily settle for slightly flat (I'm attempting accurate description here, not negative criticism), all of this stuff comprising her own inherent style, vulnerable but knowing too. Just as June seemed shy and introverted, more stay-at-home than party girl, so too her voice seemed softer and sweeter, as befitting the best-looking bird on this particular branch, less sophisticated and more domesticated. She wasn't just Gone for the Day (one album's title), she seemed halfway out the door always, ready to retire from performing yet reluctantly pressing on.

That June's first album, Something Cool, was also her best just exacerbated the problem. Her regular arranger/producer Pete Rugolo tried everything he could dream up, but the results were always hit or Misty Miss Christy (the second LP), where she was infectiously happy for "Sing Something Simple," then simply flat for "This Year's Kisses"; pitching perfectly with "I Didn't Know About You" and, of all things, "'Round Midnight," then done in by Rugolo's melodramatic, weird-instruments derangement of "The Wind." More typical for this and her other albums were "There's No You " and "That's All," mid-tempo songs adrift in the cool studio air. Musicians approved her, but she didn't want the pressure; you could say this frail Shirley added Luster to every album she cut, from June to Christmas and beyond, but a solo career lasting just a decade-and-some was enough.

Chris Connor kept at it, whispering a Broadway lullaby to some Ronnie or other and resisting the lush life, until her voice was permanently stilled in 2009. That works out to well over 60 years of cheerful chirping ("Little Jazzbird" was one of her favorite Gershwin discoveries)--but, really, one could argue that only her albums for Bethlehem and then Atlantic, 15 or so recorded approximately 1953-62, belong in the Hall of Dames (to coin a Friedwaldism). If the cats and kiddies thought Tough Auntie-Mama Anita too hot and scattered, and Tender Mama June too cool and depressured, then Chris the Goldenlocks somehow managed to keep the pot at a just-right low-boil. She admired Sinatra's ability to tell a story as he sang, so she followed suit. Anita was a Jazz musician, an improvisor determined to mess with the tune; June listened to the lyrics and let the melody go; Chris's craft was to stay alert to both, altering as needed and at will--or, maybe, as Will would approve. (Connor and Friedwald were friends from the Eighties on, and he helped her choose 40 songs for the Atlantic-albums anthology, rightly named Warm Cool.)

So where Anita romps and wallops, and June simmers and soothes, Chris learned to drift and haunt, yet swing and sizzle too--the premiere voice among the three, even if O'Day worked harder to achieve more acclaim (while Christy just went quiet). And what a throatsome pleasure, slightly husky (like a young Bacall before her voice changed), able to half-talk the lyrics or stay with her warm vibrato, then easily drop into mellow blue notes, her tenor-saxy lower register only as flattened as she allowed (until her later years, anyway). During the Atlantic sojourn Chris cut several signature performances, little-known tunes usually: "When the Wind Was Green," "I Wonder What Became of Me," "Lilac Wine," "High on a Windy Hill," "Oh, You Crazy Moon," and umpteen others. (Go with the Warm Cool set for a splendid intro.)

But to wrap up this survey I thought it might be instructive to pit the thrushes against one another with songs sung in common. Anita and Chris both do upbeat versions of "I Get a Kick Out of You," Anita adding the uncommon opening verse, then prancing with a smile but no sweat through Cole Porter's lyrics, even on a second run-through, letting Billy May's orchestra do most of the work... so not one of her cardinal, adventurous efforts. Chris on the other hand has the benefit of John Lewis, Oscar Pettiford, and Connie Kay all running through the tune (running, not walking) while her vocal slipstreams along above them; a strikingly different if not perfect performance, the chanteuse herself not yet in total control.

For a more modern take, compare the same two on Horace Silver's "Senor Blues": both arrangements follow the circling Latin beat, but Connor's sways rather than dances, moving at half-speed, while Ms. O'Day (backed by Gary McFarland's band) brazenly power-shouts right along with the Gil Evans-styled rising and repeating brass, but her reading of the words suffers accordingly. And even if a bit less exciting, Chris's voice sounds just so luscious and lovely... who'd really want to resist?

June gets her say on the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away from Me," singing in a higher key or register than the arrangements usually force her into; I say that knowing well that Rugolo would be setting her at the sexy contralto level that made her famous. But up here, in husband Bob Cooper's arrangement (backed by ace West Coast players), June can still employ her full voice, and with no chance of going flat; even the downward lines are sung as rising. So: a beautiful example of Christy at her best. Connor's playful version from her Gershwin Almanac set rides lower, at a less wide-open emotional level, but none the worse for it. And since hers was recorded some years before June's, it could well be that Christy and Cooper had Connor in their hind sights.

I'd opine that the three band thrushes all chirp most excellently depending on the song and the circumstance. Though I favor Chris finally, I can still appreciate the joyous vocalizing of her friendly rivals. If Stan Kenton had done nothing else, the Jazz world would still owe him for showcasing and so helping to launch the remarkable careers of warm cool Connor, something cool Christy, and too cool O'Day.

Johnny Came Lately

Film music grandmaster Elmer Bernstein made his bones in the mid-1950s by following the trail first blazed by Alex North, to blend Jazz instruments and Jazz composition elements into noirish movie scores. Bernstein wrote the music for The Man with the Golden Arm, Sweet Smell of Success, his non-film album Blues and Brass, the later Some Came Running and Walk on the Wild Side, and more. Piggybacking on Bernstein's style and success, television cop shows like M Squad and Peter Gunn began using Jazz too, and then the producers of a Gunn rival called Staccato (broadcast in 1959) hired Bernstein to work his magic once more.

Set in New York's Greenwich Village, the one-season, 27-episode Staccato series starred vibrant and intense young actor John Cassavetes in his one and only series television role, as a private eye who'd rather play Jazz piano and hang out at his friend Waldo's namesake nightclub than go down the Mean Streets. But some other friend's problem, some stranger's need for help, always pulls him back into action. And with Cassavetes, one really does mean action: he strides everywhere, bursts into rooms, charges up and down stairs, makes snap decisions, talks tough and fast and gets clobbered often.

The show's opening credit sequence each week set the tone, offering 30 seconds of John running pell-mell through the darkened streets and alleys of the Village; and that frantic pace continued through 25-minute stories that seemed to cram-in twice that in plot and suspense and sudden action. Rising young actors and familiar character players guested--Michael Landon, Gena Rowlands (soon Cassavetes' wife), Alexander Scourby, Elizabeth Montgomery (didn't twitch her nose, though), Jack Weston, Susan Oliver, Geraldine Brooks, Frank DeKova, and others, all of them hurting or angry or on the sly.

Staccato was truly exciting, and a total contrast to the more laid-back Peter Gunn with sleepy Craig Stevens. The Gunn show's success was largely due to Henry Mancini's score, delivered by top-flight West Coast players--plus lovely Lola Albright as the chanteuse at Mother's club. But Bernstein's music had more of an edge and truly was more jaggedly "staccato," with lots of brass and driving rhythms played by many of the same studio-ace musicians, guys like Shelly Manne, Barney Kessel, Pete Candoli, Johnny Williams (then a Jazz pianist, later to become film score giant John W. of Jaws/Star Wars/Superman/Indiana Jones fame), Reds Mitchell and Norvo, Ronnie Lang, the Nash brothers, et al.

I was 16 when Staccato had its one year, and I watched every week. The show didn't make it, disappeared into the NBC vaults, and was forgotten. Cassavetes shaped a maverick career, creating his own tough and independent films as both actor and director. Bernstein moved on to score, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred other movies ranging from The Ten Commandments to The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird to The Great Escape, Animal House to Ghostbusters, and Hawaii to Airplane! So fifty years busily synch-sprocketed by.

I held on to my copy of the Staccato soundtrack and played it occasionally, wondering if the show would ever resurface. A few years back, I noticed an eBay auction selling videotape copies of the series, so I bid and won somebody's private bootleg stash. I watched maybe half of the tapes, slightly disappointed that the show didn't quite match up to my rosy memories, but mostly just bummed by the low-quality duplication. Still, I vowed I'd really dig in some weekend...

Then a month ago I discovered an ad for the newly and legally reissued, 3 DVD set of all 27 episodes of (now retitled) Johnny Staccato: Television's Jazz Detective. I fired off my $20... and have been in TV heaven ever since I tore off the plastic wrap and spun the first DVD. The show was, and still is, excellent, blending film noir, timeless plots, philosophical questions, droll comedy, Beat Generation shenanigans, social injustice, on-location photography in the Big Apple (a few exotic destinations too), and yes, loads of action.

Oh, and some damn fine Jazz too. (Now: anybody need a VHS set, cheap...?)