The Beiderbecke Affair

Resurrection Man

“If writing is your escape from dying,” says Christopher Althouse upon retreating from the Web, “blogging is the last format you should use. Every blog post ‘dies’ after a handful of recent posts push it to the bottom—off the page entirely. Yes, it’s in the archives, but that’s a graveyard of words to the blog readers who have thousands of sites to choose from.”

It’s well put, and a little sad, and, for me anyway, wrong. This form is not about permanence or destination, but about movement. It’s not about orgasm (la petit mort—coming soon? Of course! That’s the whole point!) but about sex. “To say this is not to deny the past,” John A. Kouwenhoven pointed out way back in 1956 in a Harper’s essay titled “What’s ‘American’ About America.”

It is simply to recognize that for a variety of reasons people living in America have, on the whole, been better able to relish process than those who have lived under the imposing shadow of the arts and institutions which Western man created in his tragic search for permanence and perfection—for a “closed system.” They find it easy to understand what that very American philosopher William James meant when he told his sister that his house in Chocorua, New Hampshire, was “the most delightful house you ever saw; it has fourteen doors, all opening outwards.” They are used to living in grid-patterned cities and towns whose streets, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, are not, like those of European cities, “closed at both ends.” As Sartre says in his essay on New York, the long straight streets and avenues of a gridiron city do not permit the buildings to “cluster like sheep” and protect one against the sense of space. “They are not sober little wads closed in between houses, but national highways. The moment you set foot on one of them, you understand that it has to go on to Boston or Chicago.”

Which is a nice coincidence for I am Chicago bound . . . (h/t)

PS— Kouwenhoven’s essay is anthologized in a really heavy undergraduate-ready anthology called The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Robert G. O’Meally, ed.), and it is there, of course, because jazz prides itself on impermanence & unknowing. “One of the things I like about jazz, kid,” Bix Beiderbecke told his fellow cornetist Jimmy McPartland, “is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?”

PREVIOUSLY: Writing takes longer than orgasm.

IMAGE: De Doodgraaver

‘His life was higgledy-piggledy.’

Great profiles are underappreciated. They require insight but also courage. Here is the beginning of Whitney Balliett’s take on Pee Wee Russell (above on the right), jazz’s “lovable freak,” whose centennial was earlier this year.

The clarinetist Pee Wee Russell was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in March of 1906, and died just short of his sixty-third birthday in Arlington, Virginia. He was unique—in his looks, in his inward-straining shyness, in his furtive, circumambulatory speech, and in his extraordinary style. His life was higgledy-piggledy. He once accidentally shot and killed  a man when all he was trying to do was keep an eye on a friend’s girl. He spent most of his career linked—in fact and fiction—to the wrong musicians. People laughed at him—he looked like a clown perfectly at ease in a clown’s body—when, hearing him, they should have wept. He drank so much for so long that he almost died, and when he miraculously recovered, he began drinking again. In the last seven or eight years of his life, he came into focus: his originality began to be appreciated, and he worked and recorded with the sort of musicians he should have been working and recording with all his life. He even took up painting, producing a series of seemingly abstract canvases that were actually accurate chartings of his inner workings. But then, true to form, the bottom fell out. His wife Mary died unexpectedly, and he was soon dead himself. Mary had been his guidon, his ballast, his right hand, his helpmeet. She was a funny, sharp, nervous woman, and she knew she deserved better than Pee Wee. She had no illusions, but she was devoted to him. She laughed when she said this: “Do you know Pee Wee? I mean what do you think of him? Oh, not those funny sounds that come out of his clarinet. Do you know him? You think he’s kind and sensitive and sweet. Well, he’s intelligent and he doesn’t use dope and his is sensitive, but Pee Wee can also be mean. In fact, Pee Wee is the most egocentric son of a bitch I know.”

The full profile can be found in Reading Jazz, although editor Robert Gottlieb misdates the essay 1962. In fact, Russell died in 1969.

In another essay, this one actually from 1962 (and collected here), Balliett admires Russell’s idiosyncratic sound: “Sidling softly into the lower register, he will issue, after some preliminary blinking and squinting (as if he had just entered a dark room from a bright street), a series of irregularly staccato phrases, each shaken by a worrying vibrato and each pressed tightly against its predecessor.” Hear for yourself on “I’ve Found a New Baby” [Mp3].

PREVIOUSLY: Pee Wee battles a comb and a Hawk and wins!

IMAGE: Red Allen, Ben Webster, and Pee Wee Russell in a photograph by Milt Hinton, who, by the way, was Billy Crystal’s uncle. This is how young Billy came to take clarinet lessons from old Pee Wee. As for the photo, read an interesting description of it here.

Win or Lose, the Pants Are Coming Off

That seems to be the situation in Korea, anyway. When the national team (whose name is so howlingly un-PC that Mickey Rooney might as well be the mascot) defeated Togo in early World Cup action, the celebration got kinky. Or at least in Seoul’s Apgujeong neighborhood it did. The inevitable pictures (go here for the most revealing of the lot) prompted gasps of shame and charges that one half of this particular scoring tandem may have been . . . wait for it . . . WHITE!

Say it ain’t so, Roh! Must the price of victory be Korea’s womanhood soiled?

Not that the price of defeat is much better. After Switzerland rang up a two-nil win last weekend, one citizen (pictured), angered by a controversial call, could think of no more profound a protest than dropping trow.

For a more complete explanation, see soju.

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. (A Primer)

I happened upon artist Orna Wind’s series of paintings juxtaposing iconic Western women (like super-slash-action heroes Lara Croft and Jessica Rabbit) against a backdrop of explosions, hurled stones, and pillars of smoke. The 2004 exhibit, at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, concluded with images of veil-covered Muslim women.

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. Where I have seen that before?

Oh, yeah. Go to a website aptly titled The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters (“If people can’t stand cartoons about religion, they’ve got a problem.” – Frank Miller). There you’ll find an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting compilation of theo-geek trivia, the highlights of which include the fact that Superman is Methodist, Spider-Man Protestant, The Thing Jewish, and Elektra Greek Orthodox.

Some of these affiliations are rather more obvious (Warrior Nun Areala leans Catholic) and predictable (Son of Satan’s a former priest); some are silly (The Acidic Jew); some are confusing (Batgirl is listed as being “religiously untrained; potential Christian”); and some, like Captain Hero, are many if not all of the above.

He’s listed as Jewish, despite the fact that his name is, shall we say, non-denominational (compare with The Hebrew Hammer, Menorah Man, or Greenberg the Vampire). But he’s also listed as GLBT, which is not, strictly speaking, a religion. A handful of Catholics are listed as such and it turns out they’re stuck inside “socially relevant” Catholic comic books. Captain Hero, on the other hand, is/was stuck on Comedy Central. What’s his deal? His link leads to a Wikipedia entry with a helpful section on his sexuality, which unnamed experts have deemed “debatable.”

Some argue he could probably best be described as pansexual, because while Foxxy Love is bisexual, showing attraction to both men and women, Hero seems completely indiscriminate, possessing more of a “jump on anything that moves” attitude (and even a few things that don’t). Others believe he shows signs of internalized homophobia, indicating he may actually be simply gay, or in denial of the homosexual aspect of his sexuality. Hero has a variety of paraphilias, including pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia.

The anonymous Wiki author wisely concludes that the “question of whether Hero is gay or straight is an extremely complex issue.” Notes attached to the Wind exhibit, meanwhile, note “the Hollywood-like atmosphere emanating from the paintings, an atmosphere typified by a cross between the glamorous and the dark” and which portrays sexuality as “lacking a formed shape.”

So there you go.

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. Any questions?

IMAGES: Lara Croft by Orna Wind (Tempra oil on canvas, 2004); A Moslem Woman by Orna Wind (Tempra oil on canvas, 2003)

You Never Know Who’s Reading (Hint: Benjamin Schwarz)

In February 2003, I published an essay on the television miniseries Band of Brothers. Context is everything. The invasion of Iraq was imminent. If you opposed it, or if you merely suggested that war is more complicated than a parade, you risked mockery or worse. (Ed: You still do. See the post below.) Anyway, I suggested that while it was an excellent & engrossing film, Band of Brothers nevertheless glorified war . . . even when it pretended to do just the opposite. Take the storyline involving Spiers, a lieutenant who apparently murders German prisoners in cold blood. Apparently. It’s not clear until Episode 7, when Spiers suggests that he has encouraged the ambiguity because, he says, “there was some value to the men thinking he was the meanest, toughest son of a bitch” in the Army.

Before you can say boo, the script writers have turned a grisly subplot about the horrors of war into a red-white-and-blue subplot about the glories of leadership.

When the letter to the editor arrived from Lieutenant Spiers’ niece, I was terrified. After all, I had denigrated the memory of a war hero. Imagine my surprise, then, when Sukey Oleson of Canterbury, New Hampshire, insisted that I brought up “an important point regarding the realities of war.”

Let us hope that the realities of war [Oleson wrote] and what they do to real people, not movie people, can be brought to the forefront so that this generation of soldiers and families do not have to go through what our “heroes” of the past have endured.

Another film has just been released that may do just that. My editor, Mike Pride, has blogged on a very positive reaction in New Hampshire.

So. You never know who’s reading, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be surprised at how the people you didn’t know were reading react to what you had no idea they knew you were even writing. NEWEST CASE IN POINT: Benjamin Schwarz, literary & national editor (and xylophonist?) of The Atlantic. I happen to love the literary coverage in that magazine, but I also found reason to poke fun at Schwarz’s reviewing style (S&M Reviewing: “Whip me, Ben! Whip me with your adjectives!”). Then I presumed to suggest that “more than most of us,” Schwarz “needs a beer.”

His response is good-humored, complimentary, and much-appreciated.

Off with Their Heads

In my role as journalist, I have been called many, many names in print. (Only a couple of times have I ever been called out in person, one of those times being a memorable few minutes on live television.) Readers of the “About Me” link know the drill: I am maniacally vacillating, politically correct, disingenuous, puerile, self-righteous, foppish, talentless, irksome, unfunny, stupid, embarrassing, and pretentious. I am a scum-suckin’ creep and what I write is distorted, psychotic gibberish.

I receive each attack with the same shot of adrenaline: It is traumatizing but also thrilling and even (in some weird way) satisfying. Still, no one has ever called for my head.

In the Denver Post yesterday, some yahoo (from Littleton, ironically) did just that. Here’s his letter in full:

Response to killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq

Re: “Soldiers’ bodies found; deaths were ‘barbaric’” June 21 news story.

Why have those who have continually howled at our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo met the recent kidnapping and sadistic and brutal murders of our two young soldiers with deafening silence? Where is your outrage now? Not only should we behead 100 prisoners in retaliation (complete with Web-posted snuff videos), but also the editors, commentators, college professors and left-wing congressmen who would suddenly break their silence to come out in support of these enemy jihadists. We need to stop listening to these sanctimonious hypocrites who apply the rules of war only to our side. Let us untie the hands of our troops and allow them to fight and win.

Wow. Sometimes that’s all I’ve got.

IMAGE: Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612–1621)

‘Sanctified by a Job-Lot of Second-Hand Myths’

This is from reader Mike Smolinksy:

Not to beat a dead horse, but you might recall the interesting debate we had about “authenticity” in music. Anyway, I saw this from Babies Are Fireproof today:

My current favorite song of all time is “Yesterdays” by Guns ’n’ Roses. My yesterdays include the first time around this was my favorite song of all time, which adds a dimension, of course. But it isn’t just a nice counterpoint to McCartney’s take on the matter, it’s further confirmation in my mind that part of Axl Rose’s appeal is the way he postures—completely free of apology or irony, but never lacking in self-awareness. Others like him come to mind, but they had their imbalances (Jagger was too calculated and Plant was too horny, etc) that got in the way of this particular harmony. And that's what it is: harmonious.

The way he postures—free of apology or irony, but never lacking in self-awareness.

Of course, this is about performance, not quality of music, but it implies a whole aesthetic stance, doesn’t it?

It does, and I doubt any of us would argue that rock music (or blues or jazz or pop) has ever been just about the music; it’s about the performance, about the posturing of the artists, the way they relate (or refuse to relate) to their audiences. And rock is also about this bogus idea of authenticity. Rock is the bastard child of blues and country and everything else swirling around in 1950s America. It’s hardly pure, but I suppose it’s also as authentic as anything else that people have created.

British poet Ruth Padel argues that point in a book that arrived in my mail box yesterday: I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ’n’ Roll:

Rock music is anything but ‘natural’. It just sums up, to some people, a current ideal of naturalness.

Authenticity (in anything) is a wildly artificial idea, the product of a society that has found new meaning in the word ‘virtual’. Authenticity is the Great Good Thing in everything we have, wear, listen to and eat, from Nike trainers to yoghurt. The appearance of authenticity in, say, music gets manufactured like a laser sculptor, according to myths currently running round our own heads today. But myths have a history like anybody else. The ones we are conscious of are always standing on the shoulders of older, more shadowy ones.

The myths that Padel focuses on are about maleness and aggression, but she spends plenty of time working through this ideal of purity and the white rocker’s obsession with everything black—an obsession, by the way, that started at least with jazz. On the Bix Beiderbecke forum recently, Albert Haim charged Mezz Mezzrow with having “serious psychological problems. He was a white Jew who wished he had been born black, and lived in a world of fantasy and drugs.” That sounds like more than a few rock stars to me.

Padel sums it up like this:

Yet what could ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ possible be, in music? A particular sound, instrument or style? In a way, [blues singer] Lonnie [Johnson] singing Sinatra was as authentic as anything. He liked the song; he sang it. So what if it wasn’t blues? Him singing it was authentic something. Music is a made-up thing. Like myth; or like men’s fantasies of women. It may be natural to make music, but music itself is not natural. (Is ‘bird-song’ music, or our metaphor for music? Do we turn it into song when we listen?) You hear a song, like it, and pass it on re-stuffed with your own fantasies, myths and words. The whole lot is a product of history, like any artifact. But music is brilliant at making things feel ‘natural’. The idea that there was a ‘natural’ relationship between sound and sensuality rose from a swamp of twentieth-century musicological, psychological and even racist assumptions—confused ones, riding on nineteenth-century romanticism—about what was ‘natural’. Assumptions about rhythm and body, about adolescence, desire and the primitive. ‘Authentic’ often means ‘sanctified by a job-lot of second-hand myths’.

Hef & Bix (Take 2)

This is from Brad Kay, a regular and regularly thoughtful contributor to the Bixography forum:

I happen to know Hugh Hefner a little, through music, and let me assure you the guy really is a dedicated jazz fan. I used to play around town (L.A.) with Johnny Crawford (some of you may remember him as the kid actor on ’50s TV hit, “The Rifleman,” starring Chuck Connors). Johnny and Hefner are old pals. According to Johnny, one day in the ’70s, during a lull in his acting and rock ’n’ roll crooning career, He and Hef were hanging out at the mansion, and HH said, “Forget this rock ’n’ roll! I want you to hear something!” And he pulled out one after the other of the [Paul] Whiteman Victors with Bing [Crosby] and Bix. This changed Crawford’s whole karma. For the next 15 years Johnny yearned to sing like young Bing (which he does, admirably), and to have a band like Whiteman’s! Eventually, around 1991, he ran into me and my bunch, and we ended up as “Johnny Crawford and his 1928 Jazz Orchestra.” We worked together for about two years, including gigs at the mansion. Hefner had his birthday at our club in ’92. That evening, I played “I Can’t Get Started” with Ray Anthony on trumpet, and backed up Mel Torme on “Stardust”! Hefner loves talking about Bix, and will pause, even when being assaulted from all sides, to do so.

Of course, there’s the Playboy Jazz Festival, and the magazine’s formerly extensive jazz coverage, but we’ll just stop here.

The Corn-Fed Chronicles

Those of you who attend these pages regularly will recall my interest in the strange & fascinating process by which Davenport, Iowa—my hometown and Bix Beiderbecke’s hometown—has somehow transformed into something bigger than itself. It has become, to quote myself, “a shining beacon for all that is right & good with Planet Earth, a potent symbol that a mistress of the op-ed like Sarah Vowell might even wield against a sitting president.”

A new case in point comes from the political blog Brilliant at Breakfast (run by Jill Cozzi, a self-described “Card-carrying factinista and brainiac on the nerd patrol”). In an April 27 post, Cozzi wrote:

That quote from the Administration about creating their own reality? They weren’t kidding. The trigger from Glenn’s blog entry is the insistence by Matt Drudge that Crashing the Gate, the book by Kos and Jerome Armstrong, has only sold some 3600-odd copies, despite the fact that this is a book by bloggers and not only does that number not include online sales, but Great Aunt Mary in Davenport, Iowa is unlikely to be rushing out to get the latest book by any blogger, however alpha-dog he may be in blogistan.

This is Davenport in the role of the über-American town—virtuous but square—but why Davenport? I asked Cozzi that question and she was nice enough to reply:

The reason I chose Davenport, Iowa is really quite pedestrian—here in the Godless liberal northeast, Iowa is really the most corn-fed, middle-America, heartland place we can think of that isn’t full of the Christofascist Zombies (© Marc Maron) you find in the south and in places like Kansas. Iowa has a strong progressive tradition, as I found when I did some research for a novel I’ve been working on intermittently for seven years, which is set partially in Cedar Rapids.

So why Davenport? Because Amazon Dry Goods is there. That’s a mail-order catalog that sells reproduction patterns for vintage-type clothing of the 19th and early 20th century.

Interesting. I’d never heard of Amazon Dry Goods. (Check out the website. Who knew heroin chic was the thing a hundred years ago, too?) Nothing to do with Bix Beiderbecke, admittedly, but nothing much to do with the present day, either. Thanks for the explanation, Jill.

PREVIOUSLY: Would that the world were all Davenport

IMAGE: City of Davenport, Iowa by Rufus Wright (“Scarce important bird’s eye view . . . based upon a renowned painting then in the possession of George L. Davenport, after whom the city was named”)

Deacon Meets Nancarrow, Leaves Only Blood & Space

This weekend, WFMU recommended a new release from electronic musician Dan Deacon, “the only performer to list Conlon Nancarrow and Spider Man among his primary influences.” My first question: Who’s Dan Deacon? I followed the link to a 2004 entry on Deacon’s website:

So since March I’ve lost 60 pounds. I feel pretty good about it. I have a lot more energy and I get a lot more out of my being. Lately I’ve taken to grinding up all my food in this thing called the MAGIC BULLET. It’s pretty awesome. I’ve been trying to eat vegan and raw foods. This is difficult since I love chicken and cookies. However, I ruined my life once already, better not try again. I still have like 40 or 50 more dudes to lose. Yes I’ve been dumped.

Fuck my new CD is going to be so fucking awesome. You have no idea what a power house of music this beast is going to be. Some of you might say “Dan, your other CDs are terrible. Why should we believe you about this one?” And I say to you fuck off. This new CD will destroy all music and minds and leave only blood and space.

Stay busy. Don’t dwell on things. Don’t drive your self crazy. Find something “else” to love and focus on that. And it can’t be killing someone you hate. Nope nope nope. Stay away from that topic.

Roger wilco, Dan . . . After which I helped myself to two Deacon tracks, the rave-ready “Splish Splash” [Mp3] and “Drinking Out of Cups” [Mp3], a song Deacon describes as “a composition for voice on audiocassette.” In it, he asserts that “lighthouses rule. You don’t like the lighthouse, you suck.”

Okay, next question: Who’s Conlon Nancarrow? Apparently, this is a less excusable gap in my knowledge. For starters, Nancarrow appears on Alex Ross’s curious list of 100 recordings meant to survey the last century in music. (I say it’s curious because you’ll find Shostakovich & Velvet Underground, Bartók & Bob Dylan, but no Louis Armstrong. “The idea,” Ross explains, “was not to represent all the most important compositions of the period but to illustrate a diversity of styles.” Fair enough, but who is Conlon Nancarrow besides being #57?

According to Wikipedia, he was an experimental composer who specialized in doing strange things to player pianos. Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1912, he briefly played jazz trumpet and studied music with Walter Piston. (I was a nerd in high school and therefore loved Piston. I didn’t even know he was a Mainer!) Nancarrow fought fascists in Spain and, when the United States denied him a passport for his trouble, he moved to Mexico and later became a citizen. His artistic process suggests that he was as much engineer as musician.

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City in 1947, bought a player piano, and had a machine custom built to enable him to punch the piano rolls by hand. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work, and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather or metal so as to produce a more percussive sound. On this trip to New York he also met [Henry] Cowell, and heard a performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (also a result of Cowell’s esthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow experimenting with prepared piano in his Study #30.

So now check out “Study for Player Piano No. 37” [Mp3]. Or get a load of “Song for My Grandmother” [Mp3] by Jason Forrest, who was inspired by the many ’70s bands that used player pianos in their songs, “so I made this one as a collection of tiny bits of a few of these songs. It also has some samples from Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who used the player piano to explore super-human capabilities. Brilliant man!”

Be careful, though. These recordings could destroy all music and minds and leave only blood and space.

IMAGE: Conlon Nancarrow