The Beiderbecke Affair

And from Baseball Back to Jazz Again

As noted previously, Alfred Appel Jr. has died, and Appel wrote a book about jazz in which he mentioned the baseball player Van Lingle Mungo, whose name was so cool that the jazz musician Dave Frishberg wrote a song about it—a song whose lyrics consisted of only the names of baseball players. Frishberg also wrote a song about the early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke (“Dear Bix,” 1977), and Hayden Carruth (sadly, also recently deceased) wrote a poem that also consisted only of names—in this case, the names of jazz musicians, including Bix Beiderbecke.

Names, as these artists surely understand, carry inside of them some kind of magic. In my book-in-progress about Bix, I riff on that . . .

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning, I think, that Bix’s name matters in a way that perhaps others’ don’t. The poet Hayden Carruth dubbed “Bix Beiderbecke” one of “The Fantastic Names of Jazz,” wedging it right between Stuff Smith and Bunny Berigan. And on February 18, 1995, Bix’s name was the subject of a “Family Circus” cartoon, wherein Dolly holds up a Beiderbecke vinyl and remarks to her brother Billy, “Daddy’s listening to an old trumpet player named Big Spider Back.” Not exactly sidesplitting, but it caused me to wonder a) whether any of the cartoon’s readers under sixty had any idea who this Bix fellow was; and b) whether Bix would still be Bix were he not, in fact, named “Bix” and “Beiderbecke.” Certainly these difficult and slightly ridiculous four syllables are central to the mystique. They’re “mouth music,” as Donald Hall might put it—alliterative, abrupt, declamatory. That Saxon-y cross-like x sounds so pleasingly foreign; it’s a romantic legend all by itself. And if the clipped-ness of –becke rehearses a kind of sudden death, then the sibilance of x—kssssss—and the way it seems to echo across the peaks and valleys of “Beiderbecke,” rehearses immortality. Mezz Mezzrow was really Milton; Stuff Smith was Hezekiah, Leroy, andGordon; Bunny Berigan merely Rowland. Bix Beiderbecke, though, for what it’s worth, and with all due respect to Rich Johnson, was reallyBix.

Thinking of Carruth again—and his name was nothing to sneeze at!—here is a roundup of his four decades’ worth of work in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

IMAGE: Bix Beiderbecke (that’s him with the cornet) and the Wolverines; February 18, 1924

Two Jazz Greats, a Balding, Pear-Shaped Cartoonist, and a Midget Convenience-Store Clerk Walk into a Bar

The lead review of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review considers Beautiful Children, a novel by Charles Bock that introduces readers to a motley lineup of characters. There is, for instance, “a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies.” Here I’m quoting reviewer Liesl Schillinger, who also mentions “a midget convenience-store clerk” and “a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips.”

Schillinger is polite enough not to mention that Beiderbixxe’s burdensome name is what one might expect were Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke to collide head-on. They were great friends, those two, so it’s a nice thing they didn’t. Still, such a name! Later in her review, Schillinger returns to Bing:

Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin’ Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, “Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.” Newell isn’t impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe’s ironies, he’s bored. “Honestly, it wasn’t exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe,” he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn. “From the looks of things, Newell wasn’t alone in this opinion. The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced.”

Again, Schillinger is too polite to point out the almost sophomorically obvious irony of not getting “jazzed” about a man whose very name tangles together two of the all-time greats of jazz. But that is to Schillinger’s credit and perhaps a sign of the book’s charm.

Albert Haim, it should be said, has never been so easy to charm as me. On his Bixography forum, the retired professor calls the name “tasteless.”

Which is exactly why I love it.

Happy Birthday, Bix!

Today would have been Bix Beiderbecke’s 105th birthday. Besides being one of the great soloists in jazz history, Bix is also one of American culture’s most fascinating characters. If, according to yesterday's Washington Post Book World, the poet Homer has become “a legend, not a personage whose life we can chart more or less accurately,” then Bix has remained both—a real person and a legend. Which, believe me, causes all kinds of problems.

So if you’re interested in learning more about my take on the life & legend, then I have written plenty over the last couple of years.
If you’re interested in hearing his great solos and how others have treated the music, then check out the Bix Mix.
If you’d like my run-down of his 12 essential tracks, then you can go over to Jazz.com, a wonderful new website edited by the jazz historian Ted Gioia.
As a bonus, you can find at Jazz.com an excerpt from my book-in-progress,Bixology.
Finally, also at Jazz.com, Gioia has a brief but thorough take on Bix’s life and career.

Thanks to Ted for the support, by the way. It’s very much appreciated.

In Which Bix Beiderbecke Is Burgled!

In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm writes: "Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house . . . and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor."

 

Not that biography is a bad thing, mind you. Or that the best biographers are not like burglars. Malcolm, I think, is just reminding us that the whole enterprise is . . . what's the right word? Suspect? Compromised? Or, to put a Christian spin on it, fallen?

 

Regardless, I was reminded of this when, over Christmas, I participated in a sometimes-kind-of-heated conversation with Albert Haim, the owner and proprietor of theBixography Discussion Group, an online forum about Bix Beiderbecke. It all began innocently enough, with a debate over the way Bix is portrayed in Ted Gioia's new book, The Birth (And Death) of the Cool. I won't bore you with the details, but for Gioia, Bix is "The Progenitor of Cool" -- both in terms of the James Dean-style personal aesthetic and in terms of what became cool jazz. For Haim, Paul Newman in Hud is cool; Bix is not. Lester Young and Bill Evans were cool; Bix is not.

Fine. We went back and forth on this for awhile, each of us parsing the other's language like a couple of schoolyard toughs -- well, really geeky toughs, one of us being a retired chemistry professor, the other an encyclopedia editor. Hardly riveting stuff. But then the conversation turned. I brought up Bix's arrest, at the age of eighteen, charged with committing a "lewd and lascivious act" with a five-year-old girl. The charges were dropped when the girl's father refused to allow her to testify for what he said was her own well being.

Which was good for Bix, certainly, and perhaps good for all involved parties. But it leaves us, many years later, wondering what actually happened. I mean, we don't know, right? It's possible that Bix did something to that girl, and it's possible, of course, that he did not. That he was not tried and found guilty in a court of law doesn't tell us all that much about the facts on the ground. Haim takes a different view:

To me, the presumption of innocent is not just a legal phrase, but a living principle. To me, an individual who is not proven guilty is innocent, not only in the legal sense, but also in fact.

I'll admit that this assertion floored me. He is not guilty in fact? In fact?!? Perhaps I had misunderstood Haim. Did he know something I didn't? I argued that a biographer's duty was to wonder what happened that day and to collect as many facts as possible, always keeping an open mind about what those facts might mean. A biographer's duty was not to assume that Bix was innocent. Sure, if Bix were still alive, if Bix were, for instance, my neighbor, I would hesitate before poking around in a matter that was no longer before the courts. That might be, you know, rude. But Bix is not my neighbor; he's been dead for eighty years! No, my duty, I believe, is to refrain from assuming anything.

Anyway, that's when a lawyer weighed in -- granted, not an American lawyer, but still -- writing, "Bix is innocent and will it be forever [sic] . . . I find it highly problematic to even question Bix's innocence, particularly because of the fact that the criminal investigation in this case had been closed before it really began. Therefore, the documentation of it is more than just poor. It's almost nothing. As said before, not even 'new evidence' would change the fact that Bix is innocent."

I find this point of view so odd that I consulted a well-known biographer for input. Said biographer quoted Voltaire: "We owe nothing to the dead but the truth." Seems right to me. But many Bixophiles, I think, are still disturbed by the idea that seeking the truth requires a kind of burglary. I get that, and perhaps this is not such a big deal. I mean, why I care what people assume when they're researching and writing about Bix?

Here's why: because I think those assumptions have consequences. The authors of a couple of the most important books ever written about Bix actually knew about his arrest and conspired to keep it a secret. No burglary for them. But in protecting their purity, they also discredited

themselves as biographers.

 

PS: Out of respect to Albert Haim, it's important I mention that he is actually the first person to have published the arrest documents. That was way back in 2001. They didn't find themselves on the printed page until 2005.

 

IMAGE: 

Cat Burglar by Vangobot (acrylic on canvas, 40x27 inches)

 

Bix Beiderbecke (The Fake Interview)

The title of my book-in-progress is Finding Bix, and what better place to go looking for the legendary jazz cornetist than in the text of his only known newspaper interview? The unsigned article, headlined "'Jazz Is Musical Humor,' Says Davenport Composer and Cornetist of Whiteman's Band," appeared in the Davenport Democrat and Leader, Bix Beiderbecke's hometown newspaper, on Sunday, February 10, 1929.

When he died just two years later, Beiderbecke left behind very few words (a handful of letters, some anecdotes from friends), so this interview represents a real bonanza of Bix-speak. And yet biographers have long been skeptical that it reflects his actual words. 

Turns out their skepticism was justified. I can now say for sure that it's a fake.

First some background: In the interview, Bix expounds on the origins of jazz and his employer Paul Whiteman's landmark 1924 Aeolian Hall concert, the one in which he premiered Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. "By cacophonic combinations [Whiteman] proved what a change came over the face of Melusina and Terpsichore in a decade," the anonymous Davenport journalist writes. (Who? What?)

Bix goes on to famously suggest that "Jazz is musical humor." 

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's [sic] recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

Scholars such as Richard M. Sudhalter (who put the word interview in scare quotes when writing about it in Bix: Man & Legend) and Jean Pierre Lion never came right out and said why they doubted the article's authenticity. But presumably they wondered how a kid who had consistently struggled academically would be given to musings just a few years later on "the half-forgotten suffering of the negro." 

I shared that skepticism and decided to dig a little deeper. Phrases like cacophonic combinations and Melusina and Terpischore seemed especially to stick out. It didn't take long before Google pointed me toward So This Is Jazz by H. O. Osgood, published in 1926. "Cacophonic combinations" appears in his introduction, while the other bit comes from his review, reprinted elsewhere in the book, of Whiteman's Aeolian Hall concert.

That's pretty minor stuff, I admit, but it suggested to me that the Democrat's writer wasn't above a bit of plagiarism.* Still, he (or she) didn't appear to be making up Bix's actual words. Or at least that's what I thought until I happened upon a nationally syndicated article, published several months earlier, in The EveningStandard Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida. "The Official How and Why of Jazz -- From a Lawyer" by Louise Garwood is an interview with Edward Abbe Niles, a Harvard Law graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a fancy-pants Wall Street lawyer (Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft). He also was, at the time, the author ofEncyclopedia Britannica's entry on jazz. He even wrote an introduction to W. C. Handy's 1926 anthology of blues.

Niles was an expert, in other words, and a beautifully educated one, too. So at this point it should come as no surprise that he declared jazz to be "musical humor." And unlike Bix, he was given to musings on the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. After the jump, you'll find that Bix's words (except at the very end) are all more or less exactly Niles's words. (Both interviews are there. Compare them for yourself.) There's more to be said, I suppose, but this is enough for now. You can see the Niles interview in its original context here. More on Niles and the blues here.

* The jazz musician Brad Kay pointed out here an instance where the reporter actually seemed to be lifting from an earlier article in the Democrat about Bix's mother.

UPDATE: Discussion on the Bixography Discussion Group forum begins here andhere.

IMAGE: Bix Beiderbecke, bandmates, and giant snake

Meet Abbe Niles, the Voice of Bix Beiderbecke

We can argue all day, I suppose -- and some seem to want to -- over the precise circumstances that led to the only known interview of Bix Beiderbecke containing almost no words actually spoken by Bix Beiderbecke. Still, I think it's clear that an anonymous Davenport reporter took a nationally syndicated interview of Abbe Niles and inserted Niles's words and ideas into the mouth of Beiderbecke.

But who was Abbe Niles? It turns out he was a pretty interesting writer and thinker. A lawyer by trade with no special training in writing or music, he nevertheless was, by the mid-1920s, a leading popular music critic with a special love for blues and jazz. Here's an excerpt from an essay by Elliott S. Hurwitt in Ramblin' on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues (David Evans, ed.; 2008) in which Niles defends African American folk music from, of all people, James Weldon Johnson:

In an essay in The Nation in late 1926 Niles made one of th his strongest statements regarding the power and originality of America's black musical culture. The occasion was an offer to several writers to discuss influences on American culture from "other than Nordic sources," in the words of the magazine's editors. Niles chose this forum to defend the spirituals both against those who undervalued them and those who felt they had to be made more respectable or improved by symphonic development, in this case including James Weldon Johnson: "More can be asked from no body of folksong than may be found among the spirituals . . . it is difficult to appreciate Mr. Johnson's concern that Negro themes should be commonly employed in this country as material for music in the larger forms."

Niles pointed out that Johnson's "anxiety" ultimately led, "in grosser form," to Paul Whiteman's egregious rhetorical question: "What folksong would have amounted to anything if some great writer had not put it into a symphony?" Niles had an answer for Whiteman, and it shows his usual independence of mind, "Dvorak's use of Negro themes doubtless helped the spirituals toward recognition, but the weaving of an integral living thing like a folksong into the structure of a symphony may . . . invigorate the latter only at the expense of the former; it is by no means written that the 'New World Symphony' will outlive 'Go Down, Moses.'"

Because I haven't read Niles's full argument, I'm not completely sure how a folksong is harmed by its association with a symphony, or why we must value folk music as "integral" and "living" above high art. This smacks of the primitivism that Niles, according to Hurwitt, despised in Carl Van Vechten.(Notice, by the way, that Van Vechten took the photo of Johnson in the Wiki article linked above.)

Anyway, Niles had the opportunity to become influential beyond the intellectual Left when he became the music critic for Bookman magazine. He certainly influenced the woman who interviewed him and whose article was stolen by the reporter in Davenport. She took a sentence from one Niles's Bookman columns and slightly rewrote it for her own story. Here's Hurwitt again:

Niles's journalistic career reached a peak in 1928, when his regular column, "Ballads, Songs and Snatches," appeared in a magazine calledThe Bookman. Niles's work soon caught the eye of people in the music business, and major record companies like Victor began sending him everything they released in the pop music field. he was also sent books, sheet music, and other materials. Before long, Niles and his wife became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of records and other items arriving at their door. His regular column was discontinued a year after it began, and after early 1929 Niles's reviewing and similar activities were much reduced.

He was, after all, a Wall Street lawyer by trade. He must have been busy. Still, it sounds to me like he was a forerunner of the professional newspaper critic. Having served in that role myself, I can relate to the feelings of being overwhelmed by all the new music and, in my case, books, too. It's easy to burn out; more than that, though, it's easy to lose perspective and your criticism suffers as a result. 

Whatever the case was with Niles, his words and ideas have managed to live a long life in the mouth of Bix Beiderbecke.

IMAGE: W. C. Handy (center) with Abbe and Katherine Niles. Abbe Niles was a friend of Handy's and an important advocate of his work. This photograph, which appears in Ramblin' on My Mind, comes from the Edward Abbe Niles Papers at the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford.

Muldaur: Talent and Character Are Not Connected

On May 18, 2009, I sat down with the musician Geoff Muldaur, who in 2003 released Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Beiderbecke. We kicked back on Adirondack chairs facing out into the woods of Charlottesville, Virginia, and Muldaur spent a good chunk of the interview watching birds through his binoculars. Nevertheless, we had a pretty good conversation. Here's the beginning of it:

Geoff Muldaur: Talent and character are not connected. It's a horrible realization for most people, but it's absolutely true. And it baffles people, because how could Ray Charles produce such warm and beautiful things when he wasn't this great guy, whereas Benny Carter, greatest guy in the world. It's so random -- obsessive-compulsive slob Beethoven. I mean, total slob. Kept his shitter under his writing desk. I mean, the place was disgusting, and he produces God's music.

So that being the case, I've never been that attracted tot he historical part of each person. But I've been very interested in the music, and on that level, of course, Bix is like this shining little nugget, an absolute diamond -- very singular in our entire history. So he becomes special for that, but when I was in Davenport, the people were starting to talk about this place down the street from the house where they say he might have molested that girl and all that shit, and I was like, man, I didn't even go there. I'm a recovering alcoholic, and to me, so much is answered by that. Why does he write that letter to Trumbauer talking about how his knees don't work? Have you ever seen that? It's to get money! Because he's an alkie, man. And at the same time he's playing these pure notes from heaven, so . . . He's just an alcoholic, man. He had a disease, plain and simple. If Bill Wilson had come along sooner, then perhaps we'd have a guy visiting colleges now and talking about his chamber works. You know, I don't know what would have happened.

[. . .]

To me this is the baffling thing. Why, and not just Bix, but primarily Bix, why do these white guys in the early twenties, in the Midwest, the Chicago area, and of course Bix in Davenport -- they hear the music of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Even Bix, when you're standing in his bedroom, you wonder if he could hear that music coming from the river. It's very romantic to look out across that park and to think about the wanderlust, what sounds were coming across -- So you hear that, and you've got something in your soul, and you've got tons of classical and American popular music in your bones because everyone did, because everyone had a piano in the world, and you decide to pick up the cornet, and maybe you learned a few licks from Nick LaRocca and then this guy -- who's this other guy who came through town, Hardy or whatever it was --

Brendan Wolfe: Emmet Hardy.

GM: Yeah. So, but really, the driving force is Louis Armstrong, Freddy Keppard, these guys out of Chicago, and you decide to play this instrument, and you immediately find your own voice and don't come close to imitating those guys. How does that happen? Today, the first thing kids do is try to get in to what the guys sounds like, what he did, and he didn't do any of that. He didn't play any Armstrong licks. He didn't go for that sound. He just opened up from his soul. And the same from others; look at Pee Wee Russell and a bunch of other guys. Just like, if you're listening toJohnny Dodds on the clarinet and you're a young white guy from Chicago, and you'reFrank Teschemacher, and you decide not to play like that, or do you decide? Or do you just pick it up and out starts coming this stuff and you don't think it's your job to even come close to copying somebody as a tradition.

So to me, in this day and age, it's so different than what's done today. It's almost why there's so little going on. Everyone has incredible technical abilities but no one creates a new world.

So that's always been very curious to me, and then of course the whole midwestern thing, with the whole-tone moves and some of these great chordal moves, seems to have died out to black big band music. You know, the dancing became the thing, and having structured, interesting chordal changes like the Trumbauer orchestra or, you know, I'm not a big Goldkette fan, but the Trumbauer stuff is just sick good.

BW: Why the Midwest?

GM: Well, there were probably a lot of parlor pianos and the riverboat music, Chicago, and the black influence coming up from New Orleans, et cetera. I mean, the whole world was this way, but in the United States, music was just everywhere. Even when I was a kid in the early fifties, music was everywhere, man. One the street corners, people singin' quartets and stuff. Electronics almost kind of kills it in a way.

Over the next year, I'll post more of this and other interviews I have collected in the course of researching my book, so stay tuned.

IMAGE: Geoff Muldaur by Petra Hanisch

Muldaur: Rolling Around the Floor in Ecstasy

This is part two of my interview with musician Geoff Muldaur, conducted on May 18, 2009. 

Brendan Wolfe: You grew up in New York?

Geoff Muldaur: Outside of New York. It was the doo-wop thing. The first records I bought were 78s. And then immediately 45s. I was at the very tail end of 78s. And they were doo-wop things I bought, and then these 45s came out and all of a sudden we're dancing to Fats Domino and Jimmy Reed and we're white kids in the suburbs of New York.

BW: How big was your town?

GM: How big was my town? I don't know. You know, I really don't know. It's a major suburb, you know. It's the next one over from the Bronx. Pelham, New York.

BW: Fairly close to the city.

GM: Yeah, twenty minutes by train. There was a golden era goin' on when this whole thing happened with Bix, and it was a golden era in opera, it was a golden era in almost every style. And out of this comes these kids from the Midwest, Bix being the most brilliant of them all, and why does this happen? Why so uniquely personal? It's different music, man. It isn't Dixieland. It's totally different music.

Amos Garrett was very steeped in Bix Beiderbecke, my longtime co-conspirator in music, and he came out of barbershop quartets, and I think a lot of that quartet singing, lots of singing with augmented chords, and these different moves and changes, than in the New Orleans thing -- not that they didn't use augmented chords, I'm not saying that, but just the way they approached music. And I think -- also, as you already know, these guys listened to so much Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel . . .

BW: It seemed like Bix's ear wasn't merely sharp, it was omnivorous. He listened to everything and took it all in.

GM: Right. And he was a savant. I mean, let's face it. And he got hooked on booze. He's one of those guys like, there's a pretty large body and work, and when we went through it, 209 cuts or whatever it was [while working on Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Beiderbecke (2003)], we went through every one of them that the Italians put together in that set, put together for the Bix thing [the film Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend (1991)], and it isn't as big a body of work as everybody would like to think. There's an occasional solo here in a piece-of-crap tune that's good, and you know you've really got two CDs worth of great music. And then you got the piano pieces, only one of which was recorded by him, and of course we, I, and quite a few others, don't feel he even came close to his potential. I'm grateful for what he did for me. He really had a profound effect on me.

BW: How did you come to first listen to Bix?

GM: Well, you know, that room of my brother's was just a treasure trove, man.

BW: Your older brother, right?

GM: Ten years older, so I'm six when he's sixteen, and he's collecting 78s when he's sixteen. So Muggsy Spanier came out to the house for dinner, you know. We went up and listened to Muggsy's records, and then we listened to Bix's records. I was only a peanut.

BW: What did your parents do?

GM: My father was in advertising. This is an interesting part of this culturally, too, for me, is that, you know, sort of Eisenhower Republicans, you know: the wife doesn't work, the father wears the gray flannel suit and goes to New York on the train.

BW: Man Men.

GM: Yeah, and they were crazy for good music. And the whole idea that it's generational and the kids today aren't going to listen to your music, you're not going to understand them -- that's all crap! They loved it! They weren't as much loving what I was getting into with the doo-wop world, but I was cuckoo over what they loved. And my father, when he went to Princeton, he helped put on the dances, so he was hiringFletcher Henderson and McKinney's Cotton Pickers. I mean, unbelievable bands down there. So he had it good, and everyone had their story about the night they were with Bix. If you added up all those old grads when I was a kid that said they'd hung out with Bix you'd have a population twice the size of the United States.

BW: And he would have had a fifty-year career.

GM: It was an impossibility! But maybe a few of them had, but it was part of the whole thing about how music was everywhere. But that room -- I didn't have a happy childhood, which I don't want to go into, a lot of it. But that room became the way out. And I'm not alone in that. And it wasn't just Bix, because there was so much else there, with those X label RCAs, and those funky women blues singers, and Sydney Bechet, and of course Louis, and all this stuff. Those three Columbia LPs, and I din't know when they came out, of Bix --

BW: The ones George Avakian produced?

GM: Probably. They had various iterations in their covers. We lived with them. But you know Bix & Tram was one of them, and I just can't tell you how many times we listened to them. And we take them up to our place in the summer on Martha's Vineyard. Have you ever heard of a trombonist named Roswell Rudd? Very famous avant-garde, complete-beyond-bop, maniac-monster trombone player. World famous. And I met him when I was fourteen and he was summering on the Vineyard and I hired him a few years ago for a session. I met him again in London about ten years ago for a concert that we did together.

BW: Did he remember meeting you?

GM: No, but he remembered when I said, You're not going to believe this, but you used to come up to my house and put on these Bix albums and roll around on the floor in ecstasy, and he remembered that. And he used to go down to the Yacht Club and sit in with the band on cornet, this was not trombone at the time. He was a cornetist. As a kid. So maybe he was eighteen and I was thirteen or fourteen. For some reason there was a Bix connection, and it isn't huge, but if you had been doing [this kind of book] thirty or forty years ago, you'd have thousands of people to interview. And they're gone.

Stay tuned for part three: "The basis of my musical experience and what comes through me and what eventually gets into my arrangements and my vocalizing comes from these early records and Bix is a prime mover in that, probably the most -- he's probably way over my head in some ways and in others he isn't. So what's the question?"

IMAGE: Geoff Muldaur by Issa Sharp

'To live with a beautiful thing'

I just finished writing a review of The Pen Friend, a new novel by Ciaran Carson of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Carson is one of my favorite writers, and he's been mentioned on these pages a few times (re: Shamrock Tea, for instance, or The Star Factory). But aside from a periodic appearance in the New Yorker and the efforts of Wake Forest University Press he is unknown in the United States.

Which is too bad. The Irish Times loved The Pen Friend:

 

But while he mocks himself and his hero’s overaesthetic world-view – “it’s all a bit of tautology really, or codology” – there is a constant current of ethical seriousness running through the book. In a sense The Pen Friend is both a protest against and an alternative to the North’s recent murderous history. As Gabriel says, not very confidently, “living with beautiful things must necessarily work against narrow sectarian interests”.

 

 

To live with a beautiful thing, it first has to be created. This novel is an original creation. Technically complex but oddly simple, arcanely informative, humorously puzzling, sensible, sensational, compassionate, it deserves to win whatever prizes are going. For the Man Booker jury, here’s a book and a man.

 

I loved the book, too, although I'm skeptical that a novel as singular and idiosyncratic as this one will win a Booker. One can hope.

IMAGE: Ciaran Carson, from the cover of his Collected Poems, published last year by Wake Forest University Press.

Revealed: Agario Hack & Cheat 2015

Let's talk about the only real working agario hack as of August, 2015. There are many fake ones out there, but one of them stands out. After spending a lot of time testing out various agario hacks and cheats, I have come to conclusion that agar.io hack is the only working agario cheat at the moment.
 If you aren't familiar with agario game itself, take a quick look at a short description of the game.

I simply watched an monumental ball of Stools consume Sweden. Surely seen the Terrain be swallowed just Pubes, Steam consider up EA, and England split in few and flee beyond Mars before currently being eaten by Personal Mom's Ass (which was, quite frankly, enormous). Sights honest safe music downloads are common operating in Agar.io, a multi-player browser game even player-controlled circles eat dots, increase mass, and feast directly on each other.

Agario is lovely simply to comprehension. Name your circle, steer it around, gobble dots, and in addition grow larger. Garments you grow, that slower you move, but as good as you're bigger than another player, cannot consume you. Could certainly also shed bulk or split within just two, useful regarding quick getaways as well lunging attacks by other players. Are able to feed some of one's mass to numerous other players in teamplay, or even located in free-for-all mode for anyone who is feeling generous and wish for to help the actual little guys. In case you are eaten, your fixture is over and you are clearly demoted back in order to a single cellular again.


It's addictive but also fun (though can expect a bit using lag), and can be quickly becoming famous on Twitch, together as an aspect and as factor for streamers to complete between sessions regarding other games. Boosting large enough help to make it it onto that this leaderboards requires staying power and a type of strategy, such just as knowing when to separate to bait greater players and using the corners from the screen to retain little newcomers.

Using certain monikers also provides an circle with images. Name yourself a country as USA, France, or perhaps a Spain, and you'll the appropriate hunt painted on your personal cell. You may also appear as Earth, Mars, or the specific Moon. You could be Doge or wonderful 8-ball or an Satanist. You might name yourself Nazi or Hitler and assigned a swastika or little mustache, because of study course you can, and being the the web and all you might see players calling themselves as vow words, racial slurs and gay 'jokes.' If you'd prefer to play without needing to see images or names, you may very well tick boxes the actual world settings menu to show them off. You can also find a spectator alert if you simply need to watch, only to discover I said, home cinema popular on Have a nervous tic as well.

You can frolic for free currently in your web browser at agar.io. Option, as well a free-to-play model planned for Come in the long-run.