Category: Arts

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Duke Ellington: “I have been mistaken for an actor, yes.”

Here is a rerun of a piece I wrote for jazzinsideandout.com (now discontinued) some years ago. The Duke, by most accounts, was America’s “greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time.” His impact on Western music has been immense, yet now nearly fifty years after his death we hear so little about him. What follows is a personal recollection about his music and its impact on me.

When I started pawing through the 78s in my parents’ library at around age twelve, there seemed to be a lot of Ellington sides, one or two going back to the early Cotton Club days of the late 1920s. But most were from the mid-1940s, that is, relatively contemporaneous music for me. I fell in love with those disks, a few Vocalions but mostly black-and-gold RCA Victors, because the Ellington sound was like no other.

I couldn’t then have put it this way, but what caught my ear was the voicing of the brasses and reeds. None of the swing bands sounded like that, and none offered the kind of rhythmic punctuation that characterized the Duke’s music. But it was the timbres his players achieved and their harmonic blends—the tone colors, if you will—that struck me.

Remade tunes like “Black Beauty” and new ones like “Esquire Swank” I played over and over. I got hooked on Joya Sherrill’s little-girl voice as she and the band made pop tunes like “Kissing Bug” and “Everything But You” into sterling three-minute compositions. I hadn’t yet heard the famous earlier stuff like “Cottontail” and “Ko-Ko.” But these tunes from the mid-1940s contained references to the war—whose events made a big impression on me—and to lovers and love affairs, to life, loss and leisure among adults. Then came Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” courtesy of Nat King Cole, the lyrics of which I didn’t understand. But music was a way to begin comprehending these things. Ellington’s music was a way to learn what sophistication meant.

The 1945-46 records were made by bands which developed out of the more famous Blanton-Webster unit of 1940, and in many ways they were almost as good. The basic personnel follows but changed often owing to the war’s toll and defections by some of the best players. Trumpets—Cootie Williams or Ray Nance, Wallace Jones and Rex Stewart (cornet); trombones—Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Juan Tizol, Lawrence Brown; reeds—Barney Bigard, Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Ben Webster (later Al Sears); rhythm—Fred Guy, Oscar Pettiford, Sonny Greer, Duke Ellington (piano).

These became household names to me, familiar from their music and from photos and writeups. My firsthand knowledge of the band began in the early 1950s when some of my high school buddies and I would make regular trips to Chicago’s Blue Note where the Ellington band became a fixture for a time. We had fake IDs to get in and sought out members of the band to talk with during set breaks. Clark Terry and Russell Procope, who was kind of dour but sometimes willing to sit with us, were favorites. We liked Russell because of his cool, detached demeanor. Clark told great stories.

Duke’s music in the ‘50s has been subject to a lot of criticism, sometimes deserved. The band got brassy and repetitive; the maestro developed an addiction to certain formulas like the medley of famous old numbers, Cat Anderson’s high notes, and constant repetitions of “Satin Doll.” His key line, “We love you madly” became tiresome.

Terry Teachout’s book, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, is the new reference for Ellington’s history, his bands, his business dealings, the music, the life exposed in all its splendor and evasion. Forget the dozen full biographies; this will be the received source for many years. I learned an enormous amount I didn’t know.

It should be said that Duke, for all his greatness as composer, bandleader and musician, must have been impossible to deal with as a person. A spoiled child from his earliest years, he indulged every appetite every day—from steaks to superstitions to women—and procrastinated constantly, failing deadlines, commitments and friends. Withal, he was a kind of Beethoven whose genius would not be confined by accepted norms of behavior. The façade he maintained as a sophisticated Mr. Charm finally fooled no one though we all appreciated how well he played the role.

Duke was a consummate artist who was also an entertainer. His constant striving to create music was more than a passion; it was an economic necessity. Likewise with the brutal schedule of one-nighters and the nonstop travel. Likewise with the fluctuations in styles and personnels. To enable the band to survive as his instrument, Duke had to make many sacrifices, first among them his early partnership with Irving Mills, the manager who took most of the money and publishing credits in return for selling Ellington to the public.

Yet none of this really matters as we consider Ellington’s music.

Duke’s was originally a show band, a pit band, accompanying the dreadful jungle numbers at the Cotton Club. And to the end his music testified to that showbiz aspect. Throughout his career he was attracted to the stage, the opera, films and television. Early on, he was influenced by Paul Whiteman, “king of jazz” in the ‘20s—symphonic, highly arranged jazz, that is. We had Whiteman records in my house, and my parents used the names of Gershwin and Whiteman when they referred to jazz generically.

Contrary to received opinion, some of the band’s work in the ‘50s was fine stuff. It was the era of Ellington Uptown (1951), with Betty Roché’s version of “Take the A Train” and Louis Bellson’s drums on “The Mooche.” The Duke loved Bellson. “Skin Deep” here is part showbiz and part jazz. Maybe extended drum solos are always showbiz? My father and I often listened together to Uptown, one thing we could agree on liking.

Masterpieces by Ellington (1950), has gotten traction as one of Ellington’s most realized long-form recordings and “The Tattooed Bride” is one of the better examples of how he used longer forms. Like the “Tone Parallel to Harlem,” it’s really a kind of nonstop suite. The Duke forever had problems with truly symphonic long forms, and the critics were generally harsh.

Bethlehem has reissued the 1956 Duke Ellington Presents, on which you can find arresting performances of standards like “I Can’t Get Started,” with Ray Nance, “Deep Purple,” with Jimmy Hamilton (the band’s Mr. Clean), and an extended “Blues” featuring many of the others.

It was also the era of Ellington at Newport, a recording of the 1956 concert at which Paul Gonsalves took 27 choruses of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” which got the crowd on its feet, cheering and dancing. This album was the Duke’s best-selling LP ever and put him on the cover of Time. I still think Paul Gonsalves was an overrated player, and the 27 choruses are full of repetitious R&B fills.

Duke went on to produce other good things in the ‘50s, though many were mixed bags. The 1959 Jazz Party featured marimbas, tympani, xylophones and Latin percussion in two numbers, plus some of the same old same old. Still, he got Dizzy Gillespie to sit in on the album’s best cut, “UMMG” (Upper Manhattan Medical Group, Strayhorn’s tune); and Jimmy Rushing sang “Hello, Little Girl,” a rousing blues featuring Jimmy Jones on piano and Dizzy. One wishes the Duke had been able to explore such pathways more consistently.

Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s I sometimes had the feeling that Ellington was losing his way, that he was struggling to maintain his claim against the new music, or that the band was failing him. At the same time, I got to hear that band live on many occasions, and it was still a group of very extraordinary musicians playing an undying concept of jazz.

With someone whose music has endured like Ellington’s, at first the scope of the whole can overwhelm you since you jump into the stream where and when you can. Only later, when you have the chance to dip into the earlier music, do you come to understand how the later styles developed. Geoff Dyer put it this way: “As you move further back, so you are able to recognize the special traits of the predecessors; it is like seeing a photo of your great-grandfather and recognizing the origins of you grandchildren’s features in his face.”

The Duke in the ‘50s and ‘60s struggled to find a new audience through experiments like Jazz Party even as he kept playing the mainstream stuff—in the end pleasing nobody but the diehards like me. Which is another way of saying that, after all, the band and his muses didn’t desert him. If anything, the times finally did him in. But the great music he made will survive forever.

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How One’s Reading Habits Decay

Trinity College Library, Dublin

We are all creatures of habit, and sometimes a habit can become the unconscious focus of our daily lives. In other words, we relinquish personal control to a formula of behavior. Brushing your teeth regularly is a good idea. Reading the news every morning is not.

More than ever, it’s become a dispiriting activity that, if you take it seriously, can poison your mind for the rest of the day. Smart people know this, yet we persist. This morning we read about the train wreck in India where nearly 300 people died; Biden crows about the debt ceiling agreement; the Supremes continue to defy ethical standards.

Politics now highlights every human frailty and failing. Worse still, for me, Trump and DeSantis have displaced Barthelme, Mallarmé and the literary life I once pursued. Martin Amis is dead. So is most poetry, and I don’t read much scholarly stuff anymore—or good fiction either.

I know I’m not alone. Many of you fix on your daily dose of the Washington Post and the New York Times. I do too while castigating them for all the junk stories they pursue. I also look regularly at Politico, the New Yorker, Vox, Bloomberg, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and sometimes Axios. Most of the liberal pubs like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, etc. I’ve given up on—too pro forma.

As world problems have become more convoluted and controversial, creative writing seems to have become less innovative and more conventional. A few sites still fight the good fight. But I don’t want to read about the gender trials that young people are undergoing or their kinky love affairs or food preferences. Digital content brings us everything we don’t need to know.

The recourse used to be bedtime. You absorbed a good read until sleep took over and dreams displaced the world of the book. That worked for me for a long time, but I read more slowly now and it’s hard to focus on Kindle after a while. Or the book falls to the floor, and the memories of what it contained don’t last until morning.

Among all the positive benefits of reading proposed by one site, we’re told that reading “helps prevent age-related cognitive decline.” Well, friends, I would suggest that this notion clearly depends on what you read. And, finally, nobody but you cares what you read.

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Ominous Prophecies and Shirley Horn

You didn’t have to be psychic to know what was coming from CNN’s Trump Town Hall event. Still, it was worse than I could have imagined. One forgets how vile and lunatic the former president is.

I found myself in a deep depression on Thursday, realizing what a chokehold he has on a large number of those living in what I used to call home. Trump shows nothing but anger, defiance, and the will to inflict his madness on everybody.

I wanted to write about all this and scoured the internet for some thoughts that might be a little different from what other struggling scribblers came up with. A futile search so I fell back on music to get rid of the blues, a process I’ve written about before.

A good friend had just broken up her CD collection and given me several discs, among which were three albums of Shirley Horn’s music. I’ve been a fan of hers for many years. Before she left us in 2005 she was a unique vocalist-cum-pianist who had a following of many jazz musicians and a growing public.

I got to know about Shirley through Rusty Hassan, a DJ and jazz fanatic whom I hung out with in Washington, DC. (Rusty wrote a fine essay on Shirley, his DC friend and neighbor, plus her involvement in the local music scene. It’s in a booklet that accompanies Shirley Horn: Live at the 4 Queens, a 1988 set that captures the way she sounded in a typical club date.)

She was a regular at One Step Down, that great small Washington club no longer there. One evening my wife Jane and I went to see her on a New Year’s Eve in the ’90s. We were given seats at the piano bar right in front of Shirley for two sets. Celebrated by many, including Miles Davis, this diminutive person in white gloves sang and played piano like no one else, accompanied as she was for many years by bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams. Here’s what she sounded like:

Her music gets under your skin because Shirley is such an impeccable performer. No one has ever sung these songs with such quiet authority and good taste. Most of her tunes also represent a perfect marriage of music and lyrics. Here she is with Buck Hill (tenor sax) performing one of the more upbeat standards that she liked:

Shirley was a singer with a perfect palate and execution, a master of space and silences. She was finally honored in 2004 with a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her artistry got me out a bad funk on Thursday, and she’ll do that again, I trust.

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Ahmad: Dying into Life

When great jazz musicians die, those of us who loved their music mourn their loss by remembering their sound. We don’t rehearse and recast their lives; that’s for the obit writers to do. When I wrote about Wayne Shorter’s passing a couple of months ago, I complained that jazz’s “great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived.”

That is certainly true with the recent death of Ahmad Jamal whom the unwashed would accuse of playing cocktail music and tinkle-tinkle piano. Now at least some writers have recognized that he created a wholly new sound for jazz—not only with his rhythmic displacements (which Miles Davis often acknowledged) but with his left-hand vamping approach.

That, as pianist Benny Green noted, “laid the template for the essential approach that’s been universally applied by influential pioneers such as Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea.” Add to that roster Keith Jarrett.

Ahmad also made marvelous resurrections of old sentimental yet rich pop and show tunes, a practice Bill Evans and others took up. His 1958 hit, “Poinciana,” made him popular and well-off. About that time I was studying graduate English at the University of Chicago, and friends and I would venture to the Pershing Hotel frequently to meet the man and hear his novel music.

The Pershing was just west of Hyde Park and the University, at 64th and Cottage Grove Avenue, a solid black middle-class neighborhood. The hotel’s lounge hosted many jazz greats. Ahmad was young, approachable, and played piano like no one else. I have a number of his albums from those days when he played with the great Israel Crosby (bass) and Vernel Fournier (drums).

Another 1958 success was his version and subsequent album “But Not for Me.”

After his “Poinciana” triumph Jamal went on to greater acceptance though recently, I think, was somewhat passed over as a member of the jazz pantheon. His music changed but was always strong and involving. Here’s what he did some years ago (1970) with Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.”

Ahmad left us at age 92. For me there seems something magical and strange about dying at that age. My two good jazz friends, Sue Mingus and Sy Johnson, both died last year, also at 92. I keep wondering how and if I’ll catch up with them—and now with Ahmad Jamal.

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Wayne Shorter, Alive Still

A funny thing about jazz, at least lately, is that its great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived. That’s certainly true about Charles Mingus who passed in 1979 and whose 100th birthday was celebrated last year to much acclaim.

Wayne Shorter, another jazz great, died last Thursday at age 89. His large recorded output survives him, of course, and now the critics (like me) grab the opportunity to speak out about his greatness, uniqueness, and transformative powers.

Shorter was one of jazz’s strong composers besides being a reed player who could shape the conventional forms of the music into something truly new. So I don’t want to hear encomiums about him; I want to know how he did this. The praise will soon fade; the music won’t.

The typical obits gave the facts, as they should. But some writers went beyond that. As jazz critics will do, they offered up spiritual, even flamboyant versions of what they heard in Shorter’s music. Richard Brody of The New Yorker knows his jazz but spoke a different language in trying to express what for him was the essence of Wayne’s music:

Unlike such spiritual seekers of the avant-garde as Coltrane and Albert Ayler, Shorter, even during his most vehement solos, wasn’t heaven-storming but heaven-gazing and heaven-longing, looking rapturously upward—again, in effect, in two places at once.

Jazz people don’t talk like this. Neither should their critics. The people who really understood how to write about Shorter were other musicians, like Ethan Iverson who wrote five years ago about Shorter’s seminal recordings in the 1960s:

The compositions on “Speak No Evil” occupy a rarified plane. They aren’t quite hard bop, they aren’t quite modal. Elements of everything are just there, hanging out in a new and inspired way. The musicians at large loved it, then and now. Every song on “Speak No Evil” has been learned by each new generation of jazz students. Every solo by Shorter, Hubbard, and Hancock has been transcribed and assimilated.

Jazz lovers want to understand how the music they love was created, appreciated (or not), and produced. Let the jazz audience, not the critics, be the spiritual and rhetorical interpreters of what they are hearing. My feelings about a piece of music may or may not be yours.

And, one hopes, the critic can positively influence the public reception and understanding of a music—and do this in a timely way. My book, Mingus Speaks, finally got published almost 40 years after I had finished the interviews with Charles. The unconscionable delay was owing to some troubling and difficult times for me. You know, “life happens when you’re making other plans.”

Anyhow, the last time I saw Mingus was after a set at the Village Vanguard in 1973, I think. He fixed me with the Mingus glare and said, “I guess you’ll finally do the book after I’m dead.” And that’s what happened.

Wayne said it best: “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure.”

The folks who make their living off jazz and love it and write about it should speak up when it counts. What you have to say about the music can make all the difference to the people who play it. Wayne Shorter’s music was just too singular and important to be treated with fawning praise.

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The Piano

These days, you often can’t give them away, and many fine pianos actually end up in the trash. The market doesn’t care about family or sentimental values or the fact that music may have kept the family together or at least brought home the joy of making music.

In 1931 at the height of the Depression my parents bought a new Steinway grand for their new Chicago apartment. I was born three years later, and the piano (along with 78-rpm records) became my introduction to music—a lifelong passion. My mother played Christmas carols and simple classical pieces on it, dad would hammer out old show tunes, and some notable jazz musicians like Barbara Carroll entertained us at parties.

Other musicians recognized what a great instrument this piano was. When the family moved on from Chicago, so did the piano, to a new home in Highland Park. In 1950 my parents hosted an affair with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and Earl Fatha Hines played it and loved it. In the mid-1960s it came to rest in my New York apartment where in 1971 Sir Roland Hanna, the noted jazz musician, came to a party I had and played it. For its later years it took up space at my ex-wife’s house in New Hope, PA.

When Sally and I split up, we had a fight about who would get the piano. At that time she had a house and I was moving around, starting a new life in Rhode Island and doing a lot of itinerant communications work. So she got the piano, and I got the divorce. I think she did play it, a little. But mostly it sat for ten or more years, tuned but unplayed.

When she died the house had to be sold, and I undertook to sell the piano. I wrote to local music schools and got a lot of nice responses and no-thank-yous. I lowered the price and finally got a bite from NYU’s Music Department. They sent two people out from New York to audition the piano. They found it “a very fine instrument” and so we had a deal. Since I used to teach at NYU years ago, I thought it was a perfect home for a pedigreed old Steinway.

Grand pianos are big clunky objects, very heavy. Many people today are perfectly happy with mobile electronic keyboards that offer cheesy programmed accompaniments and sound enhancements. They are light and convenient for band musicians and those content with digital music. As readers of this blog know, I’m never content with digital music even though I do have a Yamaha electric piano to (sometimes) practice on.

Our old family piano in a way held the family together emotionally when we were all younger, analog people. It was more than a fixture; it was a memento of good times and the power of music to create a joyful connection.

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Why Beethoven, and Why Now?

Some of you know I had a partial career as a music critic years ago. (Most everything is now “years ago,” it seems.) I wrote about jazz, the record business, ‘70s rock and, later, classical. My writings were all ephemeral; but the music is not. Most all of it is on record in one form or another, the wine and the dregs.

When I was growing up, a lot of Beethoven echoed in my house. Music was an intrinsic part of our lives, and Beethoven was at the heart of it. I’ve talked about that here and in a book I wrote but not much about Beethoven. Well, the Eroica symphony was a revelation to me as a teenager because it completely broke new musical ground. When I began to really listen to the string quartets in college, they became touchstones of my musical life. Jazz was my daily fare, Beethoven the haute cuisine.

Last night, over leftover noodle casserole, I listened again to all three Rasumovsky Quartets, from Beethoven’s middle and troubled years. There is no music in the world like this. Here is Opus 59, no. 2 of these masterpieces.

I won’t give you a critique here, rather some thoughts that the music evoked. First, the surprising turns this music takes: I remembered that critic Whitney Balliett once called jazz “the sound of surprise.” The three quartets embody surprise in abundance. Second was the stark contrast between the world this music projected and our own disjointed times—the ways in which Beethoven could render his disjointed life and times in the coherence and power of his musical speech.

Later I was to think about how the Eroica Symphony and later the Rasumovsky quartets revolutionized the music of Haydn and Mozart. Here’s how Joseph Kerman put it in his classic work on The Beethoven Quartets:

A new world was being explored, and if the string quartet was going to find a place in it at all, it had to smash the fragile, decorous boundaries set by the classic image of chamber music, . . . a new “symphonized” quartet necessarily had to come into being (p. 151).

Haydn and Mozart provided the building blocks, but the decorous age was clearly over, another instance of the surprising ways the 18th century changed thought and art.

There is no analogue today. The crudeness of our pop music and the irrelevance of much contemporary classical offer no relief from the social and political chaos around us. When I’m hungry I go back to Beethoven.

The recording I listened to is a two-SACD set by the Tokyo String Quartet. The sound is extraordinary, their interpretations exemplary. I have other different but interesting renditions on vinyl by the Guarneri, Budapest, and Juilliard ensembles.

Beethoven would go on to even greater heights of expression in the Late Quartets, one of which (the C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131) would change the way I thought about music forever. More on that later, perhaps.

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Antisemitism and Crow Jim

Antisemitism is much in the news lately. So a big controversy continues over Dave Chappelle’s monologue on Saturday Night Live last week. I found most of his comments about Jews perceptive and funny. Others did not. You can read some excerpts and watch his full solo gig here; a verbal transcript is here.

Chappelle was really targeting the kind of phony socio-political correctness that informs the way we talk and think about matters racial. One commentator put it this way: “If Jews are on the receiving end of the jokes that forces this conversation, that is certainly uncomfortable, but it is also important, and not antisemitic.”

Well, Jewish humor often hits on the faults and foibles of their coreligionists. I’ve heard Italians privately do this too, and Chappelle often takes comedic whacks at black people. Who knows the in-group better than one of its members? Still, there’s the old saw that a lot of people still find true: It’s OK to joke about Jews if you are Jewish; otherwise it’s antisemitic.

As a secular Jew, I’ve often made fun of my people. It affirms my connection and the Jewish uniqueness. When outsiders do it we should look for the line between satiric humor and hate. This is usually not hard to find. The Reverend Al Sharpton used to dispense more than his share of loathing for Jews. Black folks let him get away with most of this repellent antisemitism.

Many negative comments about whites began in the “Crow Jim” era as some black jazz musicians protested against white attempts to play their music. In 1950s Chicago, friends of mine lived across the street from Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam temple, home to his radical Crow Jim-ism. Meaning all things black would finally shake off the inferior white culture and escape its attendant evils. We used to watch these guys get into their black Cadillacs to go and play golf. We would talk with them without any discord. Black Power was both understandable and unachievable.

Today racial hypocrisy is very much on the rise. The old metaphors become dangerous: when was the last time you heard “calling a spade a spade”? But in a way that’s what Chappelle was trying to do. I watch a lot of CNN and sports channels. Almost every ad for every product now features black or brown people. It’s quite amazing. You could call it advertising’s guilty attempt to make up for years of excluding these folks. The obviousness of the gesture conveys its own crudity.

Chappelle made a couple of foolish statements in his monologue. He said that African Americans can’t be blamed for the Holocaust. Wake up, Dave, nobody’s doing that. It’s ridiculous to defend idiots like Kanye and Kyrie Irving but he did so while poking fun at them. Herschel Walker he finds “observably stupid.”

I think Dave wants to be an equal-opportunity comic, but it’s hard to do that these days. He made some great comments on Trump. Still, I tolerate his flaws because he’s perceptive and funny.

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Music, Freedom, and Form

I read yesterday that Pharoah Sanders had died. By most accounts he was a kind and gentle man, though his music explored the limits of sonic tolerance. His work in the ‘60s with John Coltrane and Albert Ayler “helped pioneer a frenetic blend of spiritual jazz that, through shrieking horns and loose rhythmic structure, was meant to summon higher powers. The idea, it seemed, was to blow the sax so hard that the music reached God’s ears.”

So says Marcus J. Moore in The Nation, then going on to render an appreciation of Sanders’ development in later years, pointedly with Promises in 2021, an album I haven’t heard in which Moore finds greatness. I do have a couple of albums wherein Sanders and Coltrane are apparently searching for Karma or God on their horns. They are hard to listen to today.

When I was music critic for The New Leader in the late ‘60s I went on a couple of rants about free jazz—how screeching and emotive self-indulgence had taken over the music. Since I’ve become old and crotchety I haven’t much changed my opinion about free jazz though I’ve mellowed a bit. It’s not popular anymore for a lot of reasons, but Pharoah was one of the few to try keeping it relevant, and we salute him for that.

Free jazz proponents talked a lot about freedom. Yet when jazz tends to anarchy it can sink into expressionistic bedlam. John Coltrane’s music in the ‘50s and ‘60s was a revelation to me. When he later focused on his intense spiritual quest I simply couldn’t follow him.

For me, music must have some form or purpose or content its listeners can relate to. Free jazz leaves most musical norms behind, and “all notes are created equal!” It began as protest music and, in my opinion, evolved to self-indulgence. There’s more to it than this, of course. Below is a very good, somewhat complicated explanation of how free jazz takes different forms. I’ve never heard a better one.

When forms like serialism in classical music die out, as free jazz mostly has, what comes next? Ornette Coleman, a unique kind of free jazz musician, showed us one way. Hear “Lonely Woman” from The Shape of Jazz to Come, 1959:

The impulses—musical and social—that created free jazz were not always noble. Mingus and Miles used to say that these folks were jiving the public, trying to make money off black protest. Mingus was very vocal about this: “if the free-form guys could play the same tune twice, then I would say they were playing something . . . .”

When Mingus or his band “played free,” as they often did in his later music, they never got lost in their explorations. There was always a tonal center or a melody or chords to come back to. Mingus was also a master of the many modes and moods of jazz. These traditions and roots were his stock in trade. I’ve always felt that the free jazz people never cared much for these things.

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Vinyl Reincarnated

Record store in Oaxaca

The great viny comeback: is it a music, technology, or cultural story? Or a who-cares story? For me, a longtime vinyl lover, it’s always been just a better way to hear all the music that was recorded. Others find it satisfies different needs. Here’s a piece about vinyl’s psycho-social appeal.

I moved so many times before coming to Mexico—each time sorting and boxing some 1,500 records (classical and jazz mostly, some rock and blues)—that people used to think I was nuts. The process of keeping vinyl clean, the necessity and cost of a good hi-fi system to properly render it, the cumbersome ritual of playing it: for years now these have been impediments to vinyl’s widescale acceptance.

Before CDs and streaming audio captured the market, vinyl was always the default medium of choice for music lovers. Around 2005-2006 it began to stage a comeback. Today there’s a small but still rapidly growing market for “records,” mainly to younger buyers. London’s Financial Times, an unusual source, tells us that vinyl sales for 2021 went over a billion dollars, the highest level in 30 years.

I grew up with stacks of my father’s 78-rpm shellac recordings, then graduated to vinyl and later CD. I’ve talked about this here. Vinyl LPs became

the medium I depend on for my musical fix. It’s also, given the vagaries of my collection, one person’s version of the history of music and, certainly, a history of my taste.

As to the sound, CDs have gotten generally better in the last few years, but vinyl still has the edge in terms of warmth and fullness. It’s closer to the sound of live music, and that after all is the goal of musical reproduction. As to streaming and most online music, well, one writer put it this way: “Streaming is much like fast food, it’s not the greatest but the convenience is really nice. Records are more like cooking a really nice meal at home, you enjoy the whole experience.” I do cook a lot at home.

My father had a decent vinyl collection, and the two of us always enjoyed the musico-technical pleasures of hi-fi. But when the CD arrived, around 1982, he was captivated by the new technology and gave away all his records to the guy who serviced his stereo setup. His son was not pleased at this musical perfidy, which repeated his giveaway of all those stacks of 78s when the LP arrived (around 1948).

The way we listen to music has begun to change in the last few years. Particularly in the ‘90s people became addicted to hearing specific tunes, never a whole album. The convenience of Walkmans, downloads and cell phones made it so easy to hear one’s music that it began to function as background, almost like Muzak.

This didn’t happen for classical and jazz lovers. They never gave over the values of the concert hall—deep listening and abstracting oneself from the nonsense of the day. So, albums and LPs began to come back as preferred vehicles. I guess the moral is slow down your life and listen.