Comments

I've been having problems with comment spam--strange to see it suddenly appear. I promptly deleted. More recently, there was an anonymous comment with copious, gratuituous obscenity, also deleted. I'm not sure if that comment was meant to be obnoxious or funny, but it doesn't belong on my blog. As for now, comments are turned off. All previous comments remain, all of which I'm grateful for.

Update: Comments are back on. Please keep them relevant and clean. Comment spam (commercial or non-commercial) and inappropriate stuff will be deleted.

The man with the blue guitar (Eddie Lang)

I was happy to run across a website (still under construction) devoted to the guitarist Eddie Lang. Who? Eddie Lang (1902-1933), born Salvatore Massaro, was the first jazz guitarist. Indeed, Lang made the acoustic guitar a solo instrument in jazz. We're fortunate that so much of his work was preserved on records before his early, unexpected death (after what was to have been a routine tonsillectomy).

What's so terrific about Eddie Lang? Anyone new to Lang's music will be immediately struck by his guitar sound. There's nothing light or jangly about it. It's thick, solid--the sound of an acoustic Gibson L-5 with heavy-gauge strings and high action (the considerable distance between the strings and the neck of the instrument). Lang's playing combines the percussive authority of the pick with complexities available only to a fingerpicker. Which is to say, he can do most anything. His sound is orchestral or pianistic (or, come to think of it, guitaristic): in his hands, the guitar is an instrument of numerous tones and colors (especially French impressionist harmonies), capable of far more than the endless single-string runs of eighth- and sixteenth-notes found in so much "modern" jazz guitar.

Lang is also set apart from more recent players via the variety of contexts in which he recorded. There are guitar solos, guitar solos with piano accompaniment, guitar duets with fellow masters, guitar-violin duets with his pal Joe Venuti, guitar accompaniments for singers, and many recordings with the tonally eccentric ensembles of late-20s white chamber jazz. Bass saxophone, violin, piano, guitar: that's one example of the instrumentation to be found in the Venuti-Lang studio groups.

But Lang's work was not limited to the company of his fellow palefaces. He was significant too as a player who crossed the color line to record with eminent African-American musicians: among them, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, and Lonnie Johnson, with whom he recorded a string of brilliant guitar duets. Lang was, I'd venture, the first white bluesman, playing in the idiom with emotional and musical authority. Well before John Hammond "integrated" jazz by bringing Teddy Wilson into the Benny Goodman universe, Lang was on record as "Blind Willie Dunn." What did his colleagues of color think about it all? Lonnie Johnson called his duet recordings with Lang his "greatest experience."

If Lang has a shortcoming, it's a slight stiffness that's sometimes evident in his solo work. I'm not sure how to account for it, and I'm not even sure that other listeners would agree. But to my ears, he does sometimes sound more relaxed, more exuberant, less studied, when he's not out front. "I'm Wild About That Thing" with Bessie Smith is one example--Lang's obbligato practically dances it way off the record.

A few other bright moments in Lang's work: his solo guitar arrangement of Rachmaninoff's "Prelude," his breakneck duets with Venuti (try "Wild Cat" for starters), the solemn "Midnight Call Blues" with Lonnie Johnson, his beautiful fills on "I'm Coming, Virginia" and "Singin' the Blues" with Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer.

In Lost Chords, Richard Sudhalter recounts a Joe Venuti story. Someone asked Venuti, "Eddie Lang died 42 years ago. Do you ever miss him?" Venuti, usually a wise-cracking tough customer, replied, "Every day."

I try to avoid commercial links on my blog, but if you'd like to hear Eddie Lang, here are the best places to start:

Eddie Lang: Jazz Guitar. A single cd from Yazoo Records and a nice intro to Lang's work. Yazoo is known for getting excellent sound from 78s. (I've been buying their records since high school.)

Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti: The New York Sessions: 1926-1935. A 4-cd set from JSP, and a bargain (about $7 a cd). JSP always offers excellent remastering. (JSP's boxed set of Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven and Hot Five recordings puts CBS-Sony's efforts to shame.)

Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti: The 1920s and 1930s Sides. A 2-cd set from JSP.

The Columbia/OKeh Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang Sessions. An 8-cd set from Mosaic. All the Venuti-Lang duets, Johnson-Lang duets, small groups, Lang's work with Bessie Smith, Texas Alexander, and other singers, and much, much more.

"The Mail Moment"

From a New York Times article by James Fallows, "Why the Internet Isn't the Death of the Post Office":

The most touching artifact among these mail studies is a survey conducted by the Postal Service and called "The Mail Moment."

"Two-thirds of all consumers do not expect to receive personal mail, but when they do, it makes their day," it concluded. "This 'hope' keeps them coming back each day." Even in this age of technology, according to the survey, 55 percent of Americans said they looked forward to discovering what each day's mail might hold.

As Fallows points out, personal letters "account for less than 1 percent of the 100 billion pieces of first-class mail that the Postal Service handles each year."

So here's a suggestion: Make someone's day, three or four days from today, by sitting down and writing a letter.

Link: "Why the Internet Isn't the Death of the Post Office"

[To read Times articles online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or create an account of your own.]

Laughter and tears

From Andrew Sullivan:

"The good news is--and it's hard for some to see it now--that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house--there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter). --president George W. Bush, today.

Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future "fantastic" porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation.

Also worth reading: "The Rebellion of the Talking Heads," from Slate, on reporters' increasing impatience with official assurances and platitudes:

In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead.

Last night, CNN's Anderson Cooper abandoned the old persona to throttle Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., in a live interview.

"Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now? Should they apologize for what is happening now?" Cooper opened.

As if campaigning before the local Democratic Ladies' Club lunch, Landrieu sing-songed back, "Anderson, there will be plenty of time to discuss all of those issues, about why, and how, and what, and if." She went on to thank President Bush, President Clinton, former President Bush, Senators Frist and Reid, and "all leaders that are coming to Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Alabama," for their help.

Her condescending filibuster continued: "Anderson, tonight, I don't know if you've heard--maybe you all have announced it--but Congress is going to an unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating."

Cooper suspended the traditional TV rules of decorum and, approaching tears of fury, said:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap--you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here? …

I mean, I know you say there's a time and a place for, kind of, you know, looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. I mean, there are people who want answers, and there are people who want someone to stand up and say, "You know what? We should have done more. Are all the assets being brought to bear?"

Landrieu kept her cool, probably because she's in Baton Rouge, while the stink of corpses caused Cooper to tremble in rage all the way to the commercial break.

Link: "The Rebellion of the Talking Heads"

PocketMod

Too cool for school: the PocketMod. This Flash program lets you design and print an 8.5 x 11 page that folds into a nifty 8-page booklet. It's great for keeping notes for the day in a pocket or wallet. The page templates include lines, grids, calendars, even tic-tac-toe. And it's all free.

High Water Everywhere

Oh Lordy, women and grown men drown
Oh, women and children sinkin' down
[spoken: Lord have mercy]
I couldn't see nobody's home
and wasn't no one to be found

From Charley Patton's 1929 recording "High Water Everywhere (Part II)," chronicling the catastrophic Mississippi flood of 1927.

Link: The American Red Cross

F-words

From the Daily Mail:

A secondary school is to allow pupils to swear at teachers--as long as they don't do so more than five times in a lesson. A running tally of how many times the f-word has been used will be kept on the board. If a class goes over the limit, they will be "spoken" to at the end of the lesson.

The astonishing policy, which the school says will improve the behaviour of pupils, was condemned by parents' groups and MPs yesterday. They warned it would backfire.

Parents were advised of the plan, which comes into effect when term starts next week, in a letter from the Weavers School in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

Assistant headmaster Richard White said the policy was aimed at 15 and 16-year-olds in two classes which are considered troublesome.

"Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board so all students can see the running score," he wrote in the letter

"Over this number the class will be spoken to by the teacher at the end of the lesson."

Parents called the rule "wholly irresponsible and ludicrous."

Link: "You can use the f-word in class (but only five times)"

Getting the truth

Six months before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison broke into public view, a small and fairly obscure private association of United States Marine Corps members posted on its Web site a document on how to get enemy POWs to talk.

The document described a situation very similar to the one the United States faces in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: a fanatical and implacable enemy, intense pressure to achieve quick results, a brutal war in which the old rules no longer seem to apply.

Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report's author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.

From Stephen Budiansky's article "Truth Extraction," in the Atlantic Monthly, June 2005.

Link: "Truth Extraction"

Link: Sherwood F. Moran's "Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters" (available as a .pdf download from the page) The document is no longer available.

For freshpersons

Advice for college freshpersons, from college sophomores.

Link: "The keys to freshman success"

While my ukulele gently weeps

Below, a link to a Quicktime peformance of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"--on ukulele. Jake Shimabukuro's virtuosity must be heard and seen to be believed.

GH was a great ukulele devotee in his final years; he often has a uke in hand in the Anthology documentary. I wonder whether he ever heard JS.

Link: Jake Shimabukuro, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

April 24, 2006: While the above link is down, you can find the video clip here: Jake Shimabukuro, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

[Thanks to Carrie Kourkoumelis, who sent the original link to Elaine Fine, who sent it to me.]