Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago

Coming in January on ECM, Made in Chicago, a recording of a 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert with Jack DeJohnette, Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I’m excited to hear this music again: I’ve never before attended a performance that made it to disc.

Correction: I don’t know that I’ve ever attended a performance that made it to disc. I may have been in the audience for one or more of the tracks on Miles Davis’s We Want Miles. Not remembering which night of Miles’s three-night Boston 1981 run I was there for, I’ve never been able to figure it out. And besides, there were two shows each night —

But I know I was at the Jack DeJohnette concert.

How about you? Have you ever attended a performance that ended up on disc?

*

January 13, 2015: The release date has been reset as March 10.

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Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack Teagarden, model-train enthusiast

The trombonist Jack Teagarden loved model trains. Here is how Barney Bigard told it. Bigard, who played clarinet and tenor saxophone for many years with Duke Ellington, played alongside Teagarden as members of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars:

If we played a long engagement somewhere and you went into Jack’s hotel room, you’d see nothing but all kinds of wires, little whistles and steam engine things. He told me that he learned about all that stuff when he was a kid. One time, we were checking into a hotel and he had this great big trunk like a sailing trunk. He had all his contraptions in there, all this iron and steel stuff. So the bus driver helped him put this trunk on the sidewalk and here came the bellboys. “Which one is yours, Mr. Teagarden?” “This one, this one and this trunk.” Do you know, those bellboys had to send for help to get that thing up to his room. He was quite a man.

The girls all used to flock around Jack. He had that sort of personality where they would want to “mother” him; to take care of him. They all thought they were on to something big when he would ask them to come up to see the steam engines in his hotel room after the show. Those poor chicks would just sit on the bed waiting for something to happen, while Jack laid out on the floor blowing the whistles and making the engines work.

With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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Bix to Yoko in three or four

[This story makes me think of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and uncle Toby’s interest in military fortifications.]

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, December 28, 2014.]

It may appear that Henry is questioning. In truth he is preparing a disguise with which to launch a snowball attack. Either way, one can never have too many streetside gum machines.

More gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry

Santa’s helper

[“Santa Claus School”. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. 1961. From the Life Photo Archive.]

The November 17, 1961 issue of Life ran a two-page photo essay on Charles Howard’s Santa Claus school in Albion, New York. The photograph above did not appear, but another one did, with this caption:

John Ray holds the diploma naming him a Santa’s helper. Next year he can work for B.S.C. degree. To get it he will have to present recommendations from customers and write 1,500-word thesis.

Charles Howard’s school, now based in Michigan, goes on.

[For The Crow: yes, Martha, there really is a Santa Claus School. I thought Elaine in Arkansas was wondering about that. No, it was Martha.]

On break

[“Santa Taking a ‘Coffee Break’ During NYC Christmas Season.” Photograph by Leonard McCombe. New York City, 1962. From the Life Photo Archive.]

A related post, sort of
Going on break

Christmas 1914

[“THOUSANDS SING IN STREET. Throng in Broadway Joins St. Paul’s Choir in Carol Service.” The New York Times, December 25, 1914.]

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

[St. Paul’s Chapel still stands at 209 Broadway, across from the site of the World Trade Center. Elaine and I went there in 2008 with our friends Luanne and Jim.]

Deep-focus Lassie

[From the Lassie episode “Yochim’s Christmas,” December 24, 1961. Hugh Reilly, June Lockhart, Ellen Corby, Billy E. Hughes, Jon Provost. Cinematography by Charles Van Enger. Click for a larger view.]

Here’s more deep-focus Lassie. And still more.

[It’s like Citizen Kane in Calverton. Or just outside Calverton.]

Domestic comedy

[On the television: Christmas episodes of Lassie , every day.]

“But they just showed this one!”

“I’m a goldfish.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Grammar and politics

[Mayor Everett D. Noble (Raymond Walburn) and son Forrest (Bill Edwards). Click for larger views.]

Bill, taking dictation, has explained to his father that one cannot say “a sense of both humility, satisfaction, and gratitude.” Three things, not two. But father knows best.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) is a wonderful sample of Preston Sturges lunacy.

[Horny: “Callous or hardened so as to be horn-like in texture” (1693). Thanks, OED. The mayor’s paired synecdoches have a history. The earliest example I can find, via Google Books: “Our committee consists of working-men, our appeal is to the horny hands but honest hearts of toil”: Ernest Jones, Notes to the People (1851). I wonder if Sturges appealed to that history to get this dialogue past the censors.]

Bad advice and misinformation

[Coda to a post about Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style .]

Steven Pinker’s catalogue of epithets for the misinformed — schoolmarms, snoots, usage nannies, and so on — is unlikely to win many converts from their ranks. (Who wants to be called names?) A better way to win converts might be to take the approach of some college instructors. When I teach a writing class and dispel various imaginary (and ultimately unhelpful) rules, I tell my students (several times) something like this:

“When it comes to writing instruction, there is a lot of bad advice out there, and a lot of misinformation. Some of it is a matter of made-up rules that might, early on, serve a purpose, like the rule not to begin a sentence with and or but. A ban on those words might reduce the number of sentence fragments a teacher has to correct. But it’s better to learn, at some point, how to use the words correctly and have them in your toolkit of ways to start sentences. Otherwise, you’re limited, like someone who can drive only under thirty miles an hour. You can never get on the highway.

“Why there should be so much bad advice and misinformation about writing is an important question. I think the answer has a lot to do with teachers’ fears and and feelings of inadequacy about their own writing, and of course with misinformation that their teachers passed on to them. It’s unfortunate, but a large part of getting better at writing is unlearning what you were taught earlier on.”

And I make a point of showing my students that the instruction I’m offering is “not me” — that all of it can be found, again and again, in sources with far greater authority than mine. The Oxford comma: it’s recommended in all contexts beyond journalism. Placing a new idea at the start of a paragraph: countless guides to writing recommend putting it there, and not in the form of the awkward end-of-paragraph transition that many teachers require of high-school students.

It’s easier to convince someone that what you’re saying is true and useful if you can keep from calling them stupid.

[It bears repeating: ill-founded prohibitions against split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions and the like are derided by the very authorities on usage whom Pinker disparages.]