“Dig the gonest”

Still making progress through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Charlie Christian, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Matt Dennis, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Paul Desmond, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stéphane Grappelli, Bobby Hackett, Coleman Hawkins, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Dick Hyman, Harry James, Hank Jones (my dad did tile work in his house), Louis Jordan, Stan Kenton, Barney Kessel, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Peggy Lee, Mary Ann McCall, Susannah McCorkle, Dave McKenna, Ray McKinley, Marian McPartland, Johnny Mercer, Helen Merrill, Glenn Miller, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Gerry Mulligan, Red Norvo, Anita O’Day, and now, Charlie Parker.

By way of YouTube, here are two great ballad performances, from the Parker compilation Best of “The Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings” (Savoy Jazz, 2002), with Parker, alto; Miles Davis, trumpet; Duke Jordan, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; and Max Roach, drums:

“Embraceable You” (George and Ira Gershwin). Recorded in New York City, October 28, 1947. This is the take in which Parker begins his solo by quoting Sam Coslow’s “A Table in the Corner.” Gary Giddins gets credit for identifying the source.

“Out of Nowhere” (Johnny Green–Edward Heyman). Recorded in New York City, November 4, 1947.

And here, from the Parker compilation Best of “The Complete Live Performances on Savoy” (Savoy Jazz, 2002), is my transcription of a bit of patter from a radio broadcast. The announcer is Symphony Sid, broadcasting from the Royal Roost, March 5, 1949. Please imagine Parker’s group playing Lester Young’s “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” as Sid speaks:

“Oh what a frantic place, the Royal Roost, ladies and gentlemen, the Metropolitan Bopera House here on Broadway between 47th and 48th Street, right opposite the Strand Theatre. Aww, the music is so crazy where the lights are low and the music is a real knocked-out groove, ninety-cents admission, and all you got to do is sit back and relax, from nine-thirty till four, and dig the gonest.”

The Royal Roost stood at 1580 Broadway, Manhattan. The Strand Theatre: 1579. The Metropolitan Opera House was eight blocks away, at 1411 Broadway.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie : Duke Ellington : Coleman Hawkins : Billie Holiday : Louis Jordan

[As much as I like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, I wasn’t about to separate all those individual names with semicolons for the sake of one vocal trio. Why links to the recordings? It’s increasingly difficult to find YouTube uploads of commercial recordings that can be embedded.]

Still smoking

[Hi and Lois, October 22, 2017.]

Oh, wait — they’re birds. I thought there were little flecks of ash around him.

Thirsty Thurston first appeared in Hi and Lois on June 9, 1961. He has been smoking for more than fifty-six years.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[Even Andy Capp gave up cigarettes, in 1983.]

“An essay test!”

[Peanuts, October 22, 1970. Click for a larger view.]

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts. Or more precisely, October 22, 1970’s Peanuts was this past Thursday’s Peanuts.

You can read the entire run of Peanuts at GoComics. Begin here.

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All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

A Night at The Garden

Available for online viewing: A Night at The Garden, Marshall Curry’s seven-minute assemblage of archival footage of a 1939 German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. The 20,000-strong event was advertised as a “Pro-American Rally.” George Washington, swastikas, and a protester beaten. Draw your own parallels and conclusions.

Churchill on looking at nature

Once you begin to study it, all Nature is equally interesting and equally charged with beauty. I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours. Now I often amuse myself when I am looking at a wall or a flat surface of any kind by trying to distinguish all the different colours and tints which can be discerned upon it, and considering whether these arise from reflections or from natural hue. You would be astonished the first time you tried this to see how many and what beautiful colours there are even in the most commonplace objects, and the more carefully and frequently you look the more variations do you perceive.

Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).

No painter, I. But this passage makes me think of the way everything looks different after a day at a museum, where you might see Cézanne’s House in Provence or House and Trees or The House with the Cracked Walls. Churchill’s essay is about much more than hobbies and pastimes; it’s about attention.

[This passage so captured me that I didn’t even stop to ask whether a wall should be considered part of nature.]

The language of a military coup

At The New Yorker, Masha Gessen writes about John Kelly and the language of a military coup:

When Kelly replaced the ineffectual Reince Priebus as the chief of staff, a sigh of relief emerged: at least the general would impose some discipline on the Administration. Now we have a sense of what military discipline in the White House sounds like.

Consider, in light of Gessen’s commentary, today’s comment from Sarah Huckabee Sanders about Kelly’s claim that Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson took credit for securing funding for an FBI building: “I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general — that’s highly inappropriate.”

I think of a line from a great Specials song: “Don’t argue.”

[Sanders’s sentence was split in two by a question from a reporter. I’ve reproduced it as an uninterrupted sentence.]

“A brief overview of his life”

Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998).

I think of the “portfolio” that accompanied my application for tenure, assembled in three three-inch looseleaf binders.

The thought of “a brief overview” of one’s life that nevertheless documents “each event of any particular importance”: there’s the madness of the Trial world. I suppose that among the events accounted for would be the decision to write the overview itself. And also, perhaps, the decisions about what to leave out, in which case events of no particular importance would also find their way into the brief overview.

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All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Benguiat beatniks

[Zippy, October 20, 2017.]

Dig the lettering of BeATnik, inspired by Ed Benguiat’s Interlock. Just right for beatniks.

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Benguiat style

UPC

Elaine and I like an expensive-ish oat-and-honey granola that we call FPC, or Fancy Pants Cereal. Yesterday we bought a box of the Aldi version, which, it turns out, is just as good and much less expensive-ish. So we have decided to call this cereal UPC: Underpants Cereal.

A related post
OOP

Wrong professor

Elaine and I were walking and found ourselves in front of City Lights Books. The windows had been smashed, and the shelves were nearly empty. We stepped in through an empty window and saw that a poet was preparing to give a reading. She asked us about ourselves. When I told her I was a retired English professor, she pushed a book of her poems at me. “Here,” she said, “this better end up in a book.”

Wrong professor. But it did end up in a blog post.

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[A dream likely inspired by recent conversations Elaine and I have had about our shared distaste for self-promotion.]