Before and after

Before: “The Wikipedia article says. . . .”

After: “After some research, I unearthed. . . .”

From my dad’s CDs

I’m still making my way 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, 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, Charlie Parker, Joe Pass, Art Pepper, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Boyd Raeburn, Django Reinhardt, Marcus Roberts, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Rushing, Catherine Russell, the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, Artie Shaw, George Shearing, Horace Silver, Frank Sinatra, Paul Smith, Jeri Southern, Jo Stafford, Art Tatum, Claude Thornhill, Mel Tormé, McCoy Tyner, Sarah Vaughan, and now, Joe Venuti.

My dad had just one Venuti recording, Joe & Zoot & More (Chiaroscuro). I love the LP Joe & Zoot, so I bought him the CD reissue, which has the LP tracks (with one substitution) and a few extras. Here are two selections:

 

“Oh, Lady Be Good” (George Gershwin–Ira Gershwin). Joe Venuti, violin; Zoot Sims, soprano sax; Dick Wellstood, piano; George Duvivier, bass; Cliff Leeman, drums. Recorded in New York City, September 27, 1973.

“The Blue Room” (Richard Rodgers–Lorenz Hart). Venuti, violin; Spencer Clark, bass sax; Dill Jones, piano; Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar. Recorded in New York City, May 29, 1974. Yes, the sound is a little scratchy here.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie : Duke Ellington : Coleman Hawkins : Billie Holiday : Louis Jordan : Charlie Parker : Jimmy Rushing : Artie Shaw : Frank Sinatra : Art Tatum : Mel Tormé : Sarah Vaughan

On Duke Ellington’s birthday, a random possible discovery

It may be coincidence, but a phrase that Bubber Miley plays and repeats in “Blue Bubbles” (0:36–0:40) sure sounds like the germ of “Good Queen Bess”:

“Blue Bubbles” (Duke Ellington–Bubber Miley). Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Louis Metcalf, Bubber Miley, trumpets; Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, trombone; Harry Carney, Otto Hardwicke, Rudy Jackson, reeds; Ellington, piano; Fred Guy, banjo; Wellman Braud, bass; Sonny Greer, drums. Recorded in New York City, December 19, 1927.

“Good Queen Bess” (Johnny Hodges). Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra: Hodges, alto sax; Harry Carney, baritone sax; Cootie Williams, trumpet; Lawrence Brown, trombone; Duke Ellington, piano; Jimmy Blanton, bass; Sonny Greer, drums. Recorded in Chicago, November 2, 1940.

Miley was still a member of the Ellington band when Hodges joined in 1928. Perhaps the band was still playing “Blue Bubbles” (hardly a crucial part of the Ellington repertoire). Or perhaps Hodges had the record. Or perhaps Miley played this little phrase in other contexts. I would like to imagine that for some reason it stayed with Hodges, to reappear years later.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899. From “The Mirrored Self,” a question-and-answer interlude:

Q. Who are you?

A. I am a musician who is a member of the American Federation of Labor, and who hopes one day to amount to something artistically.

Q. Are you not being too modest?

A. Oh, no, you should see my dreams!

Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973)

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

My favorite clues from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper:

30-Across, six letters: “Travel channel.”

33-Across, thirteen letters: “Centers for drawing classes.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Today’s puzzle, by Matthew Sewell, is a difficult one. I think that the Saturday Stumper is getting stumpier.

Today’s Nancy

[Nancy, April 28, 2018.]

Today’s Nancy features a chorus of voices praising Nancy’s simplicity. See also Ernie Bushmiller on a preference for fewer words in comic strips.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 75)

Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences. Consider this sentence:

The fact that this taxicab family that is joined at the hip to Michael Cohen and his people is getting into the legal weed business is immaterial to me.

The fact that makes a bad start. The two instances of that don’t help. The three instances of is don’t help. Joined at the hip, his people, weed: all tiresome phrasing. (And his people turns out to refer only to Cohen’s father-in-law.) And the syntactic jumble of Michael Cohen and his people is getting into the legal weed business needs sorting out.

A larger issue: the question of agency in this sentence. Applying Richard Lanham’s command for sentence revision — “Find the action” — makes clear that nothing happens here. All we know is that the fact is immaterial.

A possible revision:

I don’t care that Semyon “Sam” Shtayner, a taxi baron close to Michael Cohen’s father-in-law, is entering the legalized cannabis industry.

Marshall uses the first-person pronoun later in his paragraph, so beginning with I makes sense: I don’t care. . . . But there’s new information. . . . I’ll follow up later. But no one needs to follow up with what Marshall calls “an explainer on what it seems to mean.” What else would an explanation seek to explain?

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard) : E.B. White and the fact that

[“Find the action”: from Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose (2007). The AP calls Shtayner a taxi mogul; I chose baron in honor of the old Trump pseudonym John Baron (or Barron). This post is no. 75 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Sophomore year:

Claudine and I studied The Century Handbook of Writing, giggling all the way. Examples seemed even funnier. When we came to Rule 68, “Avoid faulty diction,” we studied the examples: “Nowhere near. Vulgar for not nearly.” “This here. Do not use for this.” “Suspicion. A noun. Never to be used as a verb.” Our conversation became sprinkled with gleeful vulgarisms we had never used before. When I announced my presence by noisily tap-dancing on the Klums’ wooden porch and probably annoying all the neighbors on the block, Claudine said she was nowhere near ready for school.

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Claudine’s reply was something like, “This here shoelace broke.”

We thought our dialogue hilarious. Mrs. Klum sighed as she looked up from Science and Health and said with a smile, “Oh, you silly little girls.”

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

[From a 1922 edition of The Century Handbook of Writing, in Google Books.]

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“Thin it out”

When a “learning style” becomes an ignorance style. From a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe about H.R. McMaster and Donald Trump, “McMaster and Commander”:

The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget — approximately twelve million dollars — and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “‘Thin it out.’” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”

“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “THE WHITE HOUSE” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’”

The description of these cards seems to fit the card Tump held while he was listening to children and parents affected by school shootings. Or was he listening? Also in this article, an account from Ken Pollack, a friend of McMaster’s:

Initially, Pollack said, McMaster gave Trump “the benefit of the doubt,” assuming that he could understand complicated issues. Every day, McMaster subjected Trump to detailed briefings. According to Pollack, the President just sat there. “He would look like he was interested,” Pollack said. “He was probably trying to imagine how many times H.R. has to shave his head every day, while H.R. is going on and on about the complexities of Russia policy.” Only later, Pollack said, did McMaster realize that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a fucking thing he said!”

Related posts
Kanye West, “proud non-reader” : Learning styles

Mushrooming

[The Washington Post, April 26, 2018.]

And I thought the allegations were limited to alcohol, Ambien, and Percocet.