Zohran Mamdani visits Louis Armstrong

From a post by Ethan Iversion:

Yesterday the new mayor of New York City dropped by the Louis Armstrong House Museum. This is essentially politics as usual—AOC and others have made the same rounds—but since I really dig the Armstrong house, I felt notably cheered by this photo taken by Hyland Harris!

Of course I dig Armstrong too. Have practiced his music since my early teens. Be sure to read the rest of Iverson's post (at the link).

I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas! [Satchmo wails]

YouTube:

I'm A Ding Dong Daddy · Louis Armstrong & His Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man 1923-1934

℗ Originally Released 1930 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

Released on: 1994-09-27

Trumpet, Vocal: Louis Armstrong
Composer, Lyricist: Phil Baxter
Banjo, Steel Guitar: Ceele Burke
Drums: Lionel Hampton
Piano: L.Z. Cooper
Piano: Harvey Brooks
Alto Saxophone: Leon Herriford
Alto Saxophone: Willie Stark
Tenor Saxophone: William Franz
Trumpet: Leon Elkins
Trombone: Lawerence Brown
Executive Producer: Bruce Talbot
Mastering Engineer: Mark Wilder
Mastering Engineer: Tom Ruff

* * * * *

The song was written by Phil Harris and originally performed by Phil Baxter singing with the Phil Harris Orchestra back in 1928. The full lyrics are rather more elaborate than the truncated ones that Armstrong sings. He starts singing about a minute in and skips over the opening verse entirely, the one that introduces our rural Romero. He starts right in with the first of the "Ding Dong Daddy's." He gets about half-way in and switches to scat – to cover over just what? – before returning on a ding dong. He then scats a bit up to 1:39, when we have a sax solo. Armstrong picks up his trumpet at 1:55, taking a nice unaccompanied break at 2:05. Now listen to him wail over the band, draping himself all over the time, at 2:14, another break at 2:23, and repeat. Listen to what he does at 2:46. Damn!

I reckon you all don't know me at all
I just got here today
My home is way down in a little town
It's not so far away
Everybody for miles around
Calls me by my name
Now that I am in your fair town
You must do the same

For I'm a
Ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a clean cut fellow from Horner's Corner
Your ought to see me strut
I'm a caper cuttin' cutie
Got a gal called Katie
She's a little heavy laden but I call her "Baby"
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ping pong papa from Pitch Fork Prairie
You ought to see me strut
I'm a ding dong daddy
Got a whiz bang momma
She's a Bear Creek baby and a wampus kitty
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a popcorn popper and a big apple knocker
You ought to see me strut
I'm a mamma makin' man
And I just made Mary
She's a big blonde baby from Peanut Prairie
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a peach-pie papa from Jackson's Hollow
You ought to see me strut
I'm a honey dippin' daddy
Got a hard hearted baby
She's a sheik shakin' Sheba but she can't shake me
'Cause I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a jug jugglin' Jasper
From Flat Fork Flats, and
You ought to see me strut
I'm a corn-huskin' huskie
Got a gal called Cleta
She's a flip flop flapper
But her brains are in her fee
Oh, I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a cider sipper
From Corn Cob Center
You ought to see me strut
I'm a high powered papa
Got a gal called Susie
She's a fast movin' mamma
But she can't love me, 'cause
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff

Four out of ten rules for life over 80

I'm not there...yet. But I plan to be.

Roger Rosenblatt, How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me), NYTimes, April 13, 2025.

Here's four of the 10 rules:

2. Make young friends.

For older folks, there is nothing more energizing than the company of the young. They’re bright, enthusiastic, informative and brimming with life, and they do not know when you’re telling them lies.

Something me and my young friends accomplished a few years ago: It took 13 years, but Jersey City finally has a poured-concrete SK8park – A story of local grass roots politics.

5. Don’t hear the cheers.

This applies at any age, really, but perhaps a little more to people in later life, who are given lifetime achievement awards and other statements of how wonderful they are. Pay no attention to those accolades. Just proceed to live the life you’re living, giving it whatever it requires.

Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtics center who was responsible for many of the Celtics’ N.B.A. championships, used to be booed every night by the racist Boston crowd. The league’s greatest player, booed. One day, his little girl said to him, “Daddy, how can you stand all that booing?” He replied, “I don’t hear the boos because I don’t hear the cheers.”

One makes a great mistake believing the grand things said about him or her, even if those things are true. Especially if they’re true. The important thing, at any age, is to do the work. The work is far more satisfying than a truckload of compliments. It also takes the place of self-love, always a good thing.

This blog, this new savanna, it is the core of my work.

8. Join a gang.

This advice is meant for men more than women, because women are always part of one group or another. The value of socializing comes to women naturally, which is why the world would be better if women ran it. They know how to get along in groups. Men, on the other hand, are solitary, static things. Generals without wars, astride iron horses. They don’t band together naturally, but they ought to, especially when too much solitude leads to self-conscious gloom. Join a gang — that’s what I say. I do not mean a motorcycle gang, simply a group of guys who share an interest. Joining a gang also serves society at large. It keeps us off the streets.

Alas, I have yet to find a gang. But perhaps I'll have found one by the time I'm 80. Keep on truckin'.

10. Start and end every day by listening to Louis Armstrong.

“West End Blues” or anything, really. I won’t tell you why. But you’ll thank me.

Now, go read the other six rules. Oh, and here's a lesson in grace:

Bonus: Here's a long post I wrote when I turned 70. I figured my best years were ahead of me. As far as I can tell that has turned out to be true, though there have been some rocky times, times when I almost became lost in self-pity. But, hey, it's only yesterday that I learned it WAS self-pity. There's hope for me yet.

Tight Like This: A Tale of High Adventure in Ancient Nubia [the fourth arena]

Yet another bump, and less than two years after the previous bump, In August of 2022. This time I'm preparing for the 3QD piece that's due of Mar. 24, for posting on the 25th.

---

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? Because I can, that's why. Because the world's got to change and it's got to change NOW. You know, now's the time! We've been mugged by the future and don't realize it. We're still waiting for jet packs when the time for jet packs has done come and gone. There isn't going to be any AGI (artificial general intelligence) coming down the pike, not in time to make a difference and maybe not ever. Get real and figure out how we're doing to deal with a network of self-driving cars that can learn. Anyhow, this is going to require major changes in how we think, and that's going to require a new mythology. I figure maybe old Golfotep and the Mystic Jewels have something to say about that.

I published this on The Valve some years ago and, as the introductory note says, I'd published it on Meanderings, now defunct, before that. No doubt I will republish it somewhere else sometime in the future. Or maybe someone will make it into a movie. Who knows.

Oh, and be sure to check out Tight Like This (this is Wynton Freakin' Marsalis, Armstrong link in text below).  High drama & low-down hoochie coochie. 

---

Jivometrics

Back in the mid 1990s, about the time Mosaic was being unleashed on the internet, I met a fellow in the African-American Forum at AOL Online. Called himself Cuda Brown. We hit it off and began emailing privately. Before you know it we were collaborating on a website called Meanderings - which later became Gravity. Cuda did most of the work, including all of the HTML coding and the back-end database coding. I helped editorially, wrote some pieces, and did some art.

One day I sent Cuda an email containing a spur-of-the moment paragraph satirizing Afrocentrism, something much discussed at Meanderings. While Cuda and I were sympathetic, we were doubtful about the more inventive flavors of the brew. Thus I had improvised something about golf being invented by one Pharoah Golfotep: the primo white-shoe Anglo country club plus-fours game was invented in ancient Egypt. What could be sillier? Over the next two weeks, however, this little bit of satire jes grew and grew, like Topsy, and became something else.

So, we posted it in Meanderings, which may have become Gravity by that time, I forget. And people read it. In time, however, Gravity died. Since then I've been looking for a place to revive “Fore Play.” Well, here it is. Let's call it a cultural studies primer for the new millennium.

Some of it is a bit dated. Who remembers Dennis Rodman, much less his experimental tonsorial stylings? Back then Tiger Woods was more potential than achievement – but what potential! – while boom boxes have now bifurcated into iPods and beat boxes. "Muggles" hadn't become a Potteresque term of art for – well, just what exactly, non-magicals? (I've never read any of the books.) Back then I used it as the name of a Louis Armstrong blues and I'm sticking to it. It's also old New Orleans slang for something Bill Clinton didn't inhale.

Otherwise, it's pretty much now as it was then. Only back then the turn of the millennium was in the future. Now it's in the past.

---

Fore Play:

A Lesson in Jivometric Drummology


Jefferson Ribonucleic Parker IV

aka

Mr. Ribs

Tiger Woods is only the most recent in a long line of fine black golfers. In saying that I refer to players other than the moderns such as Charles Sifford, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and Renee Powell. Truth be told, the tradition of sepia swing masters started in ancient Egypt, where the game was invented. In that company Woods would be no more than a middling player.

By today's standards Tiger is ferociously talented and filled with promise for the future. Perhaps he'll become the best in post-modern times, the primo putter of the 21st Century, the first master to break par on the New Savanna. But those African drivers of ancient Egypt were giants the like of which haven't been seen in thousands of years.

Their stories, like so many stories, have been suppressed by the Europeans. Fortunately many of those stories have been collected by The Order of Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary. The Jewels are dedicated to preserving the ancient stories and to intervening in history in ways variously clever and indirect. They are the chief source of that version of Afrocentric thinking known as Jivometric Drummology. In her classic study, Klactoveededstene: Riffing the Noumena, Ella Birks Roach defined the basic concept thus:

Jivometric Drummology: A philosophical system grounded in African and African-American musical practice. “Drummology” indicates that the governing logos is that of the drum, of rhythm, of hands and sticks coaxing sound from skin, of people joining together, each playing a simple rhythm, with the many simple rhythms melting into a single stream of infinite diversity. “Jivometric” is here because of the way it rolls off the tongue and tickles the ear; its meaning is secondary to its sound. Jivometrics is thus a principle of grace. When jivometrics is in play outer sonic auras join in the creation of tones played by no one, but heard by all. A treatise may have drummological ideas, but if the language lacks grace, then the treatise is not jivometric -- jiveturkey is all too often the appropriate term. In the most profound works of this school jivometrics and drummology are joined through agape

The Mystic Jewels, however, are not mere signifiers. They signify with a stern purpose. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invented by the Mystic Jewels. They knew the abolitionists would never get beyond a lot of grand indignant talking so they figured a novel that stirred the imagination would be just the thing. A light-skinned sister named Eleanor Gough McKay changed her name to Harriet Beecher, married Calvin Stowe, and wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. That book, as President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged, is what gave the North the guts to wage the Civil War.

Anyhow, my mother's father, Cassius Photon Gaillard, aka Slim, was a Mystic Jewel and took a special interest in the history of golf. The following story is based on information from his papers.

• • • • • • •

The Origin of Golf and the Lights in the Sky

Golf was invented by the ancient Egyptians – well, that's what we call them now, but they were really Nubians, and proud of it, too. Most of the details have been lost, but the general shape and thrust of the story has been preserved.

It began in the reign of Pharaoh Ramses Golfotep LVII of the 'N Baa Dynasty. One day Rams was hanging out with some of his friends in the Lark Meadow gazebo at his summer palace. As usual, they were playing bid whist and sipping Mount Gay and Coke, with a twist of lemon. As so often happens, they got to talkin' trash about their wives and girl friends. Ramses talked about how he particularly liked going into a special glade with his wife Cleopatra and a boom box loaded with some righteous jams. The best time was early evening when things were cooling down and the sun lit the sky with orange fire. They'd meander down this long narrow opening among the palms and get to a secluded spot ringed with patches of sand. The ground was firm and the grass kept closely cropped so they could dance freely. Inevitably the dancing would lead to a little fooling around, and that little fooling around generally led to more and before you know it Cleo was baking Ramses' sweet potato in her oven. That was some fine sweet potato pie they'd cook up. Yes indeed.

Marvelous interview with Louis Armstrong [followed by Miles]

Bing Crosby made Silicon Valley possible

Ted Gioia, How Bing Crosby Made Silicon Valley Possible, The Honest Broker, Dec. 21, 2023. The opening:

Bing Crosby was the most successful entertainer in the world during the first half of the 20th century. He rose to the top in everything he tried his hand at—records, movies, radio, live performances.

He even defined a new cultural tone, which people called ‘cool’.

I once heard a music critic describe Crosby at his peak as the coolest white man on the planet. That’s not a bad way of conveying his appeal. Cool started out as a jazz style, but Crosby turned it into a consumer lifestyle.

Gioia then goes on to explain how, in the late 1920s, Crosby figured out how to use the technology of microphones and amplification to invent a new style of singing: "They called this new low-key style “crooning.” And no crooner was more popular than Bing Crosby." But by the mid-1940s Crosby was overworked and feeling exhausted. He needed technological help.

Because of the time difference, Crosby had to do two different live broadcasts—and the network refused his proposal that they pre-record the later West Coast show on 16-inch transcription disks, basically a very large phonograph record. NBC had good reason for this. The sound quality on the disk recordings of that day were noticeably inferior. And the disks were cumbersome to edit—negating one of the major advantages of pre-recorded shows.

Crosby needed better recording technology. And in 1947, a stranger from Northern California made the trek to Hollywood with a big box that not only solved Bing’s dilemma, but set the wheels in motion for a whole host of later innovations.

What Jack Mullin did at MGM Studio that day is almost like a magic trick. He set up a live performance behind a curtain, and then followed it with a playback from his magnetic tape recorder. The audio quality was so true-to-life that many listeners couldn’t tell the difference. A private demonstration was arranged for Crosby at the ABC Studio on Sunset and Vine.

Crosby knew immediately that this was a huge breakthrough. But the price of a single Ampex 200-A machine was $4,000—more than many people paid for a home back then. In fact, the average median family income in the US that year was just $3,000. But Crosby wanted to buy 20 of these machines. He offered to pay 60% of the money up-front.

Thus, a few days later, a letter arrived in the Ampex office with a Hollywood postmark. Inside was a check from Bing Crosby for $50,000.

Gioia then launches into the story of how Ampex got started. This, that, and the other, leading to:

Ampex, launched in San Carlos, California in 1944 is the key connecting point between music storage and data storage. That tiny startup, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was involved directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”

And so Mr. Cool gave high tech a boost. 

And here he is singing a duet with the real King of Cool, Mr. Louis "Satchmo" Armstong. You'll hear Bing make an aside about having a "piece of Gary." That's Gary, Indiana, home to a major steel mill. Gioia remarks that Crosby was a prolific investor.

Louis Armstrong and the Snake-Charmin’ Hoochie-Coochie Meme

Another bump to the top, this time (Jan. 26, 2023) to acknowledge the examples appended to the end.

* * * * *

Another "old time good one", as Pops used to say. This is about a little tune I learned as a kid, but which might well be hundreds of year old, if not even older. And I'm now (August 2016) bumping this to the top of the queue because I'm about write about my early education in jazz,

Some years ago I was looking for a way to open the final chapter of a book I was writing about music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. The chapter was to be a quick tour of black music in 20th Century America, starting with jazz and blues and ending with hip-hop. So, I thought and thought and, finally, an idea crept up on me.

I had this book of Louis Armstrong trumpet solos that I’d been practicing ever since my early teens. The solos had been transcribed from recordings Armstrong had made in the late 1920s and had been circulating ever since, all under copyright, naturally. These were classic Armstrong: “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Struttin’ with some Barbecue,” “Gully Low Blues,” “Muggles” (nothing to do with Harry Potter, muggles was Armstrong’s favorite inhalent, the one that President Bill Clinton never took into his lungs) and a few others. One of those others was called “Tight Like This” – an open-ended title that asked you to use your imagination. During his improvisation in “Tight Like This” Armstrong quoted a certain riff, not once, but twice.

 

How did I know it was a quotation? Because I was familiar with the riff from other contexts. For one thing, it showed up in cartoons, often to accompany a snake charmer, but also as general all-purpose Oriental mystery music. For another, I knew it as a children’s song that me and by buddies used to sing, with lyrics to the effect that the girls in France didn’t wear underpants – hotcha! But how did Armstrong know this tune? He recorded “Tight Like This” in 1928, the same year that Walt Disney produced “Steamboat Willie,” generally regarded as the first cartoon with a fully synchronized soundtrack. So Armstrong’s recording predated the tune’s use in cartoon soundtracks. Did he learn it as a kid growing up on the streets of New Orleans?

I made a few phone calls, sent some emails to friends, queried a trumpeter’s listserve (sponsered by TPIN, Trumpet Players’ International Network), and information began trickling in. In the first place, other people remember this tune from their childhoods. One Eric Johnson. from the TPIN list, told me that his daughters remember these lyrics:

All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,
And the way they shake is enough to kill a snake.

Karen Stober, also from TPIN, tells me the tune was sung by two children facing one another and clapping hands to the lyrics:

On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.
Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969! [whatever year it is].

We’ve moved from France to Mars, but there’s that snake again, and now we’ve got cigars – a regular Freudian wonderland of sub-rosa implication. What fun. I found a somewhat fuller version on the web where the dance was characterized as a “hookie-kookie dance.”

I then followed a lead from my friend, David Bloom, who suggested I check out the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a major event in American cultural life. It was the first large-scale use of AC electricity, and the first Ferris wheel. The exposition hosted delegations from all over the world, including Japan, the first chance Americans had to experience that nation and its people – who were here, of course, to learn about us as well. This is when and where hamburgers became all-American fast food; Pabst Blue-Ribbon Beer flowed freely on the midway; Kellogs Cornflakes debuted here as well. And, wouldn’t you know it? Elias Disney, Walt’s father, was a carpenter on the construction job. But all this is beside the point.

The point is about the entertainment on the midway. Yes, we had Wild Bill Cody, and we had John Philip Sousa. But we also had a lithe young woman who danced as “Little Egypt.” The exposition’s press agent, Sol Bloom, claimed that he had written our little tune just so Little Egypt could dance to it. The tune was a hit and was subsequently copyrighted under various names, including Dance of the Midway, Coochi-Coochi Polka, Danse de Ventre, and The Streets of Cairo. Just how it was copyrighted several times is a bit of a mystery, but the fact that several folks claimed it as their own testifies to the tune’s popularity. One of those folks, W. J. Voges, included it as the Koochie-Koochie Dance in the second edition of Pasquila Medley published in New Orleans in 1895. We’ve now got the tune in New Orleans at a date prior to Armstrong’s birth.

Louis Armstrong talks with Dick Cavett plus an ABC Nightline special based on his private tapes

Karnofsky residence – Louis Armstron'gs 2nd home – was destroyed by Ida

Hurricane Ida destroyed a New Orleans landmark—the "second home" of Louis Armstrong that helped launch his music career https://t.co/afuZMgfJqi

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) August 31, 2021

The cadenza heard 'round the world: Louis Armstrong, West End Blues, 1928

A couple of seconds of Louis Armstrong as a news boy in his teens?

According to this article by James Karst, in 64 Parishes, that clip, shot in 1915, may be our earliest film clip of Louis Armstrong:

An eight-second silent film clip shot in that year and posted on the Getty Images website captures a sea of humanity a stone’s throw away, on the other side of the Canal Street neutral ground; the camera is facing down Canal toward the river, probably at Dauphine Street, near the flagship D. H. Holmes store.

White women and men, all of them in hats, stride past one another. Several men in suits stand at the corner, perhaps waiting for someone. A young boy looks toward the street as he holds a woman’s hand. Automobiles and a streetcar are visible in the background.

Just over three seconds into the footage, an adolescent black boy walks into the scene. He is wearing a newsboy cap. The sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up to the elbows.

The boy turns around. He’s selling a newspaper, what appears to be the New Orleans Item.

The boy seems to acknowledge the camera, perhaps the only person in the clip who does so overtly. For a brief moment he flashes a brilliant smile, showing ease as a young black man among white pedestrians during a particularly oppressive period of the Jim Crow era. And then he turns away to continue selling his paper.

That newsboy, according to two prominent jazz historians, appears to be Armstrong himself, at thirteen or fourteen years of age. If it is him, it would be the oldest video footage of the future recording star by well over a decade, and it would depict him at a critical crossroads in his life, after he had left the stability of the Colored Waif’s Home and before he became a full-time working musician. It would also presumably depict him around the time his voice changed from a tenor to his famous baritone, presumably calling out the headlines as he hawked the paper.

A White Blackman [#Juneteenth]

I'm bumping this to the top in honor of Juneteenth and my friend Ade Knowles. Rest in peace, my brother. 

* * * * *

I published this over a decade and a half ago on a long-gone personal website and then on a now-dormant site called Gravity. I put it on New Savanna on March 15, 2010. In the wake of Jadzia's wonderful party back in 2014 – yes, gathering of the tribes, a meeting of the stylz – I bumped to the head of the queue.  Now, in August of 2017, I'm doing it again, for various reasons, but mostly on general principle: I like it.

New African Music Collective: L to R: Fonda, me, Ade, Druis.

The first time I heard the phrase -- "white black man" -- Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a Juneteenth party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, those many years ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn't quite understand why this man was so important. But I listened and listened and, gradually, I began to understand his music. There was Armstrong's tone -- by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender -- his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience. It was exciting.

Above all, there was the blues. There was its emotional provenance, grief, resignation, longing. And there was the sound, the particular notes, those so-called "blue notes." It wasn't until much later that I learned enough about music theory to know which notes these were, to know that these notes didn't exist in any European musical system. But I could hear these notes, I could grasp their expressive power. I wanted to make them mine.

Fortunately I had found a trumpet teacher, Mr. Dave Dysert, who was a jazz musician. He was more than willing to teach me the ways of this strange idiom. He taught me jazz rhythm and phrasing -- "It don't mean a thing if it don't got that swing". He also told me that it was almost impossible for musicians with a "legitimate" (i.e. European, classical) musical background to play with a jazz feel. The ways of swing had to be learned when you were young. That was when I first became consciously aware of the cultural distance between my background and the music I loved.

But it wasn't until I went to college -- to study philosophy -- that I began seriously to think about these matters. That was in the late Sixties, with the civil rights and anti-war movements in high gear. I read about the African origins of jazz rhythm and tonality, about how the slaves were forbidden to play drums but that didn't keep them from clapping their hands or from singing those "blue" notes, the tones they brought from Africa. Reading Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones), among others, I became aware of how American music was tremendously indebted to African-American music and, by implication, African music. I began to understand that when I moved toward jazz, as many other European Americans have done, I was moving toward Africa and away from Europe. Whatever American culture is, in general, in the musical arena it is largely a hybrid of European and African elements.

Late in my college career I joined a local jazz-rock band called the St. Matthew Passion. One particular arrangement began with the horns playing in a free-style for a short time after which the rhythm section started the song proper, with a regular beat, and melody, etc. At our last gig the sax player and I were alone -- the trombone player couldn't make it. We began as usual, and then, something snapped. All of a sudden there was just the music, flowing through me. Through us. It was wonderful. And frightening. We pulled back. And the rest of the band came in on cue. The sax player and I never really talked about what had happened -- what could we say? could talk bring it back? -- but, with a significant nod, a mumbled "that was nice," we managed to communicate to each other that something special had happened.

Perhaps a year or so later I went to hear Dizzy Gillespie play a concert at Morgan State. He played a long solo in "Olinga" and, as the solo began to end, I had a definite sense that, in some way, Dizzy was returning to himself, as though his soul had left his body during the solo and now was returning -- from a spiritual Africa, everywhere present, and available, to those who listen but do not seek the present in the future/past. While it is almost impossible to describe this event -- perhaps because I must do so in the language of a culture which tries very hard to deny that such things happen, and are important -- my sense of it is quite definite. To this day I believe that, if I saw a film of Dizzy playing this solo, I could indicate the precise moment when his soul rejoined his body.

Gone Fishin'

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue in honor of the fact that I've gone fishin'. Well, not quite. I've gone camping. So there'll be no blogging 'till I get back Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, give a listen to Pops and Bing.

* * * * * 

Lyrics, some spoken, but most sung:

Bing Crosby: I'll tell you why I can't find you Every time I go out to your place (singing starts) you've gone fishin'
Louis Armstrong: How do you know
Bing Crosby: Well there's a sign upon your door
Louis Armstrong: Uh-huh
Bing Crosby: Gone fishin'
Louis Armstrong: I'm real gone man
Bing Crosby: You ain't workin' anymore
Louis Armstrong: Could be
Bing Crosby: There's your hoe out in the sun/ Where you left a row half done/ You claim that hoein' ain't no fun
Louis Armstrong: Well I can prove it
Bing Crosby: You ain't got no ambition/ Gone fishin'.../ by a shady wady pool
Louis Armstrong: Shangrila, really la
Bing Crosby: I'm wishin' I could be that kind of fool
Louis Armstrong: Should I twist your arm?
Bing Crosby: I'd say no more work for mine
Louis Armstrong: Welcome to the club
Bing Crosby: On my door I'd hang a sign Gone fishin'/... instead of just a-wishin

Louis and Bing: Papa Bing, Yes Louis? Louis Armstrong: I stopped by your place a time or two lately and you aren't home either
Bing Crosby: Well, I'm a busy man Louis. I got a lotta big deals cookin' I was probably tied up at the studio.

Louis Armstrong: You weren't tied up dog
You was just plain old...Gone fishin'
Bing Crosby: bah-boo-bah-boo-bah-boo-bah-boo-bah

Louis Armstrong: There's a sign upon your door
Bing Crosby: Pops, don't blab it around, will you?
Louis Armstrong: Gone fishin'
Bing Crosby: Keep it shady, I got me a big one staked out
Louis Armstrong: Mmm, you ain't workin' anymore
Bing Crosby: I don't have to work, I got me a piece of Gary*
Louis Armstrong: Cows need milkin' in the barn
Bing Crosby: I have the twins on that detail, they each take a side
Louis Armstrong: But you just don't give a darn
Bing Crosby: Give 'em four bits a cow and hand lotion
Louis Armstrong: You just never seem to learn
Bing Crosby: Man, you taught me
Louis Armstrong: You ain't got no ambition
Bing Crosby: You're convincin' me
Louis Armstrong: Gone fishin'
Bing Crosby: bah-boo-dah-do-dah-do-dah-do
Louis Armstrong: Got your hound dog by your side
Bing Crosby: That's old cindy-lou goin' with me
Louis Armstrong :Gone fishin'
Bing Crosby: mmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm
Louis Armstrong: Fleas are bitin' at his hide
Bing Crosby: Get away from me boy, you bother me

Bing Crosby: Mmm, folks won't find us now because
Louis and Bing: Mister satch and mister crosb
Bing Crosby: We gone fishin'... Instead of just a-wishin'
Louis Armstrong: Bah-boo-baby-bah-boo-bah-bay-m­mm-bo-bay
Louis and Bing: Oh yeah!

*Gary Indiana. There used to be major steel mills there.

Louis Armstrong performs for the troops

Louis Armstrong performs for the troops in Pensacola, Florida in 1941. On this Memorial Day, we salute all of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. #LAHMDigitization #DailyPops #MemorialDay2018 pic.twitter.com/AiuErkK3xT

— Louis Armstrong (@ArmstrongHouse) May 28, 2018

My Early Jazz Education 1: From the Firehouse to Louis Armstrong

I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven.

Walt Disney part of the story. Not Uncle Walt himself, but a Dixieland jazz band consisting of personnel from his animation studio, The Firehouse Five Plus Two. They’d show up regularly on “The Mickey Mouse Club” TV program, and I’m sure I heard them there. Here’s a clip where they play “Muskrat Ramble”:

 

I have no recollection of having seen any particular performance of theirs, but I could well have seen this one. I’d have loved it, both because “Red River Valley” was one of my favorite tunes and because it was jazz.

I have vague memories of discussing the The Firehouse Five with friends. I have a slightly less vague memory of the first time I head Louis Armstrong. I think.

I was down the street visiting my friend David Leffler. Somehow or other his mother asked whether or not I’d heard Louis Armstrong. I’d never heard of him. So she put a record on and I listened. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that it sounded a bit thin. But – and here’s the thing – I remembered it.

When my father joined a record club – you know, one of those deals where you could by records and they’d be mailed to you – I was allowed a selection in the first buy. I read through the little pamphlet and picked something called A Rare Batch of Satch. Again, lots of tinny sound. And a lot of what I’d come to see as standard repertoire: “Basin Street Blues,” “High Society,” “St. James Infirmary” (which I loved), “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (Armstrong’s theme song), and others.

But the standout number is a little gem tucked away in a cut called “Laughin’ Louie.” “Laugin’ Louie” was a silly novelty tune that isn’t worth much. It broke down during recording and Satch decided to treat his band mates to some a capella gold: “…you must listen at this beautiful number, one of those old time good ones.”

The magic starts at about 2:16, just Armstrong’s trumpet, no accompaniment. The rhythmic virtuosity at the end of the first phrase is astounding. The highest note is G above the staff, which was quite high for trumpet playing at the time.

By this time I was earning enough money mowing lawns that I could afford to walk a mile or so to the local discount department store and flip through the record bins looking for trumpet records. Of course I found mostly jazz because classical music didn’t have much of a solo repertoire for trumpet. But trumpet is second only to the saxophone in jazz – at least that's how saxophone players see it. I'm not so sure.

One of the first albums I bought was Louie and the Dukes of Dixieland. Dixieland was popular at the time, the tail end of the so-called Dixieland revival. Dixieland was basically traditional New Orleans jazz played by white folks. The Dukes of Dixieland played it well. Here’s a cut from the traditional repertoire, “Bourbon Street Parade”:

It opens with an Armstrong vocal. Then one of the Dukes does a vocal. I likely wasn’t too enthusiastic about all this singing. We want trumpet! Still, listen to Armstrong’s scat singing behind the second chorus, and the way he joins in on harmony for the last line. We have a clarinet solo then the drummer does a parade roll-off – you know, the riffs played by the drums of a marching band to bring in the band on the beginning of a tune – to introduce the final chorus of collective improvisation. That's the key to the traditional style, collective improv, no one strutting it above and before the others.

 

The stand-out cut on the album, though, was the closer, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” a tune traditionally played at New Orleans funerals as they walked the guest of honor to his or her grave:

Louis starts it off by playing the tune on his Selmer balanced action trumpet (if you know trumpets you call tell from the picture on the album cover). His playing is stately and dignified over a dirt-simple background of sustained horn harmonies with a simple drum beat. Stunning. Then he sings the tune over the same background with the addition of a simple trumpet obbligato from Frank Assunto. Armstrong returns to the trumpet for a simple statement of the melody to close, with trumpet obbligato and harmonies.

Wipes me out every time I hear it.

At about that time I found a book of Armstrong trumpet transcriptions and started working out on them – which I’ve been doing ever since then. When I looked at the copyright dates on the individual transcriptions it became obvious that they must have been transcribed within weeks or months after they’d first been recorded. These were all from his landmark Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s. My music teacher, Dave Dysert, included these transcriptions in my trumpet lessons, along with my Mendez solos.

Here’s “Gully Low Blues”:

The format was typical: fast opening, slow it down for a clarinet solo followed by Armstrong vocal, then back to clarinet. Armstrong enters at 2:16 with an astonishing solo chorus. As you know, the blues is typically a twelve bar form. Armstrong’s chorus consists of six two-bar phrases, with the first five cut from the same cloth and then a contrasting 2-bar closer. Then it’s collective improv to the end.

Let’s look at Armstrong’s chorus. The first five phrases start exactly the same way, a rip to a half-note B-flat (trumpet key, A-flat concert) which Armstrong colors with a shake – you have no idea how long it took me to get a convincing shake. The first time Armstrong simply does a line of triplet figures descending to a low E-flat. Second time it’s much the same through for the first half of the phrase – shake on a high B-flat, triplets coming down – but he changes the second bar. The triplets are faster and the phrase goes up a bit before coming back down, this time to D-flat, a step lower than the end point of the first phrase. So, the phrase has a slightly larger range and a more complex melodic shape.

How’s Armstrong going to change it up for the third time through? Opening’s the same – by this time we’ve got the point, same old same old with a little spice on the end. He starts down but then, suddenly he leaps up above that opening B-flat to a high C and finishes the phrase on a fourth space E-flat, a full octave above the point where he ended up the first time through. The spread of the phrase is more compressed than the first two versions. The fourth time through, same opening, but he descends much more rapidly and ends up in the basement, a below-the-staff G, on the second half of the first beat. This version spans two octaves and a third, top to bottom, while the first two times it was less than two octaves and the span was less than an octave on the third.

Armstrong is working variations on this one idea with a systematic deftness and economy that would have brought tears to the eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach himself. And it’s still different the fifth time, spanning just over an octave and leading into the final phrase starting in the second half of bar 10. Five times in a row each two-bar phase starts on the first beat of the bar. The last time through, what does he do? He starts the phrase half-bar ahead of time, in bar 10, rather than waiting for the 11th bar. I’m telling you, those Bach boys must have been laughing themselves silly with joy when they heard Pops lay this one on them as he showed up at the pearly gates. What chutzpah to announce himself to St. Peter with the “Gully Low Blues.”

Now we have his performance on King Oliver’s “West End Blues” with Earl Hines on Piano.

This cut is noted for Armstrong’s opening cadenza, a capella of course (remember that gem buried in the middle of “Laughin’ Louie”?). Armstrong played pretty much the same cadenza for years and decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

This, like everything Pops does, is worth serious analytical attention. But he wore me out with those “Gully Low Variations,” so you’re going to have to take care of the analysis yourself. I will only note that it starts straight out on an A above the staff. For a trumpet player to start out cold on an exposed high A, that’s danger Will Robinson, danger! When I’m feelin’ feisty I’ll pick my horn up and, without any warm up, see if I can nail that cadenza. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. The thing is, sitting here in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I figure there must be a 100 or more trumpet players – black white yellow red purple green male female tall short wide thin young old middle-aged all kind of trumpeters – within a 10-mile radius who can play that cadenza sharp as a tack. It’s something we work on.

Let’s end on a lighter note. This is a duet Armstrong cut with Bing Crosby in 1951. No trumpeting, just singing. “Gone Fishin,” was a hit for them:

Listen to Bing scat behind Armstrong. He learned that from Louis, and he got half his style, the relaxed half, from Louis.

Here’s a version that Crosby did with Pearl Bailey in 1977 (Armstrong had died in 1972):

You’ll hear some of the same business that Crosby and Armstrong did in 1951. At one point Bailey breaks into an Armstrong gravel-tone. Listen to the very end. She hits her final note almost a half step flat, holds on to it for a while and, just when you can’t take it any more (Bing’s getting worried), she comes up on pitch.

There.

Satchmo's Jazz Diplomacy – “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”

Writing about Louis Armstrong in the NYTimes, Joe Nocera observes:

Starting in the mid-1950s, the State Department began sending jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Armstrong on tours abroad as good-will ambassadors. Part of the rationale was that jazz was a uniquely American art form that could show off the best of American culture, just as the Russians used ballet troupes to show off their culture. The government also thought that these artists, most of them black, might, by their presence, help diffuse “the widely shared sense that race was America’s Achilles’ heel internationally,” as Penny M. Von Eschen writes in “Satchmo Blows Up the World,” her book about the jazz tours.

The State Department sent the musicians to Cold War hot spots all over the world. Everywhere they went, their music was received enthusiastically. It was great music, to be sure, but it also often represented “things that were culturally forbidden” in repressive regimes, says Dan Morgenstern, the jazz historian. At the height of the jazz tours, The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a State Department meeting: “This is a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy,” the caption read. “The question is, who’s the best man for it — John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?” Dave Brubeck and his wife, Iola, even wrote a musical celebrating Armstrong’s international forays, called “The Real Ambassadors.”

Nocera's piece specifically centers on a tour that Armstrong took behind the Iron Curtain (i.e. the Soviet bloc) in 1965. During that tour he restored a tune to his repertoire that he hadn't otherwise performed in a decade. The tune was Fats Waller's “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” The title says it all:"... he played it on every stop during his Iron Curtain tour. He also played it slower than he ever had, so that it became a mournful lament."

Good Morning, Vietnam & It’s a Wonderful World

I’ve watched this film three times, once when it came out, once some years ago on TV, and then again last night. It was, of course, built around its star, the late Robin Williams, who improvised his on-air DJ routines.

It would be interesting to compare this film with two earlier films, MASH (1970), set in Korea, but made immediately salient by the war in Vietnam, and Apocalypse, Now (1979). Like MASH, and unlike Apocalypse, Now, Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) is a comedy. While GMV is set mostly in Saigon and AN is mostly in the field, I can’t help but seeing some of shots in GMV through AN: the boat shots, helicopter shots, and some of the jungle shots, though the palate is a bit less saturated.

But this is not going to be a general commentary on the film. I want to mention one scene, a bit over two-thirds of the way through the film. Cronauer, the Robin Williams character, has just returned to the air by demand of the men in the field. He’d been taken off the air for insubordination and his replacement, a lieutenant who styled himself as a comedian, was a snoring disaster. So the good-guy commanding general demanded that he be reinstated. It took awhile to pull him out of his slump and get him back on air.

And when he did, the first song he played was It’s a Wonderful World, as recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1967. (I’ve got a post on a later version by the great Hawaiian musician, Israel Kamakawino’ole.) Armstrong is backed by strings, his voice is gentle, graceful, and ingratiating, and the sound is lush. As the song plays we see a montage. First the shorts are peaceful and pensive, but then they turn violent and bloody, continuing that way until the end. The effect, of course, is ironic, if lyrical as well (but then, AN was saturated in lyricism, wasn’t it?).

When that scene ends, with a close-up of Cronauer at the mike announcing the name of the song and the singer, we cut to a scene where his immediate superior–a by-the-book Sergeant Major with a mean streak (recall Col. Frank Burns from MASH)–sets him up for an ambush. The ambush fails, but the aftermath gets Cronauer removed from his post. The Sergent, too.

Back to the song. It had been recorded 20 years before this film came out. Armstrong himself had been dead for 15 years and so had pretty much disappeared from the scene, except for those of us who knew him as a jazz master. Good Morning, Vietnam put that recording back on the charts.

Miles Davis at Harvard: “the shit sounded good as a mother-fucker”

Miles Davis didn’t speak those words at Harvard. To my knowledge, he never set foot on the Harvard campus; though it is of course possible that he did so on some occasion. It was Homi Bhabha who uttered those words, quoting a statement Davis had used in describing Herbie Hancock’s piano playing. Bhaba was introducing Hancock as the 2014 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry.

But Hancock’s not a poet, you might say. No, he’s not. The word is used with poetic license.

As Bhabha said at the beginning of his introduction, the Norton Lectures, which it is the duty of the Norton Professor to deliver, are “Harvard’s singular tribute to the most creative minds in the arts and humanities.” The Norton Professorship has previously been held by such luminaries as T.S. Eliot (1932-33), Igor Stravinsky (1939-40), Ben Shahn (1956-57), Leonard Bernstein (1972-73), Frank Stella (1982-84), John Cage (1988-89), and Luciano Berio (1992-93), only one of whom was a poet. But all of them were some variety of white. Hancock is the first African-American to hold that distinguished post.

Thereby hangs a tale, no, many tales, tales crossing over a half millennium in time and half the globe in space.

For the socio-cultural forces that gave birth to Harvard in the New World in 1636 for the purpose of educating young men in the ministry are the same forces that engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Without those forces, no Norton Lectureship and no Herbie Hancock. Without those forces, no Homi Bhabha, for those same forces extended the British Empire to India. Bhabha was born in Mumbai and educated at Oxford. Mumbai to Oxford to Cambridge, Massachusetts–that’s quite a journey, one spanning the East-West extent of the old British Empire, which gave up its hold on India only in 1947, two years before Bhabha was born.

Wonderful Rainbow Aesthetics, off the Top of My Head: An Essay on Musical Performance, Live and Recorded

This was originally published in The Valve on January 06, 2007. Examples of performance range from Louis Armstrong, through Joey Ramone, Elvis Impersonators, not to mention my own experience performaning with a rhythm and blues band in upstate New York.

This post continues a conversation that arose in response to Joseph Kugelmass's No Desert Island: Towards A Gutsy Aesthetics Via Nabokov. At a certain point Joe mentioned What a Wonderful World, “Armstrong's most clichéd entry in the canon,” and I responded with the observation that “but that's Armstrong, not the song itself.” Then Joe responded:

That said, in an age of recorded music, it again becomes hard to separate notation from performance. First of all, it would be hard for a modern singer to perform “What A Wonderful World” without either imitating or rejecting Armstrong's very specific way of performing it, because the recording is as ubiquitous as the written score.

And I found myself on iTunes looking through different performances of “What a Wonderful World,” downloading a few, and analyzing them. And things snowballed through Elvis impersonators, The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band (an upstate New York outfit I played in), Kojo No Tsuke (a Japanese song), world music, and so forth. As Joe said, “an essay on the production and performance of music.”

I rather doubt that that's what Joe had in mind when he made the initial post, nor is that what I had in mind when I started commenting on his post. But that's what happened. You can never tell just what's gonna' come through these net-tubes.

So, I started replying to Joe's last comment and that reply simply refused to listen to reason. It just got longer and longer and longer and refused to shut-up. So I decided to let it have a post all by itself. Joe's post was looking for aesthetics and so's this one. I start with a whole pile of information and observations about music production and performance on the table - if only by implication. What does that have to do with aesthetics?

While this post still takes the form of and is a response to Joe's last comment, much of it should be at least quasi-intelligible to those who haven't been following that discussion.

Objectivity, Practitioner's Criticsim, and Aesthetics

As should be obvious from various posts I've made here, and from stuff of mine elsewhere on the web, I've spent much of my career working on ways of thinking about art that bracket aesthetic judgment in favor of close description and explanation (via models derived from the newer psychologies). I want to know objectively what's there - wherever and whatever “there” is, the text, the mind, the interpretive community, the culture, society, whatever. I make no apologies for this and hope to spend much more time doing it. However the humanities move forward, that kind of work is a necessary part of the mix.

But so is criticism, aesthetic advocacy. Where do I stand on that? I don't really know.

I don't really know. And so in the manner of E. M. Forster, I write so that I can know what I think.

I know a great deal about the critical activity needed to improve one's musical performance, whether as an individual or a group. I've been moderately active as a musician my entire adult life and such critical activity is part of the craft. You think about your own work - both individually and as a group - but you must also think aesthetically, critically, about music you listen to. The practical expression of this activity, however, is in your performance, and your record-CD-download collection, rather than written critical pieces. I've also written occasional critical pieces about this or that - from undergraduate reviews of Bergman's Shame and John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse to more recent reflections on Martin Scorsese's PBS series on the blues - but that's never been a major activity.

So, these conversations give me a chance to begin thinking about aesthetics in a slightly more systematic way. Whether I'll go anywhere with it is another matter, but that will take care of itself.

Me and Music, the First 30 Years

October 18: Added three paragraphs about high school band.

My first memory of music is also my first memory of any kind. It is of listening to Burl Ives sing about a romance between a fly and a bumble bee. I loved that record – it was one of those old 45s – and played it over and ever. I must have been 4 or 5 at the time.

Some time after that, but I have no sense of how long, I remember listening to "Tubby the Tuba" and "Peter and the Wolf" and other things for children. I also remember listening to Viennese Waltzes and to Beethoven and Schubert with my father.

My next specific memory is of taking up the trumpet in fourth grade. The school offered group lessons to children free of charge. I was in a group that included at least two clarinet players, and perhaps that is all; I don't really recall. The two clarinet players were good friends of mine and remained so through high school. We played together in the band, and outside as well.

I do remember that, at some point, I fell behind the others in my lessons. At some point I starting taking lessons with a private teacher whom my parents hired. And then another. I did not practice willingly.

During this period I spent some time figuring out how to play simple melodies that I liked – from TV programs, the radio, whatever. I did this without music. I just fumbled around trying this note and that until I got them all. In some cases I would notate the pitches – but not the rhythms – on staff paper. I would also make up my own tunes.

Then, when I was twelve or so, I starting going to another private teacher, Mr. David Dysert. That's when things clicked. Dysert tailored his teaching to my interests and capabilities in a way then other teachers had not. When he discovered I was interested in jazz – remember the "Firehouse Five Plus Seven" from the Mickey Mouse Club? – he wrote out exercises in swing interpretation and taught me to play them (I've still got these). Later I also took piano lessons from him and he taught me the basics of keyboard harmony. That gave me that basic knowledge of musical structure that I needed years later (late in my college years) when I decided to write horn arrangements for a band I played in and when, still later (graduate school), I decided to become at least moderately proficient in improvising in the swing, bebop, and post-bop jazz styles.

My first musical hero was Rafael Mendez, “the Heifetz of the trumpet,” as he was billed. I was 11 or 12 when I discovered him. He was a Mexican immigrant who’d been Pancho Villa’s personal cornetist when he was ten. He emigrated to American in his early twenties, first to Detroit, but then ending up in Hollywood playing in the studios. From there he went on to a solo career during the 1950s and into the 60s.

I collected his records and bought the sheet music for his trumpet solos. I’ve still got both the records and the sheet music, 30+ solos. Some of them I can play, some of them I can’t. But I still work on them.

And then I started getting into jazz (while studying with Dysert). Louis Armstrong, Maynard Ferguson, Al Hirt, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Cat Anderson, those were the first jazz trumpet players I discovered. I bought a bunch of Louis Armstrong transcriptions and started working on them. As they came with piano accompaniment I work on them with my teacher, Dysert. He’d give me pointers on how to play the rhythms – Armstrong’s timing was masterful – and accompany me on the piano. We also worked on the Mendez solos – and, for that matter, the Hayden Trumpet Concerto.

At the same time I played in the school band during junior high and high school, marching band in the fall (football season) and concert band in the winter and spring. That was a complex and rich experience. It WAS music, and performance. That was good. The band director, Richard Cuppett, was good and so the band was good. I preferred concert band, of course. Not only was the music more interesting, but it was the music itself that was important; we weren’t performing as an adjunct to football glory.

But, you know, marching band has improved in memory, while concert band has not. Concert band remains concert band. But marching band, well, sure, the music was limited, but it was also PUTTING ON A SHOW. And just the business of moving while playing, even doing dance steps for half-time shows, that feels better in retrospect than it did in real-performance. Go figure.

In either case, repertoire was important, for that repertoire covered a lot of time and cultural space, even if it was mostly Western. Military marches, of course, were central to the marching band repertoire; that means Sousa. And Sousa’s band was enormously popular in 19th century America. But we also marched (and danced) to pop tunes, Broadway tunes, movie themes, even re-worked jazz. The concert band repertoire overlapped with the marching band repertoire in all those categories, though many of the arrangements were more complex. This repertoire also included band transcriptions of symphonic music, e.g. Dvorak’s Symphony from the New World. It was one of those concert band arrangements of something or other, a medley, that put “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” into my head. I can still hear the trumpet solo from that arrangement in my mind’s ear.

We’re now in the early 1960s. Rock and roll was all the rage, but I would have none of it, for I was a jazz man. I was also a “nonconformist” – don’t know where the word came from, but that was the word I used back in those days. Secretly I’d admit to myself that some of this rock and roll was OK, nice melodies, good beat. But my public stance was one of opposition. Jazz was superior music. Long live jazz.

That lasted until the Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper. That was my sophomore year in college (Johns Hopkins) and my upstairs neighbors, sophisticated “older” women in their early 20s, thought it was great. So did I.

For the next four or five years I immersed myself in rock. I also maintained a strong interest in classical and, for that matter, in jazz. But it was rock front and center. I was a Beatles man rather than a Stones man. And I suppose I still am, if that matters. Nor did I get into the Dead all that much either. But The Doors, Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, Quicksilver Messenger, The Who, The Electric Flag, Moby Grape, Donovan, Traffic (“Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a Tune…”), Procol Harum, Cream, ate it up.

In the early seventies, while I was working in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins, I returned to the concert band and joined a rock and roll band, The Saint Matthew Passion. We were a horn band – rhythm section plus trumpet, trombone, and sax (doubling on flute) – modeled on Chicago and Blood Sweat and Tears. That’s when I got serious about improvising.

As I’ve already indicated, I’d always been picking up tunes by ear and I’d always messed around with making up my own tunes and licks. In high school jazz band (they called it “stage” band for some reason) I even composed my own “improvised” solo for Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” But I’d never really gone at improvising in a systematic and serious way. Now I did and I quickly developed a number of solos with the band. And I wrote some arrangements: “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, “Something”, “Hey Jude”, and a complex thing combining “Summer in the City” with the “Theme from Alfie” which we never managed to play. We played some fabulous gigs.

At the end of this period I enrolled for trumpet lessons in the adult preparatory division of the Peabody Conservatory. My teacher was Harold Rehrig, who had spent his entire career playing with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. (He must have been with them when they recorded the score to Fantasia.) He helped me get my technique up a notch; in particular, he worked on my breathing.

I went off to graduate school at SUNY Buffalo in the fall of 1973. By that time I’d pretty much lost interest in rock and concentrated on jazz and on my improv skills. I hung out in an improv workshop run by Frank Foster, a top shelf pro who’d played with Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones and many others. He was now a free lancer in New York and would commute to Buffalo to teach class.

That’s when I got really serious about improvising, surrounded as I was by music majors and local jazz musicians (more about that HERE). I did a lot of serious shedding, writing out exercises and working through tune after tune after tune. When the school started a big band, I signed up. I also went to a few local jam sessions and played in a quintet led by Simon Salz.

I left graduate school in 78 and took a job on the faculty at The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. But I’ll stop this here, more or less. I was born in ’47, so that’s just over three decades. That’s by no means the end of my musical history; it’s only the first half, of my life, or my music. It’s a good place to pull over and chill.

But I will say this. By the time the ‘90s started rolling through I was losing interest in simply listening to music. I’d only checked out hip hop enough to satisfy myself that there was some real craftsmanship among the crap – and, you know, every genre’s mostly crap, it’s the craftsmanship that lasts. I want to make music, not merely listen. If someone wants to engage me on a hip hop project, fine. Love to. That’s when I deal with hip hop, while playing it.

Same with any other kind of music. Call me on the gig and I’ll learn the music. ‘Till then, bye.