Going the extra mile, radio style

In my radio days, I've managed to keep my on-air composure while other people were making faces, mooning me, talking about lingerie and a host of other distractions. But my hat is off to the Greek dude in the video above. Still waiting for a translation of the parting remarks.

Via

Oh, Bob...

A couple weeks back I downloaded the song "Dreaming of You" from Bob Dylan's webdongle (and for a while yet you can, too). It's an unreleased track from 1997 (and will soon be part of Tell Tale Signs, Volume 8 in Dylan's "bootleg" series). The song is all you could hope for from a genius at what from this angle appears to be the onset of his winter years. And may it be a long, healthy and productive winter.

Now word reaches these parts that Amazon has "an exclusive video" of the song. My advice: stick with the download. Sure, it was put together by the label to pimp the album, but who would have predicted that something that features both Bob Dylan and Harry Dean Stanton could feel like such an obvious tool?

Of course, any Dylan video is going to have trouble clearing the long shadow of this:


Failing that I'd even prefer a baldfaced knockoff:

Man on the Street

Try as you may, there's no way to escape it. Believe me, I've tried. But last Friday morning the endlessly hollow coverage of the longest presidential campaign in human history caught up with me while I was walking the dog.

As we strolled past the entrance to Loyola's North Shore campus a reporter from the Chicago Fox affiliate called me over. I'm an involuntarily polite Midwesterner, so I stopped.

And since she is a television reporter in a major market, her hair and makeup were flawless, which meant that she'd probably been up for hours at that point. Her camera operator, as so often happens in television, was scraggly and could have passed for homeless, although he too had probably been up untangling cables and checking batteries for hours. At this point, I'd been awake all of 20 minutes and had only spoken briefly to the dog, who for all his good points isn't much of conversationalist.

The ravishing reporter asked if I had watched John McCain's acceptance speech the night before and I told her no, but that I'd heard some of the news coverage. That was good enough for her. Would I mind talking about it on camera? Uh, I guess so. Ravishing and Scruffy leaned in, she with her microphone and him with his camera, and posed a question, something along the lines of "What did you think of the Republican convention?"

Gore Vidal once famously quipped that a person should never turn down an opportunity to have sex or be on television, but this was back in the days before HIV, AIDS, CNN, MSNBC and other dire acronyms. And of course it also assumes that you're able to organize your thoughts into a coherent arrangement of subjects and verbs and predicates, which Vidal always seems able to do. Problem is that even on a good day I'm no Gore Vidal, but especially not at 6:45 AM, unshowered, uncaffeinated, and holding a bag of dogshit.

Up until the question was asked, time seemed to be clicking along more or less at its usual pace. But as a random assortment of words began to make their way out of my mouth, my voice took on the quality of Charlie Brown's teacher. I rattled on for what seemed an eternity, but what a stopwatch would have clocked at a minute, tops. Unfortunately, it was all rattle, baby, and no hum and made about as much sense as the preceding simile. The term farrago comes to mind. In the middle of my blather a bus roared past. The dog tugged politely at the end of the leash.

Having been on the other side of the microphone I could tell that Ravishing and Scruffy were already mentally moving on to the next person on the street, next vox of the populi, hoping for something they could actually use. And I can't blame them one bit.

I kept thinking about it as the dog and I made our way home. After a couple blocks, I had a finally come up with a pithy statement: "I miss the old McCain." You know the one, the actual maverick, not the Stepford/podperson McCain I've been hearing for months now.

As so often happens these days, the fake news folks have the truest take on this.

I don't know that I would have voted for the pre-2006 McCain although it's certainly possible. That guy at least had a soul. And for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Well, Jesus, just ask Dick Cheney.

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See also: My friend Fred has an astute point and cinematic comparison to make about the Palin nomination.

Remembering Bird 2008

Talk about your hall of mirrors. In the photo above TNLD captures the indefatigable blogger Plastic in Bag capturing this video of this year's Charlie Parker memorial, held last weekend at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Summit, MO. (The celebration has become a annual event over the last few years, usually taking place on the Sunday before Bird's birthday which is actually today August 29. Happy birthday, Mr Parker!)

Here's the Kansas City Star's coverage of the event, which includes pictures that are much more professional than anything I took. (I was standing nearby as reporter Brian Burnes and his pen tried to keep up with saxophonist Loren Pickford, who didn't so much talk as radiate phrases that rose, fell and darted bebop style. Burnes probably had to soak his wrist that evening.)

Despite ideal (damn near miraculous, really) late-August weather, the attendance was down from last year's event in almost every category: fewer horns around the grave, fewer folks gawking the musicians, fewer Parker family members, and few members of the Dirty Force Street Band closing things out. There were also fewer revelers at the Mutual Musicians Foundation jam session afterward. The number of bigpipers held steady at one.

This could be taken as yet another reason for hand wringing about the state of jazz in old Kaycee and by extension elsewhere else. I see it more as a matter of logistics and chance.

• Logistics: Two months before, Dean Hampton, the events longtime organizer and a longtime local jazz agitator was forced by illness to hand the event over to a group of volunteers including Fanny Dunfee and Bill Doty and some stalwarts from JAM. And for their first time out, they did a very capable job.
• Chance: You can never tell how many folks, especially jazz fans are going to be able to make it anywhere on a Sunday afternoon. This year's event also faced competition from high-flying birds of another sort at the Kansas City Air Show, as well as other festivals and fair in other places.

That said, in the long run, the event will need some youthifying if it's going to stay fresh. Maybe get some of the kids from the jazz program at the UMKC Conservatory to jump in.

One particularly notable moment from the jam session: The band had played through several of Bird's tunes and wound up with about 10 guys on the stand for Billie's Bounce. They went around the band soloing, first longer solos and then back around trading tighter four-bar solos. As often happens, one guy was on fire and that afternoon it was trumpeter Lonnie McFadden. He really tore it up, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up, prompted hollering from the crowd, and when the song ended and the crowd was cheering, the musicians around him reached out, seemingly involuntarily, to touch him, as though they were hoping some of that fire might pass to them. That's the magic of art, that's the beauty of jazz.

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Listen up: My radio piece from last year's event.

Viddie: Sugarbaby

More high-minded posts to come this week, but for now something relatively new (two weeks), low down and exuberantly trashy from the kids at Morningwood.



There's also a NSFW version for fans of puppet sex and drug abuse. You know who you are.

Happy Birthday, Leon Theremin

...you wacky astronomer-physicist-cellist and inventor of the instrument makes that woo-eee-ooo sound in 1950s sci-fi movies. Oh, and he was also a commie double agent.

Today's Composers Datebook (which I love) celebrates the birth of Russian inventor and electronic music pioneer Leon Theremin on today's date back in 1896 (in a helpful footnote, they point out that li'l Lev Sergeivitch Termen was born on August 3rd on the Julian calendar, lest crotchety fans of said calendar get their panties in a bunch, cuz you know how they are).

I would link directly to today's episode if that were teknowlogiklee possible, but as some American Public Media web 1.0 kludge intrudes, I'll just paste the relevant info from their daily "enewsletter." Check it:

Theremin studied astronomy, physics, and cello, and in 1927 he traveled to the West, where he quickly obtained a patent for an electronic instrument he called the Thereminovox. In the 1930s, Theremin arranged concerts for his creation at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Then, in 1938, without explanation, Theremin disappeared. Some said it was because his American business ventures didn't pan out; others that Theremin was married to two women at the same time, and things had started to get tricky for him stateside. The truth was even stranger: Theremin was a spy, and had been passing on American technical information to the Soviets. Ironically, when he did return home, Theremin was immediately thrown into a Soviet Prison camp for 7 years. While incarcerated, he developed miniature electronic eavesdropping devices for the Soviet government, one of which was successfully installed in the American Embassy, another, for good measure, in Stalin's own apartment.

Those crazy Russians. What will they think of next?

Today's episode of Composer's Datebook features music from Bernard Herrmann's classic score The Day the Earth Stood Still and a theremin passage from Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird (not to be confused with Jim Rockford's classic Firebird). Yet even though they titled today's episode "Leon Theremin's good vibrations," host John Zeck and the kids sadly couldn't crack their classical cool to point of including what is by far the most famous musical use of the theremin:



Viddie: The Beach Boys original 1966 promo film for "Good Vibrations" - guess the BBs loved Help! -- but then who didn't?

» More info on Leon Theremin (and the Teremin) at oddmusic.com (whence the image above was ganked).

Slow Blues

Video: Oscar Peterson and Count Basie, back in the day (although not that far back).

Work in other sectors of my life has been hectic enough of late that posting in this space has slowed to a crawl. So I'm posting the slice of nice above as a way of saying that I shall indeed post again, soon.

Still to come:

• Overdue reviews/reflections on recent releases by Bobby Watson and Erin Bode, among others
  
• A brief meditation on Marilyn Maye
• Scenes from the Greenmill

And it looks like I may be able to make this year's graveside Bird memorial after all. (Here's my recap from last year.)