doneth

Bev, my favorite memory of my family's lip service to art is that my Grandma Clarke treasured a cracked 12" 78 of Madame Schumann-Heink singing 'Silent Night'.

$30 is fair. New hardback fiction is a little less, university press books are often a lot more. I picked up my copy of the Monk book today at Barnes & Noble where I work - the employee discount is nice. It's going to take me a while because I've got a lot going on at the moment but it looks like a really good read.

I was crazy about every kind of music, had to hear everything, from the time I was playing on the kitchen floor while my mother had the radio on. I was drawn to something with color, many years later realizing that I was listening to arrangements, and individual musicians effectively improvising, doing something more than just playing the notes; but it was always a seamless web: it was all music. In the late 1940s - early '50s there were still big bands on the radio; then Fats Waller was an early favorite. I liked Percy Faith in the early 1950s; in retrospect I was already looking for classical music. When I was in my early teens in the mid-1950s I discovered that I could take records out of the library, and I was done for. My family wasn't particularly musical, but my dad paid lip service to classical music: I picked out a box of 45s at Radio Doctors in Milwaukee around 1950, Horowitz playing Schumann's Kinderszenen; my dad was pleased when he bought it for me, saying 'That's the kind of music that doesn't go out of style.' He didn't listen to classical himself (or anything in particular), and it is interesting that that kind of automatic respect for high art has almost disappeared nowadays. I never learned to read music or play a note. I heard short snatches of classical pieces on Mercury 7" 33rpm samplers. I liked the big tune from Brahms' 1st symphony, and was surprised when I took that out of the library that the whole piece didn't make any sense to me. I had to work at it, listen to it over and over until it began to come together, and gradually the learning became easier. I do not know how I knew that the effort would pay off. I next learned that a great deal was down to the performers, just as in jazz, and that a great performance effectively swings, lifting the notes off the page and making them dance and sing. A symphony tells a story, using tones instead of words, and each performance tells a slightly different story, just as in jazz. So much music, so little time.

Thanks, guys and girls. My Billie Holiday book has been published in Portuguese (in Brazil), German, Japanese and Korean, and three years ago I sold the Serbian rights. Now I've discovered that it's been published in Belgrade and they've never sent me a dime! boo hoo sniff

Yeah, but did she swing?

Well, fast reply works. I wonder what all the other buttons are for. Elijah Wald's recent book, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, makes some of the same points I tried to make. I know, there's another thread on that book on this site, but most of the people there haven't read it: I don't know how well Wald makes his points, but the book is full of fun little tidbits, and any book that makes you think is a good book. He starts out apparently flabbergasted at discovering the enormous popularity of Paul Whiteman, said to be the second biggest-selling artist 1890-1950 after Bing Crosby, who started out with Whiteman. Wald doesn't quite point out that a lot of Whiteman's music was very good - somebody should compile the Bill Challis arrangements on CD. (An aside: Henry Louis Gates is the dude who, in the New Yorker when the worthless Tina Brown was editor there, thought that there was something funny about Whiteman's name.) But Wald demonstrates that most of the music we value today was outsold in its time by the likes of Patti Page and Pat Boone. I loved to listen to the radio when I was a kid, but when 'Doggie in the Window' was on the radio every ten minutes, I knew I would have to build my own music collection. The Beatles did destroy rock'n'roll, which was a feisty music, generating regional hits from Clovis, New Orleans, Seattle, Chicago, Memphis, Austin, Nashville etc. The Beatles turned it into art music, a kind of antithesis. The same thing didn't happen earlier with the Elvis Presley tidal wave for a number of reasons, but partly because the audience was smaller. When the Beatles came along the baby boomers were almost grown up (or as close as they ever got) and had lots of spending money; all of a sudden there was so much money involved that the business was turned upside down. For my money, Bob Dylan is still the greatest of the era, but he hasn't sold anything like the records that other superstars have, and I would trade any of the best Fats Domino tracks for all the arty-farty music that came out of Los Angeles in subsequent years. I think Wald's thesis, and mine, is that the industry always went where it thought the most money was, or as Chuck Nessa puts it, they didn't want to sell 10,000 copies each of 100 releases, or even 100,000 copies each of ten releases, but a million copies of one release; and the result today is pop music a lot of which sounds like kids playing with karaoke in their bedrooms, while a lot of good music is found in Americana, which is the new name for the places where rock'n'roll came from. And now the major labels are hitting the wall because kids don't want to pay for throwaway music. There are still millions of people who would like to browse in a record shop, but our money isn't good enough, so the music CDs are being pushed out of Barnes & Noble and Borders by the DVDs, and the irony there is that even the guy who runs Netflix knows that DVDs will disappear too: someday we will all be watching movies on our computers. But when all the music is on the Net, maybe it will be a level playing field.

Hello, Hello. It's Donald Clarke here. I have been registered as musicbox for a couple of days but I have been unable to post. Organissimo reminds me of the cash registers at Barnes & Noble where I work: too many damned buttons. Let's see if this message gets through, and then if I can remember how I did it. Fast Reply, I think...