Christiern

SToryville (Denmark) is, with some regularity, issuing all the Jubilee transcriptions on single CDs. Rather than concentrate on the big band tracks, they give you the entire show, complete with banter and comedy skits.

You're welcome. Here are Louis and Lil...

Someone already mentioned Valaida Snow, but there was also Flores Jean Davis, Una White, and Izola Fedford, all of whom--like Clora Bryant--played with the Prairie View Co-Eds in the early 40s; Dolly Jones, whose real name was Doli Amenra. Her mother, Dyer Jones also played trumpet. Thelma Lewis played with Frances Grey's Queens of Swing in the early 40s. Others were Florence Shefte, Jane Sager, Elizabeth Thomas, Norma Carson (whom I heard play in Iceland in 1955 or 6), Delores Gomez, Fran Shirley... ...the list goes on.

Her's Lil again, with her first husband, Johnny, on their wedding day - 1922....

Lil Armstrong looks like she is testifying, but she is talking to Franz Jackson during a break at our Sept. 7, 1961 session (at "The Birdhouse," a Chicago club). That's Darnell Howard behind her and--on the left, Pops Foster in conversation withPreston Jackson. In the background we see drummer Booker Washington and Jimmy Archey.

And here is Lil Armstrong in 1916, showing off a gown her mother made for her....

Here's a 1940s shot of Alberta Hunter, J.C. Higginbotham, and Lil Armstrong. In the early 20s, Lil used to accompany Alberta in Chicago joints.

Clora Bryant is by no means unique--there have been quite a few female trumpet players on the jazz scene, and some of them also sang.

Thanks, Chrris. No, they are not from a book--I have boxes full of photos. If this thread wasn't limited to women, I'd be able to post some nice early Louis photos. I y'all want, I'll be glad to continue--and stick to the rarely-if-ever seen. Here's a 1961 photo I took at Rudy Van Gelder's studio. An Elmer Snowden session that resulted in a Prestige album called "Uptown and Lowdown." (L to R: Elmer, Abe Bolar, Rudy Powell, and Floyd Casey). Cliff Jackson and trumpeter Ed Allen were also on the date. BTW As usual, my focus was off.

Guess someone ate the bananas...

Here's Alberta Hunter doing her bit for the war effort. She would later lead the first black U.S.O. tour, traveling throughout the European and China-Burma areas.

Mabel Mercer gives Ruth Warrick (aka Phoebe Tyler) an autograph. Ruth, BTW, also does cabaret singing--not jazz, but she is a fan.

There are not many photos of Lovie Austin around, but here's one I took in her home in 1961:

I think we need to keep Greg's often idiotic, always arrogant posts in mind as a standard of gratuitous nastiness to which depth we should strive never to sink. Did I get it all in?

One night when I was having dinner at Sylvia's (a HArlem eatery that is not as good as it used to be), a rather large group of Japanese tourists came in and were seated at 4 combined tables. They ordered a lot of food, and as each dish was placed on the table, the tour guide made a comment. When the collard greens came in, he went on for about ten minutes (in Japanese, of course), and the tourists were listening as closely as we might to a solo of rare beauty. I have always wondered what the man said about collard greens that so enraptured his audience. I think "dig in" would have told them all they needed to know.

Good one, indeed--too good not to enhance for easier perusal... B...if you lift it from here and use it to replace what you have in your original post, go ahead--I'll then delete this post.

Nor am I affiliated with the merchant (although I wrote the narrative for this DVD). I don't get royalties, but thanks for bringing this DVD up. Since the producer picked a non-jazz person (stage director Lloyd Richards) to read the narration, I'm sorry we didn't have Paula Kelly--she would probably have been better.

Yes, that would have been nice, but let's be fair here--they only had 19 hours. B)

Basically, he put on a turban, changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, shot a sheriff's deputy, and landed in jail for life.

The Problem With Jazz Criticism A noted critic and social commentator on why he was let go by the JazzTimes By Stanley Crouch NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE June 5 -- Today's jazz criticism always encourages one kind of diversity or another, that is, except when it comes to differences of opinion. It supports the idea of individual direction unless that direction provides another point of view on what is valuable in the art, what its definition is, and which of today's musicians should be celebrated. THERE IS such consistency in the jazz press, and its predilections, that it represents a virtual conspiracy--not one that includes clandestine meetings or muttering in code--but a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism. It's stapled to concepts that Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg pushed into the art world during the 1940s and 1950s, championing the narrows of Abstract Expressionism as "advanced" because they ignored the body of basic classical skills in the interest of autobiographical methods devised by the painters themselves. But right now, while mouthing those theories, jazz criticism is actually dominated by an adolescent vision of rebellion that arrives from the world of pop music, rock in particular. That is why I was fired last month from JazzTimes, the most-widely read jazz magazine in the country, despite the editors saying otherwise. (They said it had "become tedious," that they could no longer ignore my "conflicts of interest," my "missed deadlines," or my "belligerence and vitriol.") I opposed the code of the jazz establishment, itself a union of white people who, while not at all card-carrying racists, express what amounts to a backlash against all ongoing discussions of supposed black superiority and aesthetic ownership in the world of jazz. The result is the elevation of white jazz musicians above their black betters, or even above their white betters if those white betters do not fit into a conception of "pushing the envelope." Where things become complicated, however, is that black musicians are embraced if they have voluntarily enlisted in the army that takes to heart what Rimbaud called "the love of sacrilege." This perfectly aligns with the pop world, where almost all acts are presented as rebellious. The marketing tool of the corporations--the elevation of novelty--dominates jazz criticism, which is why a trio like the Bad Plus, as well as anyone who works with hip-hop materials is praised. Let us rebel against convention by submitting to convention. Before I was fired from JazzTimes, by e-mail, I was pursued by Glenn Sabin, the CEO of the magazine, for a number of years. I turned him down, feeling that my position as a founder and an adviser to Jazz at Lincoln Center (and a friend and occasional colleague of Wynton Marsalis) would lead to dismissals of anything that I wrote, even though the column was supposed to be given to my opinions, which is something quite different from writing record reviews or some such. When I finally began writing a column for the magazine about a year ago, the editors were well aware of the fact that I did not buy into the vision of the jazz critical establishment. They claimed to have been interested in me for those reasons, assuring me that it would be good to have me 'mix it up," as the saying goes. I had by then grown tired of an establishment that pretended to be at war with an establishment. I did not buy the idea that there was no definition whatsoever of jazz and that any attempt to define jazz was an attempt to "put it in a box," an idea that had come into jazz from two directions. One direction comes from musicians of the 1960s, who considered themselves avant garde and had rejected the word jazz in favor of "black music" or "creative music." When they found no takers for their wares, they angrily returned to the world of jazz--which most of them couldn't play!--and were eventually embraced by jazz critics who are, for various reasons, obsessed with exclusion and have grafted ideas about cultural relativism into the world of criticism. They love to assert, over and over, that everything is relative and jazz is whatever you choose to call it. Otherwise, they argue, you speak for an establishment trying to keep a variety of jazz musicians from receiving respect. The other direction for this thinking comes from the period in which Miles Davis and a number of first-class jazz musicians sold out to rock and produced what was eventually called "fusion," jazz-tinged improvisation over stiff, rock beats that did not swing. The result today is the instrumental pop music known as "smooth jazz." I bought none of that. Jazz has a very solid base of Afro-American fundamentals that exclude no one of talent, regardless of color, anymore than the Italian and German fundamentals of opera do. These fundamentals remained in place from the music's beginnings in New Orleans to, literally, yesterday. Those fundamentals are 4/4 swing (or swing in any meter), blues, the romantic or meditative ballad, and what Jelly Roll Morton called "the Spanish tinge," meaning Latin rhythms. All major directions in jazz have resulted from reimagining those fundamentals, not avoiding them. Taking such positions occasioned much heated mail to JazzTimes in which I was accused of everything from provincialism and nostalgia to being a racist, which should not have surprised me since my criticism of various established Negroes over the years has been interpreted as the boot-licking of an Uncle Tom neoconservative. In keeping with the latter identity, my JazzTimes writing also attacked the ganster-rap wing of hip-hop for reiterating a kind of minstrelsy in which black youth was defined as truly "authentic" in the most illiterate, vulgar, anarchic and ignorant manifestations. I concluded that such material was popular among whites because such "authentic" Negroes, however hip-hopped up, were aggressively reinstituting the folklore of white supremacy since such black people were surely inferior to those outside of their world. Since all of my opinions went against the consensus and called out the racial politics, I was fired, more for the first problem, which was questioning an establishment that pretends it does not exist. An e-mail for in-house perusal but mistakenly sent to me by the president of JazzTimes talks of "industry" pressure to remove me, which was later denied publicly. The public explanation, however, claims that my material was too predictably full of diatribes and promotion of my friends. Covering the controversy that arose following my firing, Adam Shatz wrote in The Nation that if JazzTimes applied such standards across the board the magazine would immediately have to cease publication. Shatz also claimed that a heated argument over definition is going on in the world of jazz criticism. An interesting observation. As the single voice of diversity in a world opposed to serious debate, I would like him to show me where it exists. And here is Jazz Times' response to the Newsweek article: "The Problem With Jazz Criticism" by Stanley Crouch, published online by Newsweek on June 5, 2003, is filled with misleading paragraphs and outright lies as to why JazzTimes ended his column, "Jazz Alone." Let's begin with this quote from Crouch: "I was pursued by Glenn Sabin, the CEO of the magazine, for a number of years. I turned him down, feeling that my position as a founder and an adviser to Jazz at Lincoln Center (and a friend and occasional colleague of Wynton Marsalis) would lead to dismissals of anything that I wrote...." It is true that Sabin did pursue Crouch for a column, but in no way did Crouch turn him down because of being worried about conflicts of interest with Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center, as you will soon see. That's a complete fabrication. In fact, Crouch agreed to write our back-page column in 1998, but for months and months he never turned in a single article--meaning his history of missed deadlines with JazzTimes extends to his very first assignment with the magazine. Crouch's usual excuses followed as to why he hadn't been able to turn in his first column, but after waiting many months the magazine finally gave up and turned over its much-coveted back-page space to Nat Hentoff (who has never been late once). Even after hiring Hentoff, Sabin pursued Crouch from time to time over the years, and vice-versa, about doing the column again, but Crouch wouldn't budge unless he was given the back page. Sorry, but he had blown it once, and we weren't going to remove Hentoff. After the September 11 attacks happened, Crouch wrote Sabin to see if he would still be interested in running a column. Crouch claimed that he was shaken by the events in New York City, and he felt a need to reconnect with his jazz writing; the fact that we couldn't offer the back page did not matter to him anymore. He had things to say, and he wanted JazzTimes to be the place to say them. Too bad, then, that from the beginning Crouch fell into his old ways: missing deadlines and turning in sloppy, rambling columns. We stuck with him for as long as we could, but after more than a year of battling with him over basic journalistic principles--missing deadlines, conflicts of interest, turning in clean copy--we opted to end his column. Here's another twisted version of the truth from Crouch: "Since all of my opinions went against the consensus and called out the racial politics, I was fired, more for the first problem, which was questioning an establishment that pretends it does not exist. An e-mail for in-house perusal but mistakenly sent to me by the president of JazzTimes talks of 'industry' pressure to remove me, which was later denied publicly. The public explanation, however, claims that my material was too predictably full of diatribes and promotion of my friends." Why doesn't Crouch just quote from this e-mail if it's such a smoking gun? Here's the exact sentence he's referring to from Sabin's e-mail: "The 'we' you refer to was the editor, publisher and to a large extent many readers and industry folks who felt you were 'over the top' in your editorials." What Sabin was responding to was Crouch's question about who the "we" was in the e-mail saying we--the publisher and the editor--were ending his column. What Sabin is referring to, when he mentions "readers and industry folks," is our letters page, which was filled, month after month, with readers wondering why we were wasting space on running the ad hominem attacks that had come to characterize Crouch's JazzTimes column. Not a single advertiser ever threatened to pull an ad because of Crouch's column, so those charges or implications are wholly bogus. After we sent an e-mail to Crouch saying that JazzTimes was ending "Jazz Alone" because it had run its course, he fired back a vitriolic response that lumped us in with a white critical establishment that he sees is intent on promoting less-deserving white musicians over more-talented black players. He included this conspiracy theory in his missive: "...if you pretend that there is no critical establishment, read the New York Times, Down Beat, the Village Voice, and JazzTimes. All celebrate the same people. I wonder how that happens? It couldn't be that they know each other and make decisions over the telephone, could it? I'm [sic] know that you know." This follows a comment he made in the Atlantic Monthly recently about white critics disliking Wynton Marsalis because he "has had access to a far higher quality of female than any of them could ever imagine." Crouch is certainly entitled to his opinions, even if they are laughably stupid. Also, for the record, Crouch's last column was on Eric Reed in May 2003, not his now-infamous "Putting the White Man in Charge" from April 2003. This fact has been misrepresented in the media several times. Again, we ended "Jazz Alone" because we decided the column had become tedious, because Crouch missed nearly every deadline by a country mile while making grade-school excuses as to why and because we could no longer ignore his deep conflicts of interest. For example, the "White Man" column was really just a thinly veiled attack on those who had criticized Wynton Marsalis and his associates, nothing more. The column was originally scheduled for the January/February 2003 issue, but it did not run until April 2003 because Crouch missed all his rewrite deadlines. When he finally did turn in his rewrite, he kept trying to position Marsalis into the column, going on about the greatness of the trumpeter's All Rise CD (for which Crouch wrote the liner notes). Since Crouch has worked for and with Marsalis for years, making many thousands of dollars in the process--hardly the type of relationship that lends itself to Crouch's characterization of himself and Marsalis as "occasional colleagues"--it was a blatant conflict of interest. And holding up Marsalis as the be all, end all as Crouch viciously tore down other players would completely undercut his argument, which we considered an important one worth investigating: that white critics elevate white players over some black players because of skin color. We asked Crouch not to focus on Marsalis and, if this problem was as prevalent as he believed, to choose other musicians to prove his point. Crouch would hear none of it. In a December 12, 2002, e-mail, Crouch writes, "I am not worried about 'undercutting' my argument. Marsalis IS the problem to these white men and, as you will see in my next column, their hatred of him has also led to their ignoring the contributions of musicians associated with him." "Jazz Alone" had become nothing more than a sounding board for Crouch to attack those he felt had wronged him, Wynton Marsalis or their associates. That doesn't make for an interesting column over the long haul, which is why we told Crouch "Jazz Alone" had run its course; we never said he couldn't write for the magazine again, even though he has proven near-impossible to work with (ask his former Village Voice colleague Harry Allen, or Jazz Journalists Association president Howard Mandel, both of whom Crouch has punched over disagreements). Instead, Crouch started up a smear campaign toward us when we ended his column, running to every media outlet he could find to plead his case--even if it meant skewing the facts. If the divorce between Crouch and JazzTimes is so important, it's too bad that more of these media outlets didn't see fit to write balanced news reports about these events instead of letting one side b lather on in opinion pieces, regardless of whether or not his facts are correct. Anyone who still thinks that what Crouch wrote in that one column was the cause of his "firing" (we ended a freelancer's column, just as we've ended columns by Ira Gitler and Martin Williams in the past) is just plain wrong. Our history proves that we've never strayed from covering sensitive racial or social topics, and we will never stray--and we will continue addressing these topics with intelligence and grace, rather than with the mindless vitriol that has characterized Crouch's career.

Although I worked on it, I highly recommend Bill Russell's 720-page scrapbook, "Oh, Mister Jelly". It contains many interesting, rare illustrations, a absorbing exchange of letter betwen Morton and his music publisher/friend, Roy Carew. Reminiscences by many, many people who experienced Morton in person; several pages of Morton's orchestrations (his own notations); reproduction of letters writen by Morton, and as much as exists of Morton's unfinished autobiography. Also, Roy Carew's wonderful recollections of early New Orleans, and an interesting article on the 1939 Victor sessions, written by Charles Edward Smith, based on first-hand accounts by Frederick Ramsey, Jr. I think it can be bought in the U.S., but the publisher is JazzMedia (Copenhagen). The ISBN is 87-88043-26-6 For all things Mortonian, check out Mike Medding's UK site: http://www.doctorjazz.freeserve.co.uk

Just to keep y'all up-to-date, the book party went well this (June 11) evening. Here are Dan Morgenstern and yours truly (we knew each other long before the gray hair):

Randy Weston is sadly overlooked on these BBS's, and I have long wondered why one hardly ever sees mention of Erroll Garner--I hope it's not because of his enormous commercial success. That will sometimes turn jazz people off, or make them somewhat suspicious. Heorge Shearing once told me that critics and fans labeled as "commercial" (and, therefore, of little jazz interest) his MGM recordings, but that he was essentially playing the same music when they showed enthusiasm. Thanks for bringing up Garner's name, clandy44.

That might be it, mnytime--I'll ask them.

There is some sort of Armstrong package in the making--don't know if its a Hot Fives/Sevens lite, but they asked me for the same photos.