Larry Kart

Don't mean to hijack the Django thread, but here are two pieces about the Bob Greene affair (so to speak). This one I’ve linked to: http://www.chicagomag.com/pressbox/021803pressbox.htm#more The other one appears below complete because you’ve got to go through a bit of an Internet maze to get to it otherwise. As a Chicago Tribune employee during the Greene years, I believe that while there is even more to be said on the debit side (e.g. the horrific Baby Richard crusade), both pieces are on target as far as they go, even if Neil Steinberg is more than a bit of a prick himself. It was the assumption within the paper that what got Greene fired was that when the story began to come out, he lied to his bosses about his involvement with the girl and, especially, about sicc-ing an FBI agent on her in an attempt to scare her off. Anatomy of Bob Greene The Chicago columnist crusaded on behalf of abused kids. Then he got fired for having sex with a teenage subject. By Neil Steinberg Salon, Sept. 19, 2002 | There is no shorthand to explain Bob Greene, no code. Unlike columnists such as George Will (bow-tied Washington elitist) or Jimmy Breslin (rumpled New York tough guy) or the late Mike Royko (ethnic Chicago wiseass), there is no simple way to describe the deeply weird Midwestern world that Bob Greene built through his column in the Chicago Tribune. That world shattered like a glass Christmas tree ornament hit by a brick last Sunday, after news of his forced resignation was tucked in the lower left-hand corner of the Trib's front page, in a narrow box headlined, cryptically, "To our readers." After nearly 25 years in the newspaper, and more than 30 as a Chicago columnist, he was gone, cashiered. Bob (calling him "Greene" somehow feels wrong, like calling Elvis "Presley") was the bard of Middle America, the defender of abused children, the relentless nostalgist who seldom paused from keening for the lost world of pre-1964 Columbus, Ohio, to notice anything positive in life today. It was all loss and decay, and a sense of sadness over what was and outrage over what is. In Bob's world, children were routinely tortured and murdered while the legal system yawned, cherished institutions crumbled, the niceties of life were abandoned, and nobody cared. When Bob did find something that met his approval, it was inevitably presented as a freakish anomaly, an unexpected flower growing out of our blasted and ruined landscape. When he found a high school string quartet that played diligently at a dinner he attended in South Bend, Ind., he presented the students as one of the rare "signs of hope" in a nation where otherwise "a lot of things" are "destined to go badly, to decline." Bob's world was filled with odd contradictions. He liked baseball but not baseball players, Woody Hayes but not football, airports but not travel. He hated cities but lived in Chicago, lauded the wide-open roads of the Midwest but did not drive. He was the master of the unexplained dateline, filing from some city that had little or nothing to do with that day's topic. His column might, say, carry a Tokyo dateline, but describe, not anything in Japan, but the hotel room, or the little soaps, or something on the cable TV. Perhaps the most distinctive Bob characteristic was repetition. A columnist is supposed to provide a counterpoint to the steady drumbeat of the news. When the front page is chanting Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!, the columnist can cut across field, write something entirely different -- hit some small curiosity one day, and the fate of the universe the next. Not Bob. He would latch onto a subject -- particularly the tales of tortured children he gleaned from trailer park America -- and worry them like a dog with a beefsteak. Four columns in a row were unexceptional for Bob. Eight columns. A heart-wrenching child custody case, the Baby Richard saga, prompted more than 100 columns from Bob, each day repeating large blocks of background, lines like "the only family he has ever known" burning into the memory of his readers as certainly as Homer's "wine-dark sea" and "rosy-fingered dawn." That this world could come crashing down in a sex scandal -- with a high school girl, no less -- was a shock to his fans and a delightful surprise to his detractors. For the past 20 years, there have been two ways to view Bob: You could take him at face value -- and a lot of people did. They viewed his concern for children as sincere, and made his books bestsellers. His column was syndicated. For a time, in the mid-1980s, he wrote the "American Beat" column for Esquire and filed reports for "Nightline." He was pals with Michael Jordan, and his two hagiographies on the star swept away Jordan's complex character in a blast of adoration. Or you could mock him -- and a lot of people did. They viewed his detailed descriptions of child abuse cases as an unsettling kind of pornography, and his take on America sentimental and sappy. The very first issue of the satiric monthly Spy, its October 1986 debut devoted to "JERKS," featured five little square photos of Bob Greene, in a row, under the headline "The Illustrated History of Hair, Part I." In the first, 1971 photo, he was seen on the phone, his bald pate barely covered by a pathetic tuft of hair. In the next four, he is shown in a series of patently fake toupees, lush helmets that would look ridiculous on Madame Pompadour. The toupee seemed to symbolize Bob and his writing -- a simulacrum of nature, an obvious falseness that he seemed to believe was accepted as real. He bared his soul, supposedly, but never a word about the wig. The ridicule swelled -- Chicago radio stations aired sketches and running gags about Bob. The Chicago Reader ran my monthly column, BobWatch, for two years, cruelly dissecting the columnist's passions and failings. The BobWatch philosophy was that Bob was so woefully bad, so frightened and out-of-touch and tone deaf, that he could be savored as a guilty pleasure, the way lousy 1950s sci-fi thrillers are enjoyed as camp. And now he is gone, in a flash on a clear blue Sunday, gone like dial telephones and penny candy. Scandals unfold in a natural, almost mathematical progression, and this one is no different. First that morning's shocking news, a spare gathering of fact: Bob Greene has resigned and "will no longer appear in the pages of this newspaper." He was forced to resign after an anonymous e-mail touched off an inquiry uncovering "inappropriate sexual conduct some years ago with a girl in her late teens whom he met in connection with his newspaper column." The Tribune "deeply regretted the conduct, its effect on the young woman and the impact this disclosure has on the trust our readers placed in Greene and the newspaper." If the Tribune expected this vague scrap of fact to satisfy the local media, hungry on a quiet Sunday, it had, again, failed to grasp what people consider news. Bob is married, with two kids, one of whom he celebrated in the 1984 bestseller "Good Morning, Merry Sunshine," the book that began the trend of writers commoditizing their children. Merry Sunshine is about the age of the girl he admitted to having sex with. Reporters fanned out, hot on the trail of Bob and the girl, and battering at the Tribune corporate doors, which were barred. The Trib's spokesman said merely that the statement stood on its own with no need for elaboration. Greene issued the standard, passive apology fragment, that he was "sorry for anyone I have let down." The story led the local TV newscasts in Chicago on Sunday, except of course for WGN (which, remember, stands for "World's Greatest Newspaper"), the station owned by the Tribune, which buried it deep in the program. So much for synergy. There is a certain indignity that follows Bob like a cloud. When the Tribune inserted a "time capsule" CD-ROM in the paper the previous Sunday, it included a special warning -- due to a glitch, clicking on the Bob Greene column caused the program to shut down. The scandal a week later was no different. Despite the seriousness of the reports, a subtle mockery filtered in. The local NBC station misspelled his name, "Green," in its ID tag. The Fox reporter initially gave his name as "Mike Greene." Newspapers leak like paper bags filled with water. By Monday, the details were dribbling out: The girl was a high school student visiting the Tribune for a project. There was sex in a hotel room and Bob wrote about her in his column -- not about the sex, of course, but a fond look at her naive questioning as part of the high school project. As with all things Bob, there was a weird twist. After the girl -- now a woman in her 30s -- called Bob on the phone, twice, she was contacted by the FBI, who told her, her e-mail to the paper claimed, that she was threatening the columnist. Even the Trib, which at first tried to stonewall, carried a next-day story on the vigorous debate over Bob's dismissal. There was plenty to ponder. Just why was Bob forced to quit? For the sex? That seemed odd -- his reputation for goatish pursuit of young women was an open secret. Everyone seemed to know women who had stories of Bob creepily singing his love song at them. I myself knew four. Why would the Tribune decide to act now, on this particular complaint? It couldn't be the first. Was it because he then wrote about his little missy in his column? That would be more in keeping with the Trib's recent high-profile moralizing. The paper had refused to even look at the photos of a photographer at ground zero after learning he had accepted a free T-shirt from Chicago firefighters. That set people's heads shaking -- we've come a long way from the days when City News reporters occasionally kicked in the basement windows of a crime victim's home to steal a photograph of the deceased off the mantle. They couldn't let the path to coverage in the Tribune lead through Bob Greene's bed. Or was it something else? News stories do not always emphasize the most salient facts, and Bob's apparent terrified rush to the FBI was a fact that was easy to overlook, particularly as the image of Bob Greene having sex with a teen was seared into the collective consciousness. His running to the FBI was not buried safely in the 1980s, but recent, this year. The Trib takes its ombudsmanship seriously, and can't have complaining readers ratted out to the feds. And what did the woman call about, anyway? The assumption is that, if she was actually threatening or blackmailing Bob, that would be somehow exculpatory, and the Trib would have mentioned it. What did she say? At midweek, we are at the point where, traditionally, the wrongdoing, which initially was passed off as an isolated indiscretion, is found to have been a longstanding pattern of behavior. Radio talk-show phone lines heated up with women claiming to have approached Bob as admiring young fans and left him as despoiled groupies. So far, the Trib has refused to entertain the issue of whether this was the first complaint or, like the Baby Richard columns, one in a chain of 100. "We are dealing with one specific allegation, and that's what we addressed," said Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune editor. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this entire episode is how quickly the Tribune cast its premiere columnist's being fired for using the newspaper as a chick magnet into a moral triumph. The newspaper positively glowed with pride, in a flurry of self-administered back-pats. "I'm also intensely proud of the people who run this newspaper," wrote metro columnist John Kass. "Because they had the courage to do something painful to repair that trust." "Tribune journalists must," noted an editorial, "under possible penalty of dismissal, abide by 12 pages of policies on ethics and business conduct." Now Chicago journalists are wondering how the Tribune -- which in the past five years has lost such marquee names as Mike Royko, Ann Landers and, now, Bob Greene -- will be affected, and if the Bob Greene story has legs. Midweek of the first week, interest in Bob's Big Blunder seems to have not yet crested. CNN and MSNBC are preparing programs. Newsweek is investigating. And even his detractors are shaking their heads in amazement and feeling, perhaps, a twinge of regret over the loss of Bob's warped world. Who will we make fun of now?

Don't have everything Charles recorded (far from it) and don't have fresh in my mind everything of his I do have, but with the possible exception of his solo on "You Go To My Head" (on "The Teddy Charles Tentet" album), the only Charles solo work that really works for me is on that circa 1957 Jubilee album "Three For Duke" -- an all-Ellington program, with Oscar Pettiford and Hall Overton (often in a very Monkish vein and pretty effectively so). It's certainly the only Charles I know where you could say (or I could say) he sounds fairly relaxed -- although "fairly relaxed," given his conception, was all you'd want or expect from him; there was a lot of seemingly necessary tension built into his music. BTW, while influence probably wasn't involved, Charles seems to me like a point on the line that led to Walt Dickerson. Also, BTW, I guess I'm safe in praising "Three For Duke" because I may be one of maybe ten people on the planet who owns a copy (and mine, sadly, is not in very good shape).

I'll report on the Dregni bio when I'm finished but have been deflected by other matters. Don't have the Delauney, so I can't compare it to Dregni. Sounds like Brownie knows the Delauney though, in the original French.

Got my fingers crossed that Allen's book comes out. Fascinating subject and the right author. Of many not figures mentioned yet, a guy who's always intrigued me is composer Duane Tatro. As different as they are in obvious ways, I hear a kinship with Monk in the way Tatro's pieces almost puritantically feed on their oblique core material until it's all magically used up. I spoke to Tatro once in the 1980s -- he lives (or lived, think he might be gone now) in Van Nuys, Ca., did a lot of TV scoring at one time. A very nice guy who was pleased to hear that the music on "Jazz for Moderns" was fondly remembered, he said he'd send me a tape of the premiere performance a 12-tone guitar concerto he wrote for Howard Roberts, but it never arrived.

Now that you mention it. It's perfect.

Garth: That Gopnik on Django piece was innocuous for the most part, mostly because he didn't seem to see a way, given the subject, to inject his "professional bright boy with lots of clever ideas"" persona into the mix -- though his reference to Hendrix at the end may have been a gesture in that direction. Typically, however, the subject of almost every Gopnik piece I've read or dipped into over the years (and then thrown across the room) has been the care and feeding of that "professional bright boy with lots of clever ideas"" persona of his. Now we (that is, you and I) are both of a certain age I believe (I'm 62), and I think we both have had our share of journalistic experience, so perhaps I don't need to explain what a "professional bright boy etc." -- for they abound in journalism (virtually their native habitat), and the stench they give off, once encountered, is unmistakable and unforgettable. Defrocked columnist Bob Greene would be one sterling example; while Gopnik's veneer is far more intellectual when it suits him, he and Greene veer toward an "aw-shucks" pose whenever necessary. Basically, the problem with such people is that they are, in their work and their inter-personal behavior, cynical lying suck-ups. They trade on their boyishness long after the calendar says that they ought to be regarded as men, and one can never take any of things that they profess to care about as something that they ever in fact considered apart from the advantage they might gain from professing to care about them. For instance, one of the things I know about you is that you are a passionate, knowledgable admirer of Buddy DeFranco; the genuineness of your relationship to DeFranco's music goes without saying because it's so clearly THERE -- to the point where I'm sure that anything else I might discover about who you are and what you've written or done in your life would have to be congruent with your deep fondness for DeFranco's music. And the same, I hope, could be said of me more or less -- when and if any of my enthusiasms are compared to anything else I've done or said, in public or in private. But the Gopniks of this world are living billboards dedicated to the promotion and retailing of the false self. And as with Bob Greene (about whom abundant evidence is now available to all) the scariest thing about most such customers is that may not, in fact, be as cynical as they seem to be -- rather, they quite likely believe in their own poses and cover stories up to and beyond the point where they crumble. A Gopnik anthology would prove my point, but I don't have the will to assemble one. Here's a link to a review of a Gopnik book that touches upon some of what I've said above: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/books...PARIS_MOON.html

I'm in the middle of the Django bio, which seems pretty solid, but per Allen's comment above, the New Yorker reviewer of the book, staff writer Adam Gopnik, is close to the top in that fairly rare category, the not-unintelligent idiot (piss-elegant division, in his case). While he doesn't say anything flat-out stupid in this case until, as Allen points out, the very end, bullshit (or is it horse shit?) is always lurking there with Gopnik because everything he says is something (a) he's prepped himself on more than experienced (b) his motvies for saying anything that he says always have to do with power and advancement of self. See Renata Adler's book about The New Yorker for gory Gopnik details, though she's quite a piece of work herself along related lines.

The Condon is excellent, everyone one in fine form, Pee Wee especially. Don't know that Sarah, but I wouldn't hesitate.

If you really like Friedman, you'll need both the ethereal "Circle Waltz" (perhaps the most "modal" jazz album, figuratively if not literally, ever made) and the somewhat less wistful "Flashback" -- they're more or less where Friedman started from, at least as a recording artist -- but the Friedman OJC to seek out if you're only getting one is the significantly tougher/knottier "Metamorphosis," with Attila Zoller, Richard Davis, and Joe Chambers. Davis and Chambers are full partners here and in superb form.

"Harlem Piano," with Luckey Roberts and Willie The Lion Smith. Good Lion, fantastic Roberts. And a great album cover photo too -- Lee Freidlander, I think.

I'm at page 201. Lots of old friends, but my favorite so far (and not only, I think, because it was new to me) is the 1962 Hot Lips Page piece. Seems to me that it encapsulates with special strength (as do "Lester Leaps In" and "Paul Desmond" to come, of the ones that I recall right now) one of the "secrets" (if that's to way to put it) of Dan's character and thus of his relationship to the music -- the width and depth of his empathy with the width and depth of what's really going on, which in turn can lead to the same thing flowing back, wide and deep, from the music and the players to him ... and back and forth and on and on.

"Does he see you when you're sleeping?" That's along the line of what struck me as funny, but I might have been thinking of an ad for (or the title of) a '50s William Castle horror movie or the rhythm and sound of an ad that used to be on Chicago radio all the time in the '60s -- "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday ... at U.S. 30 Dragstrip" etc.

To answer your question, while I didn't hear DeFracno the last time he was in town, about a year ago, a friend whose opinion I respect did hear him and said that Buddy was in fine form. My sense is that a lot depends on who he's playing with and what the overall concept is. A good rhythm section with Buddy calling the shots as far as repertoire and you should be more than OK; on the other hand, I didn't much care for the band he had with Terry Gibbs (though the players were fine) because it pushed Buddy into a neo-Benny Goodman role.

No disrespect intended to DeFranco (I'm a fan) or to Tel-Aviv (I'm Jewish), but there's something about the rhythm/sound combo of the phrase "Buddy DeFranco is coming to Tel-Aviv" that just cracked me up.

"Been reading Ralph Ellison's writings about jazz recently and it seems he's the main critical inspiration for some of the philosophical bent of Murray, Crouch and Co. especially in Ellison's story about Bird and his relation to modernism, audience and aesthetics..." Well, yes -- up to a point. But Ellison did write a great novel, compared to which Murray whittled some useful sticks and then cancelled that out times two, while Crouch has all the "philosophical bent" of a sack of shit.

Another classy Chicago tenorman, Eddie Johnson, whose only album AFAIK, "Indian Summer," was recorded by Chuck Nessa in 1981, when Johnson was 60.

Hi Ghost -- Met your brother. Signing went well, or at least that's what they told me -- sold about 10 or 12 copies, which they said was good (at least on a lousy weather day). Most important for me, it was pleasant in simple human terms -- someone nice to talk to as long as it lasted (about 2 1/2 hours), including two older gents who hadn't come for the signing but bought copies of the book after leafing through it. One of them turned out to have moved three weeks ago from Chicago to Whitehall, Mi., where Chuck and Ann live. This guy, in his mid-70s it seemed, had some great stories about gigs at South Side Chicago clubs like the Crown Propeller Lounge, including one where both Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were on the bill, and they played at each other for part of the evening from opposite sides of the room.

I'm impressed by Christophe Schweizer -- as a player and, especially, as a composer, though in his case it's hard to separate those things.

Correction: On that defective Shaw CD on Prism, the vocal with the striking arrangement (the coda in particular) is "He's Funny That Way." It's sort of Gil Evans-ish in the way that there's little or no sense of sections, just a shifting cloud of sound, with Jimmy Raney dancing in and out of view and the pulse almost obliterated by a "Jeux"-like hovering, but I'm sure it's not Evans; the fingerprint is different.

I have an apparently O.O.P. CD (copyright 1987) on the cheapo English Prism label of radio transcriptions (not airchecks) by Artie Shaw's superb 1949 band -- the one with Don Fagerquist, a sax section of Herbie Steward, Frank Socolow (altos) Al Cohn, Zoot Sims (Tenors), Danny Bank (bari), Jimmy Raney on guitar, and charts by Geroge Russell, Johnny Mandel et al. Sound was fine, and several pieces, including a mindboggling setting for pure-toned vocalist Pat Lockwood of "You Do Something To Me" (arranger unidentified -- no liner notes at all), were not recorded commercially by the band ASFAIK. Played it once, everything went OK; next time several tracks wouldn't play at all, and others skipped and jumped. Damn.

Thomas' name came up as one of the lyrical Swing Era players that Fruscella and Don Joseph might have liked and been affected by. There's no "controversy," I think, because his work on that Hawkins album, tasty though it is, doesn't compare to the recordings he made in his 1944-46 prime for Keynote and H.R.S. Check out his solos on "Russian Lullaby" with the Red Norvo Septet and "She Didn't Say Yes" with his own band (both Keynote) or his exchanges with Johnny Hodges on "Sumpin' Jumpin' Round Here" with Sandy Williams' Big Eight (H.R.S.) for example.

Hi Jim -- Just read the thread. Some very good people gather here, and one of the main reasons they do is that they know right off that you're a very good person. I hope (and, having read it all in one gulp, somehow believe) that you and Allison will come out the other side of this.

I bought "Handyland U.S.A." way back when (haven't had it for years -- think Leon Levitt got it when he paid me a very creepy visit some 25 years ago) and agree with Chuck. There's something (or several somethings) about that date that aren't what they should be. As I recall: The pieces are too short, three minutes or so, for what is essentially a blowing date and a bit cutesy at times; Eager, one of the two soloists most of us would be most eager (sorry) to hear sounds a bit thick-fingered and thick-headed, like he's got a bad cold or hasn't been playing steadily enough (Eager admirers will still want to hear him on this though), while Schildkraut (the other main attraction IMO) seems, like most everyone else, to be a bit detached from the proceedings. Sound is not quite right too and might have contributed a great deal to this feeling; it's like they're in a big hall (Webster Hall, probably--normally a fine place to record I believe), but the engineer got too much of an empty big hall sound (this doesn't help Art Mardigan ins particular). The soloist who comes off best, I recall, was Ernie Royal.

I have a not-in-great-shape copy of the "Showboat" LP. It's very commercial in intent -- a bit along the lines of Enoch Light's Command label ping-pong stereo stuff -- and in the liner notes Teo Macero says "We hope you will find the sounds in this album pleasing, modern -- but not too modern!" etc. Also, Macero explains that the project was, from our point of view, more less screwed up by him, or by others at Columbia. Barry Galbraith had a multiple-guitar rehersal band and asked Carisi for some arrangements. Carisi came up with a five-guitar setting of "Israel," liked what he heard when he heard Galbraith and friends play it and approached Columbia with the idea of doing an album of originals with that instrumentation, plus horn soloists and rhythm. Columbia (perhaps that was Macero) said "OK, but lets forget about the originals and use the music from 'Show Boat.'" That said, the album has its moments -- a tasty Carisi theme statement and solo on "Nobody Else But Me" and a track or two where Carisi has written out Lester Young-ish "solos" for the guitar choir, which they play with considerable elan (in addition to Galbraith, the "choir" includes Jimmy Raney).

Don't recall whether it's come up before on this thread, but Coleman Hawkins loved Costa's playing (according to D. Morgenstern). Wish there were more evidence of Costa and Hawkins together. All I know is those two old Crown LPs with Thad Jones. Are they on CD? That material sure could do with a decent remastering, especially since Crown pressings were vile, but if they're now on Fresh Sound (which seems a good bet), they'll probably be dubbed from the LPs.