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garthsj
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Posts posted by garthsj
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We were a teenage group of real jazz nuts in far off Cape Town, South Africa, and Charlie Parker was a mythical God to us. Even to us fifteen year-olds, he was the fountainhead from which all else had sprung (our knowledge of jazz at that time was based largely on that found in liner notes). I distinctly remember being in bed early on the morning after his death, and reading a small piece in the Cape Times about the "death of a famous jazz musician in New York" the day before. I was stunned and later that day, after I informed all of my jazz buddies, none of whom had seen the piece in the newspaper, we went to Frank's house and played several Parker albums. For whatever reason, I distinctly recall the joy I received that afternoon from hearing his version of "Star Eyes" ... I still do. The most intriguing memory is that right after lunch at my high school, the famous phrase "BIRD LIVES" appeared in rather large letters on the student's washroom wall ... word spread and we made excuses to go and see it. No one ever owned up to doing it (I wish I could take the credit), and it remained there for several months, before being whitewashed over by some uncaring custodian.
As an aside .... for many years, written minutely in the grouting of the tiles above one of the urinals on my floor at the university, was the legend "Bird Lives" ... hmmmmmmm .. I wonder who put it there? After several years of comfort staring at this affirmation, one day I was intensely disturbed to see that someone had added the word "Larry" to the front of the message! I tried removing it, but was never too successful, so I switched to another urinal. Now that I am in an entirely new building, and have a new washroom, the fiftieth anniversary will be honored in suitable style tomorrow when no one is around.
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I have just received the news that Larry Bunker has died. He was one of the great west coast percussionists, appearing on many important dates. I will post more details when I know them.
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and just to add - if those scenes were strictly or primarily the result of technical limitations, what of those directors who had already exceeded those limitations? Would this not indicate that the early studios had the means but not the desire to exceed these?
I would agree .... but in general the world just moved at a slower pace then ... and this shift in "rhythm of life" has been noted by many social and cultural critics ... Marshall McLuhan's concept of dominant media shaping the society and culture is accurate here. In the last thirty years the average length of a news story on television evening news has gone from nearly two minutes to less than twenty seconds today!
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The subject of the continuity between theater and the emergence of the movies is a topic of much discussion among students of early film. The first thing to remember is that there were many different "forms" of live theater, arcing from the formal presentation of opera and dramatic presentations all the way over to the other end of burlesque, and everything in between such as operettas, revues, melodrama, and vaudeville. In my own research, as well as many others, a clear relationship can be established between the increasing realism found on the meodrama stage, and the content of early movies. In some later melodramas there were sections which had 20 minutes of visual action without any dialogue (a man climbing upward to rescue a baby from an eagle's nest ... later made into an early movie, starring D.W. Griffith!). In a production of "Ben Hur" in 1899, the theater critic Hilary Bell made a wonderfully prophetic statement when he wrote: "In the play we see merely several horses galloping on a moving platform. They make no headway, and the moving scenery behind them does not delude the spectators into the belief that they are racing ... The only way to secure the exact scene of action for this incident in a theater IS TO REPRESENT IT BY MR. EDISON'S INVENTION!" ( Ben Hur has had, of coure, three very successful film productions over the years).
Anyway ... I was referring to more formal theatrical productions, but let me quote a study in Boston in 1909 which showed even at that early age, that of entertainment seating, formal theater accounted for 13.5 percent, while movies and vaudeville with movies accounted for 85.4 percent. (Opera acounted for 1.1 percent). Movies had very quickly become THE major paid entertainment throught the western world. At a time when the average weekly wage was about $8-10, theater attendance was expensive, about 50 cents to $1.50, while movies ranged from 5 to 10 cents. Many social critics decried the high costs of the legitimate theater. Melodrama was considerably cheaper, ranging from 15 cents to $1.
Hmmmmmmm.. I should just scan in an entire chapter from my book, or from a highly recommended book I edited as part of a series on the History of Communication, Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television 1750-1990 (N.Y. Cambridge UP, 2000).
.. as I said earlier, this is a fascinating (to me anyway) subject ... with much work yet to be done!
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Garth - don't you think that the fact that audiences wanted to see these long single-shot scenes had a lot to do with their conditioning from theater and the resultant expectations of dialog and exposition? I do know there were exceptions (thinking Von Stroheim as well) but I think that the reason so much of that film dialog sounds stilted is that so many of the actors came directly from the theater and were very much stuck in an old-fashioned and very stylized rhythm - not to mention the screenwriters whose backgrounds may have been in that old-fashioned kind of American stage realism -
Allen .. instinctively one would think that your observation was a very logical conclusion. However, the fact is that less than 5% of the population went to the live theater at this time ... for the majority of the population the movies were their theater , their "democratic art" so to speak (although the film industry was never really democratic, and the irony of the title of my book escaped some critics). So, for the large bulk of the movie audience, their "conditioning" had been shaped by years of movie going, not their theatrical experiences. I do agree that the migration of stage actors, directors, and others from the theater did have an influence on the structure of early sound films, but the technological limitations, limited production costs (especially in comparison to today), and desire to feature the strength of stories and stars were the major factors.
Berigan is also right in pointing out that different studios had different styles that affected the appearance of their films. I remember very clearly being at an academic presentation early in my career where a poor young scholar attempted to present a paper about Warner's "dark style" ... when one old, vastly experienced film maker pointed that that Warner's were simply too cheap to fully light their sets, and this is what gave their early sound films that peculiar framing look ... I was glad that was not me!
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JS, I can't recall if I read this somewheres, or I actually thought this up on my own, but there must have been fewer censors during the war. I have seen a few films during that era that have moments that seem right from pre-code films. (July 1934 and earlier)
Well, the only films I recall right now are I Wanted Wings (1941 actually) starring Veronica Lake, and she is soooo very clearly braless(and cold!) throughout much of the movie, I never could figure out how it didn't end up being re-shot. Murder, My Sweet has it's moments as well, but Miracle of Morgan's Creek seems quite unique to have gotten away with so much!
You raise an interesting point here. There is NO indication that there were fewer censors (although I am not sure which level of censorship you mean here ... the Production Code Administration (PCA), the 13 state censors, or the approximatley 120 local municipal and county censor boards strewn throughout the country?) However, while "moral" censorship became less of a focus during the war, this was due to a combination of factors. After December 1941, Hollywood geared up for war movie production, and this shifted the emphasis obviously. (During the period 1942-1945 "war movies" averaged about 30% of all movies produced in Hollywood ... ref. Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art, p.318) .. The major concern shifted to the censorial activities of the Office of War Information (OWI), ensuring that these war films were accurate, patriotic and contributed to the war effort in a positive way. Hollywood hated this form of control and appealed directly to the president, and eventually by 1944, the OWI was emasculated by the Congress with a very reduced budget. If you go through the files of the PCA you do not get a sense that efforts to enforce the Code were any less during these years. (Joseph Breen, the head of the PCA, was not going to let a silly thing like war stop hm from enforcing his Catholic view of morality!) Just ask Howard Hughes who was trying to get approval of "The Outlaw" during this period!
HOWEVER, your comments have stirred my academic interest .... it would take some sort of fairly extensive analysis to determine whether other censorship boards were more inclined to be lax in their efforts during the war. This is a distinct possibility.
The questions surrounding the making and exhibition of "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" deserves a posting of it own, which I will do later today. It is, indeed, a unique film for its time ....
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in terms of early films and the slowness of exposition - I think you'll find that a lot of early movies are very much caught in the rhythms of the theater of the time - and a lot of the actors were out of the theatrical tradtion (especially as a lot of these movies were shot at Astoria in NYC) - many of the scenes use static camera work, and, you are right, the idea of editing and cutting was still in its infant stages (though some were technically far in advance, like DW Griffith and than, a little later, Renoir) -
I hate to disagree with Allen on this, but his answer is not entirely correct. First, editing and cutting in the twenties and early thirties could, and in some cases was as sophisticated as that found today. However, audiences were conditioned to see longer scenes, with less camera movement and with less cutting than we are used to seeing today (this is known as the MTV effect). It must also be considered that in the period 1929-1931 the technical issues of sound movies were still being worked out, and this necessitated a much more static camera. (See the scene in "Singing In The Rain" with the microphone in the flowers). The costs and nature of the actual production process must also be considered, as these films were deliberately made with a very limited number of set shots. Story and stars were everything to the audience of this period, and there was little incentive to dazzle them with directorial technique or special effects. Slow takes, lingering closeups, and lengthy speeches were quite normal in American movies up until the 1970's. When I show some of these films to students they always remark on the difference in pace and rhythm in comparison to today's movies, and many find them difficult to watch because of this.
The history of film is a fascinating subject (after all this is how I make my living), and much more complicated than most people imagine. For an excellent primer, may I suggest the following book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/023...0581866-0523862
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Herewith the result of the second offering from the Leon Leavitt collection. Vinyl prices are going out of sight!
http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?View...since=30&rdir=0
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Tonight's movie - The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone.
Never seen it in, at least not more than a few clips here and there. Don't know if this is necessarily my bag, but who knows? Anybody got some good and/or kind words for this one?
How can you not be enthralled by a virile hero, with a winning, crooked smile, wearing green tights, swinging down on a vine, landing on a log, and saying in an Australian ("Tasmanian," he always reminded people) accent, "Welcome to Sherwood Forest M'Lady"? Add Alan Hale Sr. ( father of "The Skipper") as Little John ... and Basil Rathbone as the Sheriff of Nottingham. The great sword fights on the castle stairs, the archery contest, and Olivia De Haviland radiant as Maid Marian. And, Oh! The COLOR! Pretend you are 12 years old, grab that bag of popcorn, suspend your disbelief, and sit back .. YOU have yourself a winner here!
I may watch myself ... for the fiftieth time.
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On the day after .... facing reality, and enjoying life .....
THANKS to all my friends who took the time to send me good wishes ... I do appreciate the comradeship found on this board ... and the love of the music which is so obvious here. Now, if only we could convince the rest of the world how beautiful this music can be ...
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This review just appeared in Kirkus Reviews. I will still read this, and judge for myself ...
WITH BILLIE
Publication Date: 04/05/2005
Publisher: Pantheon
Stage: Adult
ISBN: 0-375-40610-7
Price: $25.00
Author: Blackburn, Julia
Hitherto little-seen research about Billie Holiday is put to ill use. It may have seemed good as a proposal: the acclaimed English biographer and novelist Blackburn (The Leper's Companions, 1999, etc.) would look at jazz singer/icon Holiday through the eyes of previously unheard witnesses. But Blackburn's book is lazy, lurid, superficial and more than a bit of a cheat. True, the late Linda Kuehl's early-'70s interviews, which serve as the basis for this work, have never been mined extensively, but Donald Clarke made use of Kuehl's choicest stuff in his 1994 Wishing On the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday. It quickly becomes clear why Kuehl's own editor had misgivings about her draft biography: the witnesses -- ranging from Holiday's childhood friends in Baltimore to musicians, pimps, dope dealers and the drug agents who saw her meteoric rise to fame and precipitous fall from grace -- focused on the most sordid aspects of Lady Day's saga. Precious little is provided about her music, save in the bright remembrances of the late pianist Jimmy Rowles, while many thrice-told tales appear about her alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, bisexuality and masochistic romantic relationships. Though the sales pitch here is that new voices will be heard, the reader seldom actually hears them. Most chapters are clumsy paraphrases, and what's verbatim is often unilluminating. Moreover, Blackburn is simply the wrong writer for the job. She betrays a nearly complete lack of knowledge of the cultures and vernaculars of jazz and drugs -- a failure that dooms a project like this one from the get-go. She also pads her heavily footnoted text -- which is riddled with gaping holes due to the shortfalls of Kuehl's research -- with flatly written and hardly incisive chapters, drawn entirely from secondary sources, about figures as important to Holiday's life as saxophonist Lester Young and as peripheral as actress Tallulah Bankhead. It isn't certain that the world needs another book about Billie Holiday. But it's definitely not this one.
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WOW! Thanks guys ... What a wonderful surprise to find all of these messages ... totally unexpected. But I did want to mention that I have registered for gifts at Dusty Groove (The Bastards!) ... my wish list can be found there.
I plan a day listening to DeFranco, Tony Scott, and this interesting "new" clarinet player, Mort Weiss, who at age 70 has just started playing (and playing well) again. I am thinking of getting my clarinet out of mothballs, except my dog runs for the backdoor everytime I start to practice!
What a great group this is .... I get far more enjoyment from youse guys than my colleagues at the university, none of whom are jazz fans.
(You can sample Mort Weiss at SMSJazz.com)
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Brownie, are you referring to the one coming out by Taschen? I spoke to Claxton's people and they said it's nice!!! Can't wait!
Mark
Mark, mais oui!
There is a Taschen store not very far from my place and I drop in from time to time to see if that new Claxton book has showed up. Heard good things about it but want to have a first look at it!
C'mon Big Fella,
I am certain that is not the only reason you hang around the Taschen store .... Our local Half-Price stores carry these books, usually at a nice discount, and they are hard to resist. This one caught my attention on the weekend! How come I missed this stuff in the 50s?? The graphics are just amazing ...
http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/...facts/03815.htm
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I also too the plunge on this one .. must be the 18th version I have had. I agree with Medjuck; the music sounds great, but the documentary is a little disappointing. Better to read Ashley Kahn's book on the making of the album. Still ... the price is right, and this album is such an icon how can any self-respecting collector ignore it? I will now hold out for the holographic version recreating the actual in-studio performance.
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There are many of my favorites which have already been listed .... Now, if you were of my vintage, developing your jazz tastes in the mid-fifties, then there is one live concert that would have made this list easily .... For sheer, unadulterated jazz as fun, try Charlie Ventura's 1949 "Bop For The People" Concert in Pasadena, CA. With Conte Candoli, Boots Mussulli, Benny Green, Ed Shaughnessy, Jackie and Roy, etc. Boy! We LOVED this baby, and now that it is available in its complete form for the first time, it is even more exciting. Highly recommended. Get the full concert on the Ventura Proper Box, which is worth owning in its own right.
WARNING! This concert is highly contagious!
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'I asked Chet Baker about all those deep wrinkles in his face,' said Jack Sheldon. 'He told me they were laugh lines. I told him that nothing could be that funny.'
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Garth,
This little gem is currently available in the U.S. as the second half of the Jackie McLean Vertigo Connoisseur (or is it OOP already?).
'The Way I Feel' is by Butch Warren. 'Blues For Jackie' is attributed to Kenny Dorham.
Bertrand.
You are indeed correct, Sir!!! (As Sydney Greenstreet says to Sam Spade) There it was under my nose all of the time ....
Perhaps the time has come for me to stop buying albums, and start listening to my own collection. That would probably take me the rest of my life ..
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Hahahaha .... Danny Bank was a big session musician in New York ... I laugh because many years ago, when I was lucky enough to take a course in jazz history with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen (!!!) at Oscar's then School in Toronto, the Miles/Gil Evans "Porgy and Bess" had just been released. It was Oscar who pointed out to the class how hastily this album had been put together, and how difficult Gil's orchestrations were, especially on the up-tempo pieces. Even today whever I listen to "Gone" and a few others, I hear Danny Bank not being able to quite make it (he is on bass clarinet) .. if you know what to listen for, it is quite evident ... he comes in late in several places... When I heard the recently released box with all of the rehearsal takes, this problem became even more obvious. But still .. he was a fine musician on lots of good sessions. I am sure that Mike Fitzgerald can fill us in on that ...
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I've never seen this. . . have a two cd set (would fit on one but that wouldn't mack much money right?) I like the music (not really that much Ornette, but cool stuff).
... but isn't the Chappaqua Suite essentially ALL music by Ornette? Is this a different set from the actual soundtrack?
The Ornette music didn't get used. The soundtrack is by Ravi Shankar (really!).
Thanks .. as a film scholar you would think that I might have seen the actual movie, but I have not! At one time the French 2-LP set of the Chappaqua Suite was a hot item, and much sought after in the U.S. I am not sure that it has ever been officially released in this country.
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I thought that this might be a good place to ask this question: Has this little gem of a session ever been issued on the U.S.?
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I do.
I've only been seriously into jazz for about 5 or 6 years so most of the RVGs have been new to me. Recently there have been some duplicates, but I happily pass along the previous editions to my parents.
Geez.. it must be the generation gap .. I pass on my duplicates to my 32 year old son, recently weaned on to "real" jazz .... his hip-hop friends are aghast!
Damn! I just looked at Marco's list .. by rough count I have about 80+ of them .... so kill me, but I am not a big fan of organ jazz, Ornette's Golden Circle albums, Cecil T., and Night of the Cookers. I do have those on earlier versions though. Several years ago, after I sold all of my vinyl, and filled with ennui at that loss, I decided to go for the challenge of acquiring the entire BN catalog available on CD for the 1500 and 4000 series. I managed to get most of them, one by one, through eBay, and other lists, to #4279 (what is THAT, you mavens), and then stopped doing the collector thing. I acquired the odd ones here and there as I liked them after that. Now I am "sprucing up" my favorites with the new RVG's.
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I've never seen this. . . have a two cd set (would fit on one but that wouldn't mack much money right?) I like the music (not really that much Ornette, but cool stuff).
... but isn't the Chappaqua Suite essentially ALL music by Ornette? Is this a different set from the actual soundtrack?
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My internet radio is generally the same as my regular radio, but on headphones while the wife is home....KCSM. Jazz 'round the clock every day.
I am now a very big KCSM fan ... intelligent presentation of great, mostly mainstream jazz. I switched from KKJZ after Chuck Niles passed away .. their presentation has really detriorated in the past year ..
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When I first got this as an LP many years ago, the name immediately conjured up visions of all those Arabian Nights fantasies I saw in technicolor on the screen as a kid .. shades of the great Maria Montez, and John Hall, flashing swords and girls in veils languishing around in harems ... NOW ... I have to think about dead bodies, car bombs and the Bush policy of world domination .. what crap!
...I think that I will hang on to my Conn .. it sounds just fine ..
Mosaic Reviewed on NPR
in Mosaic and other box sets...
Posted
I thought that some of you might be interested in this audio review by Kevin Whitehead on NPR's "Fresh Air" last week.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4531416