Yes, Another John McCain Sunday

Dizzy-fied and Loving It
I'm way back in time. There are several recordings from ancient days that used to be Jazz 101 for us way-back jazz cats and one of them came out on the Savoy label--it called itself "the label where bop began" and it could be right or wrong at the same time since the creators of bop, Diz and Bird, recorded on several labels before Norman Granz took 'em all with him to first be on the Disc label, then Mercury, then Norgran, then Clef, then Verve, and finally Pablo. There is one Savoy LP that was the cat's meow in the early fifties, an LP that taught us little neophyte jazz babies the elementals of be-bop. Savoy had put out a 78 rpm single of a two-part version of Dizzy Gillespie's famous bop classic (jazz classic) "The Champ" (the Champ was Dizzy)--later then Savoy issued it on a new form of recording called the "Long Playing Record" or LP, calling he overall album The Champ. [As an aside: these LPs at first were 10-inch vinyl platters and then they evolved into 12-inch ones, which became the standard size of an LP up into the 90s when the CD took over and drove off the LPs and the cassettes and the 78s--old record players up until the 80s had three speeds on them, 33 1/3 rpm (LPs), 45 rpm (the little records with the big hole in the middle), and 78 rpm. CDs totally wiped out LPs--I used to go to Sam Goody's in the Chrysler Building in old New York City and go down into that "original" Sam Goody store's basement where they had table after table filled with bin after bin of leftover LP record stock--monaurals and stereos--99 cents each--and I would go down there and buy 50 to 100 LPs at a time--jazz and classical music--and I ended up with a thousand or so of these LPs. That was back in the late 70s and by the late 90s there were no more LPs--in fact, there were no more Sam Goody's. Sam's demise came when it turned itself into a huge chain store based in the Carolinas or somewhere like that to eventually disappear from the record business--plus they were caught using dishonest business practices, too. The last big Goody's store was in the Sperry-Rand Building in Rockefeller Center back in the 80s--it's long-time-gone now (I'm pretty sure they've changed the name of Sperry-Rand Building, too)--in fact, not many New Yorkers have any remembrance of Sam Goody's. By the bye, Tower Records became the big record stores in NYC for several years after Sam Goody disappeared and now, they are all closing down, if not already closed down. The big HMV record store that was in my neighborhood for several years about 4 years ago became a huge Victoria's Secret store. Currently, as CDs are fastly becoming obsolete and recordings are going over to the Internet and to MP3 and iPod (iTunes) downloads, I've been buying them up on eBay for chicken feed--some for as little as 1 cent (with a $3-to-$5 shipping and handling charge usually). As a result I now have over 600 CDs stacked to the ceiling around behind me here as I whack off on this computer--jazz mostly though I have over 100 CDs of contemporary American classical musics (Mr. Ives, Leo Smit, Frank Wigglesworth, Howard Hansen, Roger Sessions, John Adams, Ellsworth Milburn, Henry Cowell, Leroy Anderson, Phillip Rhodes, Gunther Schuller, Roy Harris, etc.).]

So this Savoy LP, The Champ, became essential listening and learning for students of jazz in my day. The record came out in 1952 in many forms, ending up in 1993 on a Savoy CD--the whole Champ LP on it, plus some bonus tracks not issued at the time--the 78 rpm recording of "The Champ, Parts 1 & 2" came out in 1951.

The LP started off with "The Champ"--and we learned every note and breath-taking nuance of that tune--a masterpiece of arranged bop under Dizzy's masterful control. Dizzy was a very smart musician--he put together classic jazz quintets besides one of the most fascinating big bands ever in jazz. "The Champ" is followed on this recording by "Birk's Works," a blues that if you didn't know it when I was learning jazz piano you didn't get to jam--jams were still huge things in those young days of bop--jam sessions were all over New York City, especially on Monday nights, the normal dark nights at the jazz and music clubs around town--Sunday afternoons, too, were good for jam sessions. Back in the good ole days of 4/4 jazz out of Kansas City, they had what they called "Breakfast Dances"--the band wouldn't start playing until 2 pm--and it would go on playing until nearly noon the next day--with a breakfast being served around 7 am. When I was the New Year's Eve band at a restaurant in downtown NYC, at about 2 am, the restaurant would set out a free breakfast--a wonderful idea--and it kept the place packed through the midnight hour on into the early morning hours.

Following "Birk's Works" came a Dizzy arrangement of "Caravan"--in Dizzy's Afro-Persian mode with Stuff Smith on violin! And after "Caravan" came Gil Fuller and Chano Pozo's "Tin-Tin Deo." A textbook of bop. And Bird's not on any of these. Budd Johnson plays tenor on "The Champ." John Coltrane plays alto (yep) and tenor on "Birk's Works" and "Tin-Tin Deo," which were recorded in Detroit, by the bye, in 1951--57 years ago! This album also introduced us to Milt Jackson the vibist not only playing piano and organ but also singing on "Time on My Hands." The end tracks of the album contain three great Dizzy novelty tunes, "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac," followed by Joe Carrol, the white bop singer who Parker and Dizzy really dug, doing Dizzy's bop ballad, "O0-shoo-Be-Doo-Be" (remember Romper Room and Mr. Do Bee?), with some sweet 3-part harmony on the chorus. The very last track on the CD is a bonus track of a tune that was recorded back in 1951 but was never issued--I don't even know if it was ever even heard until Savoy put it on this CD, but it's Joe Carrol and Dizzy doing "Blue Skies," except this "Blue Skies" is all about a man-eating whale looking for a man to eat. The album is a low-level recording, reengineered from monaural masters, so the sound quality ain't stereophonic--but then, you tell me, what live band ever sounded stereophonic? I've always said stereophonic sound was unreal sound--fascinating and wonderful to listen to through stereo earphones, but nothing like a live band performance. But stereo did free up solos so you could dig them clearly alone. I once knew a guy who owned a fabulous recording studio in Midtown Manhattan and a bunch of us were over at his studio one late night drinking marijuana beers ($7 a bottle in the 1980s--$28 worth of it didn't even make me drunk) and he showed us this Sony device that could isolate solos--and he isolated Charles Parker, Jr., solos for us all night that night and that was a wonderful time for me--Charles Parker, Jr., blowing his alto as though just for me--and right in my face, too--the band beds gone--only Bird soloing in grandiose stereo.

And I listened once again to The Champ this morning under my headphones and then I got to thinking about how my time was utilized better when I was unaware of manmade time, the time of clocks and digital timepieces, and running simply on real time, the 4/4 time of Dizzy's jazz--and that's the time I think that works off our heartbeat--the time of life.

And I recently got into this battle with manmade time in an email to L Hat, in which I said how frightening it was to suddenly look around my apartment and see 13 clocks ticking off either digital or hand-shown times--all these clocks in disagreement as to the actual time--and then I remembered that I have 33 wristwatches--I collect old Elgins especially--a 1907 porcelain dial with solid gold works my treasure--though I also have a rare gold Hamilton semi-automatic--I don't mind automatics (self-winders) (Bulova black-dial automatics were cool) or old battery-powered Timexs (how do you plural a word ending in "x"?--I've forgotten)--or manual windups, like a beautiful circa early-1940s gold Wittnauer I'm wearing as I write this--I love 'em all--except what all these timepieces mean is that I'm shackled to manmade time and I'm tired of it. Like I told L Hat, I find real time is the right time when I put on my stereo phones and put on music like Dizzy's The Champ--there is real time in all music--especially that 120 stuff that approximates the rhythm of our heartbeats (not Unka Dick Cheney's heartbeats, however)--clock time disappears while listening to music and writing at the same time--the rhythm of good writing fitting the beats of the heart, too--time in this world settles into real time and I sit here for hours writing and listening to music and the time goes away so sweetly and poetically, so romantically, so lively and real, this time all my time, an intellectual time, a time of cultural investigation, a time of excess imagination if I want and the sensations of living in no-clock time--sidereal time. The problem--it's all I can do while I'm under the influence of musical time and writing in the same time to keep from glancing up at the clock on my computer! I could hide that clock, couldn't I? So why don't I? I think I'm still enslaved by manmade time--always clockwatching!

We never get control of our own time (I'm about as close to it as you can get in my current state of being free as a bird). Unless we all get rich and have plenty of leisure time to waste most of us will never experience real time--except when we're out partying, dancing, making love--then we are in real time though we probably don't realize it.

Nazz Jazz
I watched an NYC apartment-crawling teevee show today and it featured this twentyish black "model/actress"-- and this young lady lived in Fort Greene but she was wanting to upscale her living situation by looking at a one-bedroom apartment in the Wall Street area--the up-and-coming place where the upwardly mobile twentyish somethings desire to live now. And the apartment this rather effeminate guy was showing her was pretty plain looking--a little pre-WWII looking--you know, an old building modernized. The rent, and this young black woman said it was cool with her, for this apartment was $5,500-a-month. I got to thinking, "Wow, this means, this model/actress (she had had a speaking line in a recent black 'sploitation movie--the All-American Gangster or something like that--about a real Harlem dope lord--her only acting credit) has to make at least $66,000-a-year just for rent--not including utilities--another $500 a month!

I was particularly surprised at how not-pretty this young black woman was--very skinny, but not tall like most models--and I'm using white privilege thinking here now--she did have a nice ass--but then what black woman doesn't have a nice or eccentrically well-extended-and-rounded ass (yes, "rounded and pink like we vulgar folks think")? And, yes, again I know I'm using white privilege to say that about black babes--that's the thing with blacks these days--they say using white privilege to reason about blacks is their biggest bitch with white folks these days (blacks are wanting reparations--they are subconsciously demanding them). My own lady friend of 30 years who's black puts me down all the time by saying I have "white privilege" attitudes--in other words when I try to not be a racist I'm using my white privilege to deny I'm the reason for racism in this country. Boy that's a tough curve ball for an old white boy Sociology-trained thinker/writer who's trying to ignore race and see people as human beings to hit--no matter the color of our skin or feathers or whatnot, we're all human animals--but I understand the dilemma--I surely do--and I'm trying now to be more politically correct when I start talking to blacks about blacks and trying to explain to them that, yes, my attitudes were developed in a racist society (Texas) but my common sense (my Sociological observations leading me to a certain logic) told me I was being conditioned by my white superiors--my teachers, parents, and peers--so I rebelled against conforming to the customary way of thinking built into the Western-white-European, segregated grade school and high school education I got. However, I did attend the first integrated college in the South (integrated with the Class of 1956) and as a jazz pianist who did play in a B-unit jazz group that played for dances in my college's Union Building on Wednesday noon and then on Saturday afternoons, I was able to socialize with and get to know a lot of black kids.

After college, I had a black captain over my Army unit while I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and then my first job was an integrated workplace--and you see, I'm thinking with white privilege even in using all my black-contact experiences in explaining how I outgrew racism--though, according to this white privilege theory, I can't outgrow racism since it's so a part of my culture. I didn't have a black college teacher until I attended New York University in the early 1970s. My best friend for years in New York City was a black photographer--and we were brotherly close, too--he called me "Pepper" and I called him "Salt" to confuse the white folks he hated--and he truly hated all white people--but he did tolerate me and accepted me the way blacks accept whites, on an equal level but not with equal love and respect.

I dated tons of black women after my divorce from my Tex-Mex-white chick in the early seventies--and never did I hear this white privilege stuff until as few as two years ago. This is the subject of a book by a black professor from Portland State U named Joy DeGruy.

It works like this, say a white person says in mixed company that crime seems to be to him mostly a black problem. To Professor DeGruy and my black girlfriend, this white person is using his white privilege to classify blacks as criminal types, a holdover white way of thinking that goes back to when black Africans were considered beasts and therefore OK to enslave against their beastly wills. Black Americans do feel like strangers around white folks--same as white folks feel so weird when in the middle of a bunch of blacks--whites are not use to such easy going lifestyles--such cool senses of humor--such practical ways of doing things and thinking out things--the sharpest and wittiest people in the world--yet, I'm using my white privilege to say even that about blacks, according to my girlfriend and to Prof. Joy DeGruy. Miss DeGruy, who used to be Joy DeGruy-Leary, is, by the bye, a social science professor, which means she's a Sociologist.

Joy DeGruy

I have two black girlfriends now--they are as different as black is from white. I get along better with the girlfriend who's from Southern Illinois--her people were originally from Northern Louisiana--and she was quite pleased when I told her her people were more than likely from the Congo, where a lot of slaves brought into the New Orleans slave auction block were from--thus Congo Square in New Orleans where the Congolese dancers and drummers used to gather on Sundays--it's now called Louis Armstrong Square--I've been over there and sat and listened to the past when I lived in New Orleans--I could hear it, though I know my black girlfriend would say I was using my white privilege in even saying I could hear Congolese music when I sat in that square! Complicated, ain't it? I understand it.

atiredgrowlingwolf [did you notice, no mention of the idiocy of John McCain in this post?]
for The Daily Growler

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