Columbia Records Research Articles

“Sell It Black”: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis's Early Fusion Jazz

Although, as Steven Pond argues, “connections between the music and marketing loom over any discussion of fusion jazz,” those discussions often rely on either assuming or dismissing the idea that commercial concerns imply the corruption of an anterior musical purity. Such discussions not only disregard the necessity of material circulation which a recording's commodity status requires, but they also regularly conflate a musician's interests and goals with those of a record company. With this article, I make distinct what has previously been conflated by considering both the differences and the similarities between Miles Davis's and Columbia Records's values in relation to marketing during the contested and commonly misrepresented period of early‐1970s fusion jazz. I emphasize that while Columbia's primary concern was in reaching what it recognized to be an expansive and lucrative white youth audience, Davis would not be satisfied until Columbia began selling his music “black” in order for his recordings to reach a significant number of African American listeners. This article thereby contributes to an ongoing critical reevaluation of fusion jazz while highlighting a key issue for those jazz scholars concerned more broadly with a recording's role in the creation of musical meaning.

WHAT ABOUT BOB?

1 4 7 R W H A T A B O U T B O B ? P A U L G R I M S T A D Making Bob Dylan canonical is not hard to do. He fits right in with those who have managed to fuse popular forms with an intricacy typically associated with modernism: George Gershwin did it with his Ragtime + Ravel formula; Dashiell Hammett in the glazed tableaux of The Maltese Falcon; Miles Davis with the lush nonet on The Birth of the Cool; Judy Garland channeling the great American songbook into jittery delirium. Dylan does it by turning Dust Bowl folk idioms into acidy urbanity, as if Woody Guthrie were sitting in on Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Part of what is tricky about this hybrid is what to make of the early political songs that seemed to some a call to arms, to others a pose – and one Dylan discarded when it came time to be a star. This was already clear in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1965 vérité documentary Don’t Look Back: all those dorky reporters asking him questions about ‘‘protest’’ music, and Dylan rifling back those tart rejoinders. Eric Bulson captures something of this tension in his essay in the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Producer John T h e C a m b r i d g e C o m p a n i o n t o B o b D y l a n , edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Cambridge, 204 pp., $81, $24.99 paper) 1 4 8 G R I M S T A D Y Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia Records, was, as Bulson puts it, ‘‘looking for somebody who would allow Columbia to tap into the emerging folk music craze.’’ To Hammond, Dylan was not just a songwriter and performer; he was a set of antennae translating what was in the air into what people wanted to hear. And herein lies the ambiguity of Dylan’s place in the folk scene: Was he a fellow traveler or a shrewd opportunist? Did he embody the moment or was he just aping the vibe? Whatever it was, it got him signed to the label, led to the making of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1962, and introduced the world to ‘‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,’’ ‘‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’’ the once-again relevant ‘‘Masters of War,’’ and the beautiful, enigmatic ‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’’ It wasn’t long before Dylan dropped the folk shtick, got himself a swinging combo, and plugged in, which pissed o√ the purists and launched the first about-face in a career that has been full of them. If the A-side of Bringing It All Back Home is an early indicator that solo strumming was becoming an ensemble jangle, and the B-side that the text was getting to be less like a sermon and more like a riddle (‘‘she wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks’’ does not exactly smack of moral indignation the way ‘‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’’ does), it is not until Highway 61 Revisited that we get the full-blown metamorphosis from hick troubadour to Electro-Orpheus. As Robert Polito reminds us, the album is packed with characters: Miss Lonely, Galileo, Mr. Jones, Napoleon in Rags, Cinderella, Einstein, Sweet Melinda, Queen Jane. Polito is also spot-on in cataloguing the record’s recurring motifs: the hang-up about a privileged, Upper East Side-ish girl whom Dylan for some reason delights in taking apart; a now predictable but then exotically Beat-tinged sneer at safe, middle-class respectability, embodied in the übersquare Mr. Jones, who knows ‘‘something is happening’’ but doesn’t know ‘‘what it is,’’ a line I thought was cool when I was sixteen, pedestrian when I was twenty-three (Dylan’s age when he wrote it), and which now seems completely profound; and the apocalypticism that hangs around the record like a yellow fog in ‘‘Tombstone Blues,’’ ‘‘Desolation Row,’’ and the underrated ‘‘Queen Jane Approximately ,’’ whose fey bile became the template for Blonde on Blonde. Highway 61 is the record on which...

Psychiatry and All That Jazz Are Parallel Passions

Psychiatry and All That Jazz Are Parallel Passions

They Believe; Can I?

There was a certain advertisement on a billboard in my New York City neighborhood that still haunts me. It was an advertisement for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, but like many ads these days, the product was absent from the scene. Instead, rising above the pavement, was a super-sized portrait of a street protest. It is a particular moment: May 1968 in Paris, when students and workers took to the streets and in a fit of imagination and fury seized the city and brought down the French government, but you don't need to know the particulars to be moved by the image. It is a close shot of a handful of young protesters standing in the middle of the street. To the left is a row of attractive women in their early twenties, dressed with that careless elegance for which Parisian women are justly famous and holding red flags. Some of the flagpoles are pointed forward and some back. The flags fill and billow out beautifully, as they seem to do only in socialist-realist paintings. With their backs to the women stand two young men. They, too, are stylish, wearing black leather jackets as they raise megaphones to their lips, speaking not to the group of spectators we see lining the sidewalk, but to a larger, invisible audience down the street and, presumably, around the world. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is a striking image--both aesthetically and historically--which is no doubt why the fashion designer's advertising agency selected it. It bespeaks hip rebellion, which today is the lingua franca of mass consumption. It is the old alchemy of advertising: buy this product and you will magically become someone else: in this case, someone who could care less about something as conformist as mass-produced fashion. McQueen's last design collection and ad campaign drew upon the imagery of Mods and Rockers. To move from images of mid-'60s subcultural rebellion in Britain to late-'60s political rebellion in France is just a few short years and a hop across the Channel. Time, space, and ideology are easily transcended by advertising's appropriation; only the image of rebellion remains constant. This is nothing new. The culture of rebellion has been embraced by the very culture being rebelled against for quite some time. Arguably the first cultural artifact of modern bohemia, Henri Murger's La Vie de Boheme (1849)--along with its operatic reincarnation as Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme (1896)--was, and still is, wildly popular with the very bourgeoisie it criticizes. By 1968 Columbia Records was selling its music with an image of young protesters in a jail cell and the tagline But The Man Can't Bust Our Music, and today the image of Che Guevara sells everything from T-shirts to Swatch watches to Smirnoff vodka. Co-opting rebellion is an old story, but there is something new about the McQueen advertisement. What is being appropriated is not just the external image of rebellion, but the rebel's inner passions. What makes the billboard so alluring is that these young protesters believe in something. I don't know exactly what they believe, they might be chanting Maoist nonsense or mouthing Situationist slogans, but what they are saying or exactly what they are protesting is largely immaterial, because they believe. It is hard to say how I know this. There are signs: the paradisiacal smile that lights up the face of the woman to the far left; or the young woman in the middle, her mouth caught mid-chant, her eyes simultaneously intense and vacant as she looks off to a place that is not there (the Greek for no-place being utopia, after all); or the young man in front holding the megaphone like a jazz soloist with the cool confidence that what he has to say is bigger than he is. It is something more than these visual markers. It is a presence permeating the whole image, that reaches out through history, past its present appropriation, down from this billboard and confronts me where I stand. I can feel that they believe. …

Invited commentary

The role of endoluminal therapy in the treatment of peripheral arterial disease is dramatically expanding.1Anderson P.L. Gelijns A. Moskowitz A. et al.Understanding trends in inpatient surgical volume vascular interventions, 1980–2000.J Vasc Surg. 2004; 39: 1200-1208Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (129) Google Scholar Skeptics of endovascular therapy oft opine that PTA [percutaneous transluminal angioplasty] works best for those least in need of intervention, thus suggesting that PTA is reasonable for claudicants with focal lesions but has little to offer patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI). Ahn et al report a 10-year experience with a cohort of CLI patients managed by endoluminal therapy. Over the study period, 111 patients (128 limbs; 63% of total) with CLI were treated by PTA alone, whereas 76 limbs (37%) required open surgery. Technical success was 96%, clinical success was 93%, 30-day mortality was 0.9%, and long-term limb salvage was 89%. At first glance, these results in CLI patients after PTA are quite comparable to those of open surgery and seem astonishing. However, the devil is in the details. The mean follow-up was short (14.7 months) and likely reflected not only a shift toward less invasive approaches in recent practice, but also the sobering reality that patients with CLI do not live long (5-year series mortality of 56%). Many malignancies have superior survival rates. In addition, 45% of patients had rest pain without tissue loss, and 33% required only iliac PTA. It is no surprise that PTA for hemodynamic iliac lesions often resolves ischemic rest pain. Results were predictably worse in patients with tissue loss and multiple, distal, or TransAtlantic Inter-Society Consensus D lesions. Primary patency was low (31% at 5 years), but secondary patency was 76%; this implies the necessity for reintervention. The authors do not provide the frequency, morbidity, or costs of repeat interventions. Primary patency, however, may not be the ultimate objective of CLI treatment. A 5-year clinical improvement rate (defined by Society of Vascular Surgery category) of 80% and a 6-year limb salvage rate of 89% are more meaningful end points. What are the implications of this report? First, it is imperative that vascular surgeons become facile with thrombolysis, conventional PTA, subintimal angioplasty, newer technologies such as cutting balloons, and stent placement. These evolving therapies are applicable to an increasing percentage of our patients. Second, treatment outcomes require redefinition. Long-term patency should not be the Holy Grail of outcome assessment, particularly for CLI, in which symptom relief, lesion healing, and limb salvage, with minimal morbidity, are more critical end points. Open surgery offers excellent patency rates, but morbidity is significant.2Goshima K. Mills J.L. Hughes J.D. A new look at outcomes after infrainguinal bypass surgery traditional reporting standards systematically underestimate the expenditure of effort required to attain limb salvage.J Vasc Surg. 2004; 39: 330-335Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (140) Google Scholar Finally, it is clear that as the proportion of peripheral arterial disease patients effectively treated by endoluminal therapy expands, the numbers of open cases for practicing vascular surgeons and resident trainees will continue to wane. A recent report identified the difficulty in providing adequate numbers of open distal reconstructions for vascular surgical trainees because of the shift toward subintimal angioplasty.3Nasr M.K. Taylor P.J. Horrocks M. Vascular training in the UK femorodistal bypass, an index procedure?.Eur J Vasc Endovasc Surg. 2003; 25: 135-138Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (2) Google Scholar New clinical training paradigms for residents and changes in the residency review committee case volume and distribution (open vs PTA) requirements will need to be rapidly implemented. Although there will be a role for tibial bypasses and complex, open reconstructions for the foreseeable future, “admit that the waters, around you have grown … for the times they are a changin’.”4Dylan B. The. Columbia Records, New York1964Google Scholar The effectiveness of percutaneous transluminal angioplasty for the treatment of critical limb ischemia: A 10-year experienceJournal of Vascular SurgeryVol. 41Issue 3PreviewTo determine the efficacy, safety, and long-term results, including continued clinical improvement and limb salvage, of percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) in patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI). Full-Text PDF Open Archive

Appalachia meets the mid-south in Tennessee

The father of bluegrass and long-time member of the Opry in Nashville, Bill Monroe, had a number of musical influences, including blues, gospel, and the American versions of Anglo-Scots-Irish folk music endemic to Appalachia. (Although Bill Monroe was from western Kentucky, the Appalachian influence is apparent.) In 1946 he recorded a song for Columbia Records that he had written. This song was recorded again in 1954 at Sun Studios as a ‘‘B side’’ by the future king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley. Raised in East Tupelo, MS and Memphis, Elvis’ music derived from the mid-south’s blues and gospel music, but with a peculiar honkytonk-informed, Memphis style. We will compare these artists through this common song and their spoken interviews in terms of voice quality and English dialect. Some copy-synthesis of these artists will be attempted in our search for the high, lonesome and rock and roll sounds.

Hamish Scott Henderson, 1919-2002

Folklorists around the world have been saddened by the death of Hamish Henderson in Edinburgh on 8 March 2002. Those who had the privilege of spending time with him will recall encounters at 27 George Square, or in Sandy Bell's down the road, Padstow on a May morning, at a ceilidh, a folk festival, or in the field. He was equally at home in the lecture hall and in the travellers' gelly. Others will remember how good he was at answering queries that came by mail from all parts of the globe. He was a staunch friend to many who will be grateful for his life, his work, and the encouragement that he gave to Carrying Stream of our tradition. He began to collect in the 1930s, finding folklore enthusiasts and sources while at school, during his Cambridge years, in the context of refugee work for the Society of Friends, and during active wartime service in the Desert and Italian campaigns in the Intelligence Corps. In the late 1940s, work with the Workers' Educational Association took him to Northern Ireland and the travel stipend that accompanied the Somerset Maugham Prize, awarded to his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, allowed him a return visit to Italy, which much later bore fruit in the publication of his translations of Antonio Gramsci. It is no exaggeration to declare that Hamish Henderson's passion for Scotland's cultural traditions was literally a life-long one. From his earliest childhood, he heard songs from his mother and grandmother, in his native Blairgowrie and elsewhere, he was a pupil of Dancie Reid, one of Scotland's last itinerant dancing masters, and all this established a ground bass for his extraordinary life, a life that impinged on the lives of so many others. All of its themes--language study, soldiering, writing, collecting, teaching, translating and activism in humanistic causes--came together in his long career in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The catalyst for the creation of the School of Scottish Studies was Angus McIntosh, appointed in 1948 to the Forbes Chair of English Language and General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. With colleagues in the university and encouraged by friends such as the folklorists John Lorne Campbell and his wife Margaret Fay Shaw Campbell, he had a vision of language and folklore collection and study, Gaelic and Scots, going hand in hand in systematic programmes that would create living resources on which the nation could draw. Models of good practice, encouragement, and practical help came from several quarters but most notably from Seamus Delargy, head of the Irish Folklore Commission, and Dag Stromback, director of the Swedish Folklore Archives in Uppsala. They were swift to support McIntosh in lobbying decision-makers, providing materials, and offering training opportunities. The School was handselled with two unique archival gifts. One, from the Irish Folklore Commission, consisted of copies of all the material collected in Scotland by Calum Maclean from Raasay, the School's first full-time collector, while on its staff in the 1940s. The other was twenty-five reels of remarkable recordings, copies of tapes made by the folklorist Alan Lomax, visiting from the United States in 1951 and conducted around Scotland by Hamish Henderson and Calum Maclean at the instigation of Jimmy Miller (Ewan MacColl), to collect Scottish material for a Columbia Records LP series. The wealth to be gathered was evident to Maclean and Henderson. …

New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde

The musician who once terrified us all no longer seems to disturb soul. He has been tamed, classified, and given his niche in that eclectic Museum of Great Jazzmen which admits such variety of species, from Fats Domino to Stan Kenton. --Andre Hodeir on Thelonious Monk, circa 1959 A 1972 press release announcing the reissue of Thelonious Monk's Prestige recordings included the following observation: [I]n the early Sixties, with the emergence of and the appearance of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Monk's music no longer seemed quite so strange. He was finally able to whittle away at the Mad tags that had been laid upon him by smug critics and listeners who had neither the equipment nor the desire to comprehend. There was even the introduction to polite society in the form of Time magazine cover story in 1964, and Monk finally and without compromise began to receive the widespread attention and adequate financial renumeration that was his due. (Thelonious 1972) Although hyperbole is unavoidable in any press release, there is kind of truth here. At the very moment that Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others were bringing about revolution in Monk's career finally began to soar. After enduring almost two decades of confused and often vicious criticisms from writers and musicians alike, by the early 1960s, Juilliard students were studying his compositions, Martin Williams (1963; 1964) had insisted that he was composer, and French critic Andre Hodeir (1986, 164) had hailed him as the first artist to have a feeling for specifically modern esthetic values (see also Kotlowitz 1961; Lapham 1964). By 1961, Monk had established more-or-less permanent quartet consisting of Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore (later Larry Gales) on bass, and Frankie Dunlop (later Ben Riley) on drums. He performed with his own big band at Town Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1964. He left the Riverside label for more financially lucrative contract with Columbia Records in 1962, and by the mid-1960s, his quartet reportedly earned nearly $2,000 week for gig (see de Wilde 1997, 171-178; Gourse 1997, 153-211; Ponzio and Postif 1995, 201-267; Williams 1963; Williams 1964). The mainstreaming of Monk and the emergence of the avant-garde--or what has been called jazz or the New Thing--was not merely coincidental. In several respects, both musically and politically, these developments were interdependent if not mutually constitutive. The emergence of the avant-garde during the early 1960s did indeed change the field of reception for Monk as well as for other musician/composers (e.g., Charles Mingus) who only decade before were considered too far out and experimental. However, the shifting critical response to Monk's music vis-a-vis the avant-garde partly reflected the changing political landscape--one in which black nationalism, Third World solidarity, and even the more localized struggles against racism and exploitation in the music industry challenged Cold War liberalism. In this war of words, conservative and some liberal critics embraced Monk as foil against the free rebellion, while defenders of the avant-garde often sought to claim Monk as one of their own. Given Monk's complicated, often iconoclastic relationship to the history of modern jazz, it should not be surprising that all of these constituencies could legitimately lay claim to him. Whereas Monk, like most musicians of his generation, expressed disinterest if not outright hositility to free jazz, artists identified with the avant-garde found his music to be major source of ideas and inspiration. Indeed, as I demonstrate below, no matter how much Monk tried to distance himself from these new developments, he helped give birth to the avant-garde. …

From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

Black String Musicians: Ascending the Scale

Among instrumentalists, the one black superstar is Andre Watts (b. 1946), who burst on the music scene at sixteen and has since fully merited his worldwide acclaim; he has been for some years one of the four or five finest pianists in the world. But few realize that the plight of black players in recent decades has been worse than it was several generations ago. Several past notable violinists include Jose White (1836-1918), who was a concerto soloist with the New York Philharmonic more than once in the 1870s; Joseph Douglass (1871-1935), grandson of the legendary Frederick Douglass and the first black violinist to tour the United States as a recitalist; and Clarence Cameron White (1880-1960), who was active as a composer in addition to his concertizing. Only in the past few years have there been signs that things are looking better for black string players. Part of the evidence is a handful of recent recordings. In the world of the violin we have Sanford Allen (b. 1939), who entered the Juilliard School of Music at ten and by twenty was accomplished enough to play as a substitute violinist in the New York Philharmonic. In 1962 he became the first full-time black player in that orchestra. Over the years he gave occasional recitals, and in 1977 he courageously decided to give up his guaranteed income from the Philharmonic in favor of a career as a freelancer and soloist. Allen shows what he can do on the fourth of nine disks that Columbia Records issued in its Black Composers Series, a project that the firm unfortunately discontinued.' With the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, led

Record reviews

Jose Feliciano. Romance in the Night. Motown 6035ML. Freddie Hubbard. A Little Night Music. Fantasy F‐9626. Red Garland. Satan Doll. Prestige P‐7859. Carnaval. Various Artists. Galaxy GXY‐5144. Count Basic Kansas City Style. RCA AFMI‐5180. Freddie Hubbard. Classics. Fantasy F‐9635. Joe McPhee. Visitation. Sackville 3036. Half and Half Bluegrass Band, Volume Two. Folkways Records FTS 31103. Julian “Cannonball”; Adderley, The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco, OTC‐035 (Riverside RLP‐1157), Julian Adderley Alto Sax, Nat Adderley, Cornet, Bobby Timmons, Piano, Sam Jones, Bass, Louis Hays, Drums. “This Here”;, Spontaneous Combustion”;, “Hi Fly”;, “You Got It”;, “Bohemia After Dark”;. Capitol Records. Boy's Brigade. 1983 SOR Productions Inc. ST‐12278, Manufactured by Capitol Records, Inc. A Subsidiary of Capitol Industries/Hollywood & Vine Streets, Hollywood California Factories. Oregon, Oregon, ECM 1258. Bill Evans, from the 70s, Fantasy F 9630, Bill Evans, piano; Eddie Gomez, Ray Brown, bass; Eliot Zigmund, Philly Joe Jones, drums; Kenny Burrell, guitar, Harold Land, tenor sax. “Nobody Else But Me,”; “Up With The Lark,”; “Quite Now,”; “Nobody Else But Me,”; “Orson's Theme,”; “Gloria's Step,”; “Elsa.”; Translator—“No Time Like Now”; 1983 CBS inc/Manufactured by Columbia Records 7464–38927–1/415‐Records. Ellen Shipley. Call of the Wild. Produced by Morrie Brown. Capitol‐EMI production ST‐12289 for Wavemaker Productions, Ltd. 7777–12289–1. Rick James. Cold Blooded 1983. Motown Record Corp., Hollywood, California 90028. Distributed by MCA. 5010–96043–1. 6043GL. Earl Klugh. Wishful Thinking. Capital ST‐12323.

Brazilian Cinema Today

1. W.A. Shurcliff. Bombs at Bikini, The Official Report of Operation Crossroads, New York, 1947. pp. 151-52. 2. Terry Riley. RAINBOW IN CURVED AIR, Columbia Records, New York. 3. Rosalind Krauss. Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, October, Spring, 1976, New York. Krauss acknowledges that the last fifteen years of art writing has not comprehensively examined a body of work which conflates psychologistic and formal means to achieve very particular ends. The art of Robert Rauchenberg is a case in point. 4. Philip Leider. Bruce Conner: A New Sensibility, Artforum, Nov.-Dec. 1962.

Problems of Salsa Research

The family of Bessie Smith, the blues singer who died 39 years ago has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court in Philadelphia against CBS, Inc., and Columbia Records, Inc. The suit charged that the two companies exploited Miss Smith because she was black and never paid her more than $200 for any of the records she made between 1922 and 1933. It said that reissues of her records grossed more than $6 million. The suit was filed by Jack Gee Jr., Miss Smith's son, and others.

The Greater Sound

Today, all over the United States, American young people are being spoken to by revolutionists in words they understand, in a style that makes those words acceptable, and through an invisible medium that old professional politicos have not yet picked up on.This medium is the phonograph record, purveyor of bubble gum music and symbol of Elvis Presley's “Houn’ Dog” and the celebrated “Get off of my Blue Suede Shoes” (which John Lennon once called a protest song). One of the leading manufacturers, Columbia Records, runs a series of advertisements in the underground press the theme of which is “The man can't bust our music” and “Know your friends.” The implication aligns “us” against “them,” and the context of the advertising design and illustration is interracial, hippie, pot-smoking youth.Is Columbia for legalization of marijuana? No. Columbia is for making money. Thus the investment in music aimed at long-haired youth.

Audio‐visual aids

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE. No. CL 2710. By Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. Produced by John Simon. 33 1/3 R.P.M. 12 inch record. Cost $4.79. Available through Columbia Records, C.B.S. Inc., 51 West 52nd Street, New York, New York. MEDITATIONS FOR THE MODERN CLASSROOM, No. TC 2029. 33 1/3 R.P.M. Two 12‐inch records. Cost, $11.90. Read by Judith Anderson and Ed Begley. Available through Caedmon Records, Inc., 505 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York. THE SPEECH CHAIN, 16 mm. so minutes. Sound. Color, $85.00. Free rental. Available through Bell Telephone Laboratories, 463 West Street, New York, New York. JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW: THE GIDEON CASE. 16mm. 23 minutes. Color, No. 2471, $265. Black and White, No. 2472, $138. Available through Encyclopedia Britannica Education Corporation, 425 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. OPERATION ABOLITION. 16 mm. 42 minutes. Sound. Black and White. Rental, $30. Available through Cinema 16 Film Library, Inc., 80 University Place, New York, New York 10003; AUTOPSY ON OPERATION ABOLITION. 16 mm. 60 minutes, 2 parts. Sound. Black and White, $50.00. Available through Catechetical Guild Educational Society, 262 East 4th Street, St. Paul, Minnesota. THREE SISTERS by Anton Chekhov, No. TRS 325. 33 1/3 R.P.M. Three 12 inch records. Cost, $18.95. Produced by the Theatre Recording Society. Available Through Caedmon Records, Inc., 505 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York. AND NO BELLS RING. 16 mm. 30 minutes. Sound. Black and White, $120.00; THE QUIET REVOLUTION. 16 mm. 30 minutes. Sound. Black and White. $200.00. Both available through National Education Sales Service, Publications Sales Section 87, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D. C. THE NEW TRUCK DILEMMA. 16 mm. 24 minutes. Sound. Color. Cost, $275.00. Available through BNA, Bureau of National Affairs, 1231 24th Street, N.W., Washington, D. C.

The Technique of Variation in an American Fiddle Tune: (A Study of "Sail Away Lady" as It Was Performed in 1926 for Columbia Records by Uncle Bunt Stephens)

The Technique of Variation in an American Fiddle Tune: (A Study of "Sail Away Lady" as It Was Performed in 1926 for Columbia Records by Uncle Bunt Stephens)

Audio‐visual aids

A HOMAGE TO SHAKESPEARE. 12‐inch record. 33 1/3 r.p.m. (OL7020). Dame Edith Evans, Sir John Gielgud, and Margaret Leighton. Cost: $4.98. Available through Columbia Records, 2240 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. A PERSONAL CHOICE. 12‐inch record. 33 1/3 r.p.m. (VDM 102) Poetry readings by Alec Guinness. Cost: $4.98. Available through RCA Victor Records, 155 East 24th Street, New York 10, New York. AUTOMATED SPEECH PLAYBACK. H C Electronics, Inc., 201 East O'Keefe Street, Suite 210, Palo Alto, California, 94303, has announced the development of a Phonic Mirror system with the electronic circuit completely transistorized which can be plugged into any 105–125 volt, 60‐cycle AC electric outlet. The instrument and external speaker form two halves of a carrying case, 8"x 11” x 5” overall and g pounds in weight, including the professional quality microphone, headphones, and power cord which store in the speaker section. IN WHITE AMERICA. 12‐inch record. 33 1/3 r.p.m. (KOL 6030). Original cast recording. Cost: $4.98. Available through Columbia Records, 2240 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago 18, Illinois. THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Two 12‐inch Tecords. 33 1/3 r.p.m. Monaural or stereophonic. Cost: $12.90 ($8.90 to members of the Society). Available through Theatre Recording Society, 461 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York 10001.

Audio‐visual aids

TIME FOR PHONICS, Touch and Learn Flash Cards, by Louise Binder Scott, published by Webster Division of McGraw‐Hill Book Company. A color film, SIMPLE HAND PUPPETS, a Trend Production Distributed by Walt Disney, 16MM Films; they have offices at 350 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, California; 237 North Northwest Highway, Park Ridge, Illinois; and 477 Madison Avenue, New York 22. E. E. CUMMINGS READS HIS POETRY. 12 inch record. 33? RPM. (TC 1017). Cost: $5.95. Available through Caedmon Records, Inc., 461 Eighth Avenue, New York 1, New York. T. S. ELIOT READING POEMS AND CHORUSES. 12 inch record. 33? RPM. Album number: TC 1045. Cost: $5.95. Performance and reproduction rights available from Caedmon Publishers, 277 Fifth Avenue, New York 16, New York. DRAMATIC READINGS FROM EUGENE O'NEILL. 12 inch record. 33?. (OL5900) Read by Jason Robards Jr. Cost: $4.98. Available through Columbia Records, 2240 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago 18, Illinois. THE BOOK OF RUTH AND THE BOOK OF JUDITH. 12 inch record. 33? RPM. (to 1052) Read by Judith Anderson and Claire Bloom. Cost: $5.95. Available through Caedmon Records, Inc., 277 Fifth Avenue, New York 16, New York.

Two Interior British Columbia Records for the Ancient Murrelet

Two Interior British Columbia Records for the Ancient Murrelet

For Members Only

VIGNETTE LXXIV. William Thomas Hobdell Jackson, Executive Council member, 1960-63, is a native of Sheffield, England. His B.A. degree (1935) is from Sheffield University with First Class honors in the classics. His M.A. (1938) is from the same university. He was a Captain, Royal Artillery, General Staff, in the British Army 1940-46, and emigrated to the United States in 1948. He taught German at the Univ. of Washington, 1948-50, where he took his Ph.D. in Germanics in 1951. He taught for two years at Coe College, then came to Columbia in 1952, where he has been Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages since 1961. There he has also been chairman of the University Seminar in Medieval Studies, 1955-62, editor of the Germanic Review since 1954, and editor of the Columbia Records of Civilization since 1962. We first met him dining a Conference of Editors of Learned Journals in 1956 and were impressed with his ability to share his editorial experience with his compeers, yet maintain his individual point of view. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1958–59), a recipient of of an ACLS grant (1958), and has been tapped as visiting professor at Chicago, Princeton, and Rutgers. His teaching fields are Comparative Literature of the Middle Ages (for the Columbia English Department), Medieval Latin, Paleography, and the History of the German Language. He drives an English car (surprise, surprise) and is fond of horseback-riding, sailing, and boxing. He relaxes over fine wines (of which he is a connoisseur) and fine cheeses. His summer habitat is his place at Quonochontaug, Rhode Island, perched upon a sandbar between a salt pond and the ocean.