Lester Young Research Articles

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

마크 머피의 스캣 리듬 분석 연구 - 리듬 그루핑의 변칙 구조를 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study is to present an anomalous rhythm grouping structure by analyzing the rhythm grouping of scat used by Mark Murphy so that vocalists using scat can utilize various rhythms. In an interview with Kathryn Irene Reid, Jazz vocalist Mark Murphy said that the instrumentalist who had the greatest influence on his improvisation style was Miles Davis. and He said he listens to many jazz musicians, including Lester Young and Billie Holiday, to develop and train his musical style. In this way, Murphy has devised his own individual ways to extend music based on the bebop tradition, Murphy's solos use interesting melodic ideas and different chord tones and extensions to balance them out and creating his own unique scat syllables and creative rhythm patterns. In order to analyze from the point of view of grouping, the research method was centered on the anomalously expressed unique rhythm among the rhythms used in Murphy's studio album and live performance album, and the anomalous rhythm grouping structure applied to the analyzed song was presented. Murphy's scat rhythm deviates from the basic beat of the song, and the anomalous grouping structure with a length of two eighth notes, the length of one beat plus two of the eighth note triplets, and patterns of 6 beats and 5 beats is applied as a continuous repeating pattern, resulting in a unique rhythmic structure.

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

"I'm gonna lose my strength, I'm gonna seize and die, And all that Jazz"! Neurological diseases in jazz legends.

Even though jazz is a musical style that excels in improvisation and virtuosity, it is not without its share of anecdotes, drama, and downright tragedy, and the biographies of jazz musicians and their demise are fraught with ominous and dire straits. Unsurprisingly, some would develop chronic and fatal diseases. The neurological diseases that afflicted the following six composers and musicians, all of whom are considered jazz legends, are briefly discussed: Charles Mingus, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both diagnosed with neurosyphilis; Thelonius Monk, who had possible frontotemporal dementia; George Gershwin, who died as a result of brain glioma; and Cole Porter, who developed phantom limb pain following an amputation. The association of lifestyles, with drug abuse, particularly alcohol and heroin, in addition to great sexual promiscuity factors contributed to the development of a series of diseases such as syphilis. In addition, we also described some fatalities such as neurodegenerative diseases and cerebral glioma.

Is Cool a Virtue?

This paper argues that cool is a virtue in a specific context: that of black Americans living under a specific modality of white supremacy. But cool is not merely a coping mechanism. A historical analysis of the term shows that cool is being unimpressed by, and calm in the face of, white supremacy. This is made manifest in a style, the “cool pose,” the sophistication of which is captured in the jazz of Lester Young and Miles Davis. Thus, cool is both a virtue of character and a feature of black American aesthetics. But as a cultural phenomenon, it has been appropriated by white American culture.

Lester Young’s performance poetics and performance style: the experience of analysis

The research focuses on the system of performance resources of expression of a jazz musician, which received the title of “performance poetics” and “performance style”. L. Young’s creative work has repeatedly been the subject of research, in particularly, in publications by L. Porter (1981) and D. Daniels (1985; 2002; 2005), one of the outstanding biographers of the jazz master. D. Gelly (2007) includes L. Young into the pantheon of the most influential jazz performers reflecting the components of his performance style. J. P. De Lucia (2017) calls L. Young a key figure at the beginning of swing era. The scientific novelty of our study lies in the development of aspects of the analysis of the performance poetics of jazz musicians basing on L. Young’s creativity. The purpose of the article is to identify the parameters of Lester Young’s performance poetics. As the research methods the communicative-interpretative, systematic, stylistic approaches and the performance analysis are used. The analysis of performance poetics is based on the Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts musicologists’ developments: by L. Shapovalova (2007) devoted to the “performance time-space” concept and Yu.Nikolaievska’s monograph (2020) on the performance interpretology. The results of the study are based on the analysis of L. Young’s compositions the “Squabblin” and the “Blue Devils Blues”; on his work as a soloist-improviser in King Oliver’s orchestra and in the band “Blue Devils”. Conclusion supports the idea of performance poetics as an artistic system, which is a “reflection of the musician’s interpretative thinking” (Nikolaievska, 2020) in such parameters as melody, metro-rhythm, tonality, harmony, texture and the corresponding “toponyms” – articulation, tempo-rhythm, dynamic score, and “toponymics” as performance reproduction of texture. It is articulated оn such positions as unique timbre and sound production (specific position of the mouthpiece), expansion of harmonious thinking (melodic use of fourths and fifths, “horizontal” concept of phrasing). L. Young’s unique performing style is based on the principles of “stretched sound”, “horizontal” concept of improvisation, intense vibrato and the formation of a performance as a reflection act.

The birth of the ‘cool:’ Marlon Brando and the afro-aesthetics of psychological-realist acting

ABSTRACT Most histories of psychological-realist acting identify the mid-twentieth-century style with Lee Strasberg’s eponymous ‘Method,’ tracing its genealogy back to the work of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theatre protégés. The style’s most iconic practitioner—Marlon Brando—was more circumspect, however, rarely crediting Strasberg for his acting credentials. Taking Brando as a case study, I demonstrate other influences also at work. Tracing his ‘cool’ style of performance to the expanded movement vocabulary of choreographer Katherine Dunham and the intersubjective audience engagement of jazz saxophonist Lester Young, I demonstrate how Brando’s method of psychological-realist acting is rooted in Afro-Aesthetics and was practiced as an anti-racist form of self-imaging.

Saxophone in jazz: aspects of paradigmatics

Saxophone in jazz: aspects of paradigmatics

The Sound of Jazz as Essential Image

Over the past two decades, jazz scholars have challenged the limited way that the music’s aesthetic was understood for decades prior, moving away from the study of jazz as merely a body of recorded or transcribed texts, to consider the myriad elements that produce meaning in every act of jazz performance. Examples of this important critical turn include Dana Reason’s assertion that ‘meaning [in jazz improvisation can be] located in the ways in which improvisers situate their bodies, change their facial expressions, and use their voices to accompany notes, gestures, silences or phrases’; or Vijay Iyer’s imperative for the music’s critical interlocutors to ‘explode’ the idea of the ‘narrative’ as the dominant way to understand meaning in jazz. While the field’s collective critical focus has expanded, especially to observe the gestural and visual elements in jazz performance, the specific influence of television in formalizing audiences’ understanding of these elements demands more attention.&#x0D; In this paper, I focus on the 1957 CBS television production, The Sound of Jazz, to consider the medium’s role in shaping mid-century understandings of jazz musicians as visual characters and theatrical agents. Conceptualized by innovative producer Robert Herridge, The Sound of Jazz proposed an unfiltered glimpse of a whole array of jazz luminaries in performance, including Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie. For musical advice, Herridge called upon the critics Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, intent on assembling musicians who were not necessarily the most commercially successful, but instead the most representative of the music’s ethos. As Hentoff remembered later, Herridge’s emphasis on ‘purity’ inspired many of the production’s choices, from the lack of artifice in the stage set, to the suggestion that musicians should dress as they would for rehearsal—in their own clothes and hats, that is, rather than in the exaggerated black tie that a TV spot might otherwise impel (xv). Superficially, one might read the effect of these decisions as a ‘behind-thescenes’ view of jazz musicians at work en route to a staged performance. As I suggest in counterpoint, though, what the programme ultimately offered was the sight of jazz artists exercising their self-representation and theatrical agency as they would in more liberated performance contexts. Freed from exterior expectations about setting and costume, that is, these musicians gave the show’s audience a look at how they envisioned and exhibited themselves in the representative settings where the jazz aesthetic developed.&#x0D; As Philip Auslander has written about the relationship between theater and television, the new medium’s ontology turned on the assumption that it presented something ‘live’, rather than approximate the fixity of cinematic texts. Effectively, Auslander writes, television ‘colonized’ theatre’s ‘liveness’ and remediated stage performance through a ‘claim to immediacy’ (13). With this distinction in mind, I argue that The Sound of Jazz is of inestimable importance to the critical imperatives of new jazz studies. Just as the most acclaimed jazz records simulated access to the sound of live performance, the 1957 programme codified audiences’ awareness of the music’s theatrical elements and visual codes. Ultimately, if jazz is to be understood in this more expansive way, then this television document must be seen—and additionally, seen as canonical, with the same weight given to the contemporaneous LPs that earlier defined our sense of what jazz is.

DEEP SONG

1 7 R D E E P S O N G C O R N E L I U S E A D Y These mother-fuckers, These mother-fuckers Won’t let me sing. Billie Holiday Will not be allowed To raise her voice At Lester Young’s funeral. She won’t be allowed. She is a scarlet woman. The mourners, the mourners Are scandalized. He was sweet, And now he’s gone. He was hers, And his wife won’t have it. These mother-fuckers. These mother-fuckers. That’s love. That the understanding Of how long he’s been gone, How long he’ll be gone. It’s deep, down in her cells. It’s awful, just terrible. Right in a church She’s showing it. Right in a church. What you going do about it, Harlem? That voice 1 8 Y That broken-bottle neck Voice She wants his sax Around her voice cords, She wants his pork-pie Pulled rough against Her skin, her body Is a horn. Let me sing About love, she thunders, Let me sing about love You mother-fuckers. ...

Lester Leaps In

Lester Young was a key figure in the early development of swing. In this article, I will discuss some of the more specific improvisatory elements he used regularly throughout his recorded solos in this time period. His famous solo on ‘Lester Leaps In' will be the starting point for this analysis, with a special focus on some of the innovations that Young brought to the world of jazz improvisation. Bebop, cool jazz, and free jazz all owe a debt to Lester for loosening the structures of swing, while creating a new vocabulary. We will take a look at how he did it, and what has made him a lasting icon of creativity to so many improvisers.

Book Review Essay: Spokesman of Cool

What was postwar cool? For Joel Dinerstein, professor of English at Tulane University, the time frame is 1943–1963, and the emblematic figures are from jazz (Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Miles Dav...

Skunder Boghossian: A Brief Introduction to the Man and the Artist

Skunder BoghossianA Brief Introduction to the Man and the Artist Elizabeth W. Giorgis (bio) Perhaps one could say that everything about Skunder’s life—the sizzling of his ideas or the over intensity of his artistic talent—is surreal and at times hard to imagine. I remember the evening in September 1996, when I was first introduced to him. I had expressed my intent to write an article on him when he told me to come back to his studio/workspace in Washington, DC, the following day. We met the following day with all intentions on my part to talk about his work. Instead, he gave me a bulk of videos, tapes, and books of Ethiopian history, of African American comedians of the 1970s, and of speeches of civil rights activists that I thought at first were totally inappropriate. He engaged me in unfamiliar, peculiar, and riddled conversations such as the Chalcedonian and Monophysite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. This doctrine, I later learnt, was a debate between two ideologies on questions of whether Christ’s nature remains altogether divine and not human even though he has taken on an earthly and human body with its cycle of birth, life, and death. Of course, I was puzzled by all these overtures at first, but then I realized that it was as if he wanted me to see the metaphor of his work, and rightly so, as the paintings of Skunder Boghossian are deeply expressive in a spiritual way where art is more than a language spoken. It is metaphysics, a critical study, or yet again a systematic view of Skunder’s own natural environment. The Chalcedonian and Monophysite discussion was to show me the interconnectedness of cultures as Monophysites, I found out, were the ones that trekked down from the Near and Middle East to the region of what is now called Ethiopia. And through my friendship with Skunder that began in September 1996, and lasted until his death in 2003, I found his artistic brilliance and passionate overtures connote a certain reality but always within a universal concept of ingrained myths, symbols, and allegories unique to people of color. Skunder was born in Addis Ababa in 1937, to an influential father of Armenian descent and an Ethiopian mother. His training in art informally began at the then Teferi Mekonnen School. It was while he was a student at Teferi Mekonnen that he also met Larry Erskine, an African American neighbor who introduced him to the Voice of America jazz program that used to be relayed to Addis Ababa from Tangier. And ever since then, music, and particularly jazz, has molded and formed the colors and shapes of his canvas. In 1955, at the age of seventeen, Skunder won second prize in abstract art at the National Art Exhibition held for the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Emperor Haile Selassie. Following this success, he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad. He studied at the St. Martin’s School of Art and [End Page 10] Central School in London, the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere (1954–1956), and the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (1957–1966). His upbringing in jazz took root in Paris where the best of African American jazz musicians had flocked. He knew them all: Bud Powell, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, famed jazz musicians and the visual and aural particulars of the Paris jazz world. Pretending to be an assistant, he told me, he carried the saxophone of Sonny Rollins so as to get a front seat during Rollins’s performances, and had a part in Louis Armstrong’s 1961 movie Paris Blues. His fascinating presence amongst these jazz giants informed his exquisite knowledge in music. It was also in Paris that he met Andre Breton, the savant of the surrealist movement, who frequently came to the Grand Chaumiere and who conducted informal seminars that Skunder habitually attended. The South African artist Gerard Skoto, who Boghossian had also befriended in Paris, introduced him to the great Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam in 1959, at the Second International Congress of Negro Writers in Rome. It was then that Skunder became closely acquainted with pioneers of the liberation...

High Times

High Times John Tytell (bio) Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats & Drugs Martin Torgoff Da Capo Press www.dacapopress.com/book/hardcover/bop-apocalypse/9780306824753 393 Pages; Print, $26.00 Bop Apocalypse is a highly coherent, comprehensive and quite compelling account of the fusion of jazz history, the combustible and sometimes compromising influence of drugs, and the emergence of the Beat writers. Even if some of Torgoff’s ground has been previously covered, he weaves his narrative more fluently than some of his predecessors and with more pickle and punch. His book is not a blow-by-blow job, not a numbing parade of fact as much as a gestalt history using a synthesizing lens focusing on a conjunction of revealing events like the detail of a young Jack Kerouac sharing a table at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem with his first wife and Billie Holiday, or the bop musician Charlie Parker downing eight doubles on a dare (what downed Dylan Thomas) before performing at the Hi De Ho Club in Los Angeles in 1946. The scope of the book is large: the beginning of jazz in New Orleans after World War One; its development in Chicago in the 1920’s and Harlem in the 1930’s; the immediate repression by Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; the impact of jazz and drugs on the Beats at the end of World War Two and their ability to artistically disseminate the news of that impact. Torgoff is a gifted storyteller and he begins with a striking anecdote told to him by the writer Terry Southern. Picking cotton in Texas in 1936, on the way to fishing for bullheads in a pond surrounded by weeping willows and cottonwoods, he saw a cow sprawled on the ground in what seemed contented bliss. The field hand accompanying him noticed an uprooted green plant and explained that the cow had eaten “red dirt,” or loco-weed: i.e. Marijuana. In a time when a national paranoia about this weed had been cultivated by federal agents, Southern began searching for more. By the time he wrote the celebrated campfire scene for Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Southern had “smoked thousands of joints, sharing them with some of the most interesting cultural figures of his age….” Bop Apocalypse is organized with a series of sharply drawn vignettes: Anslinger, the country’s first drug czar, an inveterate liar and xenophobic racist who declared the drug war; the musician Muzz Mezzrow, the “White Mayor of Harlem,” who began dealing weed and whose 1946 autobiography Really the Blues was read by a student at Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg, “as if it were the Rosetta Stone”; the genial and generous Louis Armstrong who played music that could make people stand on their chairs and shout,” and who understood that the musicians in his band could function on marijuana without suffering the after effects of alcohol. Another key connection was Jack Kerouac who as a student at Columbia frequented a club in Harlem where a new evolution in jazz was created. The edgy, dissonance of Bop was formed in Minton’s cellar by musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Parker. Torgoff offers elegant accounts of Young, known as the Epitome of Cool, and Parker, the Icarus of that cellar. The use of heroin, Torgoff maintains, “spread in direct proportion to the cult of Parker’s admirers and Anslinger soon created a special file on musicians.” It is estimated that 75% of jazz musicians became addicted to heroin in the 1940s and 1950s, and Torgoff compassionately explores the dynamics of this phenomenon. For Jackie McLean, one of the musicians Torgoff interviewed, it was the best way to overcome a perplexing stage fright; for others like Holiday it was compensation for a terrible despair. Paradoxically, for the authorities, it became the most convenient excuse for repression. Part of the richness of Torgoff’s tapestry is his reliance on interviews he conducted over the past quarter century like the one he did with Herbert Huncke in 1992. A catalyst underground figure whose term “beat” became the signifier for a generation, Huncke was living in a basement on...

The Evolution of Mann: Herbie Mann and the Flute in Jazz by Cary Ginell (review)

The Evolution of Mann: Herbie Mann and the Flute in Jazz. By Cary Ginell. (The Hal Leonard Jazz Biography Series.) Milwaukee, Ml; Hal Leonard, 2014 [xvi, 199 p. ISBN 9781458419811. $18.99.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, discography, index. The eminent jazz journalist Cary Ginell has prepared another exceedingly well-researched biography of a jazz musician. Like his wonderful book on Cannonball Adderley, Walk Tall (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2013), this new biography of flutist Herbie Mann treats us to an album-by-album chronicle of the musician's life. As in his Adderley work, Ginell tells us about crucial musical events that led up to each album and what occurred at each recording session. He draws upon pointed interviews that he conducted with Mann, Mann's friends and relatives, and several musicians who played with Mann. With Ginell's help, we gain an appreciation for Mann's extensive musical explorations that stemmed from the flutist's remarkable curiosity and openness. For the many jazz fans who know only such Mann hits as Comin' Home Baby and Memphis Underground, this book will prove to be a breakthrough because it also describes how the flutist developed almost entirely new repertoires every few years and how each of them embraced a different ethnic tradition. For instance, Mann created original amalgams of jazz with Brazilian music (before Stan Getz became known for it), Middle Eastern music, African music, Cuban music, Japanese art music, soul music, rhythm and blues, reggae, and Hungarian folk music. Unknown to most jazz fans is the fact that his disco piece Hi-Jack sold millions and was the biggest hit of Mann's career. The author also provides us with a brief history of jazz flutists, mostly connected with Afro-Cuban bands, and he links Mann's longstanding interest in Latin American music to hearing a 1947 recording of Jungle Fantasy by the Puerto Rican flutist Esy Morales. For each exploration, Ginell tells us about Mann's travels to the music's original source, and how in many cases the flutist engaged the top practitioners of those styles to play with him. This ultimately means that listeners have been blessed by Mann's tendency to become restless. 'Every time a style of music am playing gets a little too perfect, ... and by perfect, mean something that is a little too tidy, something that is in a box instead of on a meadow. With me, this happens about every two years or so. When it happens, change' (p. 131). This tendency tied in nicely with his aptitude as a talent scout. For example, Mann albums marked some of the earliest appearances of such luminaries as pianist Chick Corea, bassist Miroslav Vitous, vibraphonist Roy Ayers, and guitarist Sonny Sharrock. The book is loaded with little-known facts that should delight Mann's fans. For instance, readers will learn that at one time he wrote music for television shows and that eventually he composed original music for many of his own albums as well as for one by the prominent Afro-Cuban bandleader Francisco Machito Grillo. Another little-known fact is quite significant: Mann was the first prominent jazz musician to think of himself as a flutist who doubled on tenor saxophone instead of a saxophonist who doubled on flute. Additionally, Mann told Ginell that when he was devising a jazz improvisation style: There was no style for flutists playing jazz. You couldn't listen to the Charlie Parker or the Lester Young or the Dizzy Gillespie of flute playing. So 1 said to myself, Why not listen to trumpet players? So listened to Miles and Dizzy and Art Farmer and Clifford Brown, and that's what based my style on. It was more percussive. It wasn't like the prevailing notion of the flute. Nobody plays jazz on the saxophone like classical saxophone, and nobody plays jazz on the bass like classical bass. The same goes for piano and trumpet. So said I can't base it on William Kincaid, so I'm just going to develop my own style. …

Book Review: Glenn O’Brien, Ed., The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground

Book Review: Glenn O'Brien, Ed., Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground. New York: Library Classics, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-598532562 (Hardcover). 471 Pages. S27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2015 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]A memorable scene in Robert Stone's National Book Award winning novel Dog Soldiers (1974) features Hollywood hustler Eddie Peace introducing the protagonist Ray Hicks to a couple of adventure-seeking squares. Adventure, in this case, is heroin, intravenously injected, which Hicks arrives on the scene to administer. Raymond [Hicks] is the operator, Eddie Peace tells the squares. He's the original hip guy. whole world is goofs to him.In one indelible moment, Stone collapses nearly all the qualities that manifest as hip or cool or underground in Glenn O'Brien's anthology, Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: illicit substances (in some cool schools, the harder the hipper), hustlers, thrill seekers, danger, and, in the center of it all, a character who knows the score better than anyone and cannot be surprised. [NB: Stone's scene does not appear in O'Brien's anthology-I'm not complaining-but it could, especially because so many of O'Brien's selections conjure its action, milieu, and characters.] Stone has commented that the creation of Hicks derives in part from Neal Cassady, whom Stone knew. Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a cool school bible, might qualify in his own right as an original hip guy. Indeed, his Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.) appears in the book, as, of course, does Kerouac in essay form in his The Origins of the Beat Generation. Kerouac and Cassady flow-chart into so many of the book's other hipster representatives: Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ed Sanders, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and so on-the Beats and their constellation are well represented, but Cool School shows that America's hip underground flows within them and without them.Can one quibble with the selection? Well, let's look at the numbers: of the fifty-seven entries, forty-six are male, nine female. Two of the entries by women are song lyrics (Fran Landesman's The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Annie Ross's Twisted), and as such, nearly throwaways, but we also get two lyrics from the men (King Pleasure's Parker's Mood, and Richard Hell's Blank Generation). That leaves forty-four prose (or play or transcript) entries from men up against a mere seven from women, which begs the question: whither Patti Smith, Jane Bowles, Karen Finley, Hettie Jones, Memphis Minnie, Kathy Acker, Jayne Cortez? collection includes a half-dozen entries that directly or indirectly celebrate black culture, including Mezz Mezzrow's If You Can't Make Money, Teny Southern's You're Too Hip, Baby, Jack Kerouac's The Origins of the Beat Generation, Bob Kaufman's Walking Parker Home, Norman Mailer's The White Negro, Del Close's Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases, but only seven black writers-six, if you don't count Anatole Broyard's A Portrait of the Hipster, given that Broyard passed as white in his hip-cool-beat NYC life. One may also wonder if his long-term employment at the New York Times Book Review compromises any of his hipster cred? At any rate, four of these seven come from the world of jazz, including excerpts from Miles Davis' Miles: Autobiography, Babs Gonzales' I Paid My Dues, Lester Young, from the interview LesterParis59, and the aforementioned Parker's Mood by King Pleasure. In contrast, there is nothing from Melvin Van Peebles, Claude McKay, Greg Tate, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Chester Himes, or Claude Brown. …

Second Novel No End: An Open Letter to Ralph Ellison

March 8, 20141Skirvin HotelOklahoma CityDear Ralph,I've arrived in Oklahoma City for the first time. I'm recalling how you and I talked about Oklahoma City the first time I visited you and Fanny at your Harlem apartment. I was twenty-six and graduate student at Yale. I wrote you letter during the fall of 1976. I received your reply just before Christmas-a long eloquent letter-a special Christmas gift indeed. The letter, which I still treasure, has evidence of your characteristic style and wit: once I shocked white man whose shoes I was shining by revealing that I was familiar with Freud's theory of dreams, but neither of us was prepared to communicate on that level, for it would have placed too great strain on the arrangements of social hierarchy-and on the two of us!2 You suggested that I come to see you. On Friday, February 17, 1977, I visited you and Fanny. I've already written about that special day.3 Suffice it to say on this occasion that it was an unforgettable and inspiring afternoon.Now thirty-seven years later, I'm standing here in Oklahoma City's Skirvin Hotel, where you worked as teenager. I'm reading this open letter to you at conference and symposium dedicated to your work. We're also celebrating your hundredth birthday. It's quite party. Many professors of American and African American literature are here-an unprecedented gathering of literary experts and beautiful minds. Given the array of talent in the room, I've been struggling to avoid redundancy and find worthy subject. I'll make brief suggestion that we move beyond our adoration of Invisible Man and focus at least as much on your essays, speeches, and reviews. We should think about your overall contribution as cultural critic and man of letters. I'll also urge my colleagues to reconsider the rhetoric of failure that usually accompanies discussions of your second novel.Your essays alone are an impressive body of work. 4 Several essays are devoted to the aesthetic concerns of major American novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Richard Wright. You've written essays on the early years of blues and jazz-providing vivid portraits of your first music teacher, Mrs. Zelia Breaux; blues women such as Ida Cox and Ma Rainey; and jazzmen including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian, Jimmy Rushing, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. You discuss artists and politicians like Mahalia Jackson, Romare Bearden, and Lyndon Johnson. In several essays, you describe the ethnic and cultural diversity of your Oklahoma childhood-especially the complex intermingling of Negroes and Indians.5Furthermore, your essays display your profound understanding of the dynamic nature of the cultural DNA of the United States. You illustrate ways in which African American culture represents definitive strand. You describe the unity in the diversity of American culture, including the blending of identities and deceptive metamorphoses we often see. Stanley Crouch has said that you were attuned to a score written in the sky and in the mud, where the tales of heartbreak and hope . . . tell us all of the cosmopolitan bloodlines that make us all Americans.6 However, Invisible Man, given its bright magic and canonical status, has cast regrettable cloud over your eloquent essays. But new books, taking into account your posthumous works, are providing revisionary analyses of your writing and complex portraits of you.A novelist with your penetrating intelligence and clairvoyant vision would've known that critics and biographers would research, discover, and disclose unknown details about you as talented writer and flawed man. To your own and Fanny's credit, you were both gracious archivists-leaving the Library of Congress your papers-including everything appropriate and indeed some things rather awkward for us to ponder. …

Kansas City lightning: the rise and times of Charlie Parker

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker's Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

The Story of Jazz (review)

Reviewed by: The Story of Jazz Michael Ashenfelder The Story of Jazz. DVD. Directed by Matthew Seig. Limited edition; newly digitally remastered. [UK]: Medici Arts, 2009. 2057158. $21.98. The producers of a fine music series (Masters of American Music) have made it even finer with this digitally restored and remastered re-release. The audio, photographs and film footage are sharper and clearer than the series’ first release (1993), and even though most of performances will be familiar to lovers of jazz, it is evident while watching and listening to a clean copy that despite the familiarity of the performances, some are still as timeless, unique and precious as any work of art. Performances such as Louis Armstrong’s 1933 stage performance of “Dinah” are still mesmerizing and iconic. Louis mugs, scats and delivers the music effortlessly in body language. During his sparse solo he quotes the song “Exactly Like You” and—as the band careens behind him—stretches the time slowly as if it were elastic. Or Billie Holiday’s performance of “Fine and Mellow” on the 1957 CBS TV special, “The Sound of Jazz.” Backed by an all-star band, Holiday’s caresses each note as she sings and her eyes go all dreamy and sweet as Lester Young sighs out one of the most sensual solos ever caught on video. While there is no definitive story of jazz, this series is up there with Ken Burn’s Jazz series, and each is equally valuable and deficient in its own way. Each tells their story in photos and footage with a voice-over narrative interspersed with comments from colleagues and admiring strangers. Masters of American Music features more colleagues and bandmates than admiring strangers though, which takes the viewer one step closer to the artist through recollections, personal memories and anecdotes. Masters of American Music is well paced, visually entertaining, and presents a good general overview of each subject. The individual artists’ stories could be more comprehensive but it is difficult to cover anyone’s life story thoroughly in an hour and still leave room for the performances. The writing and narrative are good overall, though occasionally clunky. But that can be overlooked because the general facts are correct and the material is so rich. And there are both excerpts of performances and full length segments. The Masters of American Music series should absolutely be part of any music lover’s library. [End Page 168] Michael Ashenfelder Library of Congress Copyright © 2011 Music Library Association, Inc

The Development of Diminutions in American Jazz

Allen Forte, the prominent Yale music theorist, delivered this previously unpublished lecture in Germany in 1958. In “Forte’s Lecture on Jazz: An Introduction” (included elsewhere in this issue), Benjamin Givan states that this lecture is “the earliest known analytical study of jazz by a professional music theorist.” The lecture applies Schenkerian concepts of “diminution technique” to jazz improvisations from early blues to bebop, including recordings by Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. As Forte explains, “By diminution technique is meant the melodic means (as distinct from, say, the rhythmic or chordal means) by which a given basic tonal structure is varied so as to expand or prolong its content.” Several notated examples are provided, as well as an appendix of recordings referenced.