In memory of a photographer —

Click on the above image to search for Jazz in this journal.

Infolded:

“In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….”
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
       City of God , by E. L. Doctorow

Perspectives:

Q — "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
A —  "Practice, man, practice."

Another Q-and-A, with a jazz D.J. who reportedly died yesterday —

Q — "Did you ever practice a religion?"
A — "I’m mixed heritage. I was bar mitzvah-ed.
My mother’s side of family is Protestant. I was
rejected as a witness at a wedding of one of
Benny Goodman's cousins because I wasn't Jewish
because of my mother. I'm still mad about that.
If you really go back, my mother’s father was
a church organist."

Update of 6:23 PM ET —

Bar mitzvah :  See Two-Bar Hook.

See as well Simple Tune and Variation.

“… and the song of love’s recision is the music of the spheres.”
— E. L. Doctorow, City of God

Doctorow’s remark was quoted here earlier, on February 5, 2009 —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

For Harlan Kane

From this  journal on Feb. 5, 2009:

"In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in 
City of God , by E. L. Doctorow (2000).

From this  journal on the date of
the above post by Gavaler:

Continued from Music Box – The Theory (April 21)
in memory of jazz enthusiast Ann Sneed,
who reportedly died in Las Vegas at 87 on that date.

Hollywood homicide detective Harry Bosch at home.

See also Mother of Beauty (April 7, 2004).

For a religion writer who reportedly died Sept. 22,
a tune from a sax player who reportedly died today.

See the recent posts below as well as the following
passage from this morning's online New York Times —

"Mr. Belden generally worked fast, but he
lingered for years over the music for his
2003 Blue Note album, “Black Dahlia,” one
of his best-known works. Inspired by the
murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947…."

— Ben Ratliff

This evening's online New York Times —

"Bruce Lundvall, a record executive whose 25-year run
at the helm of Blue Note, preceded by top positions at
CBS and Elektra, made him one of the most influential
figures behind the scenes in recent jazz history, died
on Tuesday in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 79."

See also Moulin Bleu  (Dec. 16, 2003).

"In the garden of Adding, 
 Live Even and Odd…."

– The Midrash Jazz Quartet
    in the novel City of God
    by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

From a search in this journal
for "Against Dryness":

See also the previous three posts.

“Towards the sticky end of a summer of films based on toys, comic-books
and other films, here, at last, is a film based on the Kantian model of
transcendental idealism.

In his 1781 page-turner, the Critique of Pure Reason , the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant warned that the human brain, in its
pinky-grey feebleness, has to rattle the world into an order
it doesn’t possess purely to make sense of it. Otherwise, as Kant snappily
puts it, ‘all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed
space and time themselves, would disappear.'”

— Robbie Collin, review of the 2014 film Lucy

At the end of today’s previous post, Sequel,
there is a tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden,
who died yesterday.

A darker requiem, for another musical figure
who also died yesterday:

Related material:  Prequels to this post—
Willkommen  (June 27) and yesterday’s Back to 1955.

the Silver lining.

The title refers to…

1. A Log24 post of 7:59 AM ET today
2. A New York Times  story of 11:59 AM ET today:

Online Etymology Dictionary  on the title of the first Holden Caulfield
story, “I’m Crazy,” in Collier’s , December 22, 1945 —

Meaning “full of cracks or flaws” is from 1580s;
that of “of unsound mind, or behaving as so” is from 1610s.
Jazz slang sense “cool, exciting” attested by 1927….
Phrase crazy like a fox  recorded from 1935.

The online New York TImes  this morning —

Related material linked to here at midnight Monday-Tuesday —

Djelem Djelem.

Unrelated material, suggested merely by the upload dates of 
two guitar videos* — See Oct. 25, 2008, and Oct. 26, 2011. 

* El Toro – Malagueña (guitarist: Canabarro) and Light and Shade 
  (guitarist: de Lucia).

** Update of 12:26 PM ET — Other reports now say de Lucia died
not today, Wednesday, Feb. 26, but rather on Tuesday, Feb. 25.

For the late Jim Hall—

Backstory:   Icon, 1:44 PM ET today.

Update of 11 PM ET Dec. 10, 2013 — 

For all  the notes, see Da Capo  (11 AM today)
and the Cullinane frequency matrix (12×12).

Matrix used to illustrate the well-tempered
scale. The integer frequency-ratio values
are only approximate in such a scale.

Peter Keepnews on the late jazz musician Chico Hamilton:

"He was a charter member of the baritone saxophonist
Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, which helped lay the groundwork
for the cool movement. His own quintet, which he formed
shortly after leaving the Mulligan group, came to be
regarded as the quintessence of cool." 

Example: a recording uploaded on October 27, 2013,
and this journal on that date.

Related material: Working Backward.

By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.

Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this  weblog on the date  10/04 (2012)—

• The Shining (politics and philosophy)
• Big Bird (Kerouac on jazz)
• Kids Grow Up (children's books and philosophy)

Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM.  Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):

• Decomposition Sermon (mathematics and poetry)
• Grid Compass (philosophy and death)

Related to this last post:

Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
  Later  remarks by McGinn were  posted at 10:06 AM today.  
  They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
  Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
  10/06 (2012) in this  journal with its post related to McGinn's
  weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
  That 10/06 Log24  post is somewhat in the spirit of other
  remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson  review.

A meditation on this morning's New York Times  obituaries:

Happy birthday to jazz pianist Clint Eastwood.

Related material: Skylark in this journal and Return to Paradise.

Click images for details.

Seth and Stefon, eat your hearts out.

Related material: Diamond Girl and the following ad
for Eliza Doolittle Day:
 

MORAN

MOLLOY

"I lived in the garden. I have spoken of a voice
telling me things. I was getting to know it better
now, to understand what it wanted. It did not
use the words that Moran had been taught
when he was little and that he in his turn had
taught to his little one. So that at first I did not
know what it wanted. But in the end I understood
this language. I understood it, I understood it,
all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters.
It told me to write the report. Does this mean
I am freer now than I was? I do not know.
I shall learn. Then I went back into the house
and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on
the windows. It was not midnight. It was not
raining."

— Molloy , by Samuel Beckett

The above excerpts are in memory of some wordplay
in this journal on March 2, of a sneering joke in the 
Daily Princetonian  on March 11, and of a possible saint
who reportedly died around midnight on the night of
March 13-14. 

See also the morning of March 13.

Note, at the end of the Princetonian  piece, a comment
worthy of Beckett—

"These words. They've been played on."

Grace and Abstraction

Paul Motian, Drummer, Composer and Bandleader, Dies at 80

Tue Nov 22, 2011 20:54 from NYT > Obituaries by By BEN RATLIFF

Mr. Motian, a drummer, bandleader, and composer of grace and abstraction,
was one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years.

Himmelfahrt

A link in the previous post to the Harvard Foundation led to a screenshot
of a long-neglected Harvard web page. That page stated yesterday that
"the Harvard Foundation 2008 Artist of the Year has not yet been announced."

It turns out to be jazz artist Herbie Hancock, who was honored at
Harvard's Sanders Theatre on Saturday, March 1, 2008.

Related material from this journal—

Call and Response

For a response from the next day,
March 1, click on the professor.

Lydian Mode

In memory of composer
George Russell, who
died at 86 on Monday —

Russell’s thoughts on the Lydian mode
strongly influenced Miles Davis,
notably in Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”

“The power of the Lydian mode,
  Russell realized, is
  freedom from time’s restraints.
  The major scale is in a state of becoming.
  The Lydian scale already is.”

— The Gravity Man, by Alice Dragoon,
    quoted at LydianChromaticConcept.com 

Related material:

“Field Dance,” from the date of Russell’s death.

“The Tables of Time,” from Nov. 13, 2003,
  and the four entries that preceded it.

Today’s previous entry and
The Reversible Diamond Puzzle
(from St. Nicholas, November 1874)–

colporteur

n. itinerant seller or giver of books,
especially religious literature.

Now you has jazz.

— Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956

For the feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola…

Final Arrangements,
continued:

“Now you has jazz.”
– High Society, 1956 

— Today’s online New York Times

Also from today’s New York Times: Kurt Kreuger in the 1945 film “Paris Underground.”   Kurt Kreuger, a German-born actor who reluctantly played Nazi soldiers in many films about World War II, died July 12 in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 89.

Log24, Wednesday, July 12, 2006: Band Numbers “Some friends  of mine  are in  this band…” — David    Auburn,    Proof Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine. — The Prime Powers

Related material:

A Log24 entry commemorating
the murder of six Jesuits
in El Salvador.

Campaign Song

“All things return to the One.
 What does the One return to?”

— Zen koan, epigraph to
   The Footprints of God,
by Greg Iles of
Natchez, Mississippi

“Literature begins with geography.”

— attributed to Robert Frost

Quarter to Three
 
(continued from
 Dec. 20, 2003,
 and from
 April 3, 2006)

… so put another nickel in the machine….

Related material:

1. The death of
   jazz percussionist Don Alias,
   
   
2. Miles Davis’s album
   Bitches Brew
   (“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down“),
3. Joni Mitchell’s album
   Shadows and Light
   (“God Must Be a Boogie Man“),
4. the Log24 entry
   from the day Alias died,
   which contains the following:
5. “By groping toward the light
    we are made to realize
    how deep the darkness
    is around us.”

   — Arthur Koestler

From Matt Glaser, Satchmo, the Philosopher:

“… the luminosity and perpetual freshness of Armstrong’s music. These qualities, as well as his essentially abstract ability to affect our perception of time, link him with the other artistic and scientific revolutionaries of the first half of the 20th century. Recently I had a very public fantasy (in Ken Burns’s Jazz) in which Werner Heisenberg attends a Louis Armstrong concert in Copenhagen, in 1933. Did I go too far? Actually, I didn’t go far enough.”

That Log24 entries connect both these dates to Louis Armstrong is, of course, purely coincidental.

Why is this 

man smiling?

Final arrangements, continued:

Justice at Heaven’s Gate

“Gate — Early term for a Jazz musician.
Armstrong is the original Swing Jazz player that’s why they call used to call him ‘Gate.’“
— All About Jazz

“Armstrong is also frequently cited as the main source or popularizer of words like scat, gate (a greeting among jazz musicians that became a popular WWII term for a buddy or pal)²

² The term apparently goes back to Louis’s own adolescent nickname, ‘Gatemouth.'”
— Jazz Institute of Chicago

"Professor Krauss even uses many of the same decorations with which she festooned earlier volumes. Bataille’s photograph of a big toe, for example, which I like to think of as her mascot, reappears. As does her favorite doodle, a little graph known as a 'Klein Group' or 'L Schema' whose sides and diagonals sport arrows pointing to corners labeled with various opposing pairs: e.g., 'ground' and 'not ground,' 'figure' and 'not figure.' Professor Krauss seems to believe that this device, lifted from the pages of structuralist theory, illuminates any number of deep mysteries: the nature of modernism, to begin with, but also the essence of gender relations, self-consciousness, perception, vision, castration anxiety, and other pressing conundrums that, as it happens, she has trouble distinguishing from the nature of modernism. Altogether, the doodle is a handy thing to have around. One is not surprised that Professor Krauss reproduces it many times in her new book."
 

From Drid Williams,
The Semiotics of Human Action,
Ritual, and Dance:

This is closely related to
Beckett's "Quad" figure

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching…. Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer…. For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   — Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (1970)

and to the Greimas "semiotic square":

"People have believed in the fundamental character of binary oppositions since at least classical times. For instance, in his Metaphysics Aristotle advanced as primary oppositions: form/matter, natural/unnatural, active/passive, whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/not-being.*  But it is not in isolation that the rhetorical power of such oppositions resides, but in their articulation in relation to other oppositions. In Aristotle's Physics the four elements of earth, air, fire and water were said to be opposed in pairs. For more than two thousand years oppositional patterns based on these four elements were widely accepted as the fundamental structure underlying surface reality….

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully…."

 

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners.

* Compare Chandler's list of Aristotle's primary oppositions with Aristotle's list (also in the  Metaphysics) of Pythagorean oppositions (see Midrash Jazz Quartet).
 

Harvard's Barry Mazur likes to quote Aristotle's Metaphysics.  See 1, 2, 3.

Here, with an introductory remark by Martha Cooley, is more from the Metaphysics:

The central aim of Western religion —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
                 masculine and feminine,
                      life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy —

                 Dualities of Pythagoras
              as reconstructed by Aristotle:
                 Limited     Unlimited
                     Odd     Even
                    Male     Female
                   Light     Dark
                Straight     Curved
                  ... and so on ....

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

Harvard University, Department of English:

Today's birthday: Jerry Seinfeld.
Related material:
Is Nothing Sacred? and Symmetries.

The Blues
and the
Abstract Truth

An obituary of jazz artist Jimmy Smith, who died on Mardi Gras, leads, via his album Got My Mojo Workin’, to a 1961 album of Oliver Nelson that in turn suggests the following quotation:

“After this it was noised abroad that Mr. Valiant-for-truth was taken with a summons by the same post as the other, and had this for a token that the summons was true, ‘That his pitcher was broken at the fountain.’ (Eccles. 12:6) When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’ (1 Cor. 15:55) So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

— John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Time and Chance

“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9-11

“With the passage of time, everyone participated in the ever-increasingly secret lottery.”

— Summary of Borges’s Lottery

The winning evening lottery number for Sunday, September 19, 2004, and for Thursday, September 23, 2004, in the State of Grace (Kelly) was

408.

See a 9/20/04 story about 408

and a 1/4/03 story about Grace and jazz.

From the latter:

Now you has jazz.

— Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956

Note that yesterday’s entries dealt with “the jazz church” and that Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004– the first of the “408” days above– was the date of death of Ellis Marsalis Sr., patriarch of a family of jazz musicians.  The second of the “408” days above– yesterday– was Ray Charles’s birthday.

In Ray We Trust
June 28, 2004 cover
by Eric Palma  

(See New Gold Standard: Cultural Capital)

Classic to Romantic

“Ben Webster is probably best known for his eloquent ballad playing. On JAZZ ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT, we are treated to no less than 15 ballads, all of which are performed superbly. Webster is one of the great jazz romantics….”

Song of the Father

The death of Max D. Barnes (previous entry) and the opening of the first Tennessee lottery suggested the following meditations.

Wikipedia on Jimmie Rodgers, known as the father of country music:

“Fundamentally, Rodgers was a white blues singer….”

A song by the father of country music:

T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Thelma, that gal
made a wreck out of me.

Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.

From Wikipedia:

“In modern Western popular music, call and response is most commonly found in the blues and in blues-derived music like jazz and rock’n’roll.”

If Rodgers’s song is the call, what, one wonders, would be the appropriate response?

Jazz on St. Lucia’s Day

December 13, Saturday, was
the feast day of St. Lucia.

Lauryn Hill
at St. Lucia

Log24 entry for December 13:

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
Was it a mistake?
There is pain with the power…
Time’s friction at the edges…
Center loosens, forms again elsewhere…

— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

Washington Post, Names and Faces,
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003

“A Christmas concert at the Vatican may not be the best place to criticize the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued it for the past few years. Or maybe it’s the perfect place.

Musician Lauryn Hill did just that while performing there Saturday night. The Grammy winner read a statement during the concert that scolded the church and its leaders….

La Repubblica newspaper quoted her as saying, ‘I realize some of you may be offended by what I’m saying, but what do you say to the families who were betrayed by the people in whom they believed?’ …

The Vatican said Sunday it had no comment.”

“Now you has jazz.”
– High Society, 1956   

Related entries:
9/28/03, 8/29/02.

Bel Canto

The conclusion of tonight’s season-
opening episode of “The West Wing”
was a picture of President Bartlet  
 receiving the Host at Mass.

Related material:

The Source:

Tips On Popular Singing
by Frank Sinatra
in collaboration with
his vocal teacher John Quinlan

What prompted me to find this
booklet on the Web
(at about 8:45 PM tonight) was

40,000 Years of Music
by Jacques Chailley
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964),
page 162,
on the bel canto style of singing.

I picked up this book this afternoon
at a sale for $1.

See also Sinatra’s remarks on bel canto
(various places on the Web).

For the religious significance of
the page number 162, see my
entry of 9/11 2003,

Particularity.

Added at 3:20 AM Sept. 25…

In Related News:

Source: Google News, about 3:15 AM 9/25/03

Into the Day

“…no-one sang the night into the day”

— Carly Simon, “Embrace Me, You Child,” quoted in yesterday’s entry Trick of the Light.

I have no song to bring night into day; the best I can do for this morning, the birthday of director/author Peter Bogdanovich, is supply a Frank Russo RealAudio rendition of “Long Ago and Far Away,” from his CD “Quiet Now.”

The song’s connection with Bogdanovich, who turns 64 today, is through Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles.

City of God

Today's site music is

Nous Voici Dans La Ville.

The central aim of Western religion —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... 
the bridging of                  
masculine and feminine,                       
life and death. It's redemption.... 
nothing else matters." 
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) 

The central aim of Western philosophy —

                 Dualities of Pythagoras 
                 as reconstructed by Aristotle: 

                 Limited     Unlimited                      
                 Odd         Even           
                 Male        Female                    
                 Light       Dark                 
                 Straight    Curved                   
                 ... and so on .... 

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in
   The Music of the Spheres (1993)

"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
   City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

Today is the feast of St. Johann Sebastian Bach.

Funeral or Wedding?

From the New York Times of

Bastille Day, 2003:

The Countess was associated with the

ville d’Eu in Haute-Normandie.

The patron saint of the ville d’Eu is Lawrence O’Toole, also the patron saint of Dublin, Ireland.

He is known in France as Saint Laurent, and here is a picture of his chapel near the ville d’Eu:

Two pieces of music seem appropriate to memorialize both the dark and the bright sides of life on this Bastille Day.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings was played at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco, and so should be sufficiently royal for the Comtesse de Paris.

For the midi, click here.
(Piano arrangement by Brian Robinson.)

Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” originally sung (in a 1943 film) by Don Ameche, will serve to recall the bright side of life.  It was written after the 1931 Palermo wedding of the Comtesse but may, in a jazz arrangement, be pleasing to St. Norman J.  O’Connor, the jazz priest in my entry of July 5 — the date of death of the Comtesse, who may or may not have also been a saint.

For the midi, click here.

“Now you has jazz.”
— Cole Porter, High Society

Doctorow’s Epiphany

E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.

In the Garden of Adding…

The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.

Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”

William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:

  A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”

From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:

Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.

From a website on author Willard Motley:

“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”

See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”

 

Opening of the Graves

colporteur

For the Dark Lady

On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is “Nica’s Dream.”

From a website on composer Horace Silver:

“Horace Silver apparently composed Nica’s Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a ‘hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.’ (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)

This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon.  From an essay by Charles Hollander:  

“There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with ‘…a young crude Mata Hari act.’ (V.; 386)….  Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, ‘The Big One, the century’s master cabal,’ and ‘the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name’ (V.; 226)….” 

See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, “Just Seventeen.”

ART WARS: Music for Henry

HomerTheBrave has provided a link to an excellent Tom Tomorrow strip dealing with Ford’s Feb. 23, 1997, commercial-free sponsorship of “Schindler’s List” on TV.

To honor Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co. and author of

The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,

which includes a chapter titled

Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,

this site’s music is now Rhapsody in Blue.

For more on art and power, see the article on Cardinal Richelieu by Deborah Weisgall in today’s New York Times.

Style

A memorial to jazz pianist Ellis Larkins,
who died on Michaelmas.

Angel Night

In honor of Ellis Larkins, jazz musician, who died on Sunday, September 29, 2002, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, here is the best midi rendition I can find of the classic melody “Angel Eyes.”

(This entry was actually made on October 3, 2002, but I had saved a place for it on Michaelmas.  The midi is from Wesley Dick’s Juke Box page.  For some classic New Orleans funeral music, go to Dick’s home page.)

Requiem for a Critic

Sample clips of Thelonious Monk compositions: Four in One, Criss-Cross

A 1999 Mike Melillo Trio album, “Bopcentric,” includes the above compositions.

“Melillo is a striking pianist, a chameleon who has a Bud Powell touch on a Charlie Parker be bop number, who evokes appropriate echoes of Thelonious Monk”.
— John S. Wilson in The New York Times

From sleeve notes by Orrin Keepnews at

The Thelonious Monk Website:

For many years regarded as an awesome genius, but one whose ideas were too far-out for general consumption, Monk now seems finally to be gaining long-deserved acceptance….  some critics feel that he is becoming (as John S. Wilson has put it) “increasingly lucid.”

From The New York Times of August 28, 2002:

John S. Wilson, the first critic to write regularly about jazz and popular music in The New York Times, died yesterday at a nursing home in Princeton, N.J. He was 89 and lived in Princeton.