What next?  Stores selling Rod Cless t-shirts?  Frank Teschemacher refrigerator magnets?  The Complete Works of Frank Melrose?

I can only imagine!  (“I ‘like’ it, I ‘like’ it!”)

May your happiness increase!

But thanks to Lorenz Yeung and Fernando Ortiz de Urbana (I’ve had the good fortune to meet the latter in person) are a few bite-sized bits of one kind of Holy Grail: http://jazzontherecord.blogspot.com/

(Fernando’s blog, EASY DOES IT, is a wonderful cornucopia on its own.)

Who assembled this I do not know.  It is a tribute to Sidney Bechet, who well deserves such honors.  But obviously someone followed Bechet around in 1949, on his penultimate visit to the United States.  And Bechet appeared a number of times on television (think of it!) in the States — most often, I believe, on the Eddie Condon Floor Show oon WPIX.

It’s always heartwarming to be able to praise Mr. Condon, so allow me a few sentences.  Whenever he could (later with the help of his wife Phyllis and the publicist Ernie Anderson) he looked for venues where his music could be played — in mixed bands on Fifty-Second Street, at the Park Lane Hotel, at Town Hall, the Ritz Theatre, and Carnegie Hall, several incarnations of his own club . . . on records, radio broadcasts, transcriptions for the servicemen and women . . . and television.

The Floor Show was his rewarding pioneering television series, broadcast between 1948 and 1950 on WPIX-TV.  It brought together the best jazz players and singers — Louis Armstrong, Sidney Catlett, Jack Teagarden, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday, Earl Hines, Pee Wee Russell, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Hot Lips Page, Count Basie, Bobby Hackett, Buzzy Drootin, Ralph Sutton — alongside Rosemary Clooney and tap-dancer Teddy Hale, and fifty or so other luminaries.

Eddie was wise enough to understand that the human ear and psyche would wilt on a steady unremitting diet of Hot, so in his club there was an intermission solo pianist; there were ballad medleys, slow blues, medium-tempo pop tunes, as well as RIVERBOAT SHUFFLE.

And his understanding of “show,” of variety, developed in the visual world of early television — hot numbers interspersed with slow ballads, sweet singing, tap dancing, and more.  (I’ve seen a still photograph of what must have been a perfect jazz trio: Hot Lips Page, James P. Johnson, and Zutty Singleton.  Pardon me while I rhapsodize silently.)

Some small portion of the music survives on vinyl issues on the Queen-Disc label and in the collectors’ underground trading world, but we know that the kinescopes made at the time — films of the programs — no longer exist.  I have this on very solid authority, unless there were multiple sets made.

However . . . this YouTube surprise package has color silent footage of Sidney with Cliff Jackson, Kid Ory, Muggsy Spanier, Teddy Hale, Peanuts Hucko, possibly Kansas Fields, Gene Schroeder, Buddy Rich, Chubby Jackson, George Wettling, and another saxophonist named Charlie Parker.

You will have to watch the video several times to fully appreciate all its great gifts, including shots of Bechet acting in several French films, occasionally at the stove or battling an over-assertive shirt dickey.

About the television footage: I imagine that someone who loved Bechet followed him onto the soundstage with a movie camera (the kinescopes would have had sound and been in black and white) — blessings on this intrepid soul and those who saved the footage and shared it with us.  (I’ve written to Lorenz Yeung, the poster, to ask the source of the Condon material; he generously told me that it was part of a Bechet CD package he bought in Australia, a bonus CD (!)  I’m also quite amazed that none of the orinthologists have noticed this — and it’s been on YouTube since 2011.  Research!  In color!)

The question, is, of course, “What else is out there?”  And the answer is unfathomable.  But all things are possible.

My personal Holy Grail might no longer exist.  I can’t remember where I heard or read this story, but Ernie Anderson (both diligent and a teller of tales, so this one might have to be taken with skepticism) knew a fellow in the advertising trade, quite wealthy, whose son loved jazz.  Father wanted to give his son a present, and asked Ernie to set up a recording session for the boy: Ernie assembled Bobby Hackett, Sidney Catlett, and the fine pianist Harry Gibson (later Harry “the Hipster” Gibson), had them record some music, had the records pressed in perhaps one set, and I assume the boy was terrifically pleased.  But where are those records now?

Readers are invited to submit their own versions of the jazz Holy Grail . . . we could start with the airshots of the King Oliver band with Lester Young in it and go from there.

Thanks to Lorenz Yeung, Fernando, to David J. Weiner, Maggie Condon, Loren Schoenberg, Dan Morgenstern, and to Sidney Bechet (of course): the soundtrack is DANS LES RUE D’ANTIBES.

May your happiness increase!

Even when drunk, Condon was in touch with deep wisdoms.

I encounter so many people — more often women, not men — who keep a running tally of their flaws, failures, gaffes.  They strive towards some imagined ideal of perfection and use it as a way to see themselves as lopsided, inadequate. They succeed 99% and then berate themselves for the missing 1.

In the world of jazz, our heroes were uniformly imperfect.  Hear Louis and Bix crack notes; hear Hawkins and Bird squeak and squeal.  Hear the tempo slow down or speed up on a hallowed record.  Hear the rhythm section take four bars to get itself together.  Hear the singer hit a note sharp or flat.  Hear the band come in a beat too soon.

In live performances, we’ve all heard the band start and then stop to start again.  Those who are paying attention may have heard one of the players be unsure of a particular chord change and someone in the band then says quietly, “A flat,” and things get on the right track for the next chorus.

It’s all “flawed,” but the flaws are human and thus endearing.

I remember being dismayed at my first forays into recording studios nearly ten years ago, hearing musicians I had always revered ask for “inserts” and “punches” to fix this note or that.  You could argue that they were creating artifacts for posterity that had to be as close to flawless as possible, but the process sometimes felt more like the underground laboratory of a science-fiction novel than a creative enterprise.

If Louis could make a mistake and forgive himself; if the result could be a jazz classic, why can’t we allow ourselves some of the same freedom?

Let each one reading this post follow Condon’s advice — and see that our little worlds and the big one do not fall down because we consciously made a mistake.  If we embrace our own imperfections, it seems we might be easier with the lapses of others.  And the world would be perhaps a more untidy place, but certainly a more relaxed and affectionate one.  Whether you are kind to yourself and then extend it to others, or the other way around . . . the result is tangible, sweet, and lasting.  Try it for yourself!

And here are Bob Wilber (at 84) and Ehud Asherie.  If they’re making mistakes, chasing that bunny, I can’t hear them:

May your happiness increase!

In a recent seminar with one of my mentors, Prof. Figg, he asked the question, “What are your secret guilty musical pleasures?”

I think the Professor expected that I was listening to Justin Bieber or to marimba orchestras.  Toy pianos.  Singing dogs.  Kate Smith.  Anthony Braxton.  Rossini overtures.  Andrew Lloyd Webber.

And although I thought hard, I couldn’t come up with any guilty musical pleasures.  Oh, I love sentiment: Connee Boswell’s LITTLE MAN, YOU’VE HAD A BUSY DAY makes me cry.  But I am proud of my reaction to her singing, so there’s nothing guilty in it.

But then I started to remember the time when I was a jazz operative in enemy country.

When I was nine or ten, I was already seriously hooked by hot jazz.  Louis Armstrong, first and foremost.  I recall spending birthday money on a Louis record, and I was thrilled when he appeared on television.

I was in the fifth grade when the Beatles came to the United States, and I found them fascinating — but for only a short time.  They were fun, energetic, new, uninhibited.  I remember pestering my father to buy me the soundtrack album from A HARD DAY’S NIGHT.  When I could, I bought those records, borrowed them from friends, tried so hard to make them my personal soundtrack.  (Everyone else did.)

I got all the way up to RUBBER SOUL before I decided that I didn’t really like this music all that much.  What I was entranced by was the possibility of being liked because you like what everyone else likes.

I had already begun to notice, although I probably did not articulate it to myself, that one’s musical preferences were ways definitions of one’s self, stated publicly or otherwise.  One’s taste was an ideological / emotional badge.

If you liked Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ THIS DIAMOND RING (why do I remember this now?) you were possibly a member of the club that could be considered worthy of being inspected for possible admission to the clubhouse.

But walking around telling my peers that I listened to Louis Armstrong — the truth — was clearly not the way to be accepted, to be cool, to be “in” or popular.  I remember telling some adults, who looked at me indulgently.  Perhaps they thought my preference more strange than the loud music their children were listening to.  My conscious anachronism must have struck them as at best, a benign eccentricity; at worst, inexplicable.

Among my peers, anything that new and rebellious was good.  Ancient and entrenched was definitely not.  When I met the pretty granddaughter of our French-Canadian neighbors, I knew I could not tell her that I preferred Fats Waller to Iron Butterfly and expect her to swoon.  ”Our” music was supposed to unsettle the old folks who fed and clothed you; it wasn’t supposed to have any comforting connections to their world.  Jini Hendrix, not Jimmie Blanton.

So I kept my love to myself.  I told very few people that I listened to Louis and the Dukes of Dixieland in my room, that I read Mezz Mezzrow’s REALLY THE BLUES (and was then violently disappointed by his playing — I was too young to appreciate those Bluebird sides).  I couldn’t really confess to anyone that I loved Bobby Hackett’s air-traceries on ballads, that “Dixieland jazz” on television — those small groupings of oddly-dressed men — thrilled me.  I even remember watching Lawrence Welk’s program for the brief “hot” interludes (not knowing at the time that I would someday see and admire Bob Havens in person).  Even my parents, who were very indulgent and loving, did not quite know what to make of my obsession: they had lived through the Depression and the Swing Era, but the depth of my ardor must have puzzled them.

In this century, a broader acceptance is the rule.  It is much easier to say, “Oh, I listen to Bulgarian hip-hop,” or “I am working on my harpsichord on the weekends,” than it was.  I know a young woman in middle school who dresses in elaborate clothing every day, plays the ukulele, analyzes 1905 Sousa records.  She seems to have gained much more flexibility to be unusual in this century than I had in mine.

My generation may have marched to Thoreau’s different drummer, but to call the metaphorical figure of independence Dave Tough did not do.   It still seems a towering irony that my nonconformist friends were obliviously conformist.

I had to go underground because I identified so strongly with the music of an earlier generation and one before that.  I didn’t dance, so I hadn’t met the swing-dance generation who would teach me the Balboa and know, instinctively, which version of SWINGIN’ THE BLUES they liked.  In 1966, had I come out of the aesthetic closet and said, “The music I like was the popular music — or at least one strain of it — in 1936,” I would be marked as even more freakish than I already was.

I could and did wear the flowered shirts and bell-bottom trousers (both of which pleased me for their own sake) but I could not admit to an admiration for Pee Wee Russell.  To do so would be to say, “I want to be just like your grandparents,” not readily accepted among my peers.

It might have been easier if I had had the ability and patience to seriously attempt a musical instrument.  Then I could have hung out in the bandroom with the other trumpet geeks and said, “Have you heard what Ray Nance does here?”  But that community was denied me.

Even when I was in an independent study program in my senior year of high school, I knew I had to practice secrecy.  It was difficult to unmask.  My friend Stu Zimny has reminded me of our being on field trips into Manhattan, and my running off during our lunch break to buy Commodore 78s.  He would ask, “What did you buy?” and I would say, “Oh, nothing really.  You wouldn’t be interested,” or some similar falsehood.

I was afraid of being laughed at if I was seen buying archaic recordings of strange music with odd-sounding players.  Red, Muggsy, Big Sid, Little T . . . these heroic affectionate sobriquets were encouraged in baseball but not elsewhere.

My affections did not transfer easily.  My seventeen-year-old self — suave, stylish, ineffably debonair, thought that Jack Teagarden’s 1954 recording of A HUNDRED YEARS FROM TODAY was the best seduction music ever.  What woman could resist his wooing?  (All of them.)

I don’t remember when and how the mists began to lift.  It may have been when I began to encounter other young men at jazz concerts.  We glanced at each other cautiously, suspiciously.  ”You like this music too?”  ”Yeah.”  ”Don’t tell anyone, OK?”  ”I like hot jazz.”  ”Shhhh!  Keep it down.  They’ll hear us!”

But I only began to “come out” in college, perhaps defensively but more proud.  ”Yes, I listen to Louis Armstrong records.  Do you want to come to my house and hear what I am listening to?”

It wasn’t always easy.  ”Cartoon music” was often the way my records were described.  ”How can you listen to that old stuff?  What do you hear in it?” “Wow, that’s old-fashioned!”

At this point in the imagined black-and-white film, calendar pages fall off the wall.  We are now in NOW, this century, where I am entirely comfortable with my own love for hot music.

It fascinates me that when the Beloved lovingly introduces me, “Oh, this is my Sweetie — he has a great jazz video blog!” I can see people’s eyelids begin to flutter — with puzzlement or tedium, it is hard to say.  I can only imagine what people think.  ”Oh, no.  Jazz, for God’s sake.  One step less interesting than toy trains.  What shall I say?  I never ‘understood jazz,’ and this fellow is obviously so interested in it that he’s vibrating as he stands there.”  So they say, generously, “Jazz!  Wow, that’s interesting.  Do you like Miles Davis?”  Or “I think John Coltrane was a very spiritual being.  I like electro-fusion.  Do you like Diana Krall?”

And they are being as gracious as human beings can be, so it pains me to redirect their enthusiasm.  But I have to say, “Well, I admire Miles and Coltrane, but my heart is with older stuff.”  ”Oh, what do you mean?”  ”Louis Armstrong is my hero.  Billie Holiday.  Duke Ellington,” keeping it as plain as possible.  And it is clear that with those words and those names I have marked myself as An Oddity.  The most kind people say, “Did you see ANTIQUES ROADSHOW last night?  There was a woman who had a whole collection of autographed band photographs from the Big Band Era, and one of them was signed by Louis Armstrong?”  Others smile sweetly, vaguely, and head for the white wine spritzers.

Jazz still remains a mystery to most people, and those of us who truly resonate to it are destined to remain Outsiders.  It’s a pity.  Why shouldn’t everyone be able to share the great pleasures that we know?

I am now a Spy Emeritus, now able to view these episodes with nostalgia and amusement tempering my puzzlement.  Call me 0078, retired.  But I remember the feeling of being out of step with the culture of my times, and being made to feel weird.

Yet I followed what I loved, and jazz has paid me back for my loyalty a million times over.  And it continues to do so.

This one’s for my friends AJS and KD — and, as always, for the Beloved, who knew that it don’t mean a thing . . . before I ever came along.

May your happiness increase.

But here is a very brief reposting of something both beautiful and honest.  My motivation, and it may be a crass one, is that I saw that this video had been seen by 22 people on YouTube.  Twenty-two seems like a small number . . . so I hope that JAZZ LIVES readers will forgive me for saying, “If you missed this, you owe it to yourselves to take a few minutes and watch and listen calmly.”

It is a medley of two love songs performed by singer Marianne Solivan and pianist Michael Kanan at Smalls on April 21, 2013.  The first, I’LL FOLLOW YOU, is — to my mind — inescapably associated with Bing Crosby circa 1932; the second, THEN I’LL BE TIRED OF YOU, is an Arthur Schwartz / Howard Dietz classic* that I first heard in Fats Waller’s jovial but loving version.

Marianne introduces them by noting that most of the love songs she knows are about new love (“Oh gee, oh gosh, oh golly, she’s a great great girl, I can’t wait until we go to the preacher!” — to conflate three or four Twenties songs) and, having listened to Marianne as often as possible, I know she is one of the most wrenching explorers of love that has failed.

But here she and Michael pay living subtle moving tribute to love that lasts, commitment without phobia, devotion.  It’s not the aging idea of Darby and Joan — I sense that the lovers dramatized in Marianne’s versions are still able to get up and do the hokey-pokey without making an appointment well in advance — but I so admire this presentation of music that dramatizes the idea that real love isn’t microwaveable.

And I would also like us all to bow low in the direction of Michael Kanan, soulful and generous — at the piano and away from it.

Please listen again, or for the first time.  Or send this posting as a love-token to your Beloved . . . perhaps even to someone you’d like to audition as one?

May your love be as rewarding as that Marianne and Michael bring to us.

*I sent a link to this video to Jonathan Schwartz: I hope he is able to observe and admire, too.

May your happiness increase!

But I can tell you that earlier this month they had the wonderful music of pianist / singer / barrelhouse fellow Carl Sonny Leyland, cornet hero Marc Caparone, string bass man of great renown Marty Eggers and master of the talking drums Jeff Hamilton.  Here are two performances — drawing on the lowdown blues and an obscure but sweet Twenties pop tune associated with silent comedy star Charley Chase.

Believe it!

SOMEBODY LOAN ME A MATCH:

SMILE WHEN THE RAINDROPS FALL:

May your happiness increase!

(I must apologize for the slightly muzzy quality of the visual image, which puzzles me.  Was Mercury in retrograde; were there sunspots; had my camera gotten into the gin when I’d put it down on the bar for a second?  For those who object to such imperfections, please pretend that what follows is divinely-inspired radio.)

Sorcery on the East Side — another way of reconsidering WITCHCRAFT (with a musical explanation of that unusual-looking reed by Magus Robinson):

Without being in the least disloyal to her extraordinary father, trombonist Sammy Sherman, Daryl tells a story of how she might have had a different parent.  A delightful visit to the land of WHAT IF:

One of Louis Armstrong’s less-known endearing Socialist specialties, a heartfelt reading of RED CAP (with Scott on the taragota given to him by Louis-alumnus Joe Muranyi):

The very pretty MIDNIGHT SUN:

A song — quite endearing — I’d never heard before — IN APRIL.  (The melody is Bill Evans’ FOR NENETTE; the lyrics are by Roger Schore, who was in the audience):

THEM THERE EYES is from 1930 but it never gets old:

Brilliantly at play — puckish and expert all at once.

May your happiness increase!

Here’s the first set that the Brain Cloud (featuring Dennis Lichtman, Tamar Korn, Andrew Hall, Raphael McGregor, Skip Krevens, Kevin Dorn, with guests Noam Pikelny, Rob Hecht, and Michael Gomez) created at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre on April 26, 2013.

And more!  As before, notice the delight this band takes in making the familiar new and lively, and creating its own classic tunes and performances:

WE ARE NOW!:

MISS THE MISSISSIPPI AND YOU:

WHEN MY DREAMBOAT COMES HOME:

IN THE BEGINNING (Tamar’s own “gospel tune”):

LONESOME ROAD BLUES:

I dedicate this post and the one before it to the loving presence of Tadek Korn.

May your happiness increase!

A note from JAZZ LIVES’ friend, singer Abbe Buck — someone whose enthusiasm for swinging music is real.  I’d asked her to say something about herself:

Dear Michael,

I sang in New York in the late 1980s, and surprisingly, am leaving sleepy Virginia to sing in NYC. Even then I sang music from the 1920s and 1930s. I did supper club, piano bar and light jazz, the kind of songs that Sylvia Syms sang with the great pianist Art Tatum in the 1940s, or that Lee Wiley sang with her then-husband, pianist Jess Stacy. My choice of music remains rock solid. I was mentored for a time by the late, great Rosemary Clooney, whom I met at WOR radio when I was a Manager of Clearance Communications for Sid Marks “The Sounds of Sinatra”. I knew Rosemary for over ten years until her death. I was also on the Board of the Socierty of Singers, Chapter East in 2000-2002, under the aegis of the later Sy Kravitz (Lenny’s father) and Mercedes Ellington.

My love of vocalists, whom I consider teachers of song, has stuck with me through the years. I like to stay true to the way that each song was written. I adore Lee Wiley and her rendition of “Manhattan.” Her husky tones enthrall me. I so love Mildred Bailey and her high trill. I love singing “All of Me” with her in mind. “Seems Like Old Times” and “If I had You” remind me of Her Nibs Miss Georgia Gibbs and Miss Connee Boswell’s sound. The songs are lovely and simple, and perfect for a gal singer. “Deed I Do” and It’s the Talk of the Town” were done early and later by Helen Humes, who also had a higher register, which many singers had in the 1930s and 1940s, but did convey a story every time she sang. She also sang and was famous for her blues, and did a rollicking rendition with a big band of “You’re Driving me Crazy” that knocks me out! I love Helen Humes’ singing with Count Basie so much!

I have some of my own renditions of “If I Had You,” “Seems Like Old Times” and “You’re Driving Me Crazy” on YouTube. Going to the Metropolitan Room is like a homecoming. My pianist has a sound like Art Tatum on many numbers. My bass player has a clean, 1930s style, and my sax is a soprano. Who can ask for anything more?

I think you certainly might want to check out her YouTube videos, visit her Facebook page, and make your way to the Metropolitan Room for her appearance there on Sunday, May 19, at 9:30.  Here’s the information about her gig.

May your happiness increase!

Nothing complicated: Benny Goodman and Buddy Rich playing together for the first time in thirty years, with Jimmy Rowles, piano; Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar; Jack Six, string bass — on the Merv Griffin Show in 1979.  The songs — nothing complicated there, either — AS LONG AS I LIVE and I GOT RHYTHM.  The “Sextet”: someone’s math was off that night.

Benny is in splendid form; Buddy, grinning wildly, offers masterful support and heroically beautiful brushwork throughout; Bucky and Jack are indispensably generous in their swing-pulse.

But what draws my attention throughout is Jimmy (I think he preferred “Jimmie,” so I apologize to him) Rowles.  Once you’ve heard / seen the video once and admired the Stars, I beseech you to go back and listen solely to the piano.

THAT may not be the only way to play the piano — I am not going to be narrowly didactic here — but Rowles so beautifully fuses the worlds of 1940 Lester, Basie, Duke, and Ben, with the later worlds of Miles and Bird, Dizzy and Roach.  And he always sounds like no one else.

Initially, you might say of a Rowles phrase or accent or voicing, “What is he doing?” and then it becomes both inevitable, perfectly right, and a choice only he could have made.  It is the very opposite of formulaic playing; listening to him provides us with a series of lovely small gifts — “How did you know that was exactly what we wanted?”  I miss Jimmie Rowles.  I do.

Listen again.

This one’s for Michael Kanan.

May your happiness increase.

The Beloved and I attended the first two . . . and I brought my camera to Smalls (183 West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village, New York).  I’ve adjusted the videos so that Becky, pianist Ehud Asherie, and trombonist Dan appear to be performing in a light-hearted version of film noir . . . but the music shines brightly in a rainbow of colors!

Here, incidentally, is what I wrote in anticipation of Miss Becky’s visit.

And here are five glorious performances from that Smalls triumph in swing . . . with a few more to come!  Our Becky swings sweetly, offers nuances and shadings that surprise, move, and enlighten.  She makes us smile — under a baking spotlight, in the middle of two great jazz extroverts, in front of a portrait of Louis, smiling for good reason.

The Beloved and I weren’t the only ones paying close delighted attention: the room was full of singers: Marianne Solivan, Hilary Gardner, Molly Ryan, Yaala Ballin, Petra van Nuis — as well as friends of the Jazz Bears: Justin, Danny, and Kristin; Jeanie Wilson beamed at us; Bill and Sonya Dunham made sure everyone behaved well; Stompy Jones and Maxine were there in spirit, too.

THOU SWELL:

I HEAR MUSIC:

I DON’T STAND A GHOST OF A CHANCE WITH YOU:

TEA FOR TWO:

GONE WITH THE WIND:

What extraordinary music!

May your happiness increase.

Luciano began with a short solo piano tribute to the recently departed composer Earl Zindars (you know his compositions because of the love Bill Evans had for Zindars’ music): MOTHER OF EARL and ROSES FOR ANNIG.  (For a whole CD of such lovely music, look for Luciano’s AT HOME WITH ZINDARS):

Giancarlo — master of unusual tonalities, from the near-acoustic murmurings of a mandolin-strumming gondolier to the more familiar electric spectrum —  joined him for BUT NOT FOR ME:

SOFTLY, AS IN A MORNING SUNRISE:

AUTUMN LEAVES:

A marvelously elliptical MY FUNNY VALENTINE for the trio:

Their transformation of BYE BYE BLACKBIRD:

ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE:

TAKE THE “A” TRAIN, their tribute to New York City:

As an encore, YOU AND THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC:

I have a new CD by the duo — recorded live at New York’s Metropolitan Room in 2012 — and I will report on its pleasures and queries soon.  I also gather that the duo has recorded a yet-unreleased CD of songs associated with Fred Astaire.  I can’t wait for that — I am sure it continues their playful, warm, even romantic explorations of those songs we think we know so well.

May your happiness increase!

Dennis and company are deeply into the music — but they are not “playing old records”; rather, they bring their own idiosyncratic personalities to the material.  And even if you are not terribly receptive to “Western Swing,” fearing that the first word overwhelms the latter, I urge you to put your preconceptions in the bathroom medicine chest and simply listen — I predict you will be delighted.  Jazz fans will hear echoes of Floyd Smith and Charlie Christian, of Count Basie and Benny Goodman — all synthesized in the most natural way in 2013 music that has an arresting but loving impact.

Here’s the first set.

ALMOST TO TULSA:

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN (what witty lyrics!):

TRIGGER BLUES (featuring an impromptu duet between Tamar and Andrew, with hints of MY DADDY ROCKS ME):

The classic I AIN’T GOT NOBODY, with Rob Hecht and Noam Pikelny joining in:

The very sweet MAIDEN’S PRAYER:

I SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN:

Patsy Cline’s love-lament I’VE GOT YOUR PICTURE:

SUGAR BLUES, with Michael Gomez joining in:

WHEN YOU WORE A TULIP:

The concert was uplifting in the nicest ways — worth the walk in the darkness over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway!

I should point out that this was also a CD release party, so don’t let the videos produce forgetfulness . . . the new CD, OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, is a delight that stands alongside the videos for pure pleasure.  You can order OUTSIDE LOOKING IN as a CD, download, or vinyl record (why not get all three and be safe?) at braincloud.

May your happiness increase!

Here’s the first set of a completely inspiring duo-performance at Smalls (183 West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village, New York City) that I recorded on Sunday, April 21, 2013.

LOVE IS A NECESSARY EVIL:

LOVE WALKED IN:

I’LL FOLLOW YOU / THEN I’LL BE TIRED OF YOU:

I DON’T WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE:

DAY IN, DAY OUT:

BLUE:

BEAUTIFUL MOONS AGO:

REMEMBER:

They bring such pleasure — I admire them so.

May your happiness increase!

Perhaps you have only a dim sense of the Blessed Martin Grosz?  Let me refresh your memory with two impromptu videos (sub rosa, with a low-level digital camera) I shot at the 2007 Jazz at Chautauqua party — with Professors Dapogny, Robinson, Block, Giordano:

ARKANSAS BLUES:

FROM MONDAY ON:

Marty Grosz knows how to swing.  Don’t miss these opportunities to join the oceanic motion.

May your happiness increase.

These are some of the musicians I was able to see, hear, and video during April 2013 — an incomplete list, in chronological order:

Svetlana Shmulyian, Tom Dempsey, Rob Garcia, Asako Takasaki, Michael Kanan, Michael Petrosino, Joel Press, Sean Smith, Tardo Hammer, Steve Little, Hilary Gardner, Ehud Asherie, Randy Reinhart, Mark Shane, Kevin Dorn, James Chirillo, Brian Nalepka, Dan Block, Danny Tobias, Matt Munisteri, Neal Miner, Catherine Russell, Jon-Erik Kellso, Lee Hudson, Lena Bloch, Frank Carlberg, Dave Miller, Billy Mintz, Daryl Sherman, Scott Robinson, Harvie S, Jeff Barnhart, Gordon Au, John Gill, Ian Frenkel, Lew Green, Marianne Solivan, Mark McLean, Dennis Lichtman, Tamar Korn, Raphael McGregor, Skip Krevens, Andrew Hall, Rebecca Kilgore, Dan Barrett, Scott Robinson, Pat O’Leary, Andy Brown, Giancarlo Massu, Luciano Troja, Rossano Sportiello, Randy Sandke, Harry Allen, Dennis Mackrel, Joel Forbes.

And I saw them at the Back Room Speakeasy, the Metropolitan Room, Smalls, the Bickford Theatre, the Ear Inn, Symphony Space, the Finaldn Center, Jazz at Kitano, Jeff and Joel’s House Party, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, Jalopy Theatre, Casa Italiana, and Zankel Recital Hall.

T.S. Eliot had it wrong.  Just another average jazz-month in New York.

P.S.  This isn’t to slight my California heroes, nay nay — among them Marc Caparone, Dawn Lambeth, Carl Sonny Leyland, Clint Baker, Jeff Hamilton, Chris Dawson, Marty Eggers, Katie Cavera, Kally Price, Leon Oakley, Mal Sharpe, Tom Schmidt, John Reynolds, Melissa Collard, Ari Munkres, GAUCHO, PANIQUE, Bill Carter, Jim Klippert, JasonVanderford, Bill Reinhart, Dan Barrett . . . .

May your happiness increase.

If you’ve been following JAZZ LIVES for more than thirty-two bars, you know how valuable The EarRegulars are to Western Civilization.  They hold regular EarRegular seances at The Ear Inn, 326 Spring Street, Soho, New York — but for those north of the border, those with a Monday-morning 6 AM alarm clock, those who want to make sure that Mother is feted in the best style . . . hie yourself northward for swing!

And if you don’t know them, or you need a Serious Jazz Authority, how’s this:

“There’s nothing regular or ordinary about this group of dazzling, swinging, world class New Orleans traditional jazz phenoms who we’ve coaxed up to ‘burbs from Spring Street’s beloved watering hole to complete our Mother’s Day / Brunch / Jazz triple play celebration on May 12th. Maybe whatever short-circuited parts of the Ear Inn’s neon sign out front also sent a charge through the place, catapulting the musicians, wedged in a corner, back half a century, then down to the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street in New Orleans, and on this occasion, to your neighborhood, at the Stage at Rockwells. Discover one of the City’s best kept musical secret, “Old time jazz swing with a modern metabolism.” - Nate Chinen, NY Times.

This splendid quartet will be Jon-Erik Kellso (trumpet), Matt Munisteri (guitar), Mark Lopeman (clarinet and tenor saxophone), and Pat O’Leary (bass).

About the asterisk in my title.  CHERISH THE L ADIES is, I hope, appropriate to Mother’s Day — but I know that male accompanists are encouraged.  It had been suggested to me by a colleague that I title this post I HEAR YOUR MOTHER LOVES TO SWING, but the JAZZ LIVES Legal Department said that such a statement could lead to legal action of a prolonged and costly sort.

So — eschew the usual box of candy or bouquet of f lowers this year, and make your Mother a true EarRegular!

May your happiness increase.

For me, the opportunity to see / hear / record this band was not simply one of the high points of the San Diego experience, or of 2012, but of my jazz experience.  Period.  No stage joke.  Here they are!

ROYAL GARDEN BLUES:

A BIENTOT:

MY GAL SAL:

NEW ORLEANS AND A RUSTY OLD HORN:

MY BUDDY:

IT’S WONDERFUL:

LULLABY OF THE LEAVES:

YOU CAN’T LOSE A BROKEN HEART:

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME!:

Thank you to Paul Daspit and the members of this lovely band.  I won’t forget these sounds!

May your happiness increase.

But he also owned a home movie camera in 1943 and onwards, as many people did.  However, where the average amateur films show Mom and the kids at holiday meals, or perhaps the new puppy on the lawn, Joe’s films show his jazz friends goofing around — on the West Coast, as members of the Benny Goodman band, on their way to play the gig and to appear in THE GANG’S ALL HERE.

Joe’s son, Josh, has not only rescued these film clips — black and white and silent — from oblivion, but he’s taken good care of them, annotated them, and put a few on YouTube here for us to marvel at and be amused by.  Here are two recent gifts to us and an astonishing one — in case you haven’t seen it recently. The odd allure of these films is strong yet hard to define.  Is it that the people captured here almost always come to us as sound, occasionally with a still picture — and those sounds have come to represent the whole men or women.  So when we see, for instance, that Miff Mole actually had a corporeal reality in some ways larger and more human than his notes coming out of the speaker, that’s a pleasure and a surprise.  When we see him in motion, putting on one suspender for the camera, not wearing his suit or his tiny eyeglasses, we might think, “They were human, too!”  Always a valuable realization.

Thank you, Joe!  Thank you, Josh!

Saxophonists Herbie Haymer (who played with Norvo as well as BG and showed up on a fine Keynote Records date around this time:

Any expert lip readers in the worldwide JAZZ LIVES audience?

And this group of playful jazz icons, captured at their ease:

So far the best guess at “the mystery man” is that he is Chummy MacGregor . . .

Finally, what may have been the most astonishing find in the Rushton archives, something I’ve already written about here:

May your happiness increase.

“Good deal!”

The eBay seller  says that the photograph came from the Burt Goldblatt collection.  Goldblatt (1924-2006), whom we all know from album covers and famous photographs, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts — so I am guessing that this photograph of Sidney (late in his short life) might have been taken in a Boston club — Sidney worked in that city in 1950, after leaving the Louis Armstrong All-Stars due to heart disease.    

Perhaps this could be the soundtrack to this photograph:

Or this:

Every little breeze — if it’s a rhythmic one — whispers “Sidney!”

This one’s for Romy, MB, KD, and Brother Hal . . .

May your happiness increase.

The noble participants are Matt Munisteri, guitar; Danny Tobias, cornet; Dan Block, clarinet and tenor saxophone; Neal Miner, string bass.  A nimble British clarinetist sat in for ROSETTA and TIN ROOF but like the Lone Ranger, left without identifying himself.  Perhaps some readers can help credit him?

I don’t know if love was in the air, but the song titles leaned towards the feminine, the romantic, even the heartbroken.  I hope JUBILEE was the prevailing mood.

This music doesn’t need explication: but hats off to Matt, Danny, Dan, Neal, and the UK Ranger — they done outdone themselves!

That Midwestern sweetie — faithful, frisky, and true — MY GAL SAL:

MARIE (for Irving, Tommy, and Bunny):

An EarRegulars classic, BLUES MY NAUGHTY SWEETIE GIVES TO ME:

JUBILEE (for Hoagy and Louis):

LOUISIANA (evoking wonderful thoughts of the Kansas City Six, 1938):

WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE (at a tempo far from the morose way it’s often played — a revelation!):

ROSETTA (for Henri Woode):

TIN ROOF BLUES:

LIMEHOUSE BLUES:

I don’t care how dim the lighting is . . . the music blazes brightly! This one’s for Horace G. Irwin, one of the EarRegulars’ more devoted fans.

May your happiness increase.

That is not an easy question.  Email me at swingyoucats@gmail.com for my precise co-ordinates, updated minute by minute.  We’re working out a deal with the Doppler radar people on The Weather Channel . . . stay tuned.

2.  Why do you post so many videos?  I can’t keep up with them.  I’m overwhelmed.  It seems as though there must be two of you.

I’m sorry.  Creating stress was never my intent.  But I know all things are finite.  People, too.  Someday I won’t be able or won’t be around to do this, and some of my favorite musicians might join me . . . so I am doing what gives me pleasure now.  People who subscribe to JAZZ LIVES are under no obligation to watch or read everything . . . as long as the internet exists, I hope it will be here for you when you choose to catch up.  And there’s only one of me, which is a good thing in a one-bedroom apartment.

3.  Why don’t you post anything by my favorite band?

A blog is — for better or worse — an expression of personal taste.   I fully acknowledge that and even embrace it.  If you feel that the Caffeinated Hot Shots O’Rhythm aren’t sufficiently represented in cyberspace, I encourage you to start a blog and post some videos — the internet is wide and broad enough to encompass many people and many kinds of music.  If you’d like advice on how to create a WordPress blog, I will be happy to offer some.  

3a.  Musician X doesn’t appeal to me at all.  How can you post such stuff on your blog?  That’s not “jazz”!

See 3.  And for those viewers who find my taste annoying, I choose the restaurant analogy.  If a restaurant you have often eaten in has a dish you deplore — liver and onions, say —  on the menu as one of the daily specials, do you stalk out of the restaurant in a huff?  Perhaps you could pick something else on the menu rather than being annoyed at the chef.  And I’d rather not spend my time on the planet debating what “jazz” is . . . I’d rather do what I’m doing now.  It gives me immense pleasure.

May your happiness increase.