HOLY RELICS, BEYOND BELIEF (Spring 2020 Edition)

The eBay seller “jgautographs,” from whom I’ve purchased several marvels (signatures of Henry “Red” Allen, Rod Cless, Pee Wee Russell, Pete Brown, Sidney Catlett, among others) has been displaying an astonishing assortment of jazz inscriptions.  I haven’t counted, but the total identified as “jazz” comes to 213.  They range from “traditional” to “free jazz” with detours into related musical fields, with famous names side-by-side with those people whose autographs I have never seen.

As I write this (the early afternoon of March 21, 2020) three days and some hours remain.

Here is the overall link.  Theoretically, I covet them, but money and wall space are always considerations.  And collectors should step back to let other people have a chance.

The signers include Benny Carter, Betty Carter, Curtis Counce, Jimmy Woode, Herb Hall, Bennie Morton, Nat Pierce, Hot Lips Page, Rolf Ericson, Arnett Cobb, Vernon Brown, Albert Nicholas, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Sammy Margolis, Ed Polcer, Ed Hall, Billy Kyle, Sam Donahue, Al Donahue, Max Kaminsky, Butch Miles, Gene Krupa, Ray McKinley, Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden, Arvell Shaw, Barrett Deems, Buck Clayton, Babs Gonzales, Benny Bailey, Joe Newman, Frank Wess, Pharoah Sanders, Kenny Burrell, Reggie Workman, Stanley Turrentine, Louis Prima, Wayne Shorter, Tiny Bradshaw, Harry Carney, Juan Tizol, Bea Wain, Red Rodney, Frank Socolow, Bobby Timmons, George Wettling, Roy Milton, Charlie Rouse, Donald Byrd, Kai Winding, Kenny Drew, Kenny Clarke, Steve Swallow, Shelly Manne, Frank Bunker, Charlie Shavers, Ben Pollack, Jess Stacy, Ron Carter, Bob Zurke, Jimmy Rushing, Cecil Payne, Lucky Thompson, Gary Burton, Jaki Byard, Noble Sissle, Muggsy Spanier, Don Byas, Pee Wee Russell, Slam Stewart, Hazel Scott, Ziggy Elman, Buddy Schutz, Ernie Royal, Boyd Raeburn, Dave McKenna, Claude Thornhill.

And signatures more often seen, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Hoagy Carmichael, Artie Shaw, Sidney Bechet, Gerry Mulligan, Cab Calloway, Rosemary Clooney, Wynton Marsalis,Tommy Dorsey, Oscar Peterson, Billy Eckstine, Mel Torme, Chick Corea, Count Basie.

In this grouping, there are three or four jazz-party photographs from Al White’s collection, but the rest are matted, with the signed page allied to a photograph — whether by the collector or by the seller, I don’t know.  And there seems to be only one error: “Joe Thomas” is paired with a photograph of the Lunceford tenor star, but the pairing is heralded as the trumpeter of the same name.

My head starts to swim, so I propose some appropriate music — sweet sounds at easy tempos, the better to contemplate such riches, before I share a half-dozen treasures related to musicians I revere.

Jess Stacy’s version of Bix Beiderbecke’s CANDLELIGHTS:

Harry Carney with strings, IT HAD TO BE YOU:

Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, Jo Jones, PRISONER OF LOVE:

Here are a double handful of autographs for your amazed perusal.

Bob Zurke:

Charlie Shavers, name, address, and phone number:

Lucky Thompson, 1957:

Jimmy Rushing, 1970:

Harry Carney:

Juan Tizol:

Bill Coleman:

Buck Clayton:

Hot Lips Page (authentic because of the presence of the apostrophe):

Joe Sullivan:

Don Byas:

George Wettling:

Frank Socolow:

Benny Carter (I want to see the other side of the check!):

And what is, to me, the absolute prize of this collection: Lester Young, whom, I’m told, didn’t like to write:

Here’s music to bid by — especially appropriate in those last frantic seconds when the bids mount in near hysteria:

May your happiness increase!

“WOULD YOU CARE TO SIGN OUR GUEST BOOK?” (Liberty Music Shop, 1956-57)

As of July 10, 2015, this was the eBay link for those who like an incredible collection of autographs — and who have $4500.

Here’s the description.

[Autographs] [Guest Book] Hemingway, Ernest. (1899 – 1961) & Barber, Samuel. (1910 – 1981) & Givenchy, Hubert de. (b. 1927) & Graham, Martha. (1894 – 1991) & Ferber, Edna. (1885 – 1968) etc.

Incredible 1950s Guest Book for the Liberty Music Shop

Guest book for the famed Liberty Music Shop of New York, containing approximately 200 autographs and inscriptions, signed by distinguished visitors, a virtual who’s who of the cultural life of 1950s New York. Written approximately 15 to a page on the first 14 pages, some with date or place or comments, concluding with a large bold signature by Marian Anderson, written diagonally across the blank page. Oblong 8vo, leatherette. New York, [1956-57]. The signers include Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Barber, Martha Graham, Anna Magnani, Hubert de Givenchy, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire, Hoagy Carmichael, Sarah Vaughan, Sammy Davis Jr., Bill Hayes (with an AMQS), Alan Jay Lerner (2x), Yul Brynner, Ogden Nash, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontaine, Andres Segovia, Margaret Hamilton, Tony Bennett, Myrna Loy, Edna Ferber, Zino Francescatti, Byron Janis, Farley Grainger, Rex Harrison, Broderick Crawford, Edward G. Robinson, George Szell, Jessica Tandy, Basil Rathbone, Claudette Colbert, Hazel Scott, Raymond Massey, Michel Auclair, Alexander Smallens, Kate Smith, James Mason, Ray Bolger, Benny Goodman, Noël Coward, Joan Blondell, Arnold Stang, Constance Talmadge, Garson Kanin, Mischa Elman, Erica Morini, Connee Boswell, Mario del Monaco, Robert Helptmann, Andor Foldes, Marta Eggerth, Vincent Price, Lillian Gish, Paulette Goddard, J. William Fulbright and dozens more.

The Liberty Music Shop was a fixture in the New York music scene from the 1930s through the 1950s, catering to cognoscenti and celebrities.

Why should this be on JAZZ LIVES?  One, it’s a spectacular rarity.  Some of the names above should excite people who apparently only listen to jazz, night and day.  But for the most seriously narrow readers, there’s also a genuine Benny Goodman signature and — happiness! — a Jo Jones inscription, which is how he signed two record jackets for me in 1981-2.  The seller offered photographs of sample pages — not all fifteen — which means that some of the signatures noted above aren’t visible.  But enough are to make it fascinating.

Here’s the first page, beautifully signed by Marian Anderson:

and here I see Mischa Elman, Peter Lind Hayes, Alan Jay Lerner, Farley Grainger, Edward G. Robinson, and Joyce Van Patten, among others.

Here’s Jack Carter (who just left us), Bill Hayes, Garson Kanin, Herman Shumlin, and Earle Hyman . . .

And where else would you find Ray Bolger and Francoise Sagan in such proximity?

I love the strange combinations: Gene Tunney, Herb Shriner, Jo Jones, Margaret Hamilton, Tony Bennett, and Herb Shriner, the last asking for a discount.

Still more: David Rose and Chris Connor.

And Charles Boyer, an authentic Benny Goodman (unless he brought one of his staff to sign for him), Kevin McCarthy, Givenchy, and Anthony Perkins.Finally, Dorothy Gish, Hoagy Carmichael, Fred Astaire.

Keener eyes than mine will no doubt discern other famous names.  It’s an awful cliche to say that giants walked the earth, but I know for certain that they went to the Liberty Music Shop.

May your happiness increase!

A LITTLE SOFTER, PLEASE?

Although I am not traditionally religious, I think jazz and creative improvisation are holy.

One of the great puzzlements for a devout jazz listener like myself is that some people in bars and clubs where musicians are playing talk through performances. 

Given the greater formality (and higher ticket prices) of a concert hall, this is less likely to happen.  Of course, there are the coughers and unwrappers of candy.  I once met an erudite devotee of classical music who told me that coughing in a concert hall was the response of those who could not endure that the artist was on the stage and that they were not.  To him, it was the revenge of the untalented, a belligerent assertion of their egos.

But in a club, where drinks, food, conversations are the rule, the talk flows freely.  This bothers me because I come to hear the music.  

I didn’t come to a club to hear someone hold forth about his diverticulitis.  In another context, I can sympathize, but I’d rather hear the band.  Although I celebrate romance, I don’t want to hear loud flirtations. 

But I know that the world is not my private salon, so I confine myself to eye-rolling and occasional grimaces.  Neither response is subtle or adult, I admit, but they are preferable to direct confrontation.  On rare occasions, when I am videotaping and am entrapped by loud talkers, I have said, as sweetly as possible, “I hate to bother you, but I am doing this for YouTube, and your conversation is going online.”  That usually works.

Some may perceive my behavior as that of a spoilsport, and I apologize if I have ever really ruined someone’s fun.  But I think that some of the rudeness I encounter is cultural ignorance.  If you and your Beloved make a pilgrimage to The Ear Inn or Carnegie Hall at a specific time to hear a particular group of players, that establishes a purpose.  You might not be silent, but you understand what paying attention means. 

But I think that many people are looking for a place to have a beer, a burger, and a chat.  They choose a likely-looking bar.  And — surprise! — there’s live music.  Five or six people are playing jazz.  I imagine the interior monologue, “Live music?  What’s that?  Do I have to stop talking simply because there are people with instruments over there?  Hey, fellows, pipe down so that I can hear what Charles has to say!”

But live musicians are not human versions of Muzak or an iPod, and they deserve respect and love for what they are attempting for our pleasure and theirs.   

I won’t fulminate about the silent yet tangible disrespect afforded artists by those people — not always young — who hunch over their iPhones and text throughout the evening while the players are performing.  I want to ask such people, “Why did you leave your apartment if that was all you wanted to do?”  I know that the club or bar provides — in its lights and population and rustling — a semblance of community hard to find otherwise, which I think is sad — a subject for another meditation.

Then there are the people who talk loudly through the whole performance only to whoop loudly at the end.  How much can they have heard, even given their splendid multitasking?

What I’ve written isn’t purely Luddite.  Sixty years ago, when John Hammond, who loathed Hazel Scott, conspicuously read his newspaper while she was playing, it was an equally distasteful, even aggressive act of contempt.

In conversations now and in the past that I’ve had with musicians, I thought, perhaps stubbornly, that they would agree.  Perhaps they would be even more irate.  Improvisers, creating beauty, working hard, deserve respect, and respect was shown in listening: being present, paying attention. 

But I have been surprised.  I submit for your consideration the voices of three respected musicians with whom I’ve spoken in the past weeks about the subject.  My question — or statement — usually runs, “Gee, that woman who insisted on singing along with the band / the couple who were drunk and loud / the guy arguing with his date . . . doesn’t it drive you crazy?”

Musician 1:  “Yes, he / she / they were loud, but that’s OK.  I don’t want to play in total silence.  If I screw up or make a mistake because I’m taking a chance, then it’s not like everyone hears it.  A little noise is OK: it’s relaxing.”

Musician 2:  “I heard the woman singing BLUE SKIES along with me, but that’s fine.  I like people to be talking and having a good time.  It doesn’t bother me.”

Musician 3: “I never let that bug me too much.  They were out to party and didn’t know what we were planning so what the heck.  The other thing I’ve learned — it’s a good thing the clubs don’t count on the spending of the dedicated “listeners” to pay for the band.”

The first comment is self-protective.  The jazz club isn’t a recording studio — silent, nearly sterile, where every inhalation can be heard, every imperfect note saved for posterity.  If the audience is chatting, then Musician 1 is free, relaxed: if no one is listening hyper-closely, it’s easier to experiment, to take chances.

The second comment might sound rueful, reisgned — the jazz player’s version of the Serenity Prayer: adapt to the circumstances you can’t change — but it was said to me with the sweetest of smiles, no irony, no edge.  Music, for this player, creates a loving atmosphere, so it would be futile or unkind to force people into silence.  

The third comment echoes the first two but highlights a truth that many clubowners and bartenders know.  Some jazz-lovers (although there are certainly exceptions) are so intent on the music that they forget or don’t care to spend money on food and drinks.  To Musician 3, reverent silence means less in the cash register and the band isn’t invited back. 

Two small codas need to be stated here in the name of accuracy and candor.  One is that musicians chat among themselves while on the stand during someone else’s solo.  Jokes, everyday chatter about the car repair, about getting one’s horn fixed, about the lousy meal just consumed, are part of the gig, perhaps to break up the long spaces when someone else is playing.  When I went to the last “Eddie Condon’s,” it took me a long time to get used to the undercurrents of dialogue on the stand.  I was hardly about to attempt to shush Ruby Braff. 

And if you listen to the recordings of radio broadcasts: “Dr. Jazz” at Eddie Condon’s; the Ellington band at the Cotton Club; Fats Waller at the Yacht Club, Bird and Diz at the Royal Roost — the audience is not shouting, but they are audible, they’re shifting in their seats, quietly chatting. 

Was there ever a properly hushed environment in which the holy art of jazz could flourish?  Or is my desire for near-silence — the better to hear the glories of the music — unrealistic?  I wonder.  I dream of a club or bar filled with people who love the music as much as I do and are as a result quiet . . . but until that happens I think I’ll have to learn the lesson of patience and save my glaring for the truly egregious cases of high-decibel rudeness.

BARNEY JOSEPHSON, CAFE SOCIETY, and MORE

It’s a long time since I got so wrapped up in a book that I didn’t want to stop reading it — but CAFE SOCIETY: THE WRONG PLACE FOR THE RIGHT PEOPLE (Barney Josephson with Terry Trilling-Josephson, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2009) is just that book.

Who was Barney Josephson (1902-88)?  If he hadn’t worked very hard to make his dreams become reality, we would only know him as a successful businessman: his specialty, stylish shoes. 

Happily for us, Barney had thoughts beyond Cuban or French heels: a yearning to run a nightclub in New York City, a keen sensitivity to talent, a hatred of social injustice.  And CAFE SOCIETY is the book his life and accomplishments deserve.  It could have been dull, academic, or third-hand.  But it’s a lively memoir of Barney’s life, taken from the tape recordings he made — he was a born raconteur — subtly annotated and expanded by his widow Terry Trilling-Josephson.  

CAFE SOCIETY (like the Downtown and Uptown nightclubs that had that name) is energetic, memorable, full of memorable anecdote and gossip.  Josephson was someone who had good instincts about what artists — musicians, comedians, or actors — whose work had substance.  He said he viewed himself as a “saloon impresario”: “I love it when people say that because I’m not more than that.  It’s the way I view myself.  In this business if you’re an ‘impresario,’ I say that with quotation marks around the word, you have a feeling.  You hear something, and you say, ‘This is it!’  You go ahead and you do it.  You don’t analyze.  You have to follow your hunches.”

Josephson had the good fortune to have John Hammond as his guide, instigator, and occasional arm-twister.  When Barney wanted to start a New York night club with music, it was Hammond who urged him to hire the three boogie-woogie pianists, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis, the blues singer Big Joe Turner, and Billie Holiday. 

Cafe Society is remarkable for the improvisers who played there: Teddy Wilson with a band including Joe Thomas, Emmett Berry, or Bill Coleman; Benny Morton; Ed Hall or Jimmy Hamilton; Sidney Catlett.  Frank Newton with Sonny White, Kenneth Hollon, Tab Smith, Eddie Dougherty, Johnny Williams.  Ed Hall with Mouse Randolph and Henderson Chambers.  Ellis Larkins with Bill Coleman and Al Hall. 

Later on, at the Cookery, Teddy Wilson, Mary Lou Williams.  Josephson brought back Helen Humes and Alberta Hunter for successful late-life “comebacks.”  And it wasn’t simply jazz and popular songs: think of the Revuers (with Judy Holiday and Adolph Green), of Jack Gilford and Zero Mostel, of the now-forgotten Jimmy Savo, all given encouragement and room to develop by Josephson.   

But this isn’t purely a list of who-sang-what and how they were received, a collection of press clippings and schedules.  Josephson was a first-class storyteller with a remarkable memory, and the stories he remembered are priceless.  Nowhere else would I have learned that Emmett Berry, when trying to get someone to take a drink, would ask, “Will you have a drink of Doctor Berry’s rootin’ tootin’ oil?”  For me, that’s worth the price of the book.  Wonderful photographs, too. 

And the stories!

Billie Holiday, at first not knowing what to do with the lyrics of STRANGE FRUIT when they were handed to her, and showing her displeasure in the most effective non-verbal way when an audience annoyed her.

Zero Mostel, always onstage, making life difficult for the man trying to fit him for clothing.

Barney’s firing of Carol Channing and his missing a chance to hire Pearl Bailey.

Tallulah Bankhead complaining — at high volume — about what she’d encountered in the ladies’ room.

Teddy Wilson’s drinking problem, late in his career.

The dramatic entanglements of Hazel Scott and Adam Clayton Powell.

The amorous hopes of Joe Louis for Lena Horne.

Big Joe Turner and the magic bean.

Mildred Bailey’s religious beliefs.

 And there is a deep, serious undercurrent throughout: the difficulty of having an establishment where neither the bands nor the audiences were segregated, and the looming shadow of the House Un-American Activities Committee.  (Leon Josephson, Barney’s brother, was a particular target, which cast a shadow over Barney’s endeavors.)

Ultimately, the book is delightful for its stories (and the wonderful photographs) and the way Terry Trilling-Josephson has woven recollection and research together.  And the book is — on every page — the embodiment of Barney’s achievements and of the deep love he and Terry shared.  Not to be missed!