Saturday Is Record Store Day

I still cherish the cover art and sound of vinyl records even though it has been many years since I set foot in a store that sold only records and accessories like phonograph needles and spindle adaptors (used to play donut-shaped 45 rpm records). Plus many of the stores in New York that I patronized like Discomat, King Karol, and Colony are long gone. Target is the only store I've been to where I've seen a vinyl record like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On for sale (at double or triple the original price). But no one would consider Target a record store.

That brings me to why I'm writing this blog post. It's to remind you that Saturday, April 18, is Record Store Day. So anyone fortunate to have a record store near them can stop by and buy a vinyl record or more.

Thankfully, I had the good sense to hold on to my LPs and 45s. I'm now able to play them on a portable record player that I bought at a now out-of-business Bed, Bath, & Beyond store in Harlem seven or eight years ago. The record player plays records in all three speeds-- 33, 45, and 78.

A little more than two weeks ago I found on 106th Street, near Columbus Avenue, some discarded records. The albums that interested me the most were the ones by such jazz notables as Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. In that pile of records was a five-disc set called Collector's Classic History of Jazz, as well as Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, one of my favorite classical music compositions. On the record, Stravinsky conducts the orchestra.

Jazz Music's Special Month

Since April is National Jazz Appreciation Month, there are many ways for die-hard jazz lovers  to celebrate this iconic, American-born music's global reach and influence. Among those ways are attending a live performance (in a club or outdoors); financially supporting a jazz radio station like Newark, New Jersey's WBGO; buying a jazz record or CD; watching a jazz-related movie (fictional or documentary); reading a history book on jazz or a biography of a jazz great like Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong; buying a postcard, poster, or artwork with a jazz theme.

Let's help make this month a truly memorable Jazz Appreciation Month.

Don't forget that April 30 is International Jazz Day and is celebrated in various countries around the world. In 2011, that day was declared as such by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization).

Happy Jazz Appreciation Month!

Stanley Crouch's Breath

Several years ago, the journalist and social critic Stanley Crouch interviewed my upstairs neighbor, the late legendary jazz drummer (and a former president of my building's co-op board), Charli Persip, at Minton's Playhouse, considered the birthplace of bebop. It's located on West 118th Street in Harlem. (Both Crouch and Persip died a few weeks apart in 2020.)

I got to meet Crouch only one time around 1982 or 1983 when I was a proofreader at The Village Voice. He came over to where I was sitting, presumably to discuss the article of his that I had proofread. I don't recall what was said but what was most memorable as he stood over me was getting a whiff of his bad breath.

In subsequent years, I read his New York Daily News column and saw him being interviewed more than once on Charlie Rose's public TV show (I hope he used mouthwash before going on-camera). I also remember seeing him appear as one of the authoritative talking heads in Ken Burns's documentary series on jazz.

From then on, whenever I saw his name in print or saw him on TV, my mind would go back to the first time I encountered him and got assaulted by his breath.

Show Your Love For Jazz

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. It was created at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in 2001. According to Wikipedia, the aim of the celebration was "to be an annual event that would pay tribute to jazz as both a living and as a historic music."

Among the many ways to appreciate this American-born music, you can attend a jazz performance, buy or listen to a jazz recording, buy a jazz-related poster, support a jazz radio station like WBGO in the New York metropolitan area, wear a jazz-related T-shirt, watch a jazz video online, buy a jazz-related postcard, read a biography of a jazz musician.

Sarah Vaughan's Birthday Is Today

The extraordinary jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), known as "The Divine One," was born on this day. Vaughan, a native of Newark, New Jersey, where there is a street named for her, would have celebrated her 101st birthday.

Keeping An Open Mind

"To be a great musician, you've got to be open to what's new, what's happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you're going to continue to grow and communicate."--Miles Davis (1926-1991), jazz trumpeter.

Quoted in Black Pearls: Daily Meditations, Affirmations, and Inspirations for African-Americans by Eric V. Copage (Quill/William Morrow and Company, 1993).

The above photo is of the storied New York jazz venue, the Village Vanguard. Miles Davis was one of many iconic jazz musicians who performed there.

A Jazz Portrait: Nina Simone

Nina Simone (1933-2003), born Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She was called by her admirers the High Priestess of Soul. Her many talents included singer, pianist, and songwriter ("Mississippi Goddam"). Simone was also a noted civil rights activist. This portrait of Simone is by Armando Alleyne (born in November 1959), an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Divine Sarah

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M. Hayes (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017) is a true page-turner. One memorable scene is the one in which Sarah Vaughan and her bandmates were touring the South in the band's bus in, I think, the 1950s. A vehicle rode alongside the bus and one of its occupants started shooting at it. Everyone quickly ducked for cover. Miraculously no one was hit. One of the perils of being black Down South at that time.

A Desert Island Disc

This Al Jarreau album, Breakin' Away, released in 1981, is one of the jazz albums I would want to have with me if I were stuck on a desert island. (My favorite song on the album is "Roof Garden," a foot-tapping number.)

As you can see, Jarreau, who died in 2017, unlike many men, was not afraid to be seen wearing pink, especially on an album cover.
 

The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Classic "Time Out" LP

Time Out, recorded in 1959 by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, is one of my favorite jazz albums. ("Take Five," the hit jazz tune, is on the album.) I have both the long-play vinyl record and the CD. 

Brubeck in the CD's liner notes said that "[c]reating a 'hit' out of the odd-meter experiments of Time Out was the farthest from any of our minds...when [we] went into the studio to record."

I love the above photo. It appears in the reissued CD's booklet. Paul Desmond, the alto saxophone player as well as the composer of "Take Five," did his own thing by wearing a suit and tie and didn't try to copy what his bandmates wore. He was cool and confident.

The Village Vanguard, A Jazz Mecca

The Village Vanguard, one of New York's storied jazz venues, located on Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, in the West Village. Among the musicians who've performed there are Miles Davis (trumpeter), Sonny Rollins (saxophonist), Thelonious Monk (pianist), Carmen McRae (vocalist), Bill Evans (pianist), and Gerry Mulligan (saxophonist).

Jazz In 34 Volumes

One of my favorite reference books is the Random House College Dictionary. That book defines the word "discography" as "a descriptive list of phonograph records by category, composer, performer, or date of release."

Why am I talking about this word? Well, for one thing, I am a music lover, especially of jazz. Secondly,  I am interested in the minutest details about sound recordings. And thirdly, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami told the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" column (November 20, 2022) that he owns The Jazz Discography, a 34-volume set compiled by Tom Lord.

"It takes up a lot of space," he said, "and I imagine most people would find it unnecessary to own, but for jazz collectors it's a real treasure, the painstaking result of years of work."

And no doubt the whole set would cost a jazz enthusiast a small fortune.

I would love to see one of these volumes, just to browse through its pages and immerse myself in its encyclopedic range and scholarship. Contained in those 34 volumes is presumably every, or almost every, jazz recording from the music's infancy to more recent years. That would include famous works, lesser known ones as well as those long forgotten. I would especially want to read the entries for Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959), one of my favorite recordings, and Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959), for example, to learn some little known facts about them.

The Jazz Discography, which is available in the New York Public Library, would allow me to finally gain enough jazz knowledge to be able to complete, with more ease and confidence, the esoteric crossword puzzle that appears each month in the New York City Jazz Record.

Let's Hope For An Al Jarreau Biography

I recently joined a Facebook group devoted to the jazz singer Al Jarreau, who died in 2017. It's called the Al Jarreau Family Group and has more than 32,000 members who post comments, photos, album cover art, videos, and anything else that's Al Jarreau-related.

I began listening to Jarreau in the mid-seventies when I bought his album Glow, which, according to Wikipedia, was his second album. It was released in 1976. I believe I bought the album at a Discomat chain store in the Times Square area. From that point on, I became an Al Jarreau fan.

Because there are so many people who cherish his singing talent, I posted on the site a question: "Does anyone know if there is a biography of Al Jarreau in the works? Or maybe a scrapbook publication or a special magazine issue about him?"

A day later, Shannon West, who publishes a website called jazzseries.com/wordpress, responded: "The posts he did over the years when he was doing the diary/journal/blog narrative on his website gave such wonderful insight into what he was doing at the time--traveling, recording, touring, etc.--and he writes narrative as expressively as he writes songs. I wish they could dig up the archives and compile them....Nobody could write Al better than Al so my vote is to edit and release the 15 years or so of archival posts."

I think that would be a wonderful idea including photos, song lyrics, diary entries, correspondence, etc. That could all be part of a special collectors issue magazine. On the cover could be photographer Richard Avedon's black-and-white photo of Jarreau from the front cover of his 1980 album This Time. I bet the issue would sell out immediately and require several reprintings.

A Publication For Jazz Lovers

One jazz publication I make it a point to get each month at the Mist Harlem entertainment venue on 116th Street is the New York City Jazz Record. It's a free tabloid-size magazine published on newsprint and contains CD reviews, musician interviews,a calendar of events, a birthday column commemorating day by day musicians (living and dead) born in that particular month, as well as a jazz-related crossword puzzle. The latter is so esoteric and daunting it requires a near encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and its history. For example, the June 2019 issue had the following clues: "'50s Canadian RCA Victor catalogue prefixes";"'70s jazz critic for CODA magazine"; "What Lester did in Britain"; "Gerry Mulligan nickname." If nothing else, it'll encourage me to bone up on jazz history. (Disc jockey Phil Schaap of Columbia University's radio station WKCR could probably complete the puzzle within thirty minutes or less.)

As a longtime jazz lover and CD and record collector, the New York City Jazz Record is an important part of my jazz education and I recommend it to anyone interested in jazz and its practitioners.

I look forward to reading it each month and hope it'll be around for a long time.

A Singer Who Can "Sang"

In Curtis Davenport's review of a debut album called Home by jazz singer Shirley Crabbe (Jazz Inside magazine, May 2012), he stated enthusiastically that "the lady can sang!"

He went on to explain the qualities of such a singer. "Those who can 'sang,' cause a smile to come to your face and occasional goosebumps when they vocalize."

"[T]hose who can 'sang,'" he continued, "aren't necessarily those who employ the type of amateurish vocal histrionics often heard on 'American Idol' or 'The Voice,' instead they are those who have a good voice, an understanding of the meaning of their lyric and an ability to interpret that lyric in a way that makes you feel the song they are singing."

This explains why I am such a big fan of the late singer Carmen McRae (1922-1994) and why I hope to obtain every album she ever recorded. She also could "sang."

After reading Curtis Davenport's review, I am now interested in hearing Ms. Crabbe's vocal skills.

And although the review was published six years ago, the comments are still relevant and timeless.

Remembering Claus Ogerman

In 2015, the Newark, New Jersey-based public radio station WBGO Jazz 88 announced that the  German-born conductor/arranger/composer Claus Ogerman had turned 85 years old. My introduction to him was via two George Benson albums he arranged and conducted in the late 1970s, Breezin' and Inflight. I later bought an album he recorded called Gate of Dreams at the now-defunct Colony record store in Midtown Manhattan. I thank Kevin Jeff and his Jubilation! Dance Company for inspiring me to seek out the vinyl LP. Jeff used one of the recording's tracks for a dance work he choreographed. The music was so beautiful and moving that I had to buy the album.

I learned  recently via Wikipedia that Ogerman died in March of 2016.

George Benson, Guitarist And Autobiographer

I'm looking forward to reading guitar virtuoso George Benson's recently published book, Benson: The Autobiography, written with Alan Goldsher (Da Capo Press, 2014).

I'm particularly interested in what he has to say about the recording sessions for Breezin' and In Flight, two of my favorite jazz recordings as well as what it was like collaborating with fellow guitar virtuoso Earl Klugh whose career I've been following since his emergence on the music scene in 1976 with his self-titled recording, Earl Klugh, on the Blue Note label.

I hope Klugh will also write his autobiography.

Denzel Washington To Play Thelonious Monk On The Big Screen

Denzel Washington has played several real-life people on the big screen: South African activist Steven Biko, boxer Ruben "Hurricane" Carter, and Black Muslim orator Malcolm X, to name just three roles. AARP The Magazine (December 2014-January 2015 issue) in its "Big 5-Oh" feature on the back page, which celebrates celebrity birthday milestones, reports that Washington "hopes to star as jazz legend Thelonious Monk." This wouldn't be the first time Washington, who turned 60 this month, plays a jazz musician. He had the lead role (as a trumpet player) in Spike Lee's 1990 flick, Mo' Better Blues.

Don Cheadle Is Miles Ahead On His Miles Davis Film

Now that actor Don Cheadle has gotten his Miles Davis biopic, Miles Ahead,* before the cameras, maybe he should consider doing a biopic of Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's openly gay friend and collaborator. (Strayhorn wrote among other well-known tunes, Take the A Train.)There was supposed to be a film version of  Lush Life, David Hadju's biography of Strayhorn, but nothing came of it. It would be wonderful if a film about Strayhorn would be made. Such a film would remove him from Ellington's shadow.


*Note: See Alan Light's article, "Middle-Aged Man Without a Horn," in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section (September 14, 2014). It is about Don Cheadle's making of the Miles Davis biopic.

Rap Vs. Jazz

May 18, 2006

To the Editor:

You never hear that young jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, or Roy Hargrove have had a run in with the law, been involved in a shootout, or started a verbal feud with a colleague. It makes me wonder what it is about rap music that brings out the worst in its practitioners and followers.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Michael Smith

Note: This is from a handwritten draft. I'm not sure which publication I had intended to send it to. Perhaps I had the New York Daily News in mind. I remember posting something similar on my Facebook page.