I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.
ART NOTES— an exhibition entitled Flesh and Blood: Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, Italy— is scheduled to be at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas through June 14th.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this lengthy Slate report, investigating you-know-who’s claims to have been a high school baseball player that major league scouts were interested in. And while unable to completely disprove his claims (in part due to lack of some records dating back to 1964, partly due to claims made by MAGA pals and the death of other sources of the day) the author seems to have found (in newspaper box scores) perhaps a good fielder … yet a .138 hitter.
FINANCIAL NEWS — Germany’s equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the DAX) has been battered relative to other advanced economy major indices … and analysts believe it is due to its selection process favoring old industrial giants and tending to leave out digital and biotech firms (which have performed better).
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Vance the Cat— a North Carolina kitteh who seems to have bonded with a deer who stayed at his window over an hour — and Vance’s family believes he communicated verbally with “Maria”.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is from an organization I never thought I’d link to (and I am wary of promoting free trade above-all-else).
Yet the Cato Institute had a short-and-quick response to Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) recent NY Times Op-Ed piece saying the US should quit the World Trade Organization (WTO) and set-up some new arrangements (sounding like the Trumpster’s bilateral deals). The Cato essay noted that Hawley (a) seemed oblivious to the WTO’s predecessor treaty (GATT), (b) seemed to argue for US protectionism that (somehow) our allies will be OK with and finally, c) wants some sort of deal with Asian allies as a counter-weight against China: yet makes no mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump abandoned …… because Obama.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Rabbit the Cat— a Mexican stray kitteh who led a teacher into a store and indicated the pet food he wanted … and upon finding he was living in an abandoned house, she adopted him.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.
THE OTHER NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a look at why liberals should relax about Justin Amash— noting in particular how Covid-19 is threatening to keep many third parties off key state ballots, and how so many fundamentals from the 2016 election have changed.
YOUR FAITHFUL SEPARATED at BIRTH correspondent has (on occasion) cited people who have said I resemble someone famous. Two have cited John Lithgow (which I don’t see) but someone that several friends have suggested that I do resemble … has just died: Florian Schneider of the German techno-band Kraftwerk (at age seventy-three).
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… the tenor saxophone is considered to be close to the sound of the human voice, and the sound that Lester Young had was one of the sweetest of the 20th Century.
Yet I found it difficult to profile him without featuring prominently his contemporary (and rival) Coleman Hawkins— because before them: the saxophone was considered a novelty instrument; more suited for vaudeville.
And then trying to describe Lester Young without Billie Holiday— well, this profile has gotten a bit large. Still, perhaps it's worth it for someone who helped change the sound of popular music in his era.
A 1909 Mississippi native, Lester Young lived in New Orleans during his youth before his musical family settled in Minneapolis by the time he was eleven. A multi-instrumentalist at a young age (especially on the clarinet) the family toured the country but Lester Young would not do so in the Jim Crow southern states, and left home for good at age 18.
After paying his dues in various lineups he made Kansas City his base and joined the big band of Fletcher Henderson in 1935 - in doing so, he replaced the first great tenor saxophonist in Coleman Hawkins who had a strong, pulsating sound that he pioneered and had already become a legend with.
Hawkins was a native of Saint Joseph, Missouri (the birthplace of Walter Cronkite and Eminem) some thirty miles north of Kansas City, and he left the Henderson band to play in Europe for five years, returning just before the outbreak of WW-II.
Upon his return, his version of Body and Soul is considered one of the most important saxophone solos of the pre-war era. Thus, the task that Lester Young had in replacing him was daunting - and not sounding at all like Hawkins made it even more so.
But Lester Young had come aways in his own playing and had already made his name in the Kansas City region, where all of the trains crossing the US then passed through ... and had a reputation as a place to have fun (which naturally made it a fertile place for jazz). Tom Pendergast was the boss of Kansas City, where during Prohibition ... not a single person was ever prosecuted for violating it.
During the Robert Altman film Kansas City from 1996, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were shown engaging in a battle of the tenors… yet shaking hands afterwards.
As contrasted with Coleman Hawkins: Lester Young had a distinctly light, cool sound with sophisticated harmonies that floated. And in time, his sound would be emulated by more and more musicians (many of them white musicians who earned quite a bit more than he did).
He eventually spent several years in Count Basie's band, and participated on several recordings with Billie Holiday. While Young and Holiday were never proven to be lovers: they had a musical romance of sorts, with one reviewer calling them the "Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris of the jazz world". She nicknamed him “Pres” (short for president) and Lady Day was the monicker he bestowed on her.
Drafted into the Army in 1944, Lester Young (unlike white musicians such as Artie Shaw) was not given service in an Army band but instead in the regular service, to which he did not adapt well. Not allowed to play his horn, he was also married to a white woman and found with alcohol. He later wrote the song D.B. Blues to describe his sentence in a detention barracks, after which he received a dishonorable discharge - all of which took its toll on him then (and later).
But following the war his career revived, and he made a number of successful tours with Jazz at the Philharmonic - the tours arranged by Norman Granz who paid black and white musicians equally and would not allow segregated bathrooms at venues.
It was Lester Young who popularized the phrase bread (for money) and the expression "cool" as a synonym for fashionable. He made a number of fine recordings into the 1950's, but depression was starting to eat away at him. As the All-Music Guide's Scott Yanow observed, Lester Young "drank huge amounts of liquor and nearly stopped eating, with predictable results".
Lester Young died in March 1959, a few months short of his 50th birthday. Billie Holiday attended his funeral and predicted she was next - and died four months later at age 44. Coleman Hawkins (who appeared with Young in the classic 1958 A Great Day in Harlem photo) died ten years later in 1969, just short of his 65th birthday - and also of heavy drinking. All, though, have left a legacy: Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young along with John Coltrane and the (still alive) Sonny Rollins are considered the Four Tenors…. and the influence of Billie Holiday continues to this day.
Just as I had trouble limiting myself to one performer, nor could I choose only one song. First is a song written after Lester Young's death: the Charles Mingus instrumental classic Goodbye Pork Pie Hat— referring to Lester Young's omnipresent chapeau — that is both elegiac yet not depressing. It's as sophisticated and complex a melody (yet still sweet) as you'll hear and cover versions have been performed by rock/pop musicians: Jeff Beck, Pentangle, Andy Summers (of The Police) and one with added vocals by Joni Mitchell.
Finally, why not a song that Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday perform on? This is from a 1957 television program The Sound of Jazz on CBS.
It features Billie Holiday's own slow blues composition Fine and Mellow with an all-star line-up. It was the last time that Holiday and Young ever met (let alone performed together) and just observe the look in her eyes when Lester Young's turn to solo arrives - and plays a sweet sound that must have recalled earlier, happy days.
Soloists are (in order) — Ben Webster, Lester Young (tenor sax), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Gerry Mulligan (baritone sax), Coleman Hawkins (tenor sax) and Roy Eldridge (trumpet) - and below you can contrast the styles of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. Or, just sample an era … that was soon to disappear.
My man don't love me He treats me so mean Well, he's the lowest man That I've ever seenLove will make you drink and gamble And stay out all night long Love will make you do things You always thought were wrong
Love is like a faucet It turns off and on Sometimes when you think it's on, baby: It has turned off and gone