Author: Devra Hall Levy

Responsibility, Truth and Honor

I just started reading “Telling the Untold Story” by Steve Weinberg. On page six he writes:

“An accomplished contemporary biographer must be an investigative journalist, historian, psychologist, sensitive interviewer, gossipmonger, and compelling storyteller rolled into one. The best biographies capture life at a deeper, more intense level than does any other form of literature. Through biography, we learn how other individuals have handled the stuggle between freedom and fate. Leaving a mark on on this earth beyond one’s immediate family is unusual; biographies tend to be written about people who have managed to leave such a mark. Biographies scratch beneath the subject’s personal myth, looking for the slippages and the fittings.”

And on page 14 he shares these words written by Margaret Oliphant in 1883 and quoted by Edgar Johnson in One Mighty Torrent: The Drama of Biography:

“The position of the biographer carries with it a power which is almost unrestrained, the kind of power which is doubly tyrannous to use like a giant. Not even the pulpit is so entirely master, for we all consider ourselves able to judge in respect to what the clergyman tells us and we have his materials in our hands by which to call him to account… but the biographer has a far more assured place, and if he is not restrained by the strictest limits of truth and honor, there is nothing else that can control him in heaven or earth…He has it in his power to guide the final deliverance, like that judge whose summing up so often decides the final verdict.”

I’m not sure I believe that biographers are quite so god-like, but holding someone else’s life in your hands is an awesome responsibility not to be taken lightly.

Nothing Is Simple, But It’s All Good

I got a lot done yesterday, although no blogging. The morning started with a trip to the dentist for an 8 AM teeth cleaning. I have to do this every three months because the radiation treatments burned out my salivary glands and left my teeth unprotected. Hard to complain about such things when the alternative was death… And there’s always an upside: the dentist’s office manager bought a copy of “Men, Women, and Girl Singers” as a Father’s Day gift.

Anyway, I hurried back to my home office and set up to record a phone interview. In 1998 we installed 4-line phones throughout the house, but GE’s proprietary wiring or whatever prevents me from simply plugging in my recording device. I use an inexpensive single-line princess phone coupled with a Telephone Recording Control (both purchased at Radio Shack) that plugs into my minidisc recorder.

At precisely 9:30 AM the phone rang and my long-awaited conversation with Sir Simon Rattle began. Because of his hectic schedule, and the time difference, it took months to arrange this call. But again, I cannot complain because we spoke at leisure for just over an hour and he was gracious to call me on his dime. (Granted, he has more dimes than I do, but generous nonetheless.) He was calling me from Berlin and had just concluded a rehearsal that he said was hard work but went well. He told me how the Classic Ellington project came to be, described the fear and the excitement experienced by all parties when the Birmingham Symphony joined together with some heavy-weight jazz artists (Clark Terry, Joe Lovano, Regina Carter, Bobby Watson, Joshua Redman, Geri Allen, Peter Washington, and Lewis Nash) to perform a complete program of Luther Henderson’s orchestrations.

While I was transferring the recorded interview to my computer, I started filling out worksheets given to me by the folks at ArtistShare. I mention ArtistShare on this blog from time to time, usually in reference to Dad or Maria Schneider or Bob Brookmeyer, but I don’t think I’ve told you that I have been thinking about launching an ArtistShare site of my own. It’s been on my mind for some time now, and it will soon be a reality. ArtistShare is all about sharing the creative process, but planning the experience is a well-thought out and intricate process all its own…hence the worksheets.

I am actually planning to launch three projects, if not simultaneously then in quick succession, but I will not be going it alone. One of the projects will be a new CD by Clairdee, to be recorded in September at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. John is Clairdee’s personal manager so I asked him to start on the worksheets for that project while I tackled the other two projects (more about those soon).

At some point yesterday I took a break from ArtistShare to check the audio levels on the recorded interview and when satisfied, I sent the file, via the Internet, to my trusty transcriptionist. I took other breaks — one for a brief phone conference with a client who needed me to edit a press release, another to re-write a Nancy Wilson press release, and lastly to cook and eat dinner — but it was after 11 PM when finally I emailed one set of worksheets to my Project Coordinator and toddled off to bed.

Today is a new day and this morning my reward will be to go horseback riding. Hi ho, Silver, away……….

I’ve Got Mail: Narratives, Full Circle

I received an email today from Carl Abernathy, proprietor of Cahl’s Juke Joint: A rock, blues and jazz blog that features reviews and meditations on an eclectic mix of music. When I first discovered Carl’s blog I remembered being intrigued right away that someone so into music and with such diverse musical tastes would list books by John McPhee and Tracy Kidder among his favorites — both authors are masters of the narrative nonfiction genre — but I had forgotten that Carl works days as a college newspaper adviser. Guess I’m not the only one to mix passions for music and narrative tales. Carl writes:

I like the Nieman narrative writing site, too. I’ve been using bits and pieces from some of the stories in seminars.

A few weeks ago, one of my former students sent me a link to another site that features narrative writing: http://www.gangrey.com/

I don’t like all of the work featured on the site, but it’s a nice resource, too.

Gangrey, “Prolonging the slow death of newspapers,” is a blog with postings by Ben that contain links to stories in various newspapers. As Carl said, some are better than others, but it’s a great way to serendipitously sample the fare in papers around the country. Thanks, Carl.

Most blogs have an About Me link, but no such link for Ben on Gangrey. I did find a link, however, referring to a story on which he had been working, a story, it turns out, that he wrote for the St. Petersburg Times Online/Tampa Bay. I couldn’t tell if he was on staff or a freelancer, but now that I had his full name, Ben Montgomery, I googled him. Guess where his bio blurb showed up! On Neiman’s Narrative Digest. And that brings us full circle to my post from yesterday that precipitated Carl’s email.

A Colleague Needs Help

The call has gone out: “Richard M. Sudhalter, the distinguished trumpeter, biographer, and jazz scholar, needs your help.” Our paths have only crossed online in a jazz researchers’ newsgroup, so I cannot count Richard among my personal friends, but we share many friends in common and he is an esteemed colleague. For the last three years Richard has been recovering from a stroke, and now he’s been diagnosed with a rare, debilitating illness of the nervous system called multiple system atrophy.

Terry Teachout and Doug Ramsey have both posted more about Richard’s accomplishments and his needs. His friends are rallying and a benefit concert is planned for September, but the bills are mounting now. Having faced serious medical challenges myself, I am all too familiar with the costs of medical care and the additional damage to one’s health, or lack of, that is inflicted by the added stress of struggling to pay for care that one urgently needs. To find out what you can do, go here.

Neiman’s Narrative Web Site

The Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has launched a new web site called Narrative Digest. While the site does feature lots of craft advice, definitions, bibliographies and such, anyone who enjoys reading true stories should check out the Notable Narratives section that contains links to some wonderfully written series running in various newspapers around the country. One of the most powerful of these stories is a 22-part series (“Through Hell and High Water“) running in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describing “the saga of two hospitals and their staffs’ struggles to keep their patients alive after Hurricane Katrina.” In this month’s edition, the featured Notable Narrative is “A Father’s Pain, a Judge’s Duty and a Justice Beyond Their Reach” — this is an article that I remember it vividly today, even though it ran in the Los Angeles Times five years ago. In addition to the article, you can also read an essay by the author, “Why We Should Care: Writing well about endangered kids.”

Memory Lapse

My induction into the world of technology dates back to the behemoth days, when mainframe systems took up entire ice-cold floors of office buildings. In the 1970s I wrote programs on punch cards in languages such as COBOL and MARC IV. When a program malfunctioned (usually at 2 or 3 AM) I would get a call from sys ops (the system operators) and have to head for the office in the dark where I would then read the “dumps” — stacks of green and white striped paper, often a foot or two high, of densely packed hexadecimal code that when properly interpreted would lead me to the broken line of program code and/or the offending data record that caused the program to abort. I had worked my way up from programmer to analyst and system designer in the days when databases were new and required experts to create the requisite “data dictionaries.”

By the early 80s I had left the corporate world and opened shop as a publicist, sharing an office suite with John. I bought one of the first IBM PCs for our office and taught myself a new database programming language called R-Base so that I could build a custom-made program for John’s management business. Over the years I moved the system from R-Base to Microsoft Access and now it’s a web-based application built with php, but functionally it is the same.

Eleven years ago I wrote one of the early books on how to build a web site, and while I don’t even attempt to learn all the new languages and programs, I still keep an eye on the trends and new developments…and I do acquire useful gadgets. I love my PDA (personal digital assistant). I was particularly happy to find that my new PDA, a Palm, was equipped for wireless connections to the Internet, a capability that enables me to pick up email and visit websites. The screen is small to be sure, but it fits in my purse, which my laptop does not. So, for the first time in many years, this past week I went out of town without my laptop.

It was a quick, four-day trip to New York, and I didn’t expect to have much time for writing. Just in case I did find some extra time to work on the Henderson biography, I loaded all the interview transcripts onto the PDA so that I could read them and make some notes. Of course, with the wireless connection, I fully expected to blog, even if inputting the text would be laborious.

I tell you all of this so you will appreciate the full extent of my chagrin as to the cause of my absence from DevraDoWrite this week. Bright and early on Tuesday morning I cruised to my blog site and…I could not remember the login code. The program in which I store such information was at home on my laptop. My little gray cells were not functioning. Another example, I suppose, of “use it or lose it.”

I’ve Got Mail: Pogo is Music To Bill’s Ears

The great bassist and jazz annecdotalist Bill Crow is not much help regarding Hans Groiner,but he has other goodies to share:

Sorry, I don’t have a clue about Hans Groiner. I hope it’s a joke.

I’m sorry Paul Weston, a great joker, passed on before he had a chance to do anything with an idea I gave him: having Jonathan and Darlene do an album of minor tunes made more upbeat by changing all the chords and melodies to major. “Moanin’,” “Saint Louis Blues,” “Alone Together,” “Comes Love,” and “Gloomy Sunday” all sound much more cheerful when played and sung this way.

Years ago, when Johnny Mercer first started Capitol Records, Paul did some country and western records for the label featuring a guy he called “Shug Fisher,” who stuttered while he sang, adding extra beats of guitar strumming during the stuttered sections of the lyrics, and putting the meter deliriously out of whack.

Consensus seems to be that it’s a joke, and Rifftides had more to say about Groiner and about other Monk-strosities.

Bill also wrote me a few days ago regarding my mention of Pogo:

I have another Pogo quote for you. Albert the Alligator was talking about, “…everybody thinks…” something or other, and Churcy La Femme remarked,

“Without me, nobody is everybody!”

I was a big fan of Walt Kelly, and during my first years in NYC, living on Cornelia Street, I was moved to write him a letter one day. I complimented him on his strip in general, and particularly on the way he often made jokes about musicians without demeaning them. About a week later I got a nice letter from him along with the original drawing for his 9/28/53 strip, an episode involving Pogo’s banjo playing and singing. It still hangs on our wall at home.
If you haven’t checked out Bill’s website, do so now. In addition to great photos (which I’ve mentioned in the past), he’s now posting some of his writing, including a lovely piece from 1999 about Marian McPartland.

A Moment of Silence for Healing Prayers

It seems that Lois Gilbert of Jazzcorner has arranged for many of our jazz venues to simultaneously dim the lights on Sunday for a moment both in memory of John Hicks and in prayer for Hilton Ruiz. Stanley Crouch has written about it in his New York Daily News column — he may be irascible, and I am not always in agreement with him, but I recommend you read “Dimming the lights for a jazz beacon“ (May 31, 2006). Here’s an excerpt:

In a historical moment as narcissistic as ours, it may be hard to appreciate someone who was loved for his ability to support others. In our empty celebrity culture it is now almost unthinkable that someone would be admired for expressing the essence of his personality through his empathy for fellow performers.

That is the deepest human meaning of jazz: it is about the individual rising from a collective. When you hear a jazz band take off, that is what you are hearing: empathy as self-expression.

A Letter To The Editor

The following is a New York Times Letter To The Editor that did not run, but should have:

The grief and sorrow I, along with so many others, feel about Barbaro (A Broken Horse, May 22, 2006) is understandable, for an animal’s beauty, purity, courage, and dependency along with its bravery and stamina are qualities we all identify with. We can empathize and identify because as children we had the same qualities. When childhood goes well there is a beautiful outcome, a race well run. But when as children we are asked to perform without the amount of support and love necessary, we lose our footing and we identify with Barbaro, too. Expecting a three-year old thoroughbred to compete before his bones are well formed is like asking an unprepared child to meet life with values and equanimity. We emulate the spirit and we are overcome by tragedy of this horse who stands for us all. My question is why we find it so difficult to identify with the men and women whose lives we put on the line every second of every day whether they be soldiers, police, or fire fighters. And why we undervalue the teachers who valiantly try to educate our children. Things seem so out of proportion.
Jane S. Hall

I’ve Got Mail: Am I Gullible?

I remember my dad telling me that he once saw a television interview where someone made a disparaging comment about all those wrong notes that Thelonious Monk played. So when I read about Hans Groiner’s recordings (see post below from earlier today), I took it seriously. I have now received two emails regarding this matter. First from Bill Kirchner (the one who told me about it in the first place), who at least admits to some uncertainty (maybe just so I won’t feel too bad):

I can’t say for sure, but I’d bet that the “Hans Groiner” (if there is such a person) recordings are put-ons, and very funny ones at that, a la Paul Weston and Jo Stafford’s legendary “Jonathan and Darlene Edwards” parodies.

And this from Mike Davis across the pond in Shropshire (Mike is co-author of Hampton Hawes: A Bio-Discography):

Think the Hans Groiner ‘Plays Monk’ saga is very funny. Jazz humour isn’t yet dead methinks. Round up the usual suspects. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill Crow knows the true identity of Herr Groiner.

So Bill Crow, what say you?