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