Same story, different continent

Even if you are abstractly aware of the global ramifications of the economic crisis, Alex Hay's article for Reuters on the shrinking middle class in Spain does a good job of highlighting the degree to which we're all in this together. The anecdotes about soup kitchens and foreclosures, in particular, are depressingly familiar.

The Funky Genius of Vince Guaraldi

Watching ABC’s “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown” special last night, I was struck once again by how these shows, watched ad infinitum in childhood, can seem so new again years later. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Snoopy’s independence. Not only was he never on a leash, he seemed to be the only adult on the program – albeit one prone to getting himself tied up in Christmas tree lights, trapped inside malevolent ping-pong tables, and getting his nose stuck in birdhouses. Eventually, I just accepted the fact that he could pilot a Sopwith Camel while neither Charlie nor his friends could cross town without the help of his grandmother and her station wagon.

Last night though, what stood out most for me was Vince Guaraldi's very progressive soundtrack. Everyone is familiar with “Linus and Lucy”, the famous piano driven and jazzy theme to 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” For the Easter special though, released in 1974, Vince goes deep into the funk.

Check out the tune he drops in this clip at 1:50. It’s as if he had been hanging out with Buddy Miles at Woodstock’s bachelor pad and just started riffing. The guitar is straight up Abraxas-era Santana. Later, at 4:47, he goes into a laid-back but soulful lounge riff (during which we see the infamous visual elevator joke at 6:46), reminiscent of "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" but updated for the post-Shaft era. You just don't think about these things when you're lying on your stomach in your parents' living room and looking up at an RCA big enough to double as a butler's table.

Of course, Vince Guraldi was already an accomplished composer before he hooked up with the Peanuts franchise, and his non-cartoon related output is well worth checking out. Sadly, he died all too young of a heart attack in February of 1976. Thank goodness a new generation will always be able to discover his brilliance every April, November and December.

I’ll be hoisting a dyed egg in his honor this Sunday.

Happy Birthday Lady Day

What a way to start the morning. Today is April 7th, the 94th birthday of one America’s greatest performing talents. There are a thousand other words and phrases to describe her, but that one seems appropriately encompassing for Billie Holiday. I didn’t even realize the significance of the day until one of my friends sent a link to a video of Lady Day performing “Fine and Mellow” on a CBS television special back in 1957. To this day, it’ll take the rug out from underneath you.

“The Sound of Jazz” was an historic television event. Never before had so many giants of the genre come together on the small screen, and never again would they. The evening’s two biggest stars, Holiday and saxophonist Lester Young, would be dead within two years. This makes the video of “Fine and Mellow” both sublime and bittersweet.

Holiday and Young were longtime friends who had collaborated for years, producing such legendary sides as “All Of Me”, “The Man I Love”, and “He’s Funny That Way”. It was Young who bestowed upon Holiday the nickname “Lady Day”, and Holiday in turn nicknamed Young “Prez”, as in President. Yet they had not spoken for quite some time prior to the December 8 taping of the show. Even during the rehearsal, they avoided one another. Once the music started, though, whatever physical and emotional distance separated them evaporated, and suddenly it was Lady Day and the Prez, together again, in synch one more time. Here’s how music critic Scott Waldman describes it:

Prez, who had wrecked his body with alcohol, was in such ill health he couldn't stand for the duration of the six-minute song. Holiday launched into the song and each sax man took a turn. Gerry Mulligan was first and played a solo in double-time. Webster was next, blowing a beautiful, breathy chorus. And then it was time for Prez. When it was Young's turn he wearily stood up, and locked eyes with Holiday as she sang a song with lines like "Love is like a faucet / It turns off and on". As Lady Day sang, Prez hit every note exactly in time with her and they took off like two eagles riding an air current as they rose higher and higher, way out of that studio and those television sets, circling around each other, Prez blowing the notes that sustained her as if he was the body to her soul, and then they came together in mid-air, as mating eagles will, and plummeted hundreds of feet earthward together, before breaking off and flying their separate ways. People in the control booth had tears in their eyes. It was the swan song of a bittersweet affection. After the show, the two had some brief backstage conversation and then they bid goodbye. They each had less than two years to live. Prez would die alone in a New York hotel, his body finally calling it quits. Not long after that, Holiday would be arrested on her deathbed for heroin possession.

One of the things I love most about this video is the body language. The postwar hipster headshake of Gerry Mulligan, almost purposefully out of tempo with Coleman Hawkins’ bluesy wails at 2:02; the “let-me-show-you-how-it’s-done” grin on Prez as he leaps in at 2:42; the utter ecstasy of rediscovery on Billie’s face at 2:56, the sincere appreciation for the younger generation evident in her approving nod toward Mulligan at 4:50, and the visible “oh my!” during Roy Eldridge’s solo at 7:20; Jazz performance has always been about the subtle visual cues, the tortoise to rock’s bombastic hare. With the aid of several television cameras at different angles, it becomes as much fun to watch the players as it is to listen to them.

Above all, though, this was Billie’s moment, her swan song after a rocky but prodigious career. More than most who claim it, she truly lived the blues. When she sings that final line about love being like a faucet – “Sometimes when you think it’s on baby, it has turned off and gone” - it breaks your heart and makes you go “mmm, hmmm” at the same time. Like I said, she takes the rug out from underneath you.

Happy Birthday Billie.

Hunger Was Good Discipline

So said Ernest Hemingway in the eighth chapter of his autobiographical A Moveable Feast. The book, published posthumously in 1964, chronicles his early years in Paris as a member of the Lost Generation. He writes of trying to support himself and his wife while pursuing an unstable career that relies on the mercurial interests of faceless editors (some things never change).

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at the tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg Gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.

So the name of this blog stems from that theory, which I intend to test. God knows I’m hungry. I don’t intend to do any original reporting here in the garden. Rather, I intend to write “nothing that anyone in America would buy”, so as to temporarily stave off the hunger while practicing the craft that originally seduced me. The bakeries will come soon enough.