Playlist: Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Keith Jarrett * * * Diatribe * * * Shades * * * Impulse

Clarence "Jelly" Johnson * * * Graveyard Bound * * * Low Down Papa * * * Delmark

Johnny Cash * * * Big River * * * Bootleg Vol. II * * * Legacy

Robert Hicks * * * Mississippi Heavy Water Blues * * * People Take Warning! * * * Tompkins Square

Mary Johnson * * * Never Too Late * * * Devil at the Confluence * * * Delmark

Gregg Allman * * * I Can't Be Satisfied * * * Low Country Blues * * * Rounder

Son House * * * I Ain't Gonna Cry No More (Depot Blues) * * * Classic Blues, Vol. 2 * * * Smithsonian Folkways

William & Versey Smith * * * When That Great Ship Went Down * * * People Take Warning! * * * Tompkins Square

Calvin Cooke & Grace Cooke * * * I'll Just Wave My Hand * * * Sacred Steel Convention * * * Arhoolie

Cynthia Scott * * * Shades of Ray * * * Dream for One Bright World * * * Ttcocs

Vera Hall * * * Black Woman * * * Classic Blues * * * Smithsonian Folkways

Nina Simone * * * I Loves You Porgy * * * Esquire Jazz Collection: Voice of the Soul * * * Blue Note

Dykes Magic Trio * * * Frankie * * * People Take Warning! * * * Tompkins Square

Playlist: Wednesday, February 16

T. Renner, "Improvisation for George Shearing & Jack Keroauc #1," 2011, acrylic on paper, 6" x 4".

Mel Torme * * * Something's Gotta Give * * * Sings Fred Astaire * * * Bethlehem

Mel Torme * * * Too Close For Comfort * * * Finest Hour * * * Verve

Thelonious Monk * * * Reflections * * * In Paris * * * Disques Vogue

Champion Jack Dupree * * * On My Way To See Moe Asch * * * Piano Blues * * * Smithsonian Folkways

Benny Goodman * * * Blue Skies * * * Complete Legendary 1939 Carnegie Hall Concert * * * Disconforme

Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker * * * Dizzy Atmosphere * * * Bird Meets Diz * * * Charly

George Shearing * * * It's Only A Paper Moon * * * Paper Moon * * * Telarc Jazz

George Shearing * * * Angel Eyes * * * Favorite Things * * * Telarc Jazz

Benny Goodman with Peggy Lee * * * Let's Do It * * * Benny Goodman Featuring Peggy Lee * * * Columbia

Memphis Minnie & Willie Dixon * * * Beer Drinking Woman * * * Classic Blues * * * Smithsonian Folkways

Joe Turner * * * I've Got the World On a String * * * In Paris * * * Disques Vogue

Warner Williams * * * Step It Up and Go * * * Classic Blues, Volume 2 * * * Smithsonian Folkways

Snooks Eaglin * * * I Got My Questionaire * * * New Orleans Street Singer * * * Smithsonian Folkways

Research Note: Jazz & Radio in Fiction

"A radio was playing a Wayne King waltz and moonlight, like spilled talcum powder, dusted the shoulders of dancers...." (page 152)

"Wayne King was playing a tango, using wood-winds and stringed instruments, and the music was subdued, sweet. (page 153)

"Louis Armstrong replaced Wayne King on the radio. It was like jumping from Vienna to Africa." (page 155)

"The music was throbbing, moaning, torrid. Saxophones, an inspired trumpet, the piano made wild improvised flights from the written melody. Louis Armstrong was swinging it."

Jonathan Latimer, The Lady in the Morgue, New York: Pocket Books, 1958 (1936)

Research Note: Jazz & Radio in Fiction

"'Miss Ross felt there was no future in strictly union work...'

Crane whispered to Williams, 'Commercial jobs with the big bands.'

'... and thought I ought to form a band of my own with some ride-men,' Udoni continued, 'and pick up some of the dough going to the jungle boys from Harlem.'

Williams' eyes were questioning, but Crane shook his head.

Udoni went on: 'I had been thinking that myself, so I got hold of Frankie Thomas on for the sax and Clem Packard for the clarinet, and Fats Wolman to handle the drums, and some other boys and we grooved a couple of tunes in New York and caught a wire at a nitery here in Chicago.'

'Wait a minute! Wait a minute!' Crane held both hands in the air. 'You're getting too deep for me. What's grooving a tune?'

'Making a record.'

'What in hell's catching a wire at a nitery?'

'A contract to broadcast from a night club.'"

Jonathan Latimer, The Lady in the Morgue, New York: Pocket Books, 1958 (1936), page 137.

Research Note: Modernism and Radio (Gertrude Stein)

"Gertrude Stein returned to the United States in 1934, a year of fierce debate over the Federal Communications Act and the regulation of American radio. As she explored the nation that figures so prominently in her writings, she could not have missed the fact that radio broadcasting had captured the imaginations of Americans. Stein had long been an avid reader and critic of popular culture and the media—her relationship with American newspapers predated her late romance with the radio. However, the influence of mass-media forms upon her writing has yet to be fully explored. In what follows I will demonstrate that radio in particular acted as a powerful formal model for Stein's late writing.

"Radio's influence can be traced in Stein's political and aesthetic strategies during her American tour, and it emerges as a dominant note in her World War II texts. Broadcasting provides a suggestive means of connecting Stein's early aural experimentalism (as in the multiple, echoing voices of 'Bon Marche Weather') with her later, more popular, idiom. Resolutely oral, dialogic, and changeable, Stein's artistic project finally finds its formal corollary in mid-century radio. Tracing the influence of the radio in Stein's late writing also makes it possible to extend our analysis of Stein's use of indeterminacy in language to her more audience-focused texts, with the effect of complicating our readings of her investment in communication and communal meaning-making. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Stein wrestles with the idea of radio as a kind of public sphere—a forum in which self, other, and community can be constituted through talk. Her aurality must thus be understood as being as profoundly public in its orientations as it is private.

"Finally, hearing the radio in Stein's late writing advances our understanding of the [End Page 261] cross-fertilizations of 'high' and 'low' modernist cultures, while beginning to acknowledge radio's own distinct thematic and stylistic contributions to mid-century modernism.

Stein was not alone in responding powerfully to radio. By the time Stein returned to the United States for her lecture tour of the mid-1930s, radio had been the subject of a powerful discourse of technological utopianism for more than a decade. Radio had promised, according to its very earliest boosters, to bring together the geographically and culturally scattered nation. Respected thinkers such as John Dewey, Herbert Cooley, and Robert Park believed that radio offered the means to create a new public united by channels of communication. In an extreme version of such claims, the League of Political Education asserted (somewhat ominously) in 1938 that the broadening 'psychological gaps' between Americans could be overcome through the radio, which fostered a 'simultaneous process of thinking.' In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'Fireside Chats' were just one way in which radio was used to call a national community into being. As Lizabeth Cohen has shown in her study of Depression-era workers in Chicago, the claims of radio boosters were not spurious: by facilitating alliances between disparate ethnic groups during the 1930s, radio helped to bring about a self-conscious community of American working people. Broadcasting seemed to be unstoppable in its promotion of social connection."

Sarah Wilson. "Gertrude Stein and the Radio," Modernism/Modernity, Volume 11, Number 2, April 2004, pp. 261-262.

Research Note: Jazz, Radio, and Modernism

"Radio programming, in many ways, defined the parameters of discourse about modern America by shaping the way the public perceived events. [...] To a great degree, radio shaped what people knew about their society at large, but it did not present a modern or unified message. While radio technology symbolized the modernity of the nation, program content reinforced traditional notions of society, especially about race. Radio, like almost everything else in 1927, expressed the ambiguities Americans experienced in their search for modern America."

Charles J. Shindo. 1927 and the Rise of Modern America, page 184.

Click here to listen to an interview with Charles Shindo.

Research Note: Jazz, Radio, and Modernism

"The first [radio] show produced by and announced by African Americans did not debut until 1928 with WSBC's The Negro Hour, produced by Jack L. Cooper of the Chicago Defender. This foray into broadcasting coincided with the decline of independent stations and the loss of local control over much radio programming due to the Radio Act of 1927. As a result, both the network expansion of radio to national markets and the nationalization of the industry under the auspices of the Federal Radio Commission solidified the marginal and stereotypical portrayal of African Americans on the radio. In this sense, radio as a modernizing force did not bring new ideas about race to the public but, rather, made traditional prejudices and stereotypes available to more people. It was a modern invention used for traditional ends."

Charles J. Shindo. 1927 and the Rise of Modern America, page 184.

Click here to listen to an interview with Charles Shindo.