Frank Sinatra, Jr.

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Frank Sinatra, Jr. has died.

He was the nicest guy, everybody said, and that means a lot in a business where not everybody is the nicest guy. He used to come to Catalina’s every once and while, the jazz spot in Hollywood, with his excellent orchestra and fine arrangements. He always got great reviews. It’s a great band, Don Heckman told me, and he’s a great guy, you should interview him. But I managed to miss him every time. Still, I figured the next time around I’d get an interview with him. Not talk about his dad, either, not the usual thing, but to talk about him, Frank Sinatra, Jr. Write up a nice story for the LA Weekly. But then there was a new editor, and he probably had no idea who Frank Sinatra, Jr. even was, and I was burnt out and didn’t feel like fighting with another new editor. So I split the gig and the interview never happened.

Now it’s too late.

I hadn’t actually remembered any of this until now. That’s probably the way it usually is, though, you never remember till it’s too late. I wonder how many of life’s potential happenings slip by like that, things that never bothered you much until you realize they can never happen. It’s not like you screwed up, really, it’s just that you never got around to it. Something always got in the way, and then it’s too late, and you dwell on it a little too much, and it becomes much better than it ever really was. A half assed notion becomes a tragedy, something to talk about half sloshed before your wide eyed friends, like a Frank Sinatra song a few drinks into the chorus, a little story I think you oughtta know.

So rest in peace, Frank Sinatra, Jr. It was a long and musical and quiet career. The public scarcely even knew. That was fine with you. No riding through desert towns with Ava Gardner, shooting out store front windows with a .38. Instead you buried yourself in music, working three times as hard as the guy off the street, singing, conducting, writing, being yourself. A life of pure big band creativity. A good thing.

I wonder if you’ll wind up out in the desert anyway, though, if they will lay you down by your old man. The desert is beautiful, hushed and spare, a dry wind blows through the poppies and the keening of far off coyotes can sound like horns in the night air.

Dances With Wolves

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The wife is watching Dances With Wolves. Russell Means nearly ruined the movie for me in an interview I read several years ago. Apparently Kevin Costner hired a Lakota Sioux woman to teach Lakota to the cast, only one of whom was a fluent Lakota speaker. Apparently no one told Costner that in Lakota, there is a male gendered form and a female gendered form. (I believe the technical description is “gender determined dialect variation”.) They are not radically different, it’s just that after some verbs, the men use one ending (or enclitic particle, to be technical), the women another. Imagine a verb suffix, but men use one suffix and women another, and though both suffix variants mean the same thing, it can sound funny when a man uses the feminine variant. Think of actor and actress, but instead of the terms meaning a man or woman who acts, an actor would be a man’s word for a person who acts, while actress would be the women’s word for someone who acts. But since, I believe, Lakota uses these gender specified enclitics in verbs but not nouns, a man would not say acting but actoring, and a woman would call acting actressing. These are all theoretical examples, since I have no idea what how to say acting in Lakota, and besides, Lakota is an agglutinative language, which means (oversimplifying to the point of absurdity) that you can have one word that we would have to write out as a sentence in English. For example, where we use whole words in a Sioux language you can use what linguists call particles, like how the syllable “ai”, added to a word, means smallness, so that there is a tribe named Yankton, meaning “Village-at-the-end” and a related tribe Yanktonai meaning “Little village-at-the-end”. I’m trying to describe why something would be funny in an agglutinative language by describing it in English, which is not agglutinative. Considering this is a one joke story, this seems like a ridiculous amount of work for nothing, and I am tempted to stoop to the methods of the radical hippie linguists in the late sixties who would spice up dry transformational grammar with obscenities, sex, drugs and rude jokes about Nixon. [Spiro Agnew][‘s] [Tricky Dick][‘s] [slick] [dick trick] [fix] [nix][ed]. I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, you could see how odd it would be for a man to say someone (doesn’t matter what sex) was actressing if actressing was a word that, by grammatical rules, was supposed to be used by women. It’s not a concept easy for English speakers to grasp, for one thing English has almost no clitics whatsoever–I’ve is one, and we’ve–and if there are gender specified words that mean the same thing, I can’t think of any. But imagine if women called any shirt a blouse (which came from the French, via the medieval ruling class) and men called a blouse a shirt (the Anglo-Saxon peasant’s term). It’s true that women sometimes call a blouse a shirt (my wife, for instance, who I believe is descended from a long line of Sioux contraries), and men will sometimes call a blouse a shirt. But a man will not call his shirt a blouse. If I showed up at the pub bragging about my new blouse, the guys would laugh and the women would correct me. (This is actually a joke in Slap Shot, by the way, the French Canadian goalie player losing at poker says fuck, I lose my blouse. His teammate says no, it’s shirt, shirt.) But I can’t think of any English verbs like this, men using one and women the other though they mean exactly the same thing. Or a verb followed by, say, a preposition that differed depending if a man or woman was using it. For instance if a man said he danced with her, but a woman said he danced at her, and they mean the exact same thing, it’s just that the man says dance with and the woman says dance at. Which, I think, is a better approximation of how these gender defined enclitics work in Lakota, and it’s part of official Lakota grammar, and Lakota grammar nazis would get all over my case if they heard me, a big gnarly dude, say she danced at me. And while that example does not explain how enclitics actually work (it gets really complicated), but it helps describe how awkward it could be if you used the wrong gender enclitic. Awkward and funny.

It’s not like there’s a lot of these gender separated enclitics in Lakota, just a handful, and I suppose the instructor figured that teaching something as complex as Lakota to English speakers (even English speaking Indians) was hard enough without getting into the finer points. And they are subtle–I don’t even think you’d notice the difference if you were a Yankton Sioux speaker, which is so close to Lakota as to be mutually intelligible, like Irish-English and American English. Lakota is unique, among the five languages of the Sioux language family, in having some enclitics for men and some for women. So, either because it was easier, or in an unheralded act of First Nation feminism, the woman instructor taught all the men the women’s endings. Any Lakota speaker could understand what they were saying, as the meaning was the same, and apparently men and women sometimes use each other’s verb suffixes and no one thinks anything about it. And it’s not like they came up in every line of dialogue.

But then it’s one thing to use the occasional female variant of the verb ending (or enclitic, suffix, whatever) and quite another to be dressed up in war paint and using only the female variants. So the actors playing fearless Sioux warriors would suddenly, mid-sentence, be talking like a woman. Talk about code switching. Russell Means and a bunch of his smartass Lakota buddies went to see the movie together and couldn’t stop laughing. Means didn’t like the movie anyway (you remember Lawrence of Arabia, he aaid, well this was Lawrence of the Plains), and sitting through three hours of something you don’t like would be bad enough even without all these actors from other tribes portraying Lakota Sioux men talking like women. And while Plains Indians may be stoic, just like in the movies, they are also funny as hell. You can imagine Russell and his buddies snickering the first couple times, then giggling, and finally laughing out loud, just waiting for the next feminine verb ending. It was like Some Like it Hot, Kevin Costner style. But only if you actually speak Lakota, which about six thousand people do. Not me, though. I just read the subtitles.

And yes, I know I never mentioned the storyline once but I stopped paying attention to the story an hour ago. It’s a good story, well acted, beautifully shot, but instead of watching I’ve been writing this and listening to the sound of Lakota Sioux, the phonemes like notes and every sentence a melody.

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My Dinner With Jimi

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I just wanted to say that Royale Watkins does a dead on perfect Jimi Hendrix in Howard Kaylen’s My Dinner With Jimi. A great flick, a Turtles biopic, a true story, with the most eerily perfect Jimi Hendrix I ever saw. On top of all that the movie is really funny. Great screenplay, tightly written I believe by the Turtles lead vocalist Howard Kaylen himself who appears to remember so much from the sixties you’d doubt he was there, except, of course, that he was. Great casting too. All around a terrific film. How it never became a sensation I don’t know. Almost nobody I know has ever seen it. I’d show you a clip but it’s better to watch the entire movie for the full impact of Royale Watkins’ performance. The story builds up to it. It’s a funnier rock’nroll flick than Almost Famous, which I thought was really good too, except this story really happened. It’s also set a couple years before Almost Famous, long before rock’n’roll had become jaded, so there’s all that innocence to mine for material, something not possible in any film set even a few years later, or in any music film since. A generation’s innocence is a rare and fleeting thing, scarcely believable to later audiences. Yet it works here. It works in the great Canter’s scene (dig Jim Morrison, nothing like the Gothic myth). It works in the great draft board scene. And in London where that innocence is shattered by the very purveyors of all that innocence, the Fab Four, after which Howard Kaylen’s dinner with Jimi provides the story’s denouement in that it all comes up again. The film came out it 2003, I think, and I have no idea why it never caught on big. Weird how that works. Some hit, some don’t, ya never know. How is the weather.

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Mali

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A massacre in Bamako, echoing Paris. Alas, this is far from the first time in recent years that Mali has had a run in with blood mad extremists…just a couple years ago, you’ll remember, fanatics ran riot over the northern half of the country, declaring their own Islamic state, Azawad, killing and brutalizing non-believers and apostates and the unlucky, and notoriously destroying the Islamic treasures of Timbuktu. They looted the ancient university, blew up tombs, and ransacked the Islamic libraries, burning manuscripts the way conquistadores had set fire to the codices of the Aztec and Maya. They even banned music. A Mali without music seemed an impossibility, but they were quite serious about it. They said they’d cut out my tongue, a singer said after the town was freed again by Malian and French forces. The insurgents fled into the desert, haunting the mountains and the shifting dunes, moving by night, glowering, remembering, planning revenge. Continue reading →

Ligia

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Woke up with a tenor saxophone solo going through my head and I can’t remember whose and it’s driving me nuts. It’s just a fragment, fifteen or twenty seconds of somebody blowing something really nice. I can’t really even hear the rhythm section. I’m not one of those cats who wakes up hearing a Hank Mobley outtake and recognizing it. I know guys like that, though. Most of them are players. Jazz players know everything about jazz. Well, they don’t, not everything, but to a layman they might as well, we can’t tell the difference. The other kind are jazz critics. Not all of them, but the serious ones. The encyclopedic Scott Yanows and Don Heckmans and Kirk Silsbees and Richard Ginells and Tom Meeks et al of the jazz universe. We’d all be hanging together in the Playboy Jazz Festival press room looking expertly and the conversation would turn to jazz players, then jazz sessions, then jazz sides, then jazz solos, then outtakes. That’s when you find out that basically you’re just a glorified rock critic. I mean these guys know everything. It’s like listening to baseball fanatics rattle off stats. I’d stay quiet, then slip off and stuff the complimentary beers into my jacket pockets to take back to our seats. You weren’t supposed to take them outside but I hate rules. Give the wrong time, stop a traffic line the poet said. Once I copped a whole bottle of wine. Then went back and got another. You just can’t trust some people. That wine sure went down nice with Wayne Shorter’s set, though. Wayne was so out, I mean he didn’t give a flying fuck if the crowd liked it or not (they didn’t) and his band–Brian Blade on the drums, John Patitucci on bass, Danilo Perez on piano–were so intense, and I’d slipped into the seats they reserve for VIPs and network newsmen and beauty queens…like the beauty queen who sat next to me, in fact. Lovely. We chatted, me and Miss California. It wasn’t a bad gig, really, being a jazz critic.

Stan Getz. Obviously. Ligia. That’s what I’m hearing. The Jobim tune. Once the guitar filtered in I recognized it. João Gilberto’s playing is so instantly identifiable. Well, it is now, though it would have spared me some annoyance if I recognized it an hour or two ago. Of course now the whole tune with guitar and bass and drums is going through my head over and over. But that’s OK, I absolutely love this take. I have it on a comp–think it’s The Lyrical Stan Getz–and not  on the original. I can hear the long solo blowing through my cerebral cortex now. There are worse earworms. Ça Plane Pour Moi, for one. You even think of that name and the infuriatingly catchy chorus will skip around inside your skull like a broken record. Like it is now, in fact. Brick, you’re an idiot.

Richard Ginnell and Scott Yanow surrounded by rich people and looking way too smart for their own good. Playboy Jazz Festival, 2011. Photo copped from scottyanow.com.

A splash of orange juice

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Don Edmondson and his annoying little camera. Here I am, mouth wide open, at the Musicians Union on Vine Street in Hollywood. I don’t think I was singing, but have no idea what I am saying, or drinking, but John Altman can’t get a word in edgewise.

I love those Musicians Union gigs. The Professional Drum Shop is across the street. They have one of Shelly Manne’s old kits in there, I think. And at the Union Hall that afternoon Flip Manne knocked me on my ass with a jazz drummer’s screwdriver–eight ounces of vodka with a splash of orange juice. Is that strong enough, she asked? I asked for a little more OJ. You like ’em watered down, huh? I apologized. Shelley liked his with just a splash of orange juice, she said. Well, he was a jazz musician, I said. You’re not a jazz musician? No, ma’am, I’m a writer. I’m so sorry, she said, and dumped out most of the vodka and filled it to the brim with orange juice.

Those jazz dames can be rough.

A jazz critic explaining to a jazz musician why he plays like that. A jazz critic explaining to a jazz musician why he plays like that.

Sweet Georgia Brown

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Hanging out at a jazz spot with a good buddy of mine and realized he is not a lively seventy something, he’s a livelier almost ninety-something, telling me stories about the summer of ’54. Bird lived one floor up, Prez one floor down. Prez on steamy summer nites in jockey shorts and a pork pie hat; Bird, shy, high, in love, brilliant. Miles would come by, just to hang. I wasn’t even born yet. I ask him what his secret is. He holds up his beer. Good living, he says, and the sax player takes off into Sweet Georgia Brown.

Hollywood Forever

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Wandering through Hollywood Forever cemetery on Easter Sunday, past the DeMille family plot, I came across two guys–one English, the other an Angeleno–deep in conversation about Sidney Bechet. Sidney’s not in Hollywood Forever–he’s interred somewhere in France, I think–so why they were talking about him I have no idea, but delighted, I joined in. We talked about what a great soprano saxophonist he was, and what a hellraiser, and what a lousy shot. The French adored him, the Englishman said. But they put him in jail, I said. Yeah, he said, but they also raised him a statue. We laughed. A grieving family around a fresh grave gave us the evil eye. We moved on. More jazz talk. I let drop I’d been a columnist. I know where all the bodies are buried, I said. Well, they were buried everywhere. It’s a cemetery. I did show them where Art Pepper’s ashes lay, in the mausoleum. We talked about what a great alto saxophonist he was, and what a hellraiser, and how he got jail but no statue. I dropped Laurie Pepper’s name, just to be hip. It echoed in the marble corridors. Outside on the lawn again, we passed show biz people on location for their very last scene. There’s Mickey Rooney, I said. There’s Fay Raye. And there are the Fairbanks, at the end of that long reflecting pool. We stood at its edge, reflecting. Are there any Barrymores in the cemetery, the Englishman asked. Are you kidding, I said. They wouldn’t be caught dead here.

Bob and Ray

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Tom Koch, RIP. Not that I ever heard of him, actually. But I heard him, heard his stuff. Some stuff too. He wrote for Bob and Ray from 1955 on. Thousands of sketches.  Bob Elliott says the material came by mail. Says he met Tom Koch–pronounced Cook–three times. Three times in three decades. Ray Goulding never met him at all. It’s Bob and Ray, who knows if that is true or not, but it’s a great story and that’s what matters.

Bob and Ray were natural improvisers, and their early stuff was free form when jazz musicians were still playing be bop. On NBC the execs demanded order, though, so in 1955 Bob and Ray somehow found Tom Koch. He’d provide sketches for them to take off on. The head arrangement. Be bop. It worked brilliantly. The Bob and Ray Shows on CBS every day from 1959-1960, each a quarter hour long, are hands down the funniest stuff I have ever heard in my life. Seriously weird. Take it from me. I know. I once spent an entire day at work in a silent office listening to Bob and Ray. The ’59-’60 episodes. Eight hours’ worth. That’s like eight thousand shows in dog years. I emerged at day’s end in a post-LSD state. I think it damaged my chromosomes. Soon afterward I quit the LA Weekly and joined the priesthood and no one has seen me since. And no wonder. The human brain is not designed for that much concentrated Bob and Ray. You don’t mess around with that stuff. I was like Cary Grant after 300 acid trips, acting odd on the set. Judy Judy Judy he chanted, scaring the extras. Me, I left the office mumbling like Webly Webster. I should have known. The humor on Bob and Ray is deep. There are sages high in the Himalayas who spend their whole lives trying to get one joke. They say the humor on Bob and Ray is so deep it might be a couple centuries before the rest of civilization catches up with it. We’ll have big throbbing brains and communicate by telepathy and Bob and Ray will be gods. Then the world ends.

–ick Wahl, the Finley Quality Network

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Summer of Love

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The Reluctant Astronaut is on. Some channel is having a Don Knotts marathon. (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is next, but I’m not in the mood for gothic horror.) I remember seeing The Reluctant Astronaut at a Saturday matinée in Woodbury, New Jersey.  And I remember thinking it wasn’t the most exciting science fiction movie I’d ever seen, but at ten, perhaps I was already too sophisticated. This was the same theater where a couple months later Son of Flubber caused a riot. Perhaps the kids knew it wasn’t a first run picture in that Summer of Love in 1967. Perhaps we were just blowing off steam. Perhaps we just wanted to die before we got old. Whatever, it sure pissed off the manager. He turned off the projector, turned on the house lights and stormed on down to the front of the theater and glared at us. If we didn’t stop running and shrieking and throwing popcorn he’d kick us all out and there would be hell to pay when our parents came to pick us up. The place grew quiet, the hail of popcorn subsided. That’s better, he said, and the lights came down, the film came on, and there was Fred MacMurray again, Professor Ned Brainard, turning people on to flubber, and everyone was bouncing and floating and high as a kite. Feed your head, Ned said, feed your head, and the kids laughed and shrieked and the popcorn came down like rain.

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