Opinions & Comments
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“Life is like jazz. It’s best if you improvise.”
George Gershwin
“Life is like improvising. It’s best if you get lucky.”
Dave Frishberg
Apr 2007
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My favorite literature about jazz and music:
The Agony of Modern Music--Henry Pleasants
Gene Lees' Jazzletter-- Gene Lees (periodical)
Lost Chords --Dick Sudhalter
Bix, Man and Legend--Dick Sudhalter
The Reluctant Art--Benny Green
Let's Face The Music--Benny Green
Swing To Bop--Ira Gitler
Really The Blues- Mezzrow & Wolfe
Jazz Anecdotes--Bill Crow
The American Popular Song--Alec Wilder
The Stardust Road--Hoagy Carmichael
22 Sep 2005
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The Hopi way
I remember vaguely a scene from a movie I saw when I was a kid: A noble Indian chief was presented with an opportunity to benefit from behaving in a less than ethical manner. He looked straight into Richard Widmark’s blue eyes and said solemnly, “That not Hopi way.”
Through the years I would use that line sometimes in conversations, in reply to commonplace queries like “More chicken?” or “Will you be wearing a tie?”
The song The Hopi Way is offered in the same spirit, and the character who sings the lyric could easily be me. The Hopi Way is essentially outmoded, and the Hopi knows it.. It' s stubborn adherence to lost and obsolete values. To say one will follow the Hopi way is to say : I'm going to dance to a forgotten rhythm.
Mar 2006
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Favorite singers over the years
| Woody Herman Fred Astaire Louis Jordan |
Frank Sinatra Roy Kral Frank D'Rone |
Bing Crosby Mike Palter Bob Dorough |
Johnny Mercer Al Hibbler Jimmy Rushing |
| Sarah Vaughan Barbara Cook Connee Boswell |
Peggy Lee Sue Raney Ella Fitzgerald |
Ethel Waters Becky Kilgore Ivie Anderson |
Billie Holiday Elis Regina |
Dec 2005
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Vic and Sade
I worship Paul Rhymer, who wrote the Vic and Sade radio series, popular during the 1930s and 40s. He’s in a class with Thurber, Perelman, Benchley, Woody Allen, etc . The closest thing to Vic and Sade today is probably Seinfeld, with their scripts "about nothing." Rhymer turned out five hilarious twelve minute shows every week for about a dozen years. He was certainly the most prolific humorist America has produced, and he was a total original, impossible to imitate.
Trouble with the Vic and Sade scripts is that without those four original actors, the scripts are in trouble. Beware the outsider trying to do Vic and Sade. What Rhymer wrote he designed especially for those four specific actors playing the roles of Vic, Sade, Rush and Uncle Fletcher, and only they knew how to make the correct inflections and emphasize the right words and get the exact tone and sound and rhythm of those characters. I've heard a couple of attempts to "recreate" some Vic and Sade scripts, and I must say that in the hands of other actors, no matter how skilled and sensitive they may be, Vic and Sade just ain't funny, McGee.
17 Jun 2003
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My ideal audience is a roomful of retired dance band musicians.
29 Jun 2003
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To Neal McCabe re a previous conversation
We all knew people like Bob Dylan. We met them in college-- talented guys who could strum guitars and sing angry songs about the Spanish civil war. The girls went for it. But these guys didn't have illusions about professional music as a vocation. Most of them stowed the guitars after graduation and began teaching English . The concept of Rock Star hadn't been invented yet
Anyway, seems to me Blowin' In The Wind doesn’t make any sense. I don’t get it. The lyric presents simple-minded questions and then dismisses them with a vague patronizing conclusion that doesn't address the questions at all. The message of the song seems to be, "You're fulla shit, so don't ask," which is neither profound nor helpful. But isn't that a recurring underlying message in other Dylan songs? Hey let’s face it, that’s why Dylan never made it.
I prefer professional lyric writers. For my money Hal David and the Bergmans are the best lyricists of the Dylan years. And for artful thoughtful lyric writing that's both magic and meaningful I'll take Hal David’s "Alfie", and various lyrics by by Paul Williams, Carolyn Leigh, Tommy Wolf, Fran Landesman, and Bob Dorough. Among the younger writers of today I respond to Lorraine Feather, who’s smart and crafty as hell.
D Frishberg
Author of SHRINERS ON ACID: The Sun Ra Experience
and TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!: The Songs of Phil Ochs
“Shriners on Acid” courtesy of Judy Roberts.
10 Jul 2003
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For Scott Yanow's book on jazz singers
The jazz of the 1930s and 1940s came naturally to me, and as a young pianist I was charmed. But I don't think I'd be interested in contemporary jazz if I were growing up today, and that goes for pop music in general. If I were a young kid today, musically sensitive, I'd steer clear of the music industry.. I'd learn to be a classical ensemble player (cello or viola), or maybe a librarian or English professor.
Jul 2004
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I think jazz sounds best when applied to song forms. I think songs are at the heart of jazz, a fact that was pretty well ignored on the famous Ken Burns documentary. Sure there's a big blues element in jazz since the beginning, and also a vital rhythmic element, but what would jazz sound like today if Lester Young and Charlie Parker hadn't heard All the Things You Are?
Jul 2005
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re: Rowles
I recognized early on in my piano-playing life that there are certain pianists (and I'm talking about jazz players in this discussion) that can touch the keyboard in such a personal way that the informed listener, upon hearing a few notes on a recording, knows instantly who is playing; and I also recognized the remarkable fact that among these pianists, there are a handful who draw such a personal sound out of the keyboard that nobody can duplicate it.
For instance Duke Ellington can strike a three note chord in the middle of the piano along with a single note down in the bass, and you can walk up to the same piano and hit the same four notes and you can't get Duke's sound. Blossom Dearie can play a chord and it will sound unearthly quiet, and you can play the same voicing, and it will be beautiful, but it won't sound like Blossom. Often it's the time feeling that's so personal, as with Mose Allison or Erroll Garner or Pete Johnson, but the scary ones are the pianists that can touch a piano key and make a sound that nobody else can make.
Continuing the list of unique sound generators: Count Basie, Eddie Heywood, Claude Thornhill, Nat Cole, Thelonious Monk, Mel Powell, Bud Powell, Horace Silver- and outside of the strictly jazz realm don't forget Frankie Carle and Chico Marx. And then there is Jimmy Rowles.
Jimmy Rowles was unique in a different way. It was the way he proceeded from note to note, He spun passages that were so dynamically constructed that he seemed to be bending notes, and everyone knows that's impossible with a piano. Rowles could milk sound from the bass clef register that was almost organ-like. He splashed chords down with a rolling blurry attack that was his alone. I've never heard anybody come close to his piano sound.
I think he has been my main piano influence, even though I long ago stopped trying to sound like him. I was a teenager in the late forties when I first heard him on the Woody Herman Woodchopper Columbia records. I was stunned by the way he handled his parts in the rhythm section and the sometimes startling way he comped behind soloists. Then I bought the Peggy Lee ten-inch Decca LP "Black Coffee", and I heard Rowles as accompanist. For my money nobody touches him when it comes to playing behind singers. His imagination is outrageous, and his taste is flawless-- a perfect model for artistic playing.
Once in St. Paul when I was about nineteen, a trumpet player said to me, "Hey, you sound like Jimmy Rowles." Although it wasn't true of course, and it never would be true, I still consider it the most generous and rewarding compliment I ever received. But "sound like Jimmy Rowles?" Forget it.
Dec 2006
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