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The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)

Cover of first US edition of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff

When poet Charles Reznikoff died in 1976, his wife, Myrie Syrkin, gave his papers to publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, which had begun collecting and issuing his poetry and other writings. A while later, Martin called Syrkin to say he’d found the manuscript of a completed novel titled The Manner Music. She knew nothing of it — and Reznikoff had usually discussed anything he was working on with her. What’s more, Martin added, it’s a Hollywood novel. For a couple of years in the late 1930s, Reznikoff had worked in Hollywood as a researcher and assistant to Albert Lewin, an acquaintance from his Brooklyn youth who’d been a protege of Irving Thalberg and worked his way up to producer. Maurice Zolotow later compared the discovery to finding a T. S. Eliot novel about banks or one by Wallace Stevens about insurance.

The Hollywood label has stuck with The Manner Music ever since. In reality, saying The Manner Music is a Hollwood novel is like saying Moby Dick is a Nantucket novel: not untrue but generally missing the point. Milton Hindus, a friend of Reznikoff and a stalwart supporter, came closer to the mark in noting the parallels between the book and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Both stories involve two men: one a prosperous pragmatist, the other an ascetic idealist. In both stories, the narrator is nameless; in both, he is at a loss to understand the other man’s obsession. Both are case studies demonstrating the observation of Reznikoff’s friend William Carlos Williams that “The pure products of America go crazy.”

Reznikoff’s Bartleby is a composer named Jude Dalsimer. Like Reznikoff, Dalsimer works and lives alone in Hollywood while working for a studio producer, known as Paul Pasha in the book, so that his wife could stay in New York and keep her job as a teacher. He doesn’t mingle with the other writers, avoids most parties. He rents a room in a little hotel in Santa Monica, far out the tramline from the studios. Like Reznikoff, he prefers to walk, usually for miles along the beach, down the coast as far as Redondo and Hermosa Beach.

In his introduction, Robert Creeley observes that the two characters in The Manner Music resemble two aspects of Reznikoff himself. As Reznikoff did for a time after leaving college, the narrator is a traveling salesman in dry goods, and his work allows him to meet his friend Jude in both New York and Hollywood. Like Reznikoff, who held down a steady job as a social workder for years, the narrator accepts the monotony and occasional humiliations of the work in return for its security: “Like all salesmen, I suppose, I am very patient. We soon learn to wait for hours in anterooms and to send our cards again and again and still to be pleasant and to smile.” The narrator accepts listening to Jude performing his music on the cheap piano in his apartment in the same manner. “I listened patiently then for an hour or more — most likely less — and again heard nothing that moved me.” Jude’s music isn’t to his taste — not like band music or “an old fellow singing old songs for pennies in the backyards.”

Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s
Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s

Jude Dalsimer, on the other hand, represents Reznikoff’s artistic self. Though he wrote and published his poetry throughout much of his working life, Reznikoff never gained much recognitition for it until very late and he tended not to discuss it with many of his acquaintances. As a fellow Brooklyn poet, Harvey Shapiro once wrote, “Reznikoff devoted his entire life to verse, and whatever he did is characterized by meticulously fine and painstaking craftsmanship.” None of his poems, Hindus observed, “were made merely in order to ‘sell and sell quickly.’ They are without exception patient labors of love, pure skill and artistic integrity, and they seem bound, in time, to find fit readers (however few or many) to respond to their muted appeal.”

Jude is not particularly concerned with the success of his music: “As to whether it will be sold or not, sung or played, that is really not my business. I am not going to bother about that too much: my job is to write it. That no one else can do.” If anything, he is deeply suspicious of the American culture of consumerism. He tells of a dinner party at which a German refugee, a former concentration camp prisoner, was asked to speak. Instead of talking about his experiences in Germany, however, he told the story of a friend who’d committed suicide soon after arriving in America. “Why? Why did he do it?” the man asked. “I will tell you why. Because of the indifference here!” Late in the book, when destitute, homeless, and hopeless, he burns all his compositions in a trashcan in Central Park.

Both Dalsimer and Reznikoff were also great walkers and listeners. Reznikoff’s letters to Syrkin are full of things seen on his walks:

A study in tempo of conversation: a pretty big boy and a little boy are walking together. The little boy is really tagging after the other one- eager to be a fellow. The older fellow is wearing a peculiar hat and the younger fellow asks, “What kind of hat is that?” No answer. “What kind of hat is that, Stanley?” emphasizing the name. Stanley answers cheerfully, “A monkey hat.” “What kind of hat is that?” the little fellow asks again, not what kind of hat is that (namely a “monkey hat”) but what kind of a hat is that (namely, the hat you have on). And again Stanley says curtly and cheerfully, pleased with his own wit, “A monkey hat.” But, after a pause he adds, “A small round sailor hat.” Specific enough, to be sure, but the little fellow now says aloud to himself, “A monkey hat,” wondering, perhaps, if it is really a kind of hat and if so what an attractive name for a hat and could he get one …

Dalsimer’s music is also drawn from what he sees on his walks. The narrator compares one piece to the sound of the wind “blowing down a street on an April evening, rattling windows and making the swinging signs of the stores squeak.” When Jude tries to recount recent incidents, the narrator says, “‘Better yet,’ and here I lied as all salesmen lie and flatter, ‘play them.'” “Well,” Jude replies, “I was taking a walk,” and he proceeds to play.

Some of the walks in The Manner Music show us a country deep in the grips of the Depression:

As I walked along the drive again, I saw a man coming towards me; a poor man by his clothes: he had no overcoat and his trousers were of a cheap goods without the tailor’s crease. We were alone, for the day was cold and the drive was windy. I saw that he had stopped and was watching me furtively; a man of forty or fifty with an honest face, I thought, lined by cared. When I had passed, I could see that he stooped to pick up something — probably a cigar butt or cigarette that someone about to step on a bus had thrown away. Perhaps he had been ashamed to stoop for it in front of me.

The narrator has his last encounter with Jude in an automat in Manhattan. “I noticed that a seam in the collar had parted and another in the shoulder and that the thread that edged the buttonhole in the lapel was unraveling.” Asked where he’s staying Jude replies, “I have the airiest room in New York.” Only later does the narrator understand what this means.

A number of Reznikoff’s poems make their way into The Manner Music — or perhaps vice-versa. In the novel, for example, the narrator recalls,

When I left the theatre it was raining. I went to my hotel through the wholesale district, the streets of which were empty at night, rain or no rain, although busy enough by day when offices and lofts were full of people. I passed an old woman selling newspapers from the shelter of a doorway. As I bought one, I glanced down at her feet.

“You were looking at my feet, weren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t they terrible—so big in these rubbers. But it is better to have your feet look big than to get them wet,’ she added, still dubious. “A man lent them to me. They are rubbers for a man and I had to tie them with a string. But better than to be sick, eh?”

I took shelter in the doorway, too, to get out of the rain for a moment. “But how big my feet look in them,” she went on. I wondered as I listened, Does this old woman selling newspapers in the rain on this lonely corner still think it matters how her feet look—big or small? I looked at her again: whatever she had been only life was left — and vanity.

This shows up again in a passage from Inscriptions: 1944-1956:

It was raining and the street
empty. I passed an old woman selling newspapers.
As I bought one
I glanced at her feet.
“So big
in these rubbers.
But it’s better than to get them wet,” she added,
dubious, “and to be sick.
A man lent them. They are rubbers for a man, not me,
and I have to time them on with a string.
But how big my feet look!” I looked at her again:
only this was left — vanity.

Sirkin thought her husband might have kept the book a secret because of its portrait of Jude Dalsimer’s wife: “A petulant, pretty, notably unsympathetic female, a Zionist, a high school teacher who tactlessly keeps complaining about her fatigue and lets her talented, unappreciated husband end his poverty-striken quest in Bellevue. A roman-à-clef with a vengeance!” Reading Reznikoff’s Selected Letters, however, one sees that much of it was drawn from his letters to her. In September 1939, for example, as he saw his job with Albert Lewin about to come to an end, he wrote:

At lunch, and we go to lunch together every day, I am silent for long stretches and obviously comfortably so; now he makes conversation, tells stories I have heard before, and which he feels, somewhat uncomfortably that I have heard him tell; they are not particularly good stories, for example, how he dined with a certain friend and this friend engaged in a quarrel with somebody at another table, who was then insignificant but is now the head of a studio—a great man; I listen politely and think with some satisfaction that now I can make a suitable reply.

In The Manner Music, this becomes a lunch between Jude Dalsimer and Paul Pasha:

Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them — slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end — most likely in a week or two — they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell.

Myrie Sirkin suspected that he wrote The Manner Music after William Carlos Williams suggested that the exercise might help him overcome a writer’s block he was experiencing in the late 1940s. “Perhaps it was the writing of this novel which enabled Reznikoff to overcome what appears to have been a psychic or spiritual blockage (whatever the causes were) to rediscover his ancient springs, to return to poetry,” Anthony Rudolf later speculated. This should not, however, diminish the value of The Manner Music. It is, in the words of Milton Hindus, “a small, multi-faceted gem” that deserves its place on the shelf of great American short novels alongside Bartleby.

The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff
Santa Barara: The Black Sparrow Press, 1977

Jesus Be a Fence Around Me, by the Soul Stirrers (1961)

Cover of Jesus Be a Fence Around Me (1961)

I want to go off piste for a moment to talk about my second love. About the same time I became interested in discovering neglected books, I also started to read and listen to ever-expanding circles of music. I think it was Peter Guralnick’s Feel Like Going Home that hooked me, but it could just as well have been Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound. Pretty soon I was spending almost as many hours in used record stores as in used book stores — maybe more, thanks to a classmate who tipped me off to the hack of taping albums and reselling them.

One of the earliest revelations to come from these explorations was Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. Guralnick, Heilbut, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Charlie Gillett, and others of the first generation of great pop music writers all performed a great service to their readers by opening up our ears and knocking down so many self-imposed barriers. Guralnick got me past my abhorrence of “Behind Closed Doors” and forced me to take a serious listen to Charlie Rich and recognize the unique fusion of country, gospel, and cool jazz represented in his work, which never really sat comfortably inside the walls of any particular genre. And Heilbut got me to listen to gospel without the visceral desire to escape I still carried from having been forced to sit through a Billy Graham revival.

By now, Sam Cooke’s stature as one of the greatest voices in American music is well established, but in the late 1970s, he was just some dead singer who had a tune or two in regular rotation on oldies stations. So when I first bought the Specialty Records collection of the Soul Stirrers’ greatest hits, I was stunned to hear how Cooke’s voice float in, over, and around the melody in songs such as “Touch the Hem of His Garment” and “Mean Old World.” To then compare these tracks to Cooke’s RCA greatest hits album was a shock: where did the soul go? I had to take Charlie Gillett’s word and really go scouring to find an old 45 copy of “A Change is Gonna Come” to accept that Cooke hadn’t completely sold out when he went pop. It’s hard now to believe that such a seminal recording wasn’t something you could find wherever you went: RCA didn’t even consider it worth putting on their own Cooke greatest hits album.

Fast forward to the early 1980s, when I had bought and listened to most of what Guralnick and others had written about was getting into less well-known artists and the less well-known work of well-known artists — things like Roy Orbison’s MGM albums or Little Junior Parker’s Mercury albums. One of my finds from this time was Jesus Be a Fence Around Me, the one album the Soul Stirrers released on Sam Cooke’s SAR records label, but without Cooke as lead. I gave it one listen, shrugged it off as a half-filled glass, and moved on.

I rarely buy music these days, having collected too many lifetimes’ worth already, but I recently sprung for Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings, a compilation of the Soul Stirrer’s SAR album and singles released a few years ago by ABKCO. Coming back to the tracks that appeared on Jesus Be a Fence with a fresh set of ears, I found myself appreciating the music on its own merits. While it’s true that no one could ever replace Sam Cooke, there was a dynamic in the group with Johnnie Taylor as the new lead tenor. It’s more of a group of equals, which lets you appreciate the ensemble work, particularly the deft accompaniment of guitarists LeRoy Crume and Clifton “Clif” White. White has cited Count Basie’s legendary guitarist Freddie Green as an influence, and his playing provides the same subtle, solid, swinging foundation to this music.

At the same time, though, Johnnie Taylor’s singing on several of the tracks is as magical as Cooke’s on the Specialty classics, if in his own way. What I noticed, particularly on “Stand By Me Father,” was how Taylor played with pacing almost as a contrast to Cooke’s use of melisma. This is really a stand-out tune, the type of performance and recording that rises above its category and time and deserves to be heard as simply a great piece of music.

In his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie, Peter Guralnick writes that Cooke and his partner and fellow producer J. W. Alexander seriously considered turning it into a pop single:

It was a lover’s cry for help, an almost heartbroken admission of vulnerability, but, of course, it was not a lover, it was the Lord who was there to provide inspiration and support. None of the other three songs carried the weight, ambiguity, or emotional complexity of “Stand By Me Father”: two further collaborations between Sam and J.W. (“Wade in the Water” and “He’s Been a Shelter”) were vehicles for Paul Foster; the last (“I’m Thankful”) was a kind of sentimental recitation for Johnnie of all the things for which to be grateful, written by new Stirrers baritone Richard Gibbs. But, Sam and Alex were agreed, “Stand By Me Father,” if done right, had the potential to break both pop and gospel.

Guralnick writes that these aspirations were undermined by Taylor’s calls out to Jesus in the recording, but I find it hard to believe that pop fans could have overlooked the Biblical references to Samson, Philistines, Daniel in the lion’s den, etc.. It’s still significant, however, that “Stand By Me Father” was the very first single released under the SAR label.

“Stand By Me Father,” SAR Records SAR-101

The whole ABKCO set is well worth a listen, with plenty of tracks that show black gospel in a transition, moving from the very successful vocal group style that brought the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and others to the top of their charts and even occasionally broke into the R&B charts and presaging the sound of soul music. The lead track puts a fine strolling rhythm on the standard, “I Am a Pilgrim,” simply by introducing a contraction (“I’m a Pilgrim”). “I Love the Lord” gives Paul Foster a chance to show of his strong pipes over a backing arrangement that could have come straight out of Cooke’s pop catalogue. And though I refuse to take the Staple Singers’ version of “Wade in the Water” from its permanent place in my personal pop Pantheon, I have to admit that the Soul Stirrers’ version is a contender.

Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings includes an excellent set of liner notes by R&B expert Bill Dahl.

Music At Midnight, by Muriel Draper (1929)

Front cover of 'Music at Midnight'I don’t believe in golden ages. Pick anyone’s candidate for a golden age — the Athens of Socrates, the Italian Renaissance, Paris in the Twenties, Eisenhower’s America — and without much looking you will find someone — the slaves, the serfs, the blacks — for whom the time was no great party. But I do believe in golden moments — a few months or a few years when circumstances allow a few people to something uniquely marvelous and irreproducable. Music at Midnight is a memoir of one of these golden moments: two years (1912-1914) when Paul and Muriel Draper rented a house at 19 Edith Grove, Chelsea, and it became the center of the music world of London.

Paul Draper was an aspiring American tenor who came to London to study lieder with a renowned voice coach, Raimund von Zur Mühlen, bringing his socialite wife Muriel and their two sons in tow. Although Draper proved a good but not great singer, the couple quickly managed to attract many of the finest musicians living and performing in London at the time. A list of their friends and acquaintances is impressive: Igor Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Chaliapin, Rubinstein, Pierre Monteux, Pablo Casals, Eugene Goossens, Gertrude Stein, John Singer Sargent, and even Henry James were among those who spent evenings at the Draper’s. And no gathering was complete without music.

It often occurred that an artist who did not live in London would arrive for the night of the concert only, leaving London the next day. This meant that he would not arrive at Edith Grove until after the concert and its tedious artist’s-room salutations and compliments were terminated (though I never knew one who did not like them) anywhere between ten-thirty and midnight, and would not leave until it was time to catch the boat-train in the morning. He would find perhaps a movement from a Brahms violin sonata, a Beethoven trio for flute, violin, piano, a Chopin mazurka or German song cycle already in full swing and would creep into a chair or on a cushion until it was over. Then, usually hungry and a little tired from the strain of a concert, we would carry him off upstairs for food and drink. After which the really serious work of the evening would begin and continue until the skylight in the roof above us would turn from black to black-blue to blue-grey to yellow-grey and at last show clear blue sky beyond yellow sunlight, seen through blue-yellow-grey layers of smoke from burning wood, burning tobacco and burning candles. It would be six o’clock — seven o’clock — eight o’clock in the morning before we would make another visit to the dining-room, where the miracle maids after eight hours’ sleep had somehow managed to clear away the debris of Chester’s pink food and lonely parts of deserted fowl and make room for fresh coffee, scrambled eggs in an enormous chafing dish, raspberries and strawberries in big bowls. Oh! those English berries! We would breakfast, and break day by going to bed.

Their neighbors were less enthusiastic about the Draper’s musical soirées. The folks behind them once staged a protest one evening, going from window to window, “blowing policemen’s whistles, shooting off torpedoes, and filling the night air with hootings and rattles.” In response, Rubenstein and John Warner merely attacked the Bach prelude and fugue with even greater enthusiasm. “Bach is stirring enough played by two hands: by four, it is not conducive to sleep,” Muriel notes.

In one way, Music at Midnight is a bit like a snooty man’s version of People magazine — or, as Jim Gaffigan puts it, McDonald’s of the soul. It’s utterly superficial and primarily of interest for the glimpses of the great when they let down their guards. But what English major can resist an account of Henry James on the phone?

To be called to the telephone by Henry James was an experience in itself. The first time it happened I, all unaware, took up the receiver eagerly, and said, “Yes — this is Muriel.”

A voice that began to twist and turn on the other end of the wire, finally spoke.

“Would you be — er — or, rather, my dear, — er — my very dear, if I may call you so, child, would you, — not by — er — er arrangement, but would you — more — er — truthfully speaking — be — er — er NATURALLY at home — this afternoon?”

By that time I was not naturally anything at all, and could only gasp, “Yes, always, any time — yes, yes, this afternoon at five, I will, unnaturally or not, be here — yes,” and hung up.

Muriel soon discovered a trick that many a reader of James has probably been tempted to repeat:

I soon learned to talk with him and listen to him, by withdrawing the weight of my attention from his actual words and the anguished facial contortions that accompanied them, and fastening it on the stream of thought itself. I even diverted my eyes from that part of his face from which the phrases finally emerged, namely, his mouth, and directed them to a more peaceful spot between his eyes, which I imagined to be the source of tought. It proved helpful. … My effort to ignore the words and extract the meaning by a sense of weight, inflection and rhythm which emanated from him … proved an excellent modus operandi from then on….

Muriel Draper, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934
Muriel Draper, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934
Even though Carl van Vechten groused in his diary that Muriel Draper couldn’t write, Music at Midnight bubbles with what one critic called “the zeal of a child anticipating a good time,” and is filled with memorable sketches of the greats. Of the actress Eleanora Duse, for example: “She permeated the air with the ethereal assurance that she was inhabiting her body, but could leave it if she chose.” Or the intimidating Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, who “had the shape and substance of a rock, the smell and sound of vast stretches of earth and water, and breathed like the winds in the air.”

The parties at 19 Edith Grove might have carried on for years, but like most golden moments, it came to a ugly and unexpected end with the start of World War One. Caught on a tour in Germany, Paul Draper obtained passage back to America, leaving Muriel and the boys in London. She hung on, selling off bits of furniture for cash while foreign exchange with the U.S. was restricted, but by mid-1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania, she decided it too risky to postpone their own return. When the cab arrived to take them to the train station, a group of friends serenaded their departure.

The Drapers divorced not long after Muriel’s return to the US. Paul Draper married a show girl in 1920 and she divorced him a few years later. He died in 1925 at the age of 38. The New York Times reported the cause as heart disease, but in truth, he drank himself to death. Muriel carried on without him, remaining active in New York social and artistic circles. Despite the fact that Van Vechten dismissed Muriel’s ability to write, he photographed her often in the 1930s. And she was a great supporter of young talent, as actress Marian Seldes recalls in this YouTube clip.

Muriel Draper and her sons Sanders (L) and Paul, Jr. (R), in the late 1930s
Muriel Draper and her sons Sanders (L) and Paul, Jr. (R), in the late 1930s

Her son Paul Jr. became a well-known dancer, particularly for his fusion of tap and modern dance. His brother, Sanders, went to England and joined the Royal Air Force in 1940. He died a hero’s death when he steered the plane he was flying, which had been severely damaged and was plummeting to the ground, and avoided crashing into a school full of children in Hornchurch, just outside London. Muriel became a proponent of Communist and socialist causes until scared off by investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee. She died in Manhattan in 1952.

Music at Midnight, by Muriel Draper
New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1929

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, by Val Wilmer (1989)

Cover of first paperback edition of "Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This"Books on jazz, blues, country, rock, soul, and other styles of popular music are, for me, the closest written equivalent to potato chips. I have to be careful taking one down from the shelf, because there is a high risk I will get nothing else accomplished until I finished it. And it’s worse now with the Internet, since just about any tune mentioned, no matter how obscure, can be located and downloaded in seconds, so reading slips all too easily into listening and, suddenly, who knows where the time goes? At least in the old pre-Net days, all you could do was write down the record title and hope that some day in the distant future you might have the luck to find a copy in some used record store.

So when I got a copy of Val Wilmer’s terrific autobiography, Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, I saw a lost weekend coming. She got her first taste of jazz via an early teen boyfriend and a copy of Rudi Blesch’s pioneering study of jazz, Shining Trumpets (1949), and the rest is history. Over the course of the last 60 years, she has listened to, photographed, interviewed, wrote about, partied with, and gotten to know most of the major figures, and many more of the minor ones, in pop music. You can get a good sample of her talent for sizing up musicians as performers, artists, personalities, and human beings in The Guardian’s archive of obits she’s written (and you can get a small sample of her work as a photographer here, here, and here).

But there’s some serious starch in Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This. As Wilmer’s eyes and ears were opened up by her exposure to a variety of styles — including African, West Indian, and Jamaican pop years before it hit white audiences — her understanding of the social, economic, and gender dimensions of the music and the musicians also grew deeper and more sophisticated. She quickly learned a few lessons as a young and single white woman spending hours in the company of musicians, mostly black and uniformly male:

Many feminists believe there to be an unspoken bond between males, the understanding that all women belong to all men. Where the white woman and the Black man are concerned, this understanding of the woman as shared possession, breaks down under the white man’s gaze — unless the woman can be shown to be a “prostitute.” If she wasn’t, back in the 1960s, then in my experience the white men on the scene made sure she’d be treated like one. This was the penalty to pay for associating with Black men and breaking down the order of things white men had established. No woman was allowed to exist in her own right as an autonomous individual, if she was there, it had to be for the benefit of some man. As a result, hotel porters, bus drivers, stage doormen — real “jobsworth” to a man — became a thorn in my side when it came to moving around with musicians. If the thought of sex had never crossed anyone’s mind, these people certainly put it there.

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This is really much more than a book about music, though it’s exceptional on that level. But Wilmer’s life is something of a distillation of much that was of importance in the 1960s and 1970s. The growing recognition of race as a political factor, of the rise of civil rights. The increasing influence of American culture in British life. The changing British economy (Wilmer collaborated on a never-published oral history of coal mining). And the sexual revolution.

“It is how we are treated as women, rather than as individuals, what happens to us because we are women, that dictates the direction of our lives,” she declares in the book’s introduction. “To us the personal is political, whether we like it or not.” In her case, it was not only a matter of being witness to the rise of the woman’s movement: she took an active part, helping to organize the first “Take Back the Night” events in London.

And her understanding of her own sexuality grew, as she came to recognize her preference for women. She describes experiencing a thrill when Althea Gibson was kissed by an opponent after a match at Wimbledon and the shock of seeing lesbian couples openly embracing and dancing in Paris nightclubs. In the mid-1960s in London, however, lesbians had to seek the safety of forming private clubs — which even then were occasionally subjected to vice squad raids. Yet the act of going to one of these clubs was also a matter of asserting a gay woman’s rights:

… because what we were doing by walking through that door was declaring ourselves — what some would call “coming out” — there was about the whole exercise a sense of terrible excitement. It revolved around bravado and ritual. Getting ready to go there was a ritual, the crease in the trousers, the eyes made-up just so Parking the car was a ritual, as near to the club as possible to avoid the voyeurs and the challenge of passers-by. Gaining entry meant mustering bravado. And for what? To spend time in a place where you could, supposedly, be yourself.

Val Wilmer's mother and drummer Herbie Lovelle, 1959
Val Wilmer’s mother and drummer Herbie Lovelle, 1959
Wilmer acknowledges the large and positive role her mother played in her life. Her father died when she was still young, and her mother raised two children on her own, taking in boarders to get by. Despite a most conventional English middle class upbringing, her mother was remarkably open to both her daughter’s interests and the string of musicians — almost all of them black, male, and from other countries — that Val brought home for tea. Her hospitality became legendary among jazz performers visiting London. Harry Carney, Duke Ellington’s great baritone sax player, sent her Christmas cards every year. “Randy Weston stayed at our house and talked Africa and Nationalism, she cooked him bacon and eggs; the Liberian Ambassador invited her to his parties and she drank champagne.”

And though her mother never quite understood her daughter’s sexuality — “Well, not for women, dear” — she was open to just about anyone Val associated with: “I always knew I could bring my friends home to a warm welcome. Without such a love behind me, I doubt whether I could have even coped with the stresses of trying to be myself in an essentially homophobic society.” The only things she wouldn’t tolerate were slovenliness and mistreatment of her daughter. Other parents could learn from her example.

“People often write autobiographies as if they had no mother, no children, as if sexual love had passed them by,” Wilmer writes at the start of Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This. “This not one of those.”

Amen.

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, by Val Wilmer
London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1989

From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives, by David Wooldridge

Charles Ives has been one of my heroes ever since I read about his reaction to a man who started hissing at a performance of Carl Ruggles’ piece, “Men and Mountains,” in the early 1930s. Ives turned around and hissed back, “When you hear strong masculine music like this, sit up and USE YOUR EARS LIKE A MAN!”

It’s good advice for anyone who wants to open themselves up to new forms and styles of music. And applied to other senses, it’s good advice for learning to appreciate any form of art or experience that doesn’t wrap itself up in a gentle blanket of pleasantness.

Cover of first U.S. edition of "From the Steeples and the Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives"David Wooldridge’s From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives (first published in the U.K. under the title, Charles Ives: A Portrait) appeared in 1974, marking the centenary of Ives’ birth. Although Ives had by then won a sure place in musical history as the first important, and perhaps greatest, American composer, his work hadn’t–and may never–gain the level of popular recognition and appreciation as that of Copland, Gershwin, or Bernstein. A hundred years after he wrote most of it, his music still requires most listeners to sit up and put some effort into their listening.

Wooldridge’s own approach to Ives pretty much guaranteed that his book would receive the same scant acceptance that Ives’ music did with its first listeners. Although the U.K. edition of the book appears from its sedate cover to be a conventional biography, it’s hardly the sort of account that would sit well with the average fan of classical music.

A clue to Wooldridge’s literary inspirations comes from the book’s prologue, which opens with a quote from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, his influential 1947 celebration of the work of Herman Melville. “Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.”

“Ives mounted,” Wooldridge writes. “His music rides on such space. The man, his life, the whole pattern of his thinking are witness to it. A sense of space, a use of space, an understanding of space that transcended metered time.” Like Melville–using Olson’s words, Ives had “a comprehension of PAST, his marriage of spirit to source”–and “a confirmation of FUTURE.”

Ives’ past, as Wooldridge shows, went back almost as far back in American history as any white man’s could. Captain William Ives landed in Massachussetts in 1635, and his family lines crossed paths with the Puritans, George Washington, Emerson, and Thoreau. His father George once helped a drunken Stephen Foster home from a Manhattan bar and led the band of the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery that paraded past Lincoln and Grant after the surrender of Richmond.

George passed along to Charles a unique mixture of popular American and classical European music. He led bands that played at camp meetings and holiday celebrations in Charles’ home town of Danbury, Connecticut. He also encouraged his son to study the piano and organ and shared what formal training he’d had in composition. By the age of 18, Charles was working for pay as the organist of St. Thomas’ Church in New Haven, where he later attended Yale University.

At Yale, his primary teacher was a stalwart figure of the American musical establishment, one Horatio William Parker. As his Wikipedia entry puts it, “During his lifetime he was considered to be the finest composer in the United States, a superior craftsman writing in the most advanced style.” He didn’t think much of Ives’ student work and couldn’t even remember him years later, in a letter to Wooldridge’s father. Although Wooldridge acknowledges, “Who all remembers the names of the great composers’ teachers?,” he can’t resist the chance to give Parker his posthumous come-uppance:

Why pick on Parker?

FOR ONE REASON ONLY. Parker was a fluent, competent, intelligent musician who ought to have been able to recognize a NEW VOICE when he heard it. No one asked him to acknowledge Ives as America’s musical Messiah–though he’d have enjoyed that privilege. He didn’t have to like what he heard. He even could have hated it. And he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening.

And I mean REALLY listening–not just letting the ears lie back on a bubble-bath of agreeable, ready-made sound. Musicians, precisely the fluent ones, make the poorest listeners, because they get bemused by the sound of their own voices–singers, players, composers–cannot understand there is anything more to it than fluency of sound, accuracy of sound, opulence of sound, refinement of sound. And sound has so little to do with music–nice, agreeable, chromium-plate sound.

This passage provides ample evidence of Wooldridge at his most idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. Elsewhere in the book he launches into a rant about THE SYSTEM that brings one right back to the spirit of 1960s student protests. I imagine Wooldridge saw himself “sticking it to the Man” in writing this book.

Which was certainly one reason the book dropped into obscurity moments after being published. I doubt this kind of writing held much appeal for many of Wooldridge’s most likely buyers. Nor does it age well. Fortunately, such passages are rare.

The more striking and interesting aspect of From the Steeples and Mountains is Wooldridge’s approach to the narrative of Ives’ life and work. I may be going too far out on a limb with this, but I think there’s an important clue behind his use of the Charles Olson quote about Melville, and that clue leads to the work of Paul Metcalf–Melville’s great-grandson and a student of Olson’s.

As his Wikipedia entry puts it, Metcalf’s “work generally defies classification.” Best known–for those who knew his work at all–for his 1965 novel, Genoa, Metcalf relies extensively on the use of original texts, weaving slender threads of his own narration to create a unifying theme. As with Metcalf’s books, there is barely a page in From the Steeples and Mountains comprised solely of Wooldridge’s own words. And like Metcalf, Wooldridge uses quoted text for visual as well as narrative effect. He tosses in snatches and bursts of texts from letters, newspaper articles, songs, poems, concert programs and advertisement like Ives tosses musical quotations into his own pieces, very deliberately creating the semblance–but only the semblance–of a “slam-bang racket.”

Metcalf’s work is very much a meditation upon history, particularly American history, and particularly American history of the 19th century. And like Metcalf, Wooldridge is constantly drawing links between Ives and figures such as Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, highlighting the uniquely American nature of their voices and world views. He draws heavily on Ives’ own writing, including Essays Before a Sonata (1921) and the extensive marginalia in Ives’ compositions, which include such gems as the following, from a score-sketch of The Fourth of July:

Mr. Price: Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have–I want it that way …

As Wooldridge tells the story, Ives’ creative energies were worn down by a combination of ill-health and distress at the development of American politics and the entry into World War One. A prolonged recovery after a series of heart attacks in 1918 led to his eventual abandonment of composing entirely. His wife found him in his studio one morning in 1925 “with tears in his eyes, saying he couldn’t seem to compose any more–nothing went well–nothing sounded right.”

Ives’ failure, to Wooldridge, is America’s failure:

. . . . . Ives the composer remains, still in largely silent reproach of a nation’s music-making, its way of life, the way of life of music-making as a whole. Still largely silent, because few have ventured his music to be properly heard, or, being properly heard, accorded proper attention. But the world cannot wait while America gets it together, and now the sound, impatient, is gone out into other lands. Charles Ives is the FERMATA. Full stop/half circle. End and beginning.

I’m not sure David Wooldridge succeeded in accomplishing what he set out to do in writing From the Steeples and Mountains. If he intended to use the story of Charles Ives to send a message to America about the need to look past the “establishment sop we use to salve our consciences in, 99%, lip service,” America clearly took less note of Wooldridge’s message than it did of Ives’ own work.

In the process, however, he did create a portrait that does a remarkably effective job of setting Ives’ life and work into a cultural context and in conveying a sense of his character and his musical sensibility that irresistibly leads the reader to becoming the listener. I defy anyone to read From the Steeples and Mountains and not find oneself soon downloading and enjoying Ives’ music. And I also expect to dig out my copies of Paul Metcalf’s books and immerse myself again into the sounds of another uniquely American voice.

From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives, by David Wooldridge
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974

And Sleep Until Noon, by Gene Lees

Gene Lees, 1958Gene Lees, one of the finest jazz writers ever, passed away a few days ago. Without a doubt, his best work was the series of jazz portraits and memoirs he published in his long-running journal, Jazzletter, which were collected in such books as Cats of Any Color and Meet Me at Jim & Andy’s. He was also a fine lyricist, best known perhaps for his English version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” which Lees transformed into the lovely “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”

But Lee also made two ventures into fiction. Late in his life, he published the nostalgic Song Lake Summer, set in upstate New York in the late 19th century, which received generally positive reviews. His first book, And Sleep Until Noon, his first novel, did not.

Lees started writing And Sleep Until Noon in the late 1950s, but only got the book published in 1966.

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'And Sleep Until Noon'
The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. Lees portrays Jack as a talented jerk, the kind of temperamental celebrity who tries to get hotel managers fired when the wrong drink shows up on his room service cart. Jack’s life and ways are turned around in the course of a week or so in Stockholm when he meets a beautiful journalist, Disa Lindahl. Unlike Jack, Disa is true-hearted and pure in spirit. Her effect on Jack is like that of a tuning fork, putting his mind and life back to the right pitch, and even though they go their separate ways in the end, it’s clear that Jack will now take his work, art, and other people seriously.

If that plot sounds thin, Lees’ characterizations do little to compensate. He attempts to draw some kind of parallel between Jack’s meandering career, marked mostly by a series of self-indulgent decisions, and that of Bud Weston, Jack’s boyhood friend, who drops jazz for medicine after meeting–and falling in love with–a Costa Rican prostitute scarred in an auto accident. As young men, both Bud and Jack are liberal users of booze, pot, and women, and there are numerous accounts of their debauches, none of them particularly convincing. Jack postulates at one point that “an entertainer’s popularity with women, who formed the majority of his audience and determined the tastes of the rest of it, varied directly with his utility as a focus for sexual fantasies, and any one of them who thought otherwise was a damn fool.”Library Journal called the book “sophomoric with puerile gaps predominating in the earlier parts.” I’m guessing the Journal’s critic was thinking of the scene where Bud masturbates a horse with a violin bow.

As a lyricist, Lees’ writing could be subtle and poetic. As a budding novelist, his work was on a par with those tired old lines about how the love of a good woman’ll set a man straight.

The only bright spots in the book are a few passages where Lees gets down to his true passion, music. There’s a wonderful little essay toward the end about the art of the pop singer, particularly on record:

Recording was an intimate medium. The listener’s ear was brought to a distance of only inches from the singer’s mouth. It was not only unnecessary to shout; it was rude. Making it even more intimate was the fact that the record was usually heard by one person, sometimes two, rarely as many as three at a time. If there were more persons present, he was fond of saying, nobody was listening–they were too busy talking.

And so, in recent years, there had been a steady evolution of his conception. He had dropped the volume of his voice. Not that he had abandoned the use of dynamics; he had simply made them more subtle. As a result his records had an arresting quality of intimacy, of private urgency, and a woman who listened to them tended to be drawn into the illusion that he was singing directly to her; while men, oddly enough, were inclined to feel that he was speaking on their behalf, saying those thing, making those confessions that they would make themselves were they only eloquent enough ….

Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.

And Sleep Until Noon, by Gene Lees
New York: Trident Press, 1966

Sideman, by Osborn Duke

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sideman' by Osborn DukeI probably would have filed Sideman under “Justly Neglected” if it weren’t for the fact that it’s about a trombone player in a big band. As an occasional trombone player in a big band myself, I had to give this book a couple of bonus stars.

Sideman portrays a few weeks in the life of Bernie Bell, a trombonist who drops out of college in Texas to take a job with Matt MacNeal’s big band. MacNeal’s band is in the midst of an extended gig at a dance hall near the Pacific Park pier in Santa Monica. Bell’s real reason for joining the band is the chance to study with an Arnold Schoenberg-like modernist composer living in L.A..

Even though the novel comes in at close to 450 pages, the world it describes is a microcosm. All the scenes take place in one of a half-dozen or so sites–the dance hall, the hotel where most of the band members stay, the shack Bernie rents so he can compose on an old piano–close to Santa Monica Beach. Aside from a few marginal characters, most of the interaction is among a few of the band members and a couple of their wives. Although Duke doesn’t lay out a clear timeline, from start to finish the story can’t take longer than four to six weeks. That much is a given, since this is the early 1950s and few working big bands had the luxury of staying off the road very long.

The plot is equally slim: Bernie arrives and tries to fit in with the other band members. He starts in on his composition studies. He gets attracted to the free-spirited wife of a fellow trombonist and agrees to write some original dance music for her. She accidentally poisons herself. Everyone starts whispering about a love triangle and the band’s manager fires Bernie. Bernie heads off to New York City to meet up with an old girlfriend. The end.

In hindsight, I’m not quite sure how Duke managed to fill up so many pages. There is a lot of talking, but not much of it is of any substance. There are lots of details about the life of a working sideman in the big band days. Duke was a trombonist himself and played with Bobby Byrne and Sammy Kaye’s bands after serving as an Army musician in World War Two. The details are probably the main reason anyone would want to pick up this book today–I suspect it’s about as accurate an account of what went on before, during, and after a typical big band performance back in their heyday. But it will linger in memory no longer than one of the lesser numbers that these bands relied on to pad out their books.

There are other autobiographical streaks in Sideman. Like his protagonist, Osborn Duke grew up in Texas and attended college in Texas. Sideman was his one and only published novel, and other than a couple of short stories and television scripts, his list of credits is short. It appears from his obituary that he spent most of his working life as a corporate writer and industrial filmmaker for General Dynamics. His papers are kept in the Special Collections of the University of North Texas, which is one of the premier centers of jazz education in the U. S..

Locate a Copy

Sideman, by Osborn Duke
New York City: Criterion Books, 1956

“The Gospel at Colonus” now available on DVD

The Gospel at Colonus DVD

I’m going to shift my spotlight away from neglected books for the first time to draw attention to the long, long-overdue release on DVD of the 1985 PBS “Great Performances” production of the Lee Breuer/Bob Telson landmark show, “The Gospel at Colonus”. Recently, I was talking to an acquaintance about memorable theater experiences. He and his wife had seen “The War Horse” at the National Theatre in London, and he said the first sight of the horse puppet, designed by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, sent a shiver up his spine.

I told him I had the same reaction to the opening moments of the theatre production of “The Lion King,” when the dancers, in Julie Taymor’s incredible costumes, begin to come onto the stage from the wings and through the aisles. “I think there have only been three or four times I’ve had that reaction something in theater,” I said, but my mind instantly went blank when I tried to think of the others. And then it hit me: “The Gospel at Colonus”, of course.

It was in 1990, when my wife and I went to see Breuer’s revival of his 1985 production for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. About 10 minutes into the show, Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama enter from the left wing, dressed in shining silver tuxes. They are the collective, choral Oedipus. “Daughter, lead me on,” Fountain calls out, and Jevetta Steele, playing Ismene, begins to lead them in a classic sufferin’ gospel show trudge, toward center stage. From the right wing goes out a shout: “Stop!” The Soul Stirrers, as the defenders of Colonus, all dressed in deep burgundy suits, with Sam Butler, Jr. on guitar in the lead, begin moving out to stop them. “Stop, do not go on,” they sing. “This place is holy. You cannot walk this ground.” A vocal battle of sorts then erupts, as the Oedipi come on and the Soul Stirrers push back. With each step, the tension mounts. Behind, a large gospel choir sways back in forth to the rhythm of the march. Butler and Fountain come face to face, duking it out: “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” Finally, in frustration, Fountain lets out with a wild, falsetto howl that slices right through to the heart. I had tears in my eyes, it was so thrilling.

I had first heard about “The Gospel at Colonus” in the Village Voice back in 1983, when it opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the academy’s Next Wave Festival. I was intrigued at the whole concept of the show: an interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy, “Oedipus at Colonus” in the music of modern American black gospel. I was already a big fan of black gospel music. But the fact that Breuer had been able to enlist the participation of not just the Five Blind Boys but the Soul Stirrers left me dearly wishing I was living on the right, not the left coast.

Fortunately, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame was also a fan of the show and arranged to release an original cast recording on Warner Brothers Records in 1984, and I swooped my copy up the moment it hit the racks. I copied it to cassette (remember them?) and played it over and over in the car. Some critics have written that “Stop! Do Not Go On” is the only memorable song from the show, but having listened to the album at least a hundred times over the last 20+ years, I think this is unfair and seriously wrong.

Virtually even number is good enough to take its place alongside the best gospel tunes of the last fifty years. “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?”, Ismene’s plaintive cry for her long-lost father is matched Oedipus’ desparate wish that the Lord would “Life Me Up (Like a Dove)”, so that “I could look with the eyes of the angels/For the child that I love.” The joyous resolution of the choir’s answer to Oedipus’ plea to find a resting place: “Live where you can/Be happy where you can.” The stunning oratio of “Numberless Are the World’s Wonders”, in which the singer lists all the powers of man, spiralling up to a series of “From every wind/He has made himself secure”, only to end with the chorus reminding us, “From all but one/In the late wind of death he cannot stand.” And the stomping, rousing celebration of the peace Oedipus finally finds: “Lift Him Up.” These songs are among the most moving I know.

Although “The Gospel at Colonus” only ran for about two months when Breuer took it to Broadway in 1985, he’s managed to stage a number of revivals at fairly regular intervals, so that by now, the show has been performed over 1,000 times. A second recording of the songs from the show, with mostly the same cast members as the first, was released in 1985 and is now available on CD (although I personally prefer the Warner Brothers version).

PBS recorded a performance in Houston in 1985, when Morgan Freeman was still playing the speaking Oedipus, and showed it on their “Great Performances” series. This was briefly available on VHS tape, but it’s effectively been out of reach until a month or so ago, when NewVideo finally issued it on DVD. Given the show’s record, this release may disappear just as quickly as all the past revivals and recordings, so I urge everyone to buy or rent a copy and see while it’s still available. The video quality is not the best, being just a digitized version of the first release without any apparent touch-up. But the power of the music, the performances, and the visual impact of the staging easily overcomes this shortcoming. Until you have that once-in-a-lifetime chance to see it live, don’t stop and do go on to see it now on DVD. Your life will be richer for it.

“The Gospel at Colonus”

Book by Lee Breuer
Based on “Oedipus at Colonus,” “Oedipus Rex,” and “Antigone” by Sophocles; Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and “Antigone” adapted by Robert Fitzgerald; Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone” adapted by Dudley Fitts
Music by Bob Telson
Available from New Video (ISBN: 1-4229-1948-X)

Al Young’s Musical Memoirs

Excerpt

from “Body and Soul” in Bodies and Soul:
When the record came out, saxophonists all over the world, hearing it and sensing that things would never be the same, started woodshedding Hawkins’s impassioned licks in their closets and on the stand. Why’d he have to go and do that? Of course, everybody fell in love with it. My father would play it, take it off, play something else, then put it back on. This went on for years. What was he listening for? What were we listening to? What did it mean? What were all those funny, throaty squawks and sighs and cries all about? I knew what a body was, but what was a soul? You kept hearing people say, “Well, bless his soul!” You thought you knew what they meant, but really, you could only imagine as you must now. You knew what they meant when they said, “Bless her heart!” because you could put your hand to your heart and feel the beat, and your Aunt Ethel sometimes fried up chicken hearts along with gizzards, livers and feet. But a soul was unseeable. did animals have souls, too? Did birds, dogs, cows, mules, pigs, snakes, bees? And what about other stuff, like corn, okra, creeks, rivers, moonlight, sunshine, trees, the ground, the rain, the sky? Did white folks have souls?

… Thirty-nine, forty, fifty, a hundred, thousands–who’s to say how many rosy-chilled Octobers have befallen us, each one engraved in micro-moments of this innocent utterance, electrically notated but, like light in a photograph, never quite captured in detail, only in essence. Essence in this instance is private song, is you hearing your secret sorrow and joy blown back through Coleman Hawkins, invisibly connected to you and played back through countless bodies, each one an embodiment of the same soul force.

All poetry is about silent music, invisible art and the clothing of time for the ages.

Editor’s Comments

Not long after moving to the Bay Area in 1981, I picked up a copy of Al Young’s first book of “musical memoirs”, Bodies and Soul, and devoured it. Full of short, lyrical essays no longer than it took to spin a good 45, it was the perfect book for the moment. With money to spend, nights and weekends free, and no homework for the first time in 18 years, I was reveling in the wonders of live and recorded musical to be found within an hour’s drive from Sunnyvale. Max Roach at the Keystone Korner; Elvis Costello at the Paramount; Anita O’Day at the Great American Musical Hall; King Sunny Ade in Santa Cruz; UB40 in Palo Alto; the SF Symphony at Stern Grove; Rasputin’s and Amoeba Music in Berkeley; and the world treasure of Village Music in Mill Valley. And a Tower Records store just fifteen minutes from my house.

Where, about a year later, I saw a tall black man with a distinctive streak of white hair browsing in the racks. I immediately recognized him as Al Young, and went over to offer my praise for his book. He was helping a friend decide how to spend a gift certificate, and the three of us talked for a few minutes about some albums they’d picked out. Then we all went back to fingering through the trays of LPs. It was the only time I met Young–the only time I’ve ever met the writer of a book I liked, in fact–but it seemed proof that I was living in a magical place.

Al Young.

Young published three more collections of musical essays after that: Kinds of Blue in 1984; Things Ain’t What They Used to Be in 1987; and Drowning in the Sea of Love, which included pieces from the three earlier books, in 1995. All four books are unforgiveably but understandably out of print now. Understandably, because Young had the misfortune to sign up with two different publishers–Creative Arts in Berkeley and the Ecco Press–that since went out of business. Unforgiveably because nobody beats Al Young when it comes to capturing the mood and rhythm of good pop, jazz, and blues music in prose.

You can get a taste of Young’s writing from reading his essay on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” on Salon, taken from Drowning in the Sea of Love. And thanks to their utter neglect, you can pick up used and remaindered copies of all four books for not much more than a buck total plus shipping. Until someone rights this wrong and puts at least a sampler back in print, this is what you’ll have to do if you want to experience a master at his instrument. As James Brown would have told us: “Give the writer some!”

Al Young’s Musical Memoirs: