HungryBlues

Ah Yes, That Liberal Republican, Rudolph Giuliani

Well, no.

Giuliani helps raise campaign cash for Lott

February 22, 2005, 5:28 PM EST

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ When he was Senate minority leader, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott helped support New York City as it recovered from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said.

On Tuesday, Giuliani was in Mississippi to give Lott some political help, speaking at a luncheon that raised $200,000 for Lott's campaign fund.

"I'm here because he's a great leader for Americans," Giuliani said as he stood with the senator during a news conference.

(via Mississippi Political.)

Serenade

1.

The hospice nurse checks again
The water temperature.
Swelling in the hands,
The legs, the sensitive feet,
My father in the lift device
Shows no discomfort,
Even beams a little,
Looking at me.
Fluorescent light in the poster frames.
Around a breezy field, silver coastline . . .
The patient closes his eyes
And moans as he is washed.

2.

Dream #2: I pull into the driveway
With a gift for the dying man.
Pink blossoms crowd the rose bush.
At this point in the story,
The sun-bleached, unlovely petals
Should already have littered the lawn
And disappeared. Why these clusters
Around the light post, why still
These flowers hiding the metalwork?
The neighborhood is busy with autumn raking.
Call and response of bamboo, plastic, steel.
The sun shines. The cicadas drone.

3.

An autumn drive, the suburb’s decorative elms and poplars.
Then the rural scenery, the foliage all around.
Fiery reds, greens edged with yellow,
The sky cloudless, without depth.
Then the look out point, the destination.
From the open car window, a view of the Helderbergs.
At the guardrail, a boy throwing stones into the treetops, below,
Then the clamor of beating wings, a flight of starlings
Rising, dome shaped, then taking off
In every direction, the air cold, the dying man tired.

4.

Frank’s Orchestra had three records, six songs

Under-recorded, dumped on, taken advantage of
coming out of an orphan asylum in Virginia . . .

somebody heard the melody and made it into a hit

Frank’s melody
                                The Blues My Baby Gave To Me

Stolen, never made a penny on it

There’s no places like Minton’s
no clubs like Nick’s or The Savoy in Boston

I remember when I came to New York . . .

            sixteen years old, leaving Mom all alone in Brighton

. . . it was unbearable, Dad gone again
my brothers fighting in the War

The coincidence was I got to the City and kicked around
looking for a job, still trying to become a jazz musician
and worked in Greenwich Village in Jerry Newman’s record store
and Jerry gave me an acetate copy from his original
of the session at Monroe’s
all seven minutes and nineteen seconds

Frank, improvising Sweet Georgia Brown

This is it, this next one

Hungry Blues IV

I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down on paper. The passage begins with some garbled and embarrassingly sentimental sentences, which I omit. The first sentence in the omitted passage is "Nine years ago he stopped breathing," which dates the writings in 1963, since Frankie died in March of 1954.

[Prose sketch from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]

by Paul A. Greenberg

My first memory is not music but tennis. I met Frank when I was barely in my teens. I don't remember whether it was at a friend's house or at a record shop but he was looking for someone to play tennis with the next day. In my youthful exuberance I exaggerated my prowess and we arranged a date. You may recall that Newton was a big man and athletically well developed. After 5 minutes it was obvious that this was a tennis lesson not a game. Newton: "It's a good thing you are nice because you sure ain't a tennis player." He invited me to the club he was working in. My memory fails but I believe it was in the Fenway in Boston. I do remember Vic Dickenson and Horsecollar Williams and Pete Brown were in the band. And I do remember that it swung. Lord it swung. I brought my clarinet but Frank said no he would not be embarrassed but I might be if my playing was equal to my tennis. He was right. During the next few years I saw Frank every time he was in Boston which was frequently. I learned a lot of music by the osmosis of listening. We established a man-boy relationship that was fatherly without being paternal, brotherly without being filial. We explored sports, books, politics and mostly people. I learned how to listen, doubt, and feel. I learned much about being human and some of the anguish of being negro.

I first became aware of the problem of friendships "across the wall" when we were walking in an area where Frank felt we were not welcome. He asked me to walk half a block behind him. I asked him why the parade? He said if we were jumped I should run like hell. I had thought about his being paranoid then. It was later that I found out there was wisdom in his approach. I still don't know if I would have run like hell or not.

The summer of my 17th year I arrived in N.Y. with 65 cents, a clarinet which I played at best poorly, and the ill fitting clothes I had on and presented my self to Newton as his new roommate—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in. Times were tough. Frank's jobs were infrequent but we shared what he had. I remember some of the dates. Some of the people who played those dates were Sandy Williams, Pete Brown, Art Hodes, [Bill?] Pemberton, Pops Foster, Hank D'Amico, Ike Quebec, Roger Ramirez, Frank Orchard, Bob Casey. The places? Webster Hall, a club in the Bronx, organization dinners in Brooklyn. What was the music like? Moody! Some nights it was terrible, a fight all the way. Others it swung. By now Frank was playing the flugelhorn. It's a shame we don't have records. He played it with love and what music. The horn had belonged to Boston friend, Doc Kiley who died in the army and left it to Frank who treasured the friendship and the horn. Several years later a fire destroyed the apartment and in the remains he found a twisted piece of the horn which he made into a piece of jewelry which hung around his neck. What are the real memories? I learned about girls, drinking and fun. I found out what shuffling meant. I learned anti-conformity. Some of the memories are clear. I can't always distinguish what I saw from what I heard. There were three neighborhood youngsters, brothers. Frank called these little toughs Big Jazz, Little Jazz and No Jazz. He taught the kids in the neighborhood. He was always puzzled by the fee question. He felt playing was a good discipline. On the other hand he said, "How much do you charge a note." His attitude was that any kid that wanted to learn had a right to a good teacher. He was a great teacher even if the lessons were spasmodic and on a whimsical basis.

(This prose sketch was previously published in "The Search For Frankie Newton," by Jennifer Wagner, in The Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia Bulletin, Series II, No 39a, 2002.)

Bait And Switch

So I said I was going follow my Miscounting Prisoners post with two more posts, to make a three part series for Black History Month. I've been working on Part 2 on and off, but I got into my Hungry Blues series (I, II, III), which has it's own relevance for Black History Month. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll finish the Miscounting Prisoners series before February is up, though there is still the weekend... Anyway, no matter, since explorations of Black history should always spill out over the bounds of the official twenty-eight days .

Hungry Blues III

In 1994 my father spoke during the week of Martin Luther King Day at Temple Gates of Heaven, a Reform synagogue in Schenectady, NY. In his speech, he commented on Black-Jewish relations in a way that illuminates his own relationships with Black folks.

I don't intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don't think ever existed. . . .

Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no misunderstanding. The Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country's bounty and its decision making.

In the same speech, my father recalled the experience that first made him clearly aware of his Jewish identity and first made him conscious of living in two cultures.

I don't remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn't in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother's accent and I loved Bible stories especially the Exodus tale.

They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn't the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck. "Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side." It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me. JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY! The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain. "I am an American," I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage. "Jewboy!" " Jew cry baby!" "Mockie!" Christkiller!" "Scram, Jews can't play baseball." I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find, "it's a free country!" I don't know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

In the 1930s and 1940s antisemitism was still quite overt in the US. My father's tormentors may not have understood much about the culture he came from, but they stood ready to keep him out of theirs. Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is "Lonesome Blues", the story I posted in September, named after the song [RealPlayer] by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In "Lonesome Blues," the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father's.

The other live factor in my life was basketball. I was going to show them that a Jew could be as tough as anyone. I made the team by determination rather than skill. Years later I asked Tony Nucola, who was our coach, why he put me on his squad and he told me that any one who fought that hard to play was worth having on the team. I don’t know whether he did me a favor or not. I was always playing 9 men. The opposing 5 and our other 4.

This time around, he knows where he stands. His imaginative and intellectual powers are dominated by the activity of assessing boundaries, identifying gatekeepers and allies, and developing entry and exit strategies.

Do you remember my Tuesday to Saturday Blues? That's what it was all about. Keefe invited me on Tuesday and I had to wait until Saturday. I went and didn't over and over. I was sure they were putting me on. I would flunk the test and be the laughing stock of the school. They would remember I was Jewish and ask me to leave. One country indivisible with liberty and justice for all that crap and they would call me Jewboy and I would start a fight. I wouldn't know what to say. I hated popular music.

On Saturday I walked up the hill to Keefe's house like a car with a couple of spark plugs out. By the time I got there I was shaking, inside my stomach felt like mush. Mrs. Riley, pretty, friendly, lovely Mrs. Riley answered the door and told me "the boys are down in the basement."

Eight boys looked like an army and sounded like two. I was trapped. Eight enemies of my privacy were looking at me, surveying me. I was searching for something to say when Keefe made it easy—easy like scaling Everest easy like dying. "Hi Mo. Guys this is the clary man I told you about Mo Bartel. Mo did you bring any sides?"

"Yeah, two my left and right." I made it. I was in and still breathing.

Someone shoved a coke in my hand and I was able to ward off questions about how long I was playing or who my teacher is when Keefe shouted above the din "let's get organized and start spinning some sides first one for Mo, Pops Armstrong's Lonesome Blues featuring Johnny Dodds on clarinet."

Love on first sound? Three minutes on another planet. I mean it hit me like where have you been all my painful life. This was what I felt. The truth head on. It cried without the tears showing, it screamed pain without being sent to the nuthouse. It was all about being alone, alone, alone.

He was in and still breathing but in is a state of mind and out was still where he was, and Johnny Dodds was talking about it and

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill...

I am interested in this complicated process of Mo Bartel née Paul Greenberg's identification with African American culture—among other things, that it occurred, at least in the story, in a room full of white high school boys. They knew about Louis Armstrong's mid 1920s breakthrough, modernistic refashioning of New Orleans jazz. Mo didn't, but they seemed to think he would. In their eyes a Jewish clary man had a touch of the exotic and was automatically identified with jazz rather than the classical music he was learning to play. They wanted to entertain him or prove they were in the know.

I am interested in the story's rough hewn prose style and in how Mo Bartel, and his foil, the narrator, fit into the literature of American Jewish urban experience, which should be familiar to anyone who has read Nat Hentoff or other jazz literature, like Max Kaminsky's forgotten classic My Life in Jazz. But when looking at this story as a text about my father, there is something else to know. The drafts of it, along with the other sketches and segments for the novel Long Days Short Nights it was to be part of, are handwritten on the backs of copies of the flier at right (click on image to enlarge).

Presumably Dad was the organizer of the event: William Douthard (aka Meatball) was his very close friend from when he was working for the SCLC in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was his boss, and James Farmer was a close associate, whom he revered. I don't know how well Dad knew Constance Baker Motley, but they were both part the Civil Rights Movement community in New York. My family lived in Co-op Village and Dad was highly active in left organizations on the Lower East Side. So the flier has my father written all over it in more ways than one.

During some of his most direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his inner life was preoccupied elsewhere. He didn't treat the political fliers as documents to save for posterity, but as surfaces on which to write and fictionalize his life—as if his committed activism was only the backdrop for a personal journey. Of course the two things were not really separable. In fact, the suicides in "Lonesome Blues" may well be precisely what underlies my father's participation in the Southern Freedom Movement. From "Lonesome Blues," first paragraph:

They will say he was only 37 years old no one knew he was sick that he left a wife and two children and 300 records behind. They will find out he was broke and remember he was the first whiteman to tour with Prince Kingsley.

In the summer and fall of 1963 Paul Greenberg was thirty-five years old and a one time aspiring jazz clarinetist; he had a wife and two daughters, and kept a sizable collection of records, a large portion of which were jazz. I said suicides, in the plural, because there are really two. There's Mo Bartel who seems to have taken his own life in a Chicago hotel room, and there's the journalist-narrator, whose method of narrative transmission spells a kind of professional suicide, a sacrifice of his means of publication in exchange for the hope that his revelation of Mo Bartel's inner life will see the light of day.

I don’t want the assignment. I wrote the Mo Bartel story 10 years ago and you didn’t print it. Enclosed is the carbon copy of the story filed with you then. Print it and buy all of his records with my check otherwise forget it. I won’t interview his wife or any of the guys he played with. Fire me—get a new Jazz Critic for our lousy magazine but I won’t do that kind of story.

The narrator dies a professional death so that the biographical Mo Bartel, whose music is already immortal, can have life after death.

At my father's funeral, my girlfriend, now the woman I'm married to, said it's a good thing he couldn't carry a tune: otherwise he wouldn't have done all this important political work. Lack of musical talent had much to do with it, but for him jazz was "a way of walking, talking. / Had it in his soul." His story in politics was the story of a lonely, Jewish high school kid in Brighton, Mass. who was catapulted by Johnny Dodds' clarinet into Frankie Newton's apartment in Union Square and into the Communist Party, the unions, SANE, and the Civil Rights Movement. The jazz life was a fading, youthful dream, and Dad was at a painful threshold, a moment just prior to when loss translates the past into nostalgia.

The final thing to note here is that I can date the handwritten draft material for Long Days Short Nights with assurance only because there is an extended passage about Frankie Newton that locates the manuscript in time. That bit of prose will make up part IV of this series.

ELECTION RIGGING 101: A National Teach-In

ELECTION RIGGING 101
A National Teach-In

On the 2004 election and what we must do to restore democracy

With Bob Fitrakis
Ohio Attorney, Editor, Free Press of Columbus OH

with Lynn Landes, Jonathan Simon, Medea Benjamin, Larry Bensky, Butch Wing, Emily Levy

Jim March (Black BoxVoting), Kathy Dopp (US Count Votes), John Gideon, (VotersUnite!), Bob Kibrick, (VerifiedVoting) and many more!
scroll down for complete program listing
Saturday, Feb. 26th

10am - 4pm

1st Congregational Church

2501 Harrison St. Oakland

$10 suggested donation

please bring lunch

Program Overview

I. The Arc Of Justice: We've Been Here Before

* DVD excerpt: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., "Martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "How America Used to Vote"
* John Gideon, VotersUnite!, "Analysis of HAVA Misinformation in the Press"

II. Voter Suppression

* DVD excerpt: "Columbus Ohio Election Day Footage", by Linda Byrket, http://www.votecobb.org/video/#video5
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), "The Taking of Ohio Prior to Nov. 2"
* Emily Levy, Project Coordinator for Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., "Ohio--How the Election was Stolen"
* Warren Stewart, National Ballot Integrity Project, "Recounting New Mexico"

5 Minute Stretch
III. What Happened In 2004: Exit Polls - Were They Right?

* DVD excerpt: Susan Truitt, Ohio attorney
* Jonathan Simon, Alliance for Democacy, "The Edison/Mitofsky Report: The Bottom Line You Won't Hear on Nightline"
* Allyson Washburn, US Countvotes.org, "An Alternative Explanation for the Exit Poll Discrepancy: Fraudulent Vote Tallies"
* Larry Bensky, KPFA, "The Disappearing Media"

IV. The Age of the Machines

* Jim March, BlackBoxVoting.org, "How to Hack a Diebold Vote Tabulator"
* Wayne Madsen, journalist, "The Privatization of the Vote"

Lunch (45 Minutes)
V. Litigation

* Paul Lehto, Washington attorney, "Verifying Democracy 101: Sue First, Ask Questions Later"
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press, "History of Moss v. Bush, the Sanctions, Future Legal Actions"

VI. Legislation

* Butch Wing, political director, Rainbow PUSH, "Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s Constitutional Amendment Guaranteeing the Right to Vote"
* Bob Kibrick, Verifiedvoting.org, "Pending Federal Legislation for Electoral Reform"
* Sharon Cornu, Alameda County Central Labor Council, "Organized Labor and Election Reform"
* Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, "A Voters' Bill of Rights"

VII. Action

* Walter Riley, community activist, "Organize County by County, Precinct by Precinct"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "A Paper Ballot is the Only Solution"
* Alan Dechert, Open Voting Consortium, "Open Source Code Machines"
* Kathy Dopp and Allyson Washburn, UScountvotes.org, "A Plan to Restore Democratic Elections by 2006"
* Open Microphone -- Share proposals and join in citizen action to reclaim electoral democracy

This Teach-In has been organized by the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, http://democraticrenewal.us
and the MMOB (Mainstreet Moms Operation Blue), http://www.themmob.com.

For full program details, click here: http://www.wellstoneclub.org/involve/teachin.htm

If you plan to be attend, please click here to send an RSVP
(say Yes! in the subject line)

Help spread the word! Click here to download a PDF flyer you can print and hand out

Dan Ashby
e-mail: dan@redefeatbush.com
This message brought to you by Left.org
Click here to download the Left.org prospectus

Hungry Blues II

Not long after my father died in 1997, I started collecting Frankie Newton's recordings myself. There's the core group of twenty some songs that were recorded under Frankie's name, with bands that he led. But then there's another fifty or so recordings with other bandleaders and in loose, pickup bands. As with any musical obsession of mine, I devoured liner notes and quickly formed interests in the other musicians on the recordings and what else they recorded and with whom, outside of the original Newton sides.

Through Newton, I came to know a fantastic constellation of jazz stylists who all came through the swing era, the era of big bands, and produced an exciting range of small group recordings that at various times:

• take popular forms to great heights of refinement and virtuosity -- e.g., Benny Goodman (cl.), Charlie Christian (g.) and Lionel Hampton's (vibe) 1939 "Stardust"; Edmund Hall (cl.) and Sidney (trp.) and Wilbur (trmb.) De Paris' 1944 turbo charged "I've Found A New Baby"

• explore directions outside conventional swing formats -- e.g., Rex Stewart (crn.), Django Reinhart (g.), Barney Brigard (cl.) and Billy Taylor's (b.) breathtaking and inspired 1939 performance of "I Know That You Know"; Pee Wee Russell (cl.), Zutty Singleton (d.) and Joe Sullivan's (p.) wild, dare I say primal, 1941 trio version of "Sing, Sing, Sing," known as "Deuces Wild"

• give direct and powerful expression to a blues or standard -- e.g., Sidney Bechet's bowl you over 1939 soprano sax rendition of "Summertime," with Teddy Bunn (g.), Meade Luxe Lewis (p.), Johnny Williams (b.), Sid Catlett (d.); Jelly Roll Morton's 1939 vocal performance on "Buddy Boldon's Blues" (doesn't really count as small group, since the band is just Morton accompanying himself on piano)

With each new find, and with each jazz reference book, I came back to the same frustration that there is terribly little biographical information about Frankie Newton. It was frequently the case that I knew more about him from my conversations with my father than I could find in published materials. I desperately wanted to know more.

At some point in 1999 I remembered how in 1991 my father had relished reading to me from a set of liner notes by an expert who did, in fact, appreciate Frankie's greatness. The record was God Is In The House, a collection of live after hours performances by Art Tatum. In the early 1940s, a Columbia University student named Jerry Newman, had portable disc recording equipment that he took around to private jam sessions. He captured priceless moments of jazz improvisation from a period when records were only three to four minute studio recordings, generally limited in their structure and scope. The recordings Newman collected are rare, often arresting documents of how the music was played in front of live audiences. God Is In The House captures Tatum at five venues in 1940 and 1941. Some of the performances are just him on solo piano, some include other musicians. The last two tracks, "Lady Be Good" and "Sweet Georgia Brown," are with Frankie Newton and Ebenezer Paul (bass) at Clark Monroe's Uptown House. The writer of the notes is Dan Morgenstern:

The two final performances . . . are sensational. Newton is up to playing with Tatum—his ear is sure enough not to be thrown by the unorthodox backing, especially on "Sweet Georgia Brown." On "Lady Be Good," Newton shows us where Sweets Edison comes from. A master of mutes (including the almost whispery one he plays here), he was one of the three great post-Armstrong trumpeters, along with Roy Eldridge and Lips Page. It's good to have these indications of his worth; he was under-recorded throughout his career.

The complexities of Tatum's accompaniments and solos are such that it is impossible to take these two performances in at even several hearings. You'll find yourself listening first to Art, then to Frank, then to both, again and again. "Sweet Georgia Brown," I humbly submit, is one of the most remarkable pieces of spontaneously improvised jazz music ever captured by a recording device.

When we did our Frankie Newton session in 1991, Dad read out the whole two paragraphs, giving that last sentence particular emphasis, as if it were vindication of all that he believed in. He explained that Morgenstern is a famous jazz critic, a professor at a university, maybe Princeton.

I wondered if Dan Morgenstern could help me find out more about Frankie Newton. A little googling revealed that Morgenstern is the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed not at Princeton but at Rutgers. I sent him a letter on September 7, 1999. More than a month went by. I'd just about given up all hope of receiving a reply when in mid-October an envelope arrived in the mail with "Institute of Jazz Studies" in the return address. A letter from Morgenstern! It began:

Dear Benjamin Greenberg,

I was both delighted and saddened to receive your letter. Delighted because for more years than i can remember I'd hoped in some way to find a man I could recall only as "Paul." We met somewhere in Greenwich Village--in a jazz joint, a bar, at someone's house party--and had an intense, wonderful conversation about Frankie Newton during which I learned some of the things your letter conveys about your father. (Our brief encounter took place so long ago that I had not yet begun to write professionally about jazz--I was just "hanging out" and absorbing all kinds of stuff--so your father would not have remembered when he later read my liner notes, but I'm so very pleased that he did so, and seems to have approved.)

. . . let me just note that I never knew Frankie--by the time I came to the U.S., in late April of 1947, he was already elusive, and it wasn't until about a year later that I really became aware of his true stature in the jazz trumpet pantheon--I knew only a few records. But one of those, "The Blues My Baby Gave To Me," had made its mark, so when I met and became friends with Nat Lorber, whom everyone called "Face," who played the trumpet and whose three heroes (after Louis, of course) were Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge and Frankie, I was ready to learn. I saw Frankie just once--not playing, but having a bite to eat in a little village restaurant and bar called Calypso-plus-something I can't recall--but was too timid (not quite 20 yet) to approach him. That was around 1950 . . . and then, in 1954, Frankie died, just on the verge of trying a comeback. But Nat spoke vividly of him, and then that moment with your father, and other recollections by musicians, almost make me feel as if I somehow knew him.

I was beginning to feel I somehow knew him, too. And getting closer to Frankie Newton was also getting closer to my father.

Hungry Blues I

The epigraph for this blog includes these lines:

Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
      anybody dyin'

The two existing recordings of these verses by Langston Hughes, set to music and played by James P. Johnson, are pretty obscure, so it's hard to say if my father would have known the lines. Be that as it may, these words are at the crux of what drove him to live as he did. In these lines and in my father's mind, the world doesn't have to be this way: poverty and racism can be eliminated. It's all a matter of making choices, choices that may well mean putting one's life on the line. Underlying my searching the life and times of my father is the question, what leads to this kind of commitment? The song's answer is them hungry blues—the real physical hunger caused by deprivation, but also a spiritual hunger, different in each person.

This blog started out as a vehicle for me to write about my father. Knowing more about his life and his times has changed me and has consequently broadened the scope of what I do here. Lately, I have been writing very little about him and instead posting a lot about race and racism in America. Learning more about my father's participation in the Civil Rights Movement, reading Movement history, and getting to know Movement veterans has made me much more sharply cognizant of what they fought for, the risks they took, and the gains they made for America. This awareness makes witness of the Bush administration's assault on low-income people and people of color disturbing to a degree that I could not have anticipated. My liberal sensibilities were certainly offended by programmatic racism before, but in the last year it has had a radicalizing effect on me. My father's own sense of his life's purpose was deeply wrapped up in the social transformation he and so many others made sacrifice upon sacrifice to achieve. As I have watched their successes unravel, I have found my own sense of purpose becoming much more closely aligned with my father's.

The process of aligning my purposes with my father's does not actually begin with the Southern Freedom Movement. The process began in 1991, when I made my first attempt to understand my father's relationship with Frankie Newton, the mostly forgotten jazz trumpet player, whose career peaked in around 1939, during the period when his band backed Billie Holiday at the Cafe Society in New York. If you know the original 1939 Commodore recording of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", then you've heard Frankie. That's him on the melodramatic trumpet intro. If you also know Billie's 1939 version of "I've Gotta Right To Sing The Blues," from the same Commodore recording session, and you can remember the sophisticated interplay between the trumpet and Billie's voice (especially in the final verse), then you already have an inkling of Frankie's artistry.

I've written before about how circa 1944 my father, then a teenage aspiring jazz clarinet player, ran away from home in Brighton, MA to Frankie Newton's apartment on East 17th Street in Manhattan, just off Union Square. Frankie was an African American, political radical, who hung out with other artist-intellectuals like Paul Robeson, Beauford Delaney, Henry Miller, Canada Lee, and William Saroyan. On the trumpet, Frankie was a great and subtle stylist, a master of mutes and moods, who attracted a cult following of aficionados, critics, and musicians. It's hard to say what would have happened to my father if Frankie hadn't taken him in. During that year or so when they were roommates, Frankie introduced my father to life in the Communist Party and he taught my father to read James Joyce and John Donne and how to look at the paintings of Picasso and Matisse. And he taught my father volumes about what it means to be Black in America. Frankie was outspoken about race matters, often protesting injustice to his own detriment, losing gigs and being marginalized in the music profession. Being in Frankie's milieu got my dad his job at Jerry Newman's record store, selling records to likes of Pee Wee Russell and Cozy Cole and befriending them, and led to my dad's first union jobs, organizing tobacco workers across racial lines in North Carolina and textile workers in Massachusetts.

Frankie Newton died in 1954 at age 48, by then alcoholic and shut out of professional music. In those last years of his life, Newton painted and was politically active, and he was married to a white Jewish leftist, Ethel Klein. They lived in the West Village on Barrow Street, across from the Greenwich House settlement house, which had (and still has) a music school where Newton sometimes taught music to low-income city kids. Frankie died a poor man, under-recorded and largely forgotten by jazz history. To my father Frankie was one of the great heroes of jazz, as well as a stand-in parent, a brother, a mentor, a friend.

My oldest sister was born two and half years after Frankie died. Dad named her Francine, after Frankie. If Dad got your ear about Frankie, there was an urgency with which he had to communicate Frankie's importance, as an artist and as a human being. By the time I was in my twenties, my father was one of the few people alive who had such intimate knowledge of this national treasure whose life had not been documented, whose music had been stolen and undervalued.

1991 was the year I graduated from college. Home for the summer, before I moved out to Oregon for a while, I sat my father down with his Frankie Newton records and asked him to educate me. We made a mix tape of the tracks, and I taped him as he expounded on the music and reminisced about Frankie. I took the tapes with me when I moved out west, but I did not dwell on the music or what I'd learned. A year or two later, my first cousin Alan tracked down a British cd that collected most of Frankie's major recordings and sent copies to me and to Dad. But that was about it for me and Frankie Newton until 1997 when my father was dying of cancer.

My father died on Election Day, November 4, 1997. I had been driving from Boston to Albany, New York every other weekend to be there with him in the last months and support my mother who was his primary care giver. I was there the weekend before he died, but drove back to Boston on Sunday the 2nd, not knowing that was the last time I'd see him living. On Saturday night, we listened to Miles’ Sketches of Spain. “Music is the staff of life,” he said. On Sunday afternoon, I came into the sick room to be with him before I had to go back to Boston. As usual, he was in pain. I asked him if he wanted to hear some music. “I don’t know,” he said. I put on the Frankie Newton cd that Alan had found for us in England. My two sisters were there, too. We tried making conversation, hoping the blend of our voices and the music would lift him out of depression. But when The Blues My Baby Gave To Me [mp3] came on, we weren't allowed talk: that was Frank's masterpiece.

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Photo: Frankie Newton & Sidney Bechet at Port of Harlem Jazzmen session for Blue Note, June 8, 1939 (Charles Peterson)

Bad chemistry

Josh, who wrote the article in this post, is my oldest friend—since age 3, when we went to play group together. The article was originally published by the Albuquerque Tribune in late October, 2004.--BG

Bad chemistry

Our chemical plants could be ready-made bombs for terrorists, but the Senate isn't budging on legislation to ensure better security

COMMENTARY

By Josh Sher

Since Sept. 11, 2001, chemical plants have been recognized as significant potential targets for a terrorist attack. Why is this? There are at least three reasons.

First, even commonplace chemicals can pose significant health risks. As an example, chlorine gas, which was used as a chemical weapon during World War I, can burn a human's respiratory tract.

Second, many chemical facilities are located in urban areas or near water supplies and store potentially dangerous chemicals on site. In 2002, Greenpeace put a map on the Internet that predicted highly toxic chlorine gas would cover much of New York City, if a particular chemical plant in New Jersey were attacked.

Finally, many chemical plants have minimal security. For instance, in a July 14, 2002, report, the New York Daily News found no security at the Matheson Tri-Gas facility in East Rutherford, N.J. Why would terrorists need to sneak a weapon of mass destruction into the United States, when such a weapon is just sitting around unprotected in the United States already? A well-placed bomb in one of these chemical facilities could potentially kill millions of people.

In recognition of the severity of this issue, two bills were placed before the U.S. Senate in early 2003, addressing the risks posed by attacks on chemical facilities: Senate Bill S157, sponsored by New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine, and Senate Bill S994, sponsored by Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe.

Both bills require vulnerability assessments at chemical facilities that contain potentially harmful chemicals, but there are significant differences between the bills.

S157 requires chemical companies to submit their assessments to the Environmental Protection Agency for review, so if a plan is insufficient for the current threat level, the EPA will notify the facility of this and, if necessary, take appropriate actions to correct the problem. Further, S157 gives the EPA an oversight role in determining which chemicals are potentially harmful and calls for the companies to reduce on-site storage of the chemicals.

The Republican bill, S994, has greatly reduced requirements on the chemical industry. The Department of Homeland Security is given the oversight role for the risk assessment process, but there are no requirements for submitting the assessments to the government for review, and there are no requirements for reducing on-site storage of dangerous chemicals.

An ideal bill would provide both a carrot and a stick for the chemical industry.

The stick should be a formal requirement to perform a comprehensive terrorism risk assessment, which includes an assessment of the safety risks to the general population from attacks/accidents at each facility and an assessment of the adequacy of the current security. The carrot should be government grants given to chemical facilities that produced thorough assessments, which could be used either for securing these facilities or, even better, for switching to less-dangerous chemicals.

Sadly, the Republican Senate leadership has taken no action on either bill. S157 has been pending without action for 18 months, and the Senate has not scheduled a vote on S994, which made it out of committee more than a year ago. Chemical plants, meanwhile, have taken minimal actions to improve security, while waiting for direction from the government.

The Bush administration has not taken a position on the chemical security bills.

At present, a disproportionate amount of federal Homeland Security money is being spent on airports, while other areas such as chemical facilities or ports are given meager resources. Further, terrorists have demonstrated the capability to use existing infrastructure as a weapon.

While it important to deny the terrorists access to planes, it is also important to deny them access to large quantities of dangerous chemicals.

The present situation is like securing a house by triple-locking the front door, while leaving the back door wide open and leaving matches and gasoline lying around. It's cheaper and more effective to single-lock both doors and remove the matches and the gasoline.

Sher is a senior scientist working on terrorism risk assessment for ARES Corp. in Albuquerque.

Support Our Troops: Give Them Proper Psychiatric Care

(via Professor Kim.)

[O]n Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'

"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.

In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.

Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.

"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."

(Whole thing.)

Oh, in case you're wondering why this post got tagged with the race and racism category, Mr. Soto-Ramirez was Puerto Rican. Latinos and African Americans are heavily over represented in our armed forces, especially in combat units:

 Brain Gifford, a researcher with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley, told AP reporters, “"That this may be related to Latinos' participation in the Marine Corps, which would increase their exposure to high-intensity combat situations, or perhaps it is due to Hispanics' overrepresentation in the lower ranks.”

Last year, the Inter Press Service printed an article stating that Hispanic soldiers fighting in Iraq were dying at higher rates, and were being lured into dangerous positions when recruited by the Armed Forces.

As American causalities in Iraq steadily increase, so does the apprehension in many of the nation’s Latino communities. The concern is that their children are dying at incredibly high numbers and that they are being lured into dangerous services by the Armed Forces. Overall, the community is worried that Hispanic men and women are being unjustly exposed to risky situations and sent to the front lines. One of the first U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq, Jose Gutierrez, was an orphan from Guatemala and not even a citizen at the time of his death.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos make up 9.5 percent of the active enlistees in the armed forces; they are over-represented in the most dangerous assignments, such as infantry, gun crews, and seamanship, and make up over 17.5 percent of the front lines.

(Whole thing.)

Further reading:
Conflict with Iraq: Study shows 20 percent of war deaths are blacks
Military Luring Black and Latino Youth With Hip-hop
Troops' Citizenship