In the fall of 1969, I left my wife and children behind for a month and took a bus trip across America. One of the most memorable events of that month was my encounter with record librarian Charlemaude Curtis in New Mexico.
In those days, Greyhound was selling a 30 day bus pass, and I bought one. It was good for unlimited travel throughout the U.S. and Canada. During the course of the month, I covered approximately 10,000 miles. I later calculated that I spent about a third of my time on buses.
I first went straight across the country to visit my sister-in-law, who was then living in Los Angeles. I wound up spending most of my time visiting my former piano teacher, Joanne La Torra, who had become a close friend. (She made two LPs for the Orion label as Joanne Smith.) From there I went back east to Tucson to visit friends who had a summer house in Phoenicia, near where I lived. My next stop was Fort Worth, where by arrangement I recorded an interview with the pianist Lili Kraus (then teaching at Texas Christuan University), who took me out to lunch at Furr’s Cafeteria. Unfortunately the magazine I did the interview for ceased publication, and the interview was never printed.
From Fort Worth I traveled to Albuquerque, where my uncle Lenny Felberg had recently taken up residence as professor of violin at the University of New Mexico. After that, I went to Seattle, spending a few days with my science-fiction friends F.M. and Elinor Busby and, of course, getting wet. My last stop was in Edmonton, Alberta, where I visited my old friend Calvin Demmon and his wife India. En route home I was stranded in Watertown, NY by a bus strike. My friend Henry Fogel, who lived in Syracuse, drove up and rescued me, and I spent a couple of days with him and his wife Fran before the buses started running again.
I had many memorable experiences during that voyage, but perhaps none stands out as strongly as my encounter with Charlemaud Curtis. At that time, Charlie Curtis–as everyone called her–was an assistant music librarian at the University of New Mexico Library. Since my uncle Lenny and his wife Arlette worked during the day, they needed a place to park me while they were at work. Lenny took me to the UNM Library, where I already knew the librarian, Jim Wright, head of the Fine Arts Library, through the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
I figured I would just spend my time browsing and listening, but Jim had another idea. The UNM Library had a room full of 78s that had been donated over the years and never sorted or catalogued. Charlie, who had come to UNM after having run her own record store for years, had been agitating to have something done with the 78s. While I wasn’t particularly an expert on 78s, I was already known as a “record expert” in general. Jim and Charlie asked me if I would help Charlie sort through the 78s.
Thus began one of the most entertaining experiences I’ve ever had. Charlie, who was old enough to be my mother, was a lively woman, and she knew a lot about records from her experience running a store that I didn’t know. For example, she explained one thing I’d always been curious about, why the Columbia 78 of “Preludio a Cristobal Colon” by the Mexican microtonal composer Julian Carillo, recorded in Cuba in 1930, was so common. I would have expected an avant-garde piece like that to be extremely rare, but Charlie told me she always sold a few copies in her store at Halloween.
Even in those days, most 78s had already become pretty worthless. We decided early on to keep for the collection only relatively important material which was not available on LP. The large majority of records we didn’t think were worth keeping went onto carts, where they were wheeled out to the open area of the library and offered for sale to faculty and students for ten cents each. I wasn’t there long enough to see how many of them sold but I learned later that quite a few of them were actually bought.
Most of the collection was classical music. However, we found some interesting early recordings of Latino music which were of great interest to the library. One record in particular excited Charlie. It was an acoustical recording which had been made and issued in Albuquerque, and she was convinced that it had been the earliest record made in New Mexico.
I worked with Charlie for three days on the records, and by the third afternoon we had them all sorted. We congratulated each other on a job well done. The records the library would keep were boxed and ready to catalog. The unwanted records were all out of the storeroom. We were left with a small pile of records we had set aside as completely useless, all either broken or obviously worn beyond playability. We smiled at each other, and without a word we started reaching for the records in the discard stack, smashing them on the concrete floor of the storeroom. Then, laughing almost uncontrollably, we went out for a beer.
I saw Charlie one more time, about 20 years ago. My wife Tara and I were in Albuquerque to visit my uncle and my parents, who had recently moved to Albuquerque. Charlie had retired by then, but we called her and got together. She drove us to visit friends at Jemez Pueblo, and Tara bought some pots from the wonderful potter Phyllis Tosa. Driving with Charlie was An Experience, though. She was a speed demon.
Today there is a Charlemaud Curtis Collection of Southwestern Music, Interviews and Programs at the UNM library, including material that Charlie recorded herself. She obviously did a lot of great work for recordings during her career. But I’ll always remember her as Charlie the Record-Smasher.
One summer I attended a huge party in rural Indiana hosted by science-fiction fans and writers Buck and Juanita Coulson. When the party was down to about 20 people, Buck pulled out a book of poems and offered a prize to anyone who could read through one of them without cracking up. Nobody made it.
This event, when I was a teenager, was my introduction to great bad art. The poet, who is still unknown even to most connoisseurs of inadvertent humor, was Violette Peaches Watkins. The book, her second, was “My Dream World of Poetry: Poems of Imagination, Reality and Dreams.” Mrs. Watkins was “a popular radio announcer on Station WHFC, Chicago, and a prominent patron of the arts,” according to the dust jacket. (I’ve guessed this means she was a gospel music DJ, since many of her poems have a religious theme, but I have no evidence.) My friend Marianna Boncek has done some research on Mrs. Watkins and discovered that she was apparently well known in black artistic circles in Chicago.
I searched for a copy of “My Dream World” for four decades, even though I had a photocopy provided to me, years after the party, by Buck. I used to tell people I was confident I would die without ever finding a copy, but I was wrong. Eventually an Internet search turned up two copies from the same seller, and I bought them both. Hey, you never know.
Incidentally, when I first told Marianna about the book and the contest, she told me with great confidence that she was certain she could read one of the poems without problems, having read plenty of awful poems produced by the students she teaches. She got through three lines of Mrs. Watkins and started laughing so hard she couldn’t go any further.
Mrs. Watkins has the qualities required by artistic inadvertent humor: ambition, incompetence, and gradiosity. They’re all necessary, and when done “right” they add up to a kind of anti-genius. I have seen plenty of movies made more ineptly than those of Ed Wood. Mill Creek Video has issued three 50-film collections of amateur horror movies, “Catacomb of Creepshows,” “Tomb of Terrors,” and “Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares.” The ones I’ve watched are incredibly awful but few of them are funny.
Mrs. Watkins’s “best” poems go on for several pages. But I want to quote one complete, so here is one that shows off her typical qualities:
The Cure for Juvenile Delinquency
You must start, from the beginning of time,
Praying hard daily, at least three times,
Thanking Almighty God for what you’ve got,
To be sure He will take care of that.
If your prayers successfully reach God’s throne,
Your child will be trained before it’s born;
For the Almighty God, who made heaven and the universe,
Will guide your child while it’s on this good earth.
Both parents should be faithful, loyal and true,
Because your child will have characteristics of you;
This much you owe to your child before it’s born:
To be brilliant, healthy and have a happy home.
Pray that he will be a blessing to humanity
And won’t lead a life of crime and insanity;
Pray hard that he will walk in God’s light;
Pray that he will always live upright.
And somewhere, sometime, the day will come
You’ll be repaid for the songs you’ve sung,
The prayers you’ve prayed, your toil and patience,
For being faithful and true, and your kind consideration.
There’s no reason to point out all the many reasons why I consider Mrs. Watkins the greatest bad poet I’ve ever read–even funnier than the legendary William McGonagall. All I can say is that if anyone ever finds a copy of her first book, “Violette Peaches’ Book of Modern Poetry for All Occasions,” let me know. I’m offering serious money!
I can think of only two other producers of legendary bad art whose work makes me laugh a lot. One is the singer Florence Foster Jenkins, who in her brief career managed to convulse thousands of music lovers, without ever realizing that people were laughing at her. Jenkins’s rich husband wouldn’t allow her to perform in public. After his death, though, she started a series of salons which eventually grew to concerts in hotel ballrooms and finally, in her last great moment of triumph, a sold-out recital at Carnegie Hall. No doubt such recitals would have become annual events had she not died soon afterwards.
Listening to Mrs. Jenkins carefully–which is, I admit, difficult–you can actually hear some suggestions of musicianship. And she doesn’t sing consistently out of tune. (If she had, she would have been less funny.) But hearing her grasp for the notes in the famous aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” is an experience which continues to crack me up even after having heard it for more than 50 years. It’s also fun to hear her accompanist, one Cosme McMoon (his real name!), trying to keep up with her. We are fortunate indeed that Mrs. Jenkins decided to immortalize her art on private recordings, which she sold only directly to individual music lovers after interviewing them and making sure they were sufficiently educated in music to appreciate her work.
Mrs. Jenkins’s recordings are most conveniently available in a reissue from the Naxos label. My friend Gregor Benko’s collection “The Muse Surmounted” includes an interview with McMoon as part of a collection of other bad singers whose work he has enjoyed. One of them is Vassilka Petrova, whom operaphiles generally consider the worst singer to record a complete opera role. (She did two for the early bargain-priced Remington label. Rumor has it that she was married for a time to Remington’s owner.) When I was a dealer in classical LP records, I always rejoiced when I found a Petrova recording. They sold for very high prices. Follow the link above and you will be able to buy all of Petrova’s LP recordings on CD!
Then, of course, there’s the great bad film director Edward D. Wood, Jr. His “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is often cited as the worst film ever made, but it’s definitely not. His first feature, “Glen or Glenda,” is even worse (and perhaps even funnier), and the 1930s films of Dwayne Esper (probably best known for “Maniac”) are certainly worse in all respects. But it’s the grandiose stupidity of Wood’s dialogue that makes his films among the greatest examples of inadvertent humor ever produced. You can demonstrate this by seeing movies like “Orgy of the Dead” or “The Violent Years,” which are hilarious even though Wood only wrote the scripts and did not direct them.
Since most of Wood’s work is now in the public domain, it’s relatively easy to find. Two useful collections of Wood’s worst have now gone out of print, and the new “Big Box of Wood,” as wonderful as it is, doesn’t have “Glen or Glenda” in it. If you’re curious try “Plan 9” or this collection.
What do we gain by laughing at the ineptitude of others? Well, the most useful element I can think of is the way bad art illuminates the difficulties of creating great art. Seeing how badly Wood’s films demonstrate elements of film making we usually take for granted, I realize just how hard it is to make even a competent run-of-the-mill film. But the hell with that. Mostly what we gain are laughs, which are always useful. I still remember the experience of my old friend Sasha Gillman, who unwillingly accompanied her husband Jerry to my house for an Ed Wood Night. (I still do these!) She said she wouldn’t find anything to laugh about in a bad movie, and she wound up laughing so hard she literally fell off the couch.
As recently as fifteen years ago, the idea that I could become seriously involved with poetry would have been very remote to me. I’d been a minor poetry consumer all my life, but I’d never become very interested in writing it, until a series of nightmares changed everything.
When I was quite young, I wrote some verse. I remember that a narrative verse I wrote about the second century Jewish hero Bar Kokhba won a writing prize for students offered by my synagogue, Temple Beth Emeth in Brooklyn, and was printed in the synagogue newsletter. I would have been about twelve then. I was definitely eleven when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series, beating the hated Yankees in 1955. I wrote a verse about that event, and I even remember a few lines of it:
Traffic jams. Loud horns all night.
Policemen smiled, saying, “It’s all right.
It’s just Brooklyn celebrating
after fifty years of waiting.”
Not too bad for a little kid, but not exactly an indicator of great talent!
In junior high school, I won an elocution contest for reciting an old piece of comic verse, “The Owl-Critic” by James Thomas Fields. My prize was an anthology of English language poetry, which I still have. But I didn’t read most of it. In high school I took a poetry class, mostly because the teacher, Harold Zlotnik, was a friend of my father’s. Harold, whom I’ve reconnected with in recent years, is now in his late 90s. I was impressed that his poetry was frequently published in the New York Times, which used to run poems on its editorial page. In Harold’s class I read Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane,” which began a lifelong love for that particular poet. He took his class to the 92nd Street Y to hear readings by Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. So I was at least exposed to good stuff.
During my junior high and high school years I was intensely involved with science fiction fandom, although I never wrote any science fiction myself. I ran into a phenomenon called “filk songs,” folk songs rewritten with humorous lyrics. I wrote a few of those which were moderately successful, getting some practice in creating rhymed lines for an audience.
At Brooklyn College I studied poetry in literature classes. I earned an honors degree in Creative Writing (which I never used for any purpose), but my interest then was in writing fiction. I wrote a parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (which I didn’t like) called “The Fallow Men,” and as I recall it had a few clever lines in it. (I also wrote a parody of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which I admired tremendously.)
My interest in poetry remained relatively mild. My first date with my first wife was a memorial to Theodore Roethke, but I think I was mostly trying to impress her. In the late Sixties I had some correspondence with Roethke’s widow Beatrice Lushington about publishing a reading of his on my Parnassus LP label. Just before we were ready to go to print, she finally heard from Caedmon that they were interested in the recording, so I told her to go with them since they would sell a lot more copies.
From time to time through my adult life, some poetry or other would catch my attention. I wasn’t closed to it. But it wasn’t a major pursuit of mine.
The disastrous close of a brief toxic romance in 1983 got me started writing songs. I was still playing the piano in those days and I started performing them, along with favorites by other songwriters like Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, and Little Richard. I wrote a lot of song lyrics over a period of a few years, more than a hundred of them. But song lyrics aren’t poems.
In 1997, I moved from my long term rental of “Big Pink” in Saugerties to another house nearby which I was able to buy. Not long after I moved into the new house, I started having terrible nightmares about death. They happened only in that house, not when I stayed at Tara’s, and usually during midday naps rather than at night. But they were really frightening. Eventually, I hired a psychic I knew slightly. She told me I was being haunted by the spirit of a child who had been killed on my property, probably several hundred years earlier, and she did something to set the child’s spirit free. I didn’t believe in any of this, but the little ceremony she performed set something free in my psyche and the nightmares stopped.
During the nightmare period, though, I started writing poems. They were all about death and dying. As I read them now, they don’t seem particularly bad work for a novice poet, although I wouldn’t want most of them exposed. My favorite was one I wrote after a walk through an ancient cemetery near my parents’ house on Cape Cod. I saw several tombstones that were no longer legible at all, and I sat down on a bench and wrote:
I have been dead so long
even the stone cannot remember my name.
You think I wait beneath the earth
to feel your footfall,
but it is not so. I fly above my grave
where I can smell the salt and hear the waves
and watch you, looking down,
fearing when you will join me.
Shortly before the nightmare period, I had become interested in another poet, J.J. Clarke. The Woodstock Times, for which I wrote music reviews (and still do), used to run work by local poets, and Clarke’s poems knocked me out. He used to read once a year at the old Woodstock Poetry Society, back in its glory days when Bob Wright was running it. I went to hear him, which proved a great but intimidating experience. The poems were wonderful, and his reading was the most powerful I’d ever heard.
After the reading I bought a chapbook, and had James inscribe it for me. He recognized my name immediately, and it turned out that he had been a regular listener to my radio program in the 1980s. He asked me if I wrote poems, and I told him I had just started but they weren’t much good. He invited me to send me some. Apparently, he saw more talent in them than I did, because he sent them back with comments and suggestions and invited me to send more.
This was the beginning of a mentoring relationship which went on for several years. James was an experienced teacher–he taught poetry at Ulster County Community College for 25 years–and his comments were extremely useful. I also got a lot of useful feedback from my wife Tara, who had read much more poetry than I had and had already written some wonderful poems herself, most of which she never showed to anyone.
So, I kept writing. I found a lot of stimulation in the monthly meetings of the Woodstock Poetry Society, and started reading some of my own work in the open mike sections. After a few years, Bob Wright invited me to be one of his featured readers, my first time as a feature. The Woodstock Poetry Festival, a marvelous although quixotic enterprise, brought a number of major poets to Woodstock for a couple of years. Hearing people who had been only names on a page, like Sharon Olds and Billy Collins, turned out to be inspiring.
One of our best Ulster County poets, Cheryl A. Rice, invited me to a poetry salon she had decided to host. We had only two meetings, but I found those sessions tremendously useful, not only for the feedback I got on my work but also for the way it focused my attention on what was happening in other poets’ work. When Cheryl told me she hadn’t continued the salons because she didn’t want to be stuck cleaning her house on schedule, I invited her to start the meetings up again at my house, since I had a paid house cleaner. Because my house was on Goat Hill Road, we became the Goat Hill Poets, and we still are even though we now meet at Tara’s house in Woodstock.
I was intrigued when I learned that Sharon Olds, one of the poets I most admire, was teaching workshops at Omega Institute in nearby Rhinebeck. Attendance at these workshops was by invitation only, and the first two times I submitted work I wasn’t invited. The third time, though, in 2007, I was invited as an alternate, and someone dropped out. I got to work for a long weekend with Sharon Olds in a small group, ten of us. I thought everyone else wrote better than I did. But for the final session, I wrote a snidely satiric poem about Omega itself. Seeing the whole group, including Sharon, laughing heartily at my work gave me a sense of poet power that I’d never had before.
The following summer I got to work with Sharon and nine others for a full week. It was an incomparably nourishing experience. At the next to last session, she challenged us to write something that was difficult to write. I wrote a poem about my wife Tara and our experiences together, and “My Love” won a prize in the Prime Time Cape Cod poetry contest. It was just honorable mention, but it was $50 cash and a $25 gift certificate to Borders, a lot more than most poets receive for published work.
Unfortunately for me, Sharon has decided to limit her teaching and concentrate more on her own work, so she doesn’t teach at Omega anymore. Last summer, Omega had a very different type of event, a “Celebration of Poetry” hosted by the wonderful Marie Howe, with half-day visits from Mark Doty, Patricia Smith, and Billy Collins. With 91 people in attendance, I wasn’t expecting much. But I was surprised by the excellent experience it turned out to be. Collins, answering a question, said that he could recognize a talented poet by a gift for rhythm and a gift for metaphor. I’ve been surprised over the years to discover that I have both of those.
I’ve been a slacker about submitting my poetry for publication. But I have had a couple of poems published in Home Planet News, a long running poetry paper edited by Donald Lev. My father got to see the first one shortly before he died. I’ve had a few poems published elsewhere, including the Goat Hill Poets anthology issued in 2010 and in an article on the Goat Hill Poets published by Ulster Magazine. Aside from reading with the Goats, I’ve done various features in and around Woodstock, most recently July 4, 2011 at Harmony. (The link leads you to an audio recording.) On February 3, I was one of the featured poets at the excellent Calling All Poets Series in Beacon. A recording of that reading will shortly be available on the series website.
I’m still writing poetry. Unlike some of the really good poets I know, I don’t set aside regular time for writing. The ideas have to force themselves into my awareness for me to pay attention to them. But I’ve learned always to have a pad and pen with me.
(Top photo: Leslie reading in Kingston. Photo by Dan Wilcox.)
Tara, Renee, Leslie, and Gerard at my birthday party
One of the happiest events of my life occurred in March of 1985. I was at work on my Sunday afternoon shift at WDST, trying not to let my gloominess affect what I was saying to my listeners. As a piece of music was playing, I heard the doorbell ring and found my old friend Tara at the front door. I was glad to see her.
Since I’d met Tara, about eight years earlier, she had become one of my best friends, a trusted confidante and someone I admired tremendously. Tall (six foot two) and glamorous, she was about as smart a person as I’d ever met, a prosperous full time professional writer with a wide range of artistic and intellectual interests. She was also real home folks, completely without pretension. Hell, she had taken money at the door the night my one-shot band The Pub Crawlers, with her then boyfriend playing drums, had performed.
Since I had plenty of time before the music ended, I invited her into the air studio and asked what brought her by. Nothing special, she told me, just wanting to know how her friend Leslie was doing. I told her I was not feeling very good. Since a brief but disastrous affair with a bad woman a couple of years ago, I had been recovering only slowly from that awful experience. Recently I’d been dating a woman from New York whom I’d met through the Classical Music Lovers Exchange. It hadn’t been very serious, but she had just broken it off and I was feeling very lonely.
“I don’t know who’s going to want me now,” I said. She grinned. “I do,” she said.
Well, we were both single, and we certainly knew that we enjoyed each other’s company. So we agreed to go out on a real date, unlike the friendly dinners we’d had before. Because I was about to go to England, we made the date for the day after I got back. And because that date was stamped on my passport, I know the exact day of our first date: March 25, 1985. We’ve celebrated that as our anniversary ever since–and we probably will always, even though we actually got married on October 17 of last year.
Within a few months, Tara and I had decided that we were going to be committed to each other. The relationship took a long time to evolve, though. We each had our own houses, and although we spent more and more time together, we didn’t even talk about living together. I think the scabs were still healing on both of us. Still, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was involved in the love affair of a lifetime. From our early days, Tara and I encouraged each other in positive ways. She was very stern about my tendency to be careless with money, to the extent that she once broke up with me over that issue. Our dear mutual friend Charles Elliott, up from Florida for a visit, told both of us that we were crazy to look for anyone else, so after two months we were back together for good.
Although she was far more financially successful than I was, she never made an issue of it and when she decided we should do some traveling together, she insisted on paying more than her share so we could go. At her urging, we took some wonderful trips I would never have made otherwise, to Hawaii, Peru (a magnificent Nature Conservancy tour of the Amazon and the Andes), and Belize. I didn’t like her tendency to work very late. She would often write until 2 a.m. or later (these were always “work nights,” when we stayed at our own houses), but I saw that such late work had a bad effect on her, and eventually I got her to promise she would stop by midnight. She admitted that she felt she got more work done overall that way. When I first got together with Tara, she was still smoking cigarettes. I urged her to quit, and she promised she would. But I still was finding ashes in the toilet bowl. One day when I was at her house, I was looking for something in her office and found an unopened package of cigarettes in a desk drawer. I took it out, put it on the floor, stepped on it, straightened it out, and put it back into the drawer. We never exchanged a word about it, but I never saw a sign of smoking again.
We encouraged each other’s creativity. Although I’d majored in Creative Writing in college, I was doing very little writing aside from my music criticism. Tara encouraged me to get back to it, and she shepherded me through the writing of a novel, which I wrote mostly just to prove to myself that I could get through a book-length project. When I began to write poetry–a strange result of a series of nightmares–she was extremely encouraging and helpful. I knew I could believe her when she said something was good, because when she said just “Needs work” I knew that poem was destined for the recycling bin.
Tara was writing short stories and poems just for herself, but she got involved in a local writing group and let it publish a couple of her poems and a memoir. I talked her into going to Omega Institute to take a writing workshop with Grace Paley. The night after the first session, she told me that Paley had invited the participants to bring in a piece of finished writing for the second day. She showed me a story I had never seen before and asked me if I thought it was good enough to show someone else. I read it and said, “She’s going to tell you to publish it.” “You’re just being my fan club,” she said. “No, I’m not,” I insisted, “and I’ll bet you dinner for two at New World (our favorite restaurant, still) that she says you should publish it.” She took the bet, but I won it. (Paley’s words, she told me, were “This one’s ready to go.”) I got the dinner, but she never did submit the story.
Most of Tara’s writing was for educational purposes, textbooks and teacher guides. Many of them are still in use. But early in her writing career, when she still had her original name of Agnes McCarthy, she wrote a book based on a year’s experience of teaching third grade in Wyoming, called “Room 10.” It was in print for more than 25 years. During one of our visits to Charles in Florida, I accompanied Tara to the large children’s library in St. Petersburg, where she wanted to do some research. She told one of the librarians that she was a writer and needed some help. The librarian asked if Tara had written anything she might know. Tara mentioned “Room 10.” The librarian asked her to wait for a moment, then rounded up all the children’s librarians so they could meet the author of “Room 10.”
When I think back on the good years with Tara, what I remember most is playing a lot. We would sit home and watch a movie. We would go out to see friends. We would go to concerts, movies, theater. (She insisted we go to New York to see “Angels in America,” one of the great experiences of my life.) We had tremendous amounts of fun, the most I’d had since I was raising my step-daughters only it went on a lot longer.
Nine years ago, Tara became seriously ill. A visiting friend of mine, Steve Smolian, pointed out that she seemed in particularly bad condition and urged me to get better medical care than we were getting. After some fumbling doctors dropped a few balls, we finally got a dreaded diagnosis: ovarian cancer. It turned out to be in a very early stage. This “silent killer” had apparently outraged her system, which had reacted violently and given warning. Her surgeon told us the cancer had been in Stage 1C, and that chemotherapy might not be necessary, but he strongly urged it. Then he left his post weeks later, leaving her essentially unsupervised. It took us years and hi-tech tests to discover that while her immune system was suppressed by the chemo, she had fallen victim to a brain infection.
We have both worked very hard to help Tara recover from her injury, and we have had some successes. Unfortunately they have not lasted. Today, she is incapable of living independently and I am her full-time caregiver. She still loves me deeply, and frequently tells me so. But she becomes so frustrated with her own limitations that she gets very angry sometimes, which is hard for someone who loves her as much as I do to witness. I still wouldn’t trade her for any other woman in the world. And we still have plenty of fun together. Only two days before I am writing this, we went to see the Met Live in HD broadcast of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” which lasted with intermissions nearly six hours. We both had a good time.
We still go to lots of movies and concerts, watch “The Daily Show” and “Real Time with Bill Maher” regularly, and do whatever stimulating activities I can come up with. Fortunately, poetry seems to reach her on a level that few other things do, so we go to lots of poetry readings. When I decided we needed to be legally married so that I could do the best possible job of protecting her in difficult circumstances, I was concerned that she might not like the idea or even understand it. But she became very enthusiastic, and her only reservation was, “I thought we were already married.” She was right.
The Considerate Boyfriend
My lover is a very nice lover.
He doesn’t jump on me while I am reading.
He doesn’t paw me at bedtime.
He doesn’t ask me to take my clothes off after I have just finished dressing.
My lover is very considerate and subtle.
Like, when he sees a real hot movie star in a movie,
he just goes, “Wow, look at that!” “Would I like to have a piece of that!”
Then, after the movie, he says, “I hope you didn’t take offense.”
“I mean, she is a 10 definitely,
but you are a ten and a half.”
So eat the pizza slowly, because afterwards
you have to paw him and take your clothes off slowly, just to
show both of you that you are as wonderful
as he thinks the hot movie star is.
“Wow,” he says. “I love an assertive, take-charge woman!”
So you lie there and sigh a lot as he jumps on his dream.
Meanwhile, the movie star is probably reading the script for
her next movie! which you will probably have to suffer through
with this
Considerate Boyfriend.
–Tara McCarthy, c. 1987
The great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska died last week at the age of 88. You can learn a great deal about my own taste in poetry, and ambitions for my own work, when I mention that she was one of my favorite poets ever.
Since Szymborska dealt so profoundly with the life of ordinary things, I’ll start off by telling you how to say her name correctly. That funny symbol of the L with the line through it, which I believe may be unique to the Polish language, is pronounced like a W in English. The W in Polish, as in some other languages, is our V. So her name is pronounced vis-WA-va shim-BOR-ska.
I am not really equipped to write an analysis or appreciation of Szymborska’s poetry. That task has already been accomplished satisfactorily by Billy Collins, in his introduction to “Monologue of a Dog,” the first collection of her work published in English after she was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature. (Her friends referred to that event as the “Nobel Tragedy” because she stopped writing for several years after the prize was awarded.) Here’s the quote that appears on the dust jacket: Szymborska knows when to be clear and when to be mysterious. She knows which cards to turn over and which ones to leave facedown. Her simple, relaxed language dares to let us know exactly what she is thinking, and because her imagination is so lively and far-reaching–acrobatic, really–we are led, almost unaware, into the intriguing and untranslatable realms that lie just beyond the boundaries of speech.”
Collins is a profound fellow, despite the conversational nature of his prose and poetry, and he has given a good definition of poetry here, at least poetry as I conceive of it: “realms that lie just beyond the boundaries of speech.” That’s why I cannot summarize one of Szymborska’s poems–not only because they are so concise, but because in their selection of images, their unconventional thoughts, and their precise expression, they are indeed beyond the boundaries of speech. That paradox–using words to express what lies beyond words–is the nature of great poetry. Szymborska travels in that land very often, and in moving and surprising ways. And although I read her only in translation, I feel that I do understand what she is getting at. The concepts come across.
Although half of “Monologue of a Dog” is wasted on us because it includes the Polish originals of the poems as well as translations, I still recommend it as an introduction to her work. If you want to see how this modest woman, working in obscurity as an editor at a Polish literary magazine, developed her unique voice, you can get either of the earlier English language collections, “Poems New and Collected” or “View with a Grain of Sand.” Both volumes include a lot more poems than “Monologue of a Dog,” and both include many examples of the work Szymborska did–including much rhyming verse–on her way to mastery. But “Monologue of a Dog” is all masterpieces. It includes the great title poem, which shows how the choice of a limited perspective (a dog’s) on human activity illuminates human experience; “A Few Words on the Soul,” as amusing as it is a profound exploration of human nature; and the heartrending “Photograph from September 11,” in which a few words recreate the awful experience of that day with the most beautiful compassion and sorrow. These poems are magic tricks as much as they are explorations of the experiences we share.
If you don’t know this magnificent poet, even if you are usually not a poetry consumer, take a few minutes to read some of her work. These poems may not change your life the way they have mine, but the will put you in touch with one of the most beautiful people ever to walk our planet.
You can find out more about Wislawa Szymborska on the Culture.pl page about her at http://www.culture.pl/web/english/resources-literature-full-page/-/eo_event_asset_publisher/eAN5/content/wislawa-szymborska
At the Woodstock Library desk, a woman I didn’t know recently asked me, “Are you Leslie Gerber?” I asked how she knew. “I recognized your voice,” she said. “I used to listen to WDST.”
She had a long memory, but I’ve had this experience occasionally over the years, since I left WDST in 1991 after eleven years on the air. I actually launched the station; my weekday program, “The Concert Hall,” was the first of the station’s regular broadcasts, at noon on April 30, 1980. I still have a recording of that show, which I can use to embarrass myself whenever I need taking down. But I did get a lot better.
WDST started out as an idea of Jerry and Sasha Gillman’s. After they moved to Woodstock in the 1970s, they soon realized that there was no radio station in Woodstock, nor any nearby that reflected the cultural life of the town. Since Woodstock was already “the most famous small town in the world,” due to the festival that had not occurred here, they thought a Woodstock station might do well in the surrounding area. Eight years after their first application for a license, WDST finally went on the air. The station’s nickname was “the bulldog of the Hudson Valley.” It was chosen partly because of the tenacity required to get the station started. Also, the Gillmans had bulldogs as pets.
Jerry thought that a successful radio station didn’t have to be homogeneous. He was planning to run a commercial station and to make money with it–which he did–but he also wanted to have fun and to do things he thought were worthwhile. After deciding what kinds of music he wanted on his station, instead of looking for radio people who could handle those types of music he looked for people who knew the music. He told me he thought it would be easier to teach radio skills to people who knew music than to teach music to people with radio skills.
As it happened, one of his first hires, Jeanne Atwood, had gone to broadcast school. But most of the rest of us had little if any radio experience. I had done college radio for only a few months, and I had made many guest appearances on classical music stations, but I hadn’t run my own program for twenty years. It didn’t matter. I learned quickly. So did everyone the Gillmans hired with the sole exception of John Herald. John was a wonderful bluegrass musician and songwriter and an excellent programmer, but after months on the air he was still uncomfortable with “the board” and he gave up.
At the reunions we’ve had on the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the station’s beginnings, most of us who were on the air in the early days have assembled to share our happy memories of the place. We were a fun crowd in the early days, and we had a real sense of accomplishment. Jerry, who was very interested in news and politics, had a real news staff providing a lot of local reporting and occasional features. He interviewed many of the area’s politicians, often repeatedly. My own classical music programs reached a lot of people who caught them because they were listening for something else on the station. The promoters of one local concert series told me they could never have survived without my listeners. Betty MacDonald, herself a fine jazz singer and violinist, worked tirelessly to promote jazz performances in the area, and hosted many interviews with jazz musicians. She told me that one of the highlights of her life was interviewing Sonny Rollins. (One of mine was interviewing Aaron Copland for one of my programs.)
In the earliest days the station tried out a number of specialty programs which quickly fell out of favor. I remember a Sunday opera program, hosted by a strange woman whose name I can’t remember. One week she came in with what she said was her favorite recording of a Mozart opera, and apologized because the LPs had been “well loved.” At the beginning of the show I wondered how she was going to fit that work, which ran for three hours, into her two hour time slot, but I needn’t have worried. The records skipped so often that she finished well within her time. On her final week, she opened her program by saying she didn’t feel like listening to opera that day and she played instead some avant-garde music so weird that even I couldn’t stand it.
One rather feckless woman named Cindy did a one-hour Sunday program of Broadway show music. I happened to be engineering for her the week she interviewed the participants in an upcoming performance at the Woodstock Playhouse. One of them was a surly teenager who answered all her questions with “Yeah” or “Nah.” Instead of sticking with the other cast members, Cindy kept asking her questions.
As the station evolved, more and more of what I called the “mutant” programming fell out. But as long as the Gillmans owned the station, it remained a “mixed format” station, and a very successful one. It started making money fairly early in its run. I remember that in 1987 we saw an Arbitron survey of local radio which showed that WDST was the #1 Ulster County radio station on weekends, which was when we still had the most “mutant” programming, including lots of classical music.
After the Gillmans sold the station to a lawyer, the advertising staff began making the decisions, and the quotient of pop music started rising. I left when I was told that my Sunday afternoon classical program was being canceled. The owner asked me to stay on for Saturday and Sunday mornings. I told him that all my best programs, with interviews and even live performances, had been possible only on Sunday afternoons and that if I couldn’t do them there was no point in staying on. “But,” he protested, “right now you’re getting the highest pay of anyone on the air.” I was making $7.50 an hour.
Today, WDST is a pop music station. The only “mutant” programs left are the “Woodstock Roundtable” hosted by Doug Grunther (the only one of the original programmers still on the air, I believe) early Sunday mornings, and “Blues Break” with Big Joe Fitz on Sunday nights. I hardly ever listen to it anymore. Remembering the old days is much more fun.
Walmart and Amazon are both out to conquer the U.S. retail world. Walmart is already the largest business in America, while Amazon is often cited as the growing monster. I avoid shopping at Walmart, but I frequently buy from Amazon. And, more significantly for me, I make a good part of my living selling through Amazon. That’s an opportunity Walmart doesn’t offer.
If you haven’t seen the documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
The “High Cost of Low Prices” documentary (not on sale at Walmart.com!) demonstrated the way the chain pursues greater sales through low price advertising, even to the extent of pressuring manufacturers to shift their production from the U.S. to China so that Walmart can sell their products for less. It has also encouraged reputable companies to produce lower quality goods to reduce their prices. Those that have refused have found that Walmart won’t offer their merchandise. Walmart is also often dishonest about claiming its prices are the lowest on everything it offers. They aren’t.
Shopping at Walmart has been far from a convenient experience the few times I’ve tried it. The stores are deliberately vast. Unless you’re familiar with the layout, finding almost anything can be a chore. And there are often long waiting lines at cash registers. It has been well documented that one way Walmart seeks to keep prices down is the way it treats its labor. Walmart is the largest private employer in the U.S.. Its workers are poorly paid and otherwise mistreated, and managers are pressured to keep paid employee hours to a minimum.
Target, another chain which has demonstrated corporate citizen problems, has a sign in every store announcing the amount the store donates to local charities. I haven’t seen signs like those in Walmart.
By comparison, Amazon seems like a good corporate citizen Recently, when Michael Moore had a new book, “Here Comes Trouble
I’m sure an exhaustive investigation of Amazon’s business practices would turn up some things I wouldn’t like. But it’s no Walmart.
Instead of seeking a Walmart-like monopoly on sales, Amazon offers its huge customer base to anyone willing to pay it a small commission on sales. Not only do I buy a lot of things through these “Associated Sellers,” I’m one of them. Since I had to close my own mail-order business (not due to competition from Amazon), I have been selling used CDs through Amazon. My competition there is from other independent sellers, which is fair enough. Amazon relays orders to me, takes a very reasonable 15% commission, and pays me promptly every ten days (more often if I request).
One used book dealer I know, after years of selling through his own website and a large specialist on-line book site (ABE), took the plunge into Amazon sales a couple of years ago. He told me the experience was like moving from a rural road to Times Square.
Buying from Amazon could hardly be easier. Its searches do have a tendency to overload the results with oddly irrelevant material, but I still nearly always find what I am looking for. I even discovered through Amazon a very reasonable supplier of vitamin and mineral supplements (Swanson), which has its own obviously large operation but also sells through Amazon.
My daughter Jaida, a published writer, likes to buy from the great independent bookseller Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. Powell’s is indeed a wonderful place. Unlike Jaida, I’ve actually been to the store, which occupies an entire city block and is so large it devotes one story to a parking lot. Powell’s website has a lot of interesting reading on it, including independently written reviews and contributions from an uncommonly intelligent array of customers. But Powell’s serves only itself. Amazon enables me to sell.
Years ago I wrote many reviews of classical CDs for Amazon. That work dried up as Amazon began to solicit unpaid review of everything it sells from customers. These reviews have no quality control aside from other customers’ ratings of them , but I’ve still found some of them very useful sources of information. For example, the Mill Creek company offers large compilations of public domain video material (sometimes 50 or 100 movies in a box) at extremely low prices, but Amazon’s offerings of them don’t include contents listings. You can be certain that some customer will have listed all of the contents in a review.
A couple of years ago, in a moment of weakness, I joined Amazon Prime. That service, among other things, gives me free two-day shipping on all purchases. It costs me $70 a year, but I’ve found it still saves me money and I’ve renewed it. Now Amazon Prime subscribers are being offered free access to thousands of streaming movies and TV shows on line. I can’t wait to get my new Blu-ray player on line!
Movie lovers like me often make the director of a film our main point of interest. I don’t allow myself such nonsense as having a “favorite” director. But I can tell you that I have seen every feature film Robert Altman ever directed.
Since Altman’s death, I’ve been paying attention to the directors of films I love, hoping for someone whose work I would enjoy as much as his. When I saw Michael Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Kaufman’s directing debut, “Synecdoche, New York,
One of my favorite films of recent years was the Pixar animated masterpiece “Ratatouille
It’s a disaster. The “plot” is ridiculous and incoherent. The story makes no sense at all. There’s no apparent continuity between one scene and another except that good guys are chasing bad guys and trying to keep the world from being destroyed. Characters’ motivations are barely even referred to, and then so cursorily that you can’t really understand what bugs are up their respective asses. Perhaps if I’d been paying better attention by the end of the movie, I might have understood why Ethan, Tom Cruise’s character, finally reunited with his beloved wife, waves to her at a distance as she smiles at him and enters a building with someone else. But by then I didn’t care.
Did Bird’s contribution to this stupid mess make any difference? I don’t know. The various explosions and stunts were all pretty noisy and gaudy, but since there was no emotional involvement with the characters or the situation they didn’t mean anything to me. When Cruise was trying to climb up the side of the top stories of the tallest building in the world and one of his magic adhesion gloves failed, I hoped he would fall and put an end to the picture. And as the renegade atomic missile streaked through the stratosphere and the magic timer counted towards zero, I was hoping it would blow up and put us all out of our misery.
OK, any great artist is entitled to a flop here and there. Beethoven, after all, not only wrote “Wellington’s Victory,” he proclaimed it one of his best works. (I’m not alone in considering it one of the worst pieces of crap ever written by a great composer.) But “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” left me strongly suspecting that “Ratatouille
This experience actually does not help me answer the question posed by my title. Frankly, I can’t answer it. Of course, a great artist like Akira Kurosawa managed to infuse many films with his personal vision
Right now I’m keeping a hopeful eye on Sylvain Chomet, the French-Canadian animator now working in Scotland. His first film, “The Triplets of Belleville
When I first heard the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, I was very favorably impressed with her playing. Perhaps that helps to explain why I have been so disappointed in her recent development.
Dinnerstein’s performances with cellist Zuill Bailey at Maverick Concerts were splendid. One time they played all of Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas in one concert. (They also recorded them for Telarc.) And at the Bard Music Festival devoted to Aaron Copland, she played Copland’s “Piano Variations” with such intensity that I was literally in tears at the conclusion. I can understand why Copland told a friend that the “Piano Variations” was his favorite among his works. Dinnerstein played it better than anyone else I’ve heard–and I’ve heard it many times–except for the composer’s own recording.
I’d actually been hearing about Dinnerstein for several years before I actually heard her play. Her father, a well-known painter, is a friend of one of my best friends, and I’d been hearing from him about Simone’s prodigious talent. Hearing her in person confirmed the reports.
So I was excited, five years ago, by the chance to hear Dinnerstein play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” nearby, at Bard College, and I went with high expectations. I was appalled by what I heard. She seemed to have no idea of proper Bach style, frequently deviating from regular meter to make exaggerated expressive points. I don’t say that Bach playing has to be rigidly metronomical to be “correct.” But Bach is a baroque composer, not a romantic, and the power of constant rhythm is an essential aspect of his music. Dinnerstein played as if she were totally unaware of this aspect.
The performance was quickly followed by a recording, issued by Telarc
Dinnerstein’s third CD for Sony, entitled “Something Almost Being Said”
The Schubert Impromptus are no better. Dinnerstein’s tempo for the first, in C Minor, is so slow that the piece takes her 11:37 to play. By contrast, the great Artur Schnabel plays it in 8:53. For a piece of that length, 2 ½ minutes is a tremendous difference in time. And if you hear the way Dinnerstein starts to toy with the rhythm of the music at 4:25 of this movement, you may wind up as unhappy as I am.
But the worst example I can cite is Dinnerstein’s playing of the opening movement of the First Partita, played at a ludicrously slow tempo and with rhythmic freedom that would be excessive in Chopin. This is truly awful musicianship.
Dinnerstein is, alas, only the latest in a series of prominent musicians who have come to fame by playing in a manner I consider self-indulgent and unmusical. Such pianists as Ivo Pogorelich, Mikhail Pletnev, and Olli Mustonen have become great successes with performances that I doubt would have won them admission to any major music conservatory. Recently I heard a Chopin Prelude on the radio and said to my wife, “I don’t like this pianist.” It was Pogorelich. Mustonen, whose recordings had driven me crazy with their excessive rhythmic freedom, found a new way to antagonize me by recording a complete CD of Beethoven Variations and playing them with weird detachment and hyper-clear articulation.
One day I was listening to the radio and heard some unaccompanied violin music I did not recognize. It took me two minutes to realize it was the unaccompanied portion of Ravel’s “Tzigane,” music I know very well, but being played so freely it was unrecognizable. “Ah,” I said to myself, “must be Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg.” It was. But some people like this kind of playing. Remind me not to invite them over for dinner.
Wondering what to do with your Christmas bonus or cash gifts? I know how you can get a 500-disc series of jazz recordings for about $500.
This series, entitled “The Encylopedia of Jazz,” is probably the largest-scale recording project ever put together. Experts and collector friends I consulted couldn’t come up with anything in the past larger than the Philips “Great Pianists of the 20th Century,” 100 two-disc sets.
“The Encylopedia of Jazz” is published by Membran, a huge German conglomerate which has issued many super-bargain sets in the past. I own quite a few of its “Quadromania” boxes, four disc sets which I bought for an average of about $12. They include fine selections, mostly of jazz musicians but sometimes classical music, in quite good sound, with good documentation and even rudimentary program notes. Membran also has issued many 10-disc sets, economically packaged in small boxes with the individual discs in strong paper sleeves. These sets come with no documentation at all, just names of performers and titles. I have a wonderful Ella Fitzgerald set in this series, and a box of tango recordings most of which come from 78s. They’re delightful. I had the Miles Davis set also, but I gave it away because I was so frustrated in being unable to find out who was playing on each individual track. (Also, apparently to get around copyright laws dealing with compilations, Davis’s LPs were broken up between different CDs, making for a frustrating listening experience.)
“The Encylopedia of Jazz” was issued in 2008. This leaves me fearful that it could disappear before too long. Membran once had a 168-disc set of ragtime and early jazz, which I frequently saw on eBay. I was determined to get a copy for $100 or less, but I kept being outbid by a few dollars and never got one. Now it’s apparently out of print and being offered for $700. So, when I ran into the new series by accident on eBay, I bought the first volume, “Classic Jazz,” to check it out. The selection and sound quality were good enough so that I quickly picked up the remaining four volumes. Didn’t want them to get away.
I can’t review this series. I’m only halfway through listening to Volume 1, and some of that “listening” has been pretty casual. But I can give you a description and overview of the series.
Each boxed set has 100 CDs. The paper sleeves that hold the discs list the titles, authors, and timings. A booklet with each set has personnel listings and matrix numbers (but not labels or issue numbers). There are no program notes, but every once in a while the compiler has sneaked in a comment (like identifying Louis Armstrong’s first recorded vocal). Each set also comes with a CD-ROM listing the contents of the entire series. Many of the discs are encoded with text information which tells you the name of the set, the disc number, the title of the disc (usually the leader of the group), and the track title. This information is really useful when you’re driving. However, some discs in the first two sets (all I have investigated) lack this encoding, and a few apparently list only the track number, not its title.
Nearly all the discs are devoted to one performer or band, but in the cases of the few compilations the names of the performers are not in the texts. One of the most useful discs in “Classic Jazz” is a collection of very early recordings from New Orleans, all of which are fascinating and most of which are by performers I’ve never heard of. (They must have been recorded by mobile recording units, since there was no recording studio in New Orleans until Cosimo Metassa started his after World War II!) If you’re listening to this disc in the car, you can’t find out who is performing on each track without taking your life in your hands to look at the disc sleeve.
I know one dealer who refused to sell these sets, after they were offered to him at very low prices, because of the hazards of dealing with large sets. Here’s one example: in “Classic Jazz,” disc 58 is supposed to contain recordings by Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. It’s properly labeled and comes in the right sleeve, but the contents of the disc is actually identical to that of disc 69, a Bix Beiderbecke collection (which also appears properly on disc 69). I wrote to Membran asking for a replacement disc but got no answer, so the error was probably never corrected. I can only imagine what this dealer would have gone through getting back the whole set because of this error and being unable to do anything about it. Also, unless you put the box in your listening room and the discs never get far from their box, there’s an excellent chance that a disc or two will stray and be missing for a while or forever. My own “Classic Jazz” disc 11 has gone missing and I’m still looking for it.
Another drawback: while these boxes aren’t gigantic for 100-disc sets, they aren’t as economical as they could have been. Instead of lining all the discs up in a row, they are presented in three mini-browsers, each allowing enough room to flip through the discs. This format makes it easy to locate a given disc, but it also means each one of the boxes take up lots more space than Brilliant Classics’ 170-disc set of the complete Mozart.
There are two peculiarities of the Encyclopedia of Jazz which may affect some potential listeners one way or the other. The first is the inclusion of alternate takes. There are many of them. The disc of the earliest Duke Ellington even has a couple that were not in the Classics label’s coverage of the same period. When I get to hear alternate takes of great soloists like Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker, I can definitely enjoy their different responses to the same tune. But the great majority of these alternate takes don’t feature outstanding improvisors, and I find hearing almost identical versions of the same arrangement two or three times unilluminating. Also, strangely, the producers of these sets allow very little time between tracks. The industry standard is usually 5 or 6 seconds. On these discs, it’s about a second. I’ve gotten used to this but it’s still not my preference.
When I first saw the listings of these sets, I was skeptical about the sound quality. When I started listening to them, I became skeptical about their origins instead. While they aren’t the absolute ultimate in transfer work–the early King Oliver sides, for example, aren’t quite as vivid as they are in the Off the Record/Archeophone set–they are mighty damn close. I spent some time trying to figure out what label or labels Membran had gotten its material from. But several factors, including credits to collectors in the booklets coming with the later sets, have left me fairly certain that Membran has done its own transfers. How the label managed to compile this amazing collection of material–approximately 10,000 sides!–I will never understand. But it does seem that the series has been compiled and transferred from scratch. (Sorry!)
Glancing through the contents of all five sets, I am fairly impressed with the quality of the selections. The “Big Band” set was the most pleasant surprise. I was afraid it would be full of non-jazz blandness like Glenn Miller, but there’s only one Miller disc, and lots of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Some of the “Classic Jazz” discs might seem like wastes of time, and my real introduction to “Red” Nichols demonstrated why my friend Tom Piazza’s “Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz” dismisses him as “much-recorded” with no further discussion. But the Goofus Five gets two discs, 25 tracks each, and while they’re not great music they are very entertaining, perfect driving music.
There is one very major drawback to the selections. The series should have been titled, “Encyclopedia of Instrumental Jazz.” Singers appear only incidentally, if they performed with bands that are otherwise included. There are no discs devoted to Ella Fitzgerald (as I mentioned above, Membran has already issued a ten-disc set of her, so they had the material), Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, or any other singers. So what did I want, a sixth set of great singers? Maybe. Also, the compilers have gone out of their way to avoid piano solos. There’s a group of Earl Hines solos on one of his discs, but the early Jelly Roll Morton collections leave out his fabulous 1923-24 solo sides completely. I haven’t noticed any solos by Fats Waller or James P. Johnson either.
While none of these sets offers comprehensive coverage of its topic, most of them are pretty thorough. I can’t think of a major artist who is omitted, although no doubt a real jazz expert could. The “Modern Jazz” set is more of a sampler than the others, including relatively small selections of some major artists. (The one disc devoted to Monk presents his album with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, one of the least characteristic of his recordings and one of my least favorite.)
So, accepting all these shortcomings, do you still want to fill up about seven feet of shelf space with these boxes? I expect them to be keeping me company for the rest of my life, and I’m sure that although I’ll play through every disc in the years to come, I’ll never have enough time to absorb all the material. I’m still glad I have them. So I’m going to tell you how I recommend buying them. But let me add that you might want to keep an eye on eBay’s auction listings. As I write, used copies of all five boxes are on offer, and the high bid on each is $75, but they have only a few hours to run and will be gone by the time this posts. Still, they could show up again. For more reliable purchases, a combination of Amazon and eBay will serve you best:
Classic Jazz: available through Amazon for $81.31 (prices listed include shipping).
Big Bands: available through Amazon for $80.00
Swing Time: available through eBay for $149.99 “or best offer.” Also available new or used from amazon
Bebop Story: available through Amazon for $80.33.
Modern Jazz: available through eBay for $199.99 “or best offer,” Amazon for $165.74.
I don’t know why the “Modern Jazz” set is offered at so much higher a price. However, I tried making “best offers” on the sets I bought (from a seller in Germany, who charges no additional shipping). I got “Swing Time” for $120, “Modern Jazz” for $125. My total outlay for the entire series was just a bit over $500.
The entire set is available from amazon, under the title “The World’s Greatest Jazz Collection”
