← New Books Network
New Books Network
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
01:14:40
Loading summary
Transcript130 lines
- [00:01]
A
This Friday see what critics are calling a cold blooded masterpiece.
- [00:05]
B
Hello Finny. Your back. Dead is just a word. Did you think our story was over?
- [00:13]
A
Discover the secret. It's brought us here for a reason. Behind the mask.
- [00:17]
B
What do you think happens when you die?
- [00:19]
A
It's time to find out. You can honk. I'm not afraid of you. You should be. Black Phone 2 only in theaters Friday. Rated R under 17. Not admitted without parenting. Every drop of Jack Daniels is mellowed through sugar maple charcoal, giving Jack its smooth taste. That's what makes Jack Jack.
- [00:39]
B
Please drink responsibly. Jack Daniels and Old no.
- [00:41]
A
7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, I'm Nathan Smith, host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure to speak with Darren Miller, Associate professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music, which is part of the University of Rochester. About the book at the Vanguard of A Cultural History of the Long Played Record in Jazz, which was published by Duke University Press in 2024 to steal some Good Words from the Inside Flap in at the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Miller examines how the advent of the long playing record, or LP in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP's increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Miller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus work to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Miller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of black modernity in the 1950s, and with that, Darren, welcome.
- [03:25]
B
Thanks for having me Nathan, excited to be here.
- [03:27]
A
So before we jump into the book itself, could you first say a little bit about yourself and how you got into this project?
- [03:35]
B
Yes. Well, I'm a musicologist who is primarily interested in sound and what sound could tell us about the world. I've been interested in jazz since my days as a performer. Went to music school, majored in saxophone performance, and I had a dual degree in classical and jazz performance. And so I've kind of lived a hybrid lifestyle ever since then and continues to this day with my scholarship being in the jazz realm and my teaching primarily at Eastman, in more of a classical music history in the 20th century. So I like being in between things. And so my background, I think, kind of set me up for an interesting or a way in which to engage with music in a bunch of different ways. Now, in terms of the project itself, I wanted to write originally, actually, I wanted to write a project about live records. And I got interested in that because of the pull that I. The pull on our imagination as jazz listeners that sort of capturing of the live moment seems to have. And this was, of course, with conversations that I had with people throughout my learning to listen to jazz. And so I was kind of interested in why and how live recording, kind of what it said, it sort of said about documenting jazz history and what it said about the performers and the relationship between technology and performance. And in any case, I ended up writing a list of live records and I started doing some research about them. And I quickly realized that it was much more complicated than I initially thought. There were so many different types of live records. There were ones that were found or bootlegged. There was ones that were off the radio. There were ones that were made in a studio, ones that were made in a small venue, in a large venue, some that were recorded 50 years before they were released, some that were made and manufactured to be live. And I just realized that there were so many different things here. And as I started to sort of realize that there was a much larger story here. And so what I did is I started looking at who was in charge and who made the decisions about the production process, both about in terms of the technology and the recording, but also just the record companies. And I was especially interested in the dynamics between those entities and musicians and how musicians position themselves and how they thought about that in relationship to their music. And so as I realized that there was this larger story, I ended up. It was really only then that I said, oh, I think that a focus on a specific time period and a Specific format is the way to go. And that's what got me to focus on the jazz lp also realizing that it wasn't just a story of live records, but it was actually a story about production and about a format and its relationship to jazz musicians more generally.
- [06:20]
A
Yeah, no, that's, that's fantastic. That's fascinating. And yes, I can sympathize as a guitarist. This kind of like weird hybrid life that you have to live where you're, you know, it's like you, you can play rock and jazz and jazz has been in, you know, kind of enmeshed in the university and you know, a much more sophisticated way, I suppose, than rock has. But you also have to be a classical musician and teach, you know, with, you know, certain conservatory style students and at least, you know, bridge those gaps and try to speak to both audiences. So yeah, can, can absolutely relate there. And with the, Yeah, I mean, with this, with the turn to the lp and this will kind of get us into some of, some of the book is this is the moment in which such long form, and indeed that's what LP or long play stands for, is what kind of like undergirds some of this. So it makes sense that as you're like going through all these processes, you know, like, how is this being distributed? This is also at the moment in which having something like a long set or multi track or multi song recordings or really long song recordings becomes possible as well. And as we'll probably get into its relationship to magnetic tape as well. But for those not steeped in the media history, I want to briefly set the stage for the listeners on a more material or nuts and bolts level before we dive into some of the social implications that you track that emerge out of this. So imagine I go into a record store in 1938 and I asked the vendor for one Duke Ellington, please, what would I be handed, Likely handed. And how would that change if I repeated that exact same experiment in, I don't know, 1958?
- [08:23]
B
Yeah, it's of course a good question that kind of gets at some of the center of the technological change, I guess. Two things I would, I'd say one, asking for one Duke Ellington would never work because there's multiple Duke Ellington's always right. So I like the framing.
- [08:37]
A
Very true.
- [08:39]
B
The second thing that I would say is that records are always cultural objects, no matter when and how you look at them. So as much as it's about nuts and bolts, it's also a window into sort of how I think about media. So in 1938. There's a couple things that your answer would actually depend on. It would depend on where you were. For example, distribution was quite limited. And so stores had different records and had different distribution arrangements with record companies. It would even depend, neighborhood to neighborhood or sometimes in certain regions, you would have certain things that were available and not other places. And so it was quite Regional in 1938. But let's just assume that you were in a place that had Duke Ellington and you went in and you said, I'm interested in the latest Duke Ellington, whatever that would be. And the record store would have a bunch of shelves and in those shelves would be brown paper sleeves with records in them. And if this was Duke Ellington, it would most likely be a 10 inch record. Because at that time 10 inches was associated. That was the size that popular music came on. And Duke Ellington was sort of within the popular music frame of mind. Now if you're a classical listener, you might get a 12 inch record. And so there was a certain way in which genres were coded into the actual physical elements of the medium. In any case, what would happen is that you'd be handed, let's say you selected whatever it is song that you wanted and you'd be handed a 10 inch record. It would be a shellac record. It'd be quite heavy and very brittle. So if you dropped it, it would break and you'd be handed it in a brown paper sleeve. Usually they were brown, sometimes there were other colors. And what you would do is on that, that brown paper sleeve would have no indication of what the record, what was on the record. The label itself would have information about Duke Ellington. Rarely did it have personnel, although sometimes it did. It usually had just the track and legal things for copyright and whatnot. In any case, you would bring it home and you would put it in an album that looked like a photo album. And that's where the term album actually comes from, is you had these different 10 inch records that were sort of in an album. And people would write notes about it, they would write personnel, they'd write listening notes and things like that. And so it was a much more process in which you would curate things in 1938 with the shellac closer to.
- [10:54]
A
You know, like a, you know, closer to what we might call like a, you know, like if you were creating a CD or, or now I even like creating a playlist. Like it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like, hey, here are, you know, here's, you know, to jump ahead, like can't or Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, where you have, you know, the five, six tracks that make up the record. And they're. There's something holding them together. It's more like you would just get so what? Or you know, a single track that you would then, you know, modularize a little bit.
- [11:26]
B
Yeah, exactly. But. And even in that, that example reveals another difference too, is that, you know, so what is a much longer track? In 1938 you'd only be able to record three minutes per side, about maybe a little bit more, depending on the record. And so there was very little information about the music. And the music wasn't necessarily. You weren't buying a ton of music at any one time. And yes, and you would be able to curate things in a lot, kind of in a different way. So if you were to then repeat the process in 19 or repeat the experiment in 1958, you're talking about a whole different world of records. The record industry exploded in the 1950s in part because of the post war boom, but also because of the rise of rock and roll. And record companies realizing that they had a younger demographic that they could sell to. And that actually ended up being really good for a lot of different people, including a lot of jazz musicians, because there was just a broad audience and there's more money flowing and it was just easier to sort of record in that way. The other thing too is that ellington in the 1950s, by 1958 was with Columbia, which had national distribution. It was one of the major record labels. And so you would just have more of a chance of getting an Ellington record then. And so if you were to walk into a record store one, you wouldn't have a paper sleeve. You would have a 12 inch record with a nice cover and probably liner notes that explain something about the. Either the history of the tracks or who the musicians were, or some sort of story about how that record came to be. That larger size also meant that you had more music per side because of a different material it was made out of. Instead of shellac, which was very brittle, you had plastic, which meant that you could have narrower grooves and more basically more information per side. So you had a larger size and also a greater density of information. So you had 22 and a half minutes per side. So it was just a totally different world in terms of how you might consume that music. The other thing too is that the LP was very much marketed to a white middle class audience. And so there's certain things about Ellington's records that would also kind of cater to that as well. And I guess the last thing I'll note is that not in Ellington's case, but in someone else's case like Cannonball Adderley or Louis Armstrong. You also might have additional formats. You could have 45s, you could have EPS. And there are some different ways of engaging with the music that wasn't just a long form record.
- [13:44]
A
Yeah, no, and that's a good thing to like one talk about how these types of things were inflected regionally and socio. Culturally. I mean a big thing with a lot of you know, or one of the early types of like aspects of like jazz history in Dealing with these 78s was the idea of like what we would now call like, you know, like searching through the stacks or the crates in like places like, you know, I don't know. For me it'd be like you go to Goodwill and you look through all of the records. They have a lot of these like early things, not some. I mean Duke Ellington had a little bit broader thing, but some like the early Louis Armstrong. And some of these things that are, are heralded as some of like the original classics of, of jazz were often much more racially and regionally restrained. And then they, you know, they went out of, they went out of fashion at some point. They end up in like a Goodwill. So they're like the idea of like hunting through crates of records started all the way back in the 30s as like a, a cultural practice as well of like trying to one get over that but also wanting to find the, you know, your little treasure, your little treasure chest of like, oh, I found this really rare record in the middle of nowhere. But yeah, you know, the, the larger shift of like it seems like there are two sides that you kind of brought out. One is the increased length, but one is also like the entire. And as you track in the book, the entire packaging, you know. So like when you said the label on the 78, I mean much like if I imagine some listeners at some point have seen like, like a, a long play record, you know, the type of like 12 inch, it has a little disc on the inside, maybe with a picture maybe, you know, or like on the inner aspect that has some like metadata. Here's the tracks, here's the person, as you say, the legal stuff. That was basically all you got with the 78.
- [15:47]
B
And I'm making very little, yeah, very little information. You know, actually it's not too unlike streaming today where you just, you often don't have a lot of information in the metadata. There's some of it there, but it's very uneven and, and depends on what genre it is too.
- [16:00]
A
Yeah, no, and so like, when you get these larger things, you also, as you, you know, you talk about in the book as well, you get. This is where, you know, you get the, the, the cardboard sleeve with the picture, you know, and then you flip it over and there's like all of this. You know, it could be journal articles, it could be the history, it could be whatever, you know, and sometimes with like, you know, eventually when you get into like, rock LPs, if people have seen things like the, like Led Zeppelin records, for instance, I don't know, you don't necessarily get the. Let me explain to you how this song was put together. Probably at most you might get the lyrics as well as maybe a personnel, you know, track and like some more metadata. But especially that's like an interesting thing with these, like, especially mid century and continuously for jazz records, there's this like, impulse to explain what you're about to hear or frame it in various ways and towards various types of things. Like you flip over and you get, you know, a whole, you know, not necessarily like a thesis, but you get, you get like a little article on the back often.
- [17:09]
B
Yeah. And certainly some of them were like theses. I mean, they were, some of them were quite in depth and they wanted to tell you a certain story about the music. And so this was also a way in which, like, information about the music circulated and also a way that narratives were shaped as well. And often who was doing the liner note. Writing also really mattered in that context too, because whoever was writing it was. It was. They were writing it for a certain audience. And so again, you start to see how all the different parts of the record are actually really embedded in a certain kind of assumption about audiences and also a certain kind of cultural practice.
- [17:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, and you know, just to flag one more thing that you mentioned with that is, as jazz was being fashioned as a long play, middle class, largely white audience, that's a lot of that had to do also with the, you know, the 45s were what, you know, you put in jukeboxes and, and rock and R and B and these types of things like the, what the, what the kids were listening to were circulating on, you know, 45s.
- [18:07]
B
Yeah.
- [18:08]
A
Which is a much more modular. It in some sense kind of picks up the modularity and the low information density of the package because you could still buy 45s, you know. Yeah, of course, my mom, I just, I'VE been curating my mom's and turning them into a playlist for her on Spotify. So she can, like that's nice because she doesn't have a record player, but she loves these, you know, so like that. I mean that was there, but you know, so there that. I love that you bring out that the. This is simultaneously technological, about the length about the packaging, but it's also embedded in these like larger corporate social processes. And throughout the text, you know, you're constantly weaving together these various parts. So I to start jumping into some of the chapters and pull out like that's a good. That sets us up nicely. And like what are some of these dynamics or the vectors that you could follow? So one of them is what you call the documentary impulse. So there's a lot to talk about in jazz around the nexus of improvisation, authenticity and spontaneity. So can you tell us a little bit about Prestige Records and this documentary impulse?
- [19:26]
B
Yeah, sure. So Prestige Records was a small independent record company that was formed in 1949. And the important thing to think, to know about these small independent record labels is that they were very much like first they were very budget operations. They had to really fight for, for a place in the market. And then the second thing to know about them is that they're very much at the. Is whim the right word or there's. They. They're very much curated by their owners. Right.
- [19:52]
A
And so subject to the whims of the owners or something.
- [19:56]
B
Yeah, I mean whims almost makes it sound like it's. It's too whimsical, I guess. I mean it in terms of that like the, the people who owned it, you know, their values come through in the way that they produced records. And that's true of I think any record label in a way. And that has historical connections as well. But in the case of Prestige, that was owned by someone named Bob Weinstock who actually started as a record collector. He was sort of a white middle class guy. He got really into jazz. He started a record company to record what he considered to be modern or sort of advancing and people on the cutting edge. And he really, you know, he had an emphasis on emerging artists for. Because one, they were cheaper than big stars and two, because he was really invested in this kind of more cutting edge music and people at the forefront, at the edge. And as a result he ended up recording a lot of folks that were associated with bebop and its sort of aftermath in the, in the, in the 1950s. And so you kind of have these different dynamics where you're recording people often on their first record label or on their first record deal. People who are maybe a little bit younger, they're a little bit more adventurous, but then they were also on a budget. And so what happened is that they would bring people into the studio. It was very loose. They just wanted to get material out so that they could then release it on record. So they had more of a jam session. Aesthetic mistakes were often in it. They sort of sold that as part of what made their records different. There was a looser feeling about it than you might expect on maybe some of the more commercial acts. And so what happened is that Weinstock needed to embrace this feeling of looseness in the marketing, right? It became a marketing strategy as much as anything else, or I guess an economic strategy, and one in which he then kind of matched his own kind of feelings about the music. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move.
- [21:56]
A
Another smart move.
- [21:57]
B
Having State Farm help you create a.
- [21:59]
A
Competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling.
- [22:03]
B
Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.
- [22:10]
A
Coverage options are selected by the customer.
- [22:12]
B
Availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [22:18]
A
I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays hit different when you earn them. We've got you covered with outdoor power equipment from Cobalt and everything you need to weatherproof your deck with Trex decking, plus with lawn care from Scotts and of course, pit boss grills and accessories, you can get a home field advantage all season long. So get to Lowe's, get it done, and earn your Sunday. Lowe's official partner of the NFL.
- [22:47]
B
So he starts recording all of these different musicians and he sort of realizes as the years go on also that, like, he's recording some people that then become big stars. And so he's also then wanting to sell his records as, like, hear them when they were young, hear them when they were just developing. And so there's, there's kind of this real impulse. And by impulse I just mean this, like, real desire to want to make, make the records part of the narrative of jazz history. And so it was really wanting to document how jazz was developing, documenting the music of the time. And Weinstock also happened to be a jazz part of a generation of record makers who very much wanted to preserve jazz in their own View of what they thought was important. Thinking about jazz as a spontaneous form of improvisation, but also one that is one quote, unquote, modern. And they use this term again and again to sort of sell their records. And because of that, again, because of his own situation, there was kind of a way in which these kind of white men record producers really thought of themselves as curators of jazz history.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah, no, and that's. It's an interesting tension there that you're. That, like, you're. That you bring to the fore in this of, like, the idea of wanting to just document. And the implicit idea of, like, look, here's the thing, as it happened, I'm not doing too much intervening. We're presenting or putting out a certain informality or looseness perhaps in the. Like, you might get some banter in the studio, something like that. But there's simultaneously, as you just mentioned, this desire to curate, you know, so there's the tension of like, look, our hands are entirely off, but also our hands are incredibly, you know, like, we're deeply involved in this process of framing.
- [24:35]
B
Absolutely. And this also happened when there was mistakes in the studio because they didn't want to necessarily record more because that meant more time and money. And so there was this also this way of wanting to like, how do we. How do we sell these mistakes as something that is. Is not a liability, but an asset?
- [24:50]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [24:51]
B
And the LP ends up being this really important medium for that because as Prestige moves from the 78 to. To the LP, they start needing to. To fill records on the one hand and then also needing to sell them in. In this particular way. And so all these things kind of come together. They start producing LPs and they start including liner notes. They get more so in terms of their covers. The early covers were these very. Just like stock images of people recording or block lettering. And then by the mid-50s, you have these really experimental typeface and he's hiring these artists that are making these really kind of out there for the time record covers. And they become known for their record covers, in fact. But in part it all comes from this combination of sort of aesthetics and economic realities. And so that was like really sort of important to what. What Prestige was doing at the time. And I used documentary impulse to sort of describe. As a way of describing some of these dynamics and how they sort of actually work in terms of the decisions around record record making.
- [25:56]
A
Yeah.
- [25:57]
B
But there's one other thing that I want to say though, too, is that the real reason I ended up kind of getting into this is. Or maybe not the real reason, but one of the things that I wanted to emphasize also with this is that there are also sort of consequences that ended up happening that had nothing to do with Weinstock. And what this meant for musicians. Again, that's one of the core concerns that I had is what did it mean when they start putting more and more of these elements on record? What does this mean for musicians? And in this case, what it meant is that their expertise began to circulate in different kinds of ways. Of course, they had the longer solos. We also hear their voices in a new way where you wouldn't have heard them in a 78. Because there just wasn't time necessarily. I mean, there's exceptions, but for the most part that was true. So we hear their musical ability. We hear their personalities a little bit different. We also hear their compositions. Right. This is a time in which we're moving from standards into more of a. People are composing and wanting to put their compositions on record in a different kind of way. I shouldn't say that it didn't happen before, but that was definitely happening more so in that generation of musicians. And so musicians were able to take advantage in a situation which they didn't necessarily have control over a lot of things. But there were sort of some additional consequences that were really meaningful for what happened later in the 1990s.
- [27:14]
A
Yeah. No, and this, you know, just to jump in a little bit to the next chapter as well, because these dynamics kind of continue and are furthered and, you know, differently inflected. So the next chapter moves from the studio dynamics and this type of, like, you know, documentary impulse. It's still documentary impulse, but like from the studio dynamics and then toward the idea of a quote unquote, live concert recording. So you focus in particular on Avakian's editing and framing of Duke Ellington's performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. Can you say a little bit about the resulting recording and what this has to say about how we normally understand the term live or liveness?
- [28:07]
B
Yeah. So Duke Ellington signs back to Columbia. He had recorded in Columbia earlier. And one of the things that happens with people like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong is that they have a very long history, a documented history on record. And so the producers start aim to come up with new things for them to do or new material. They can't just play in a sentimental mood again, just a longer version of it. You can't do that again and again. And so Avakian had the idea he was on the Board of the Newport Jazz Festival, which was relatively new, of recording live at the Newport Jazz Festival. And they commissioned Duke Ellington to write a suite for the performance. Ellington knew that the band wasn't necessarily very well prepared ahead of time, and so they booked studio time for that as well. And so the record is actually a hybrid record. There are performances from the Newport Festival itself. And there are also performances that were in the studio with applause that was added after the fact that the announcements actually that begin and end the record are also heavily edited. They're from a totally different time in the performance. And when the performances were released in full. You can actually trace how Avakian ended up sort of splicing things together. Now, of course, Newport 1956 is known for the famed solo of Paul gonzalves. He plays 26 choruses of blues. The crowd goes crazy. This is sort of this moment in Ellington history where he's reaching a crowd in a different kind of way. It's credited as revitalizing his career in a way. Now, the interesting thing about this story is that Paul Gonzalez, when he goes up to play, he plays into the wrong microphone. He plays into the VOA microphone instead of the Columbia recording microphone. And so this presents a problem of production. What do you do when you have this amazing moment? And they knew immediately that it was an amazing moment. What do you do when it doesn't sound the way that you want it to sound or doesn't quite quite capture that feeling? And so what Avakian did is he did a lot of things in post production. He did things with equalization. He added crowd noise in part to mask some of that production and in part to also embed a kind of feeling of what it was like at the event. And so by liveness, and the reason I come back to this term of live and liveness on record is because it is a feeling of being live. If you think about liveness as being defined as the presence or the feeling of being live, then you also have to think about it in relationship to recorded media. And recorded media are always constructed. And so the question is, how do you create a feeling of being live? And so that the answer to that question has to do with who is in charge, what kind of decisions they make. It also depends on where and when they're making their decisions. So it's historically contingent. Liveness and live means something different in the 1950s than it does today. And so I'm very much was interested in what did it mean to record. And the story is good of just how this happens and what do you do with this? But I was also interested in like, well, what does a 1950s record producer want to do with this live moment? And I think it's very easy to just be like, oh, well, it's fake. The liveness is fake. But is it fake if he's trying to recreate the feeling of being there? And so the question is like, well, liveness, to whom and in what ways is this created? And I think the critique of it just being fake is actually doesn't tell the whole story, of course.
- [31:26]
A
Yeah, no, I, I, I, this is a perennial problem in, well, both media studies, but also to the extent that there is a subfield called liveness studies. Like they're always imbricated, implicated, you know, in one another. And just to like, this is a persistent problem. And I was just doing, I was teaching the history of pop and rock music or Taing and leading a section on music videos. And I had to inform some of the students that even live performances, like, you know, the original Beatles performance of on the It's Alvin Show, I think it was. And I'm like, do you notice how like the guitar isn't plugged in anything, you know, like, and like you, it's this type of things and people are like, wait, so there's lip syncing. And I did have a student, so like, wait, so that's fake? I'm like, no, it's not fake, right? Like, like it, it is a testament to the fact that you are a 20 year old at, you know, in this case, like Yale. You're allegedly a smart individual and I do think you are and you believe that it was good enough. It, this is what a live, you know, X, Y and Z would look like. Like, it's more of, it's not so much to, you know, when people just say like, oh, it's fake. It's like you're just brushing it away when that's the exact moment that you can push more and add more into. It's like, well, yeah, it isn't what you thought it was, but it's actually way more complex and way more interesting. And you have to add in technology, media history, cultural construction, all these other types of dynamics.
- [33:05]
B
Yeah, and you're exactly right. It's just, you know, I think that also it's interesting to think about some of these iconic performances, whether that's the Beatles on it, Sullivan or du Guington in 1956. And from a more of, you know, cultural studies and media studies angle. And I think once you Start to do that. That's the power of some of the. That. That kind of thinking is to sort of. How do we unpack these in some different ways?
- [33:28]
A
Yeah, no, exactly. And. And then, you know, to. I had to break it to. To, like, take it one step forward. You know, I. I mean, because now kids are students. They're adults. But, you know, like, the. You know, the. The students are more.
- [33:43]
B
It's.
- [33:44]
A
I'm always shocked by how young they are. And I'm like, wait, yeah, you grew up after 9, 11 and after the. The wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl. Yes, infamous, you know, And I was.
- [33:56]
B
Like, often credited for the rise of YouTube as well. Right, Exactly.
- [34:00]
A
Yeah, no, exactly, right. And it's like, no, well, I still want to see this. And let's just. Let's. How can we distribute it? And then also to remind them that basically any live recording, quote unquote, that they watch, like, a live super bowl performance is on a delay so that they can control for that. And then I reminded them, like, you guys are on social media. The most recent, you know, like, the Kendrick Lamar halftime show, there were protests, like, from members of the. Of the camera. And we don't need to go, you know, go into it here, but it's like those circuit. It was a very interesting thing where you did not see those on your tv, but they were circulating on social media of like, did you see the person with the flag and he's running around, like, the field waving a flag like it was one of the dancers. But it, like, that's one of the things that they can do. They can be like, okay, well, now in the main shot, there is something we don't want to see. Let's go over to camera two. You know, like, they can. They can make these types of distinctions. So. Which, again, isn't to say that, like, did I watch a live recording of the super bowl performance? Yeah, sure, whatever. Like, it's not to say, like, no, it's. But it is a more complex story, which you kind of bring here with this.
- [35:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, actually, the. The question, is it, like, real or fake? Is actually an uninteresting question a lot of times because it doesn't actually lead you to anything, and it just kind of lets you just chase kind of a myth of authenticity about what is real and what is not, rather than kind of investigating why we even care if something is real and how we define that in the first place.
- [35:34]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [35:36]
B
Well, cool.
- [35:36]
A
I mean, to keep with this. This discussion of how. How things are being presented as other than what they are, but also not, not in a deflationary, like, let's pop the bubble. You thought this was real, it's fake. So let's talk about Dizzy. So I think it has been talked about enough in just like popular culture, that's become something of familiar knowledge of the use of the US. Sorry, the US's use of jazz and jazz musicians as Cold War cultural ambassadors. So can you tell us a little bit about that, just briefly, and then talk about the fascinating framing of the two LPs of Dizzy Gillespie about his travels abroad?
- [36:29]
B
Sure. So Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie was in fact, the first jazz ambassador. They weren't really talked about at that time, and there were certainly other people that were traveling and performing abroad, of course, but Dizzy Gillespie was the first person that was hired by the State Department to be part of what was called the Cultural Presentations Program. And to give you a little bit of the backstory. So between 1945, at the end of World War II and 1960, so 15 years, roughly a quarter of the world's population. So that's. I have a number in the book, I think it's 800 million people gained independence. So you're at a moment in which the whole political dynamic is changing around the world, also its economic element as well, which is also undergirding a lot of this. And as a result, the US government, which is in this, like this kind of fight for hearts and minds as well as political control with the Soviets, they're in this, you know, the Cold War of trying to gain influence in the world for all these different reasons. And what the USSR kept doing is they kept highlighting the Jim Crow laws and the violence and racial capitalism that was at the heart of the American system. And so that was a perceived weakness. And so this was of course, right at the time in which the Civil Rights movement was getting started as well. But the U.S. government, which was of course very conservative in terms of this, was not changing any laws anytime soon. But the State Department realized that they needed to do something about the way that the US was perceived abroad. And so they had a cultural presentations program in which it was kind of a soft power exchange of arts and culture. And so they begin to send African Americans all around the world, so authors, athletes, and musicians to help with this specific problem. So jazz ends up becoming part of this. Jazz was one of the US's greatest exports. And it was also one of the things, musically that we could really call our own. We could send the Philadelphia Orchestra, but they would be playing European music. So that didn't really make sense in a way that jazz had a certain kind of gravity towards it. And they ended up sending Dizzy Gillespie with his big band. He did two tours in a number of different countries. And Dizzy Gillespie's record company at the time, which was Norgrand, which then soon changed to Verve, during this time, people will most likely recognize Verve Records decided to record this ensemble and their music. And they got a man named Marshall Stearns to write the liner notes. Marshall Sterns was the founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies. He was an academic in English that also ran a hot club, a listening session, when he was a grad student or. Yeah, when he was a grad student at Yale. Yeah. And that's where he met Avakian. And Vakyan was part of that as well. So anyway, they send. Along with Dizzy, they send Marshall Stearns to document. He wrote a bunch of different articles that he sent back to the United States. A lot of them appeared in media, all throughout the media ecosystem. So they get Marshall Stearns to write the liner notes. And in the liner notes, Marshall Sterns says, this is the band that performed abroad. And the thing that happens is that the actual recordings are just studio recordings of the big band. They're quite nice recordings. The band sounds really good. The arrangements are very good. But that wasn't representative of what actually happened on tour. On tour, they told a history of jazz where they played a bunch of different styles, and they kind of ran through the history of jazz in a way that was not going to sell in a record. And so on the one hand, you have liner notes and the record cover and the title. Right. World Statesman is the first record and Dizzying Grease. And it's pointing to these tours, while the actual sounds are much more. They're not really representative of the tours itself. And so I was interested in these records as a way that the people that were involved, which is, of course, Dizzy Gillespie, Marshall Sterns and Norman Grant, who ran the record label, worked in collaboration to sell jazz, to sell jazz as a. What they say in the liner notes, a worldwide force for goodwill. And so there's very much a way in which these records were used as. And to literally package a narrative around jazz at the time, which, of course, fits into all these other broader narratives about Cold War, about racial relations, about the place of black music in the cultural imagination of the United States.
- [41:02]
A
Yeah, and the. The, you know, you. You talk through some of, like, his travels and, you know, he has the. He goes to Greece, he Goes to Syria. Those are some of the bigger ones. But I mean, if I'm remembering correctly, it's you. You also go into some of the South American. I'm just like, bring this out. Because we just talked about, like, protest in relation to how it gets filtered out. I believe that. Was there something in the South American concerts he did where he, like, did talk a little bit more about, like, not so much presenting, like, the State Department front of, oh, being black in America is fine. Look at me, I'm an ambassador, you know, that type of thing. But he would, like, in his kind of, like, stage banter and in some of his gimmicks and. And things he did, like, talk more honestly or more like not on behalf of the State Department, but on behalf of himself. Yeah, I can remember if I'm. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:01]
B
There's a couple things I think you might be thinking about. The riots that were happening in Greece at the time. And, yeah, when they arrived in Greece, there were these huge riots that were happening and there was this anti. And the history is a little too much for our purposes here, but there was a lot of, like, anti American sentiment. And so the story that they tell is, of course, that Dizzy played and they calmed down the crowd, and then by the end, they were all together celebrating. So, again, this is kind of this narrative that they're offering, and there's some photo evidence to suggest that it's not entirely untrue. Again, I'm not interested in necessarily the ins and outs of exactly what was happening at that moment. So I think that you were thinking about the kind of those Greece protests.
- [42:47]
A
Yeah.
- [42:47]
B
But the other side is that Dizzy Gillespie was always politically minded, as a lot of jazz musicians were, and he was not going to let anyone tell him what he could and couldn't say. And in some. In some ways that actually worked to the State Department's benefit, because he could go over there and say, I'm not going to say the company line. I'm going to tell you about how difficult it is. But also, look at me, I'm up here. I have my band, you know, and we have this. You know, they had a. Two women that were. They were traveling with them as well. It was a mixed band, so there was. There was white and black musicians as well. And so there's a way in which they sort of performed a certain kind of integration otherwise. And the fact that Dizzy could sort of speak out and he was asked about things like Emmett Till, which was, you know, happened right around that time, and he could Speak out about that actually made the case for the State Department that freedom actually meant a way in which, like, people had the freedom to criticize or to talk about these issues in the open.
- [43:42]
A
Yeah, things that. Things that have aged really well. But no, you. Like, you're absolutely right. Like, there is a way in which you can spin it where you're like, yeah, you're critiquing the government, but that's just proof of concepts like, this is how this works, which can, you know, again, you can simultaneously talk about, like. Like, you know, the brutality of black life while simultaneously presenting, like. But yeah, it's okay. America's good. Because I can say I can talk about it to you on the State Department's dime, you know, and, like, it ends up all kind of, like, coming out in the wash in a certain sense.
- [44:21]
B
And there was also a way in which he could perform the history of his music that he was really invested in. And there was then, I mean, and therefore, it was a way of kind of showing, like, this amazing creation that they made, too. And so the amazing tradition that he was a part of. And there was a kind of a celebratory aspect which I think was genuine. So. And I think, you know, to say it's one or the other again, it's always more interesting when it's a little of both and an extra for everything in between.
- [44:49]
A
The new Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is the definition of fire flavor. We've got the sizzling Sriracha dippers.
- [44:56]
B
10 out of 10. Time to take it up a notch with the smoking rojo chicken sandwich. Mmm, that's so hot, but it's so good.
- [45:04]
A
Now onto the daring dab ghost wings. Yep, there it is. I love the spice level. Attempt the Popeyes on Hot Ones menu in stores. Our hottest collaboration yet. Love that chicken from Popeyes. Limited time in participating US Restaurants. Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier.
- [45:32]
B
Sugar free.
- [45:34]
A
Unlike other energy drinks.
- [45:36]
B
You know, the ones that make you.
- [45:38]
A
Feel like you're glitching. It's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes.
- [45:41]
B
So you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier.
- [45:46]
A
Sugar free hydrating energy.
- [45:48]
B
Tap the banner to learn more.
- [45:49]
A
Yeah, no. And this I'm not sure if you've seen. This is not your. Your book. It just. I watched it. I think it came out last year. Did you happen to see the documentary? The soundtrack or a soundtrack To a, oh, I, I, I, I encourage you. Like, I think you will enjoy it. But it's about this, the cultural ambassadors and the assassination of Patrice Lumumbe in the Congo and how, you know, it's, it's playing all of these things. They're talking about Dizzy, Louis Armstrong going to play in the Congo as well as part of, you know, so in addition to the Cold War like this was, there was a cultural front. Right. And it is in some sense documentary about that. But, but it's also a documentary about, I, I think it was the CIA embedding with Louis Armstrong to attempt to assassinate the like leftist, I can't remember it's prime minister or president, like the, the very popular figure, you know, in, in the Congo. But it's so it's, it's in this kind of like, you know, to, it takes us away from the, the specificity of the record. But it does talk more broadly about both the cultural Cold War, but also perhaps embedding within this thing and also doing, you know, more hot war stuff or assassinations. But yeah, it's a, it's a Dutch film, obviously.
- [47:16]
B
Well, I'll have to, I'll have to check that out. But one of the things that it made me think of too is that the way the, the places that they sent Dizzy were very much tied to what the CIA was doing as well. And so there's, there's always these elements of hot and, and cold, the soft and the hard, hard power. And this is what a lot of the scholars who have wr have said. And I'll particularly flag Ingrid Munson's Freedom sounds, which really kind of talks about this in depth. And I eventually ended up writing about this. For a while I was on the fence about writing about this because I felt like it had already been done to a degree in which I didn't think I could add anything. But then I realized that, I think that the medium of the LP sort of was engaging with these same politics and they were engaging with it not necessarily abroad, but at home. And what did it mean to sell these, these, these tours to an audience at home? You know, I mean, the, the records were sold in other places around the world, but it was primarily for you. It was designed for a US based audience, right?
- [48:17]
A
Yeah, like Disney and Greece was not being sold in Greece, like, or in, or in, even in Greek, you know, it's in English. It's been distributed in the United States, largely. Yeah, the Western, you know, front.
- [48:30]
B
And I've looked at some of the records I Only have photos of them, but some of the records that were sold in other countries, and a lot of times the liner notes were not included. And so that's, I think, also a signal of. Of something as well. And how. How different things were marketed to different populations.
- [48:46]
A
Yeah, no, and that's. I mean, I had the same thing. It's like, this has been talked about quite a bit. I had never thought about, like, those records and. And like. Oh, yeah. Who is the audience for this record, this Dizzy Jazz ambassador? You know, it's like, is it just. We're capitalizing on the fact that Dizzy is working with the State Department kind of, or we're just fighting communism? And then it's like, oh, wait, yeah, we're. We're the target. Like, we, like, we are the audience for this. Which is interesting, you know.
- [49:15]
B
Well, and again, back to the kind of the. The unintended or the. The other consequences for musicians is that this was also a big moment for jazz to be recognized by the US Government as something of value. Yeah. And so I think Dizzy Gillespie, as much as he might have been, I don't know, I mean, he writes about this in his autobiography. But as much as he was, you know, criticizing certain elements of US Culture, he also recognized that it was a great way for him to sort of create status for himself and for his music. And so that's not something that should just be ignored either. And so it's quite complex in terms of the way that musicians are thinking about these dynamics as well.
- [49:55]
A
Absolutely, Absolutely. All right, well, let's get small scale here. So moving from international big bands to a small venue, where do Cannonball Adderley's live jazz club recordings fit within the music industry? And how does that interact with just the growing hard bop culture that he was a part of?
- [50:22]
B
Yeah. So the first thing maybe I'll just say before answering your specific question about Adderley is that I organized the book. There's six chapters and sort of two chapters about the early part of the 50s, two chapters about the middle part of the 50s, and then two chapters are the end of the 50s, and with two records specifically from 1959. And 1959 has this real pull for jazz historians as this moment in which there was a great musical revolution. That was the year that Giant Steps was recorded. That was the year that Kind of Blue came out. That was the year that Ornette Coleman was. That was doing some of his experiments. And I wanted to end there as a moment of saying 1959 has these other stories as well. And I ended up matching these two records, Cannonball Adderley Live in San Francisco and Mingus and Mingus Aum as Two records from 1959 that tell kind of a parallel story. And they exist as a pair, but also very different. Adderley is someone who embraced popular styles. He embraced a kind of crossover success, and he kind of worked within the industry in a way, despite being politically active in other ways. And Mingus is much more of a contrarian, someone who is progressively. Yes, yeah. He wants to fight in that kind of way. And so these two figures ended up being an important part of the story. And because I'm ending in 1959, I'm also finding a way to retell the story of the 1950s in a different sort of way than what I got, than what I had before. And so I focus on Cannonball Hourly in San Francisco, which is the first time that his voice appears on record. And if you know any of Cannonball's records, you likely know his voice. The way that he introduces the music, the way that he welcomes people in, the way he educates people about his music. There's just some. There's a joy about this approach. And Cannonball in San Francisco was. It was the reconstitution of his own group. And also Riverside was smart to put his voice on record because it sort of welcomes people in to the music. And as I was thinking about this record, I was also thinking about other live records made in small jazz clubs. This is very different than Duke Ellington in Newport, which was closer to a festival. Yeah, there was a festival. It was an outdoor festival. Yeah. Ella Fitzgerald has a lot of live recordings. They're in big halls. Louis Armstrong, Big Star, was in big halls, but Cannonball was in a small club. And so you end up hearing his interactions with his musicians. You end up hearing his interactions with the audience. And I started thinking about the history of these live jazz clubs and that. And this actually gets to. The answer to your question is that then it becomes clear that, like the live records of the 1950s in jazz clubs were primarily hard bop records. They were musicians that were engaged with a certain history and orientation of black music that was drawing from all kinds of traditions. Jazz, blues, soul, R and B. Yes. And the live records. There's a bunch of live records on Blue note from the 50s. There's Art Blakey, there's Clifford Brown, there's Jimmy Smith. And there's a way in which there's a sociality that's taught about this music. Is existing from person to person. And in those records, you hear individuals saying things to the musicians rather than just a clapping of a mass audience. And so I wanted to listen closely to those moments. And Cannonball Adderley in San Francisco provided a great way to do so, in part because of his announcements, but also just because of the way that he's so dynamic with his band.
- [54:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so, like, just to make sure it's clear, kind of like, you know, we're talking about things like everything from. You've been a lovely audience tonight. Like, I mean, you're talking about that type of. But also, like, talking to the other members of the ensemble. Right. So is it both talking to the audience, introducing, commenting on what. What they're playing, but also. Yeah, so interacting with the other members.
- [54:27]
B
Yeah. So one example is that you can hear a Cannonball. I think it's Cannonball snapping his fingers. Right. And kind of saying, like, you know, different things to the band. So you hear his vocalizations. That kind of makes the music come alive in a different sort of way.
- [54:39]
A
Sure.
- [54:40]
B
Which you do hear in, like, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but there's a certain way in which the proximity. It's just much closer. It sounds closer, the way it's produced. You just sound like you're much closer to the band in a way.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah. No, yeah. It's a more intimate picture, I guess. And to draw in some of the long history of mediation and intimacy, like, that was a big thing. Very different context. But some of the first, I guess, kind of like pop stars were crooners back in the 19, like, late 1920s, into the early 1930s. People like, oh, what's his name? I'm blanking. Valley.
- [55:23]
B
Oh, Rudy Valley.
- [55:24]
A
Rudy Valley, Yeah. You know, very, very intimate. Very close mic'd. Would, you know, sing in a kind of a falsetto or high tenor. So this idea of, like, technology being able to record something. Some things, you know, in the Cannonball, not only performance that are, like, legitimate, you know, interactions at a club, but it's also like, presenting a form of intimacy. And as you were kind of talking about, instead of it being the white male crooning that, you know, at the time, women would fall over. You know, it's like, oh, he's singing to me. That type of idea. It's more about, like, a framing of, you know, like a black sociality. A type of, like, being together with. In a small community or at a small event, even.
- [56:11]
B
Absolutely. And also, you know, the way that he introduces. He doesn't just Say, like, oh, you know, thanks for coming out tonight. In a way, I mean, he really does sort of say, like, let me tell you something about this music. Let me tell. You know, he has this line about, you know, church music, and he says, you know, these are not Bach chorales, you know, and. Yeah, and so that's different. Right. And he's joking. Right? He's making. He's making a joke and the audience laughs. But he's also sort of making a differentiation to say, this is my music and it's from this tradition, and you're going to hear in that way.
- [56:40]
A
Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [56:41]
B
And also, like, welcome in. Come and listen. And so there's a way in which he is politically oriented as well. He's engaging with the broader politics of the time, but from a very different position than is often sort of talked about in the 1960s. And in a different way than, like, the. The free jazz or the avant jazz musicians were. Or even Charles Mingus. I mean, Mingus was much more confrontational in that way.
- [57:08]
A
Yeah. No, and I mean, let's. Let's jump over on into Mingus, because he's someone who similarly, I, I guess, would be on, like, often affiliated with. Or he's had, like, the intersection of this kind of, like, hard bop.
- [57:23]
B
The.
- [57:24]
A
Roots style of, like, reinvigorating and, like, bringing back in blues, gospel, R and B, whatever, but also deeply in touch with the avant garde and, you know, a more. More aligned with, like, a black radicalism approach. So he's also.
- [57:43]
B
But I would also. But I would also say just. And sorry to interrupt, but he was also engaged in, like, classical music and the hybridization of jazz and classical music as well. I mean, in Mingus's early career, he was. A lot of his music was not notated and heavily dictated. Yeah. And then he. He makes a transition to be a little bit different in a way. So I think Mingus. It's like Elliott contains multitudes always. There's never one Mingus. As you write about his autobiography, you know, his autobiography is about three Minguses, So why. Why not have multiple.
- [58:11]
A
Yeah, and. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, that's interesting that you also bring up some of, like, the notation, because in the chapter, you talk a lot about his framing of, like, authorial control or, like, whether it be splicing, editing, reframing. I mean, that might be an interesting opening from, like, being able to notate what's happening to also being able to do a little. Having a little bit more of the authorial control over the Recording and production process. So you tell us a little bit about splicing and how he kind of navigated.
- [58:54]
B
Yeah, so one of the. I mean, there's Minx is another figure that's been written about a lot, you know, in part because he's just a complicated figure. I mean, he's a contrarian and activist. You know, he's firebrand, as you said before. There's also some problematic ways in which he treated the women in his life and his musicians as well. Like, he was, you know, he's. He was always at the center of some kind of controversy, but he's also, you know, in part, he deeply cared about the things that he was fighting for. And one of those things was about the. The industry and what he saw as treatment or ill treatment of folks like himself. And so the thing about Mingus is that as much has been written about him, what I came. What I also came to realize is that not a lot was written about him as a record producer. And there's actually quite a story of him as. And that begins with, again, wanting to think differently about the record industry as a whole. So he starts his own record company, Debut Records. He actually co founds it with his wife Celia, and with Max Roach. And he did this because he wanted more control over his music and the distribution. And he runs this record label for a number of years, I think from 1952 to around 1956 or so. It depends on how you want to delineate that. The Jazz at Massey hall recordings that a lot of people know came out on Debut Records, as well as a number of other first records by. I think Paul Blay's first record is on there, Thad Jones early records of him as well. And so he starts this record company to kind of upset the conditions of the industry and have more control over it. And so he's very much, you know, he's an entrepreneur in that sense, but it's an entrepreneur with a. With an activist streak. And so I use the term in the book the avant garde entrepreneur or avant garde entrepreneurialism, which is a little bit more of a mouthful to say, but because I wanted to kind of mirror these two things, I wanted to sort of say, like, well, how is he thinking within the industry and sort of being an entrepreneur while also wanting to think very differently. Right. Because he's doing both of those things at once. And so how can we understand his activities in relationship to that? And I was really inspired by some of the Mingus scholarship, as well as an article about Mingus by Celine Washington, who was really talking about this notion of the avant garde as not a musical style, but a set of cultural practices. A way of finding a more equitable future through music, which I think really embodies Mingus approach. Now when he starts his record company, he also starts just splicing all the time. He's in the studio kind of messing with all of these pieces of music. Again, the Massey hall recordings that I mentioned, he splices all of those up a lot. There's a sections missing from certain things. There's solos that are split in at times, there's audience that's added. Those records are a total mess in terms of the production. At one point he over just really.
- [62:03]
A
Quick, just for the audience. So splicing, we're talking about like editing tape, you know.
- [62:07]
B
Oh, yes, Just.
- [62:08]
A
Just like cutting things out, adding things, adding overdubs, even. Just. Yeah, I just wanted the data.
- [62:15]
B
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm kind of going a mile a minute here.
- [62:19]
A
Interesting stuff, you know.
- [62:20]
B
Yeah. The splicing with that, you'd actually take a razor blades, the magnetic tape, and you would make a cut and then you would tape it together to another part. And this is how a lot of the editing was done, which is different than overdubbing, which is recording on top of the sound in the magnetic tape, which Mingus was also doing. And so this was a form of control, in a sense. Right. He was also controlling the sound as the person that was in charge of the kind of the musical output of his label. And I knew that some of the records had been edited, but I didn't quite understand at the time, before doing the research, how deeply embedded this practice was into Migus' just the way that he viewed his record label and his music in general. Now, Debut Records was a lot before the record that I begin the chapter with, which is Mingusa Am. But Mingusa AM is produced by Tio Massero, who was working at Columbia at the time. Teo Massero and Mingus were musicians together, and also they were kind of experimentalists together in the early 1950s. So they had a personal relationship. And the record that comes out on Columbia, it turns out that the stuff that was recorded in the studio was also spliced quite a bit. And There's I think, 11 minutes of missing music from the original recordings, which are original, the unedited studio recordings which were released later. And so I kind of got. Got into this to sort of think about, like, well, what does it mean to take improvisations and splice them up. How can we think about musicians role in this, and how does this connect to a broader history of, you know, experimental music production or maybe music production of jazz that is a little bit more invasive than is often given or thought about?
- [64:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a similar type of thing with, like, I guess, kind of the discussion of. Of liveness and the mediation thereof. It's a similar thing where it's, you know, simultaneously wanting to have something of this, like, the spontaneity of improvisation while simultaneously having control and trying to mediate that relationship of, like. I don't know. I. I remember when I was, you know, I'm a guitarist, you know, at some point we're, like, making recordings of solos. I was in a band, and one of the, you know, like, kind of like old time. Oh, one second. Did you just hear my phone go off?
- [64:49]
B
I did not.
- [64:50]
A
Thank God. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, I just got a phone call, and I heard that in my. Yeah. And that will not be spliced out. We're keeping that in. It's forming.
- [64:59]
B
Keeping it in. Yeah, we want to keep. We want to keep it slots. Yeah.
- [65:04]
A
But the.
- [65:05]
B
This.
- [65:08]
A
The, like, we had kind of like a conservative or not conservative in, like, a political sense, but like. Like an authentic, you know, like, oh, no, this is the way you have to do it, man. Was the way this guy was. And he's like, no, you can't take multiple takes of the solo. You have to just, like, play it once. And if you can't, you're lying, you know, But. But you're taking that. It's a similar analogy to that approach of, like. Like, oh, this is faked. It's like, no, it's. It's a different type of, like, navigation, you know, between, like, it's not real or not or authentic or not. It's always a more complicated story, which, for Mingus involved bringing in politics ownership as well as, you know, just kind of being his quirky self.
- [65:57]
B
Yeah. I mean, the other thing, too, with him is that he did a lot of this, I think, on his own. I don't think that he was in dialogue with his musicians as well. And I think when you're talking about a white record producer splicing black music and doing and. Or adding, you know, something in a way, like, the politics are a little bit easier and more clear to see, but with Mingus, it's just. It's just not. The dynamics are much different. And so I was really interested in that as part of Mingus's story and wanting to think about his activities in the. In the. As a producer, as part of his overall approach and one that I did not feel like had a lot of. Had really received any attention at all.
- [66:37]
A
Yeah, I had. I was like, oh, these are. I. I had. You have, you know, a number of tables where you're. You like go through. It's not Fables of Fabius Fab, but you have these tables where you kind of like indicate like, oh, here's on the recording. Here are some of the things that were taken out and making these kind of like side by sides. I had no idea, you know, I'd been listening to this album for a long time and maybe it wasn't just I can't remember what the exact tracks.
- [67:08]
B
But yeah, I mean, it was. I have the table here and it was of. Of the ones that appeared on the record, there was Goodbye Pork Pie Hat Boogie, Stop Shuffle, Open Letter To Duke, Bird Calls, Pussycat Blues and Jelly Roll were all edited. Fabus of Fabus was. Was not. But of course, famously they didn't. They didn't want him to. To record any of the lyrics.
- [67:30]
A
Yes, that was it.
- [67:31]
B
Yes.
- [67:32]
A
Yeah, but, yeah, no, it's a fact. I mean, yeah, it was fascinating. I'd never thought about it. Known about it or. Yeah, it. But I love how you like take some of that pre existing discourse on Mingus and how he positioned himself and you've furthered the, you know, furthered the discussion and like unveiled another, I guess, layer of the onion.
- [67:56]
B
And also thinking about his relationship with Tio, I mean, Tio Massero, you know, who's classically trained, he has degrees, I think from Juilliard and was interested in jazz and classical. He's white. He's a white male producer. But he's also like a real big fan of Mingus and he's the one that creates even the ability to record at Columbia, you know. So their, their collaboration is. Is also really important to this story as well. I couldn't actually find any, like, hard evidence to say that Mingus was a part of the edits or not, but I have to think that they had conversations about it and were not. It wasn't done just to Mingus, you know, alone. I think that Tio felt a lot of responsibility to making Mingus sound the best that he could.
- [68:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, we. We've talked for about an hour. Is there any. I mean, this is such a rich book with all these different vectors and tensions, but are there any things else that you want to bring out for the listeners that we just didn't touch on.
- [68:55]
B
I guess maybe just a small shout out to the first chapter, which is in some ways the most dense of chapters because it tries to tell the story of the record industry in the early 1950s. And if anyone's interested in formats and kind of the way in which formats are coded onto markets and market formats courses, I think I try to illuminate some of those things. I use that chapter to tell the history of the record industry through one song, which is called the Hucklebuck. And one thing that I actually really enjoyed writing about that chapter was that the Hucklebuck is not an especially special tune. It's kind of mundane in a lot of ways. It was recorded a lot because it was really popular. But there's something about kind of, what does it mean to focus on something that is not just the epitome of the art, like something like Mingis Al Am, which is a beloved album. But what does it mean to focus on something that is. That is popular and circulating in all these ways, but is somewhat mundane in other ways? And so I actually really enjoyed that aspect of the research is to say, like, what does it mean to think about things that are in the middle or that are a little bit mediocre in that way? What stories can we tell with that?
- [70:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's. I had a professor once who opened up the history, a history of rock class by doing a similar style. Very. You know, you were like bringing out some of the media, but like, it is interesting at that time and we would like open up the idea of what pop music was through listening to. I think it was Blueberry Hill. Oh, yes. Like a Fats Wallet. You know, there's Louis Armstrong, but there's also country covers. There's like. And it's. You're right, like that. It's in some sense kind of like the minutiae, but. But of. Of like a. A moment. You know, this is just like a pop track. But seeing how it circulates throughout this larger media, social consumer environment is really illuminating. And yeah, I. I can only. I can only second your recommendation because I. I indeed learned about new formats that I thought I. I thought I had exhausted.
- [71:04]
B
Did.
- [71:05]
A
So yeah, it's a lovely, lovely introduction.
- [71:07]
B
Well, thanks, I appreciate that. One thing I also want to highlight too is that the book is also available open access. I got a grant from the University of Rochester Libraries to make it open access. So it's available for download for free. And so I was really happy that my institution supported open access and allows that to happen. So you can go to the. It's available on the Duke website. There's a link to the open access version or certainly if you want me to send it to you, I have to. I will. So please be in touch.
- [71:38]
A
Yeah, no, I can drop it in the kind of like the show notes.
- [71:41]
B
Okay.
- [71:42]
A
Of it. Yeah, no, thank you. That's good to know. And you know, as if finishing a book wasn't enough a couple years ago, I guess. Well, 2005. 4. Do you have any current plans you're working on or anything you want to share with us?
- [71:57]
B
I'm currently thinking about another moment of technological transition and that's on the other side of the lp, but from basically the rise of digital technologies in jazz in the 1980s. And that happened across the industry. It happened in the records, in the studio, at home with the new format, the CD coming out and the DAT tape coming out, as well as on stage with. With digital instruments. And so I've been thinking about digital instruments quite a bit. I've been thinking about Herbie Hancock and his use of the synthesizer. I've been thinking about Michael Brecher and his use of the electronic wind instrument. And the ways about how 1980s, the changes that are happening in the 1980s, especially around the global politics and the global economic systems are being sort of infiltrated or sort of running through. Not infiltrated is the wrong word. How they're running through the jazz industry as the sort of post war economic order is transitioned and instead the rise of home consumer electronics and these Japanese companies come to be really big players within the industry. And so maybe to run it a little full circle then is that if you think about the Newport Jazz Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival becomes sponsored by jvc, which is Japanese company at the time. The CD is released by a Japanese company, Sony Music as well in the 1980s. Sony also buys Columbia Records. And so this is a different moment of transition that actually ties to some of the things that we've already talked about, but I'm kind of interested in that transition. So.
- [73:36]
A
Yeah, that's fascinating.
- [73:38]
B
Let's see what happens there.
- [73:40]
A
Yeah, and I for one would love to read that book and talk to you a little bit more about it.
- [73:46]
B
Well then we can just hope to reconnect then about that in a future episode.
- [73:52]
A
Sounds great. Well, thank you so much, Darren. It's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for this great book.
- [73:58]
B
Yep, thanks, Nathan.