Lyndon Grove, John Maynard Keynes & Some Hot Air
Friday, March 13, 2015
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| Henry Morgenthau Jr. & John Maynard Keynes - Photograph Alfred Eisentaedt |
The guest blog below by Lyndon Grove began on a lark. I was
reading a review of a book, The Summit – Bretton Woods, 1944 J.M. Keynes and
the Reshaping for the Global Economy by Ed Conway.
The review was illustrated with a photograph of John Maynard
Keynes and US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. It suddenly occurred to
me that Lyndon Grove (who has had a
storied career as a radio DJ, magazine editor, ad agency copywriter and
writer) looked very much like Keynes. So I emailed Grove. He replied:
Interesting about John Maynard Keynes--there is a movie
waiting to be made. I wish I had his understanding of economics--I can barely
balance my cheque book. And the really
strong resemblance was between him and my father. Both JMK and JCG (my father)
cultivated broader moustaches.
Remembering that you are a jazz aficionado, jazz falling
somewhere between tea and roses, I attach a piece for which no market exists
but which might slightly amuse.
I never did photograph Lyndon Grove so you will have to take my word of the remarkable resemblance.
GROWING
UP WITH JAZZ
Lyndon Grove
The best of the disc jockeys was Dave Garroway. Horn-rimmed, scholarly, bow-tied, episcopally voiced Dave Garroway,
broadcasting from WMAQ Chicago. Playing music we’d stay up late to
hear. But it wasn’t only the music we
were listening for—it was Garroway.
There were discoveries. “Who are the most exciting trumpet players
you’ve ever heard?” Garroway asked, and then answered,
“Louis Armstrong. Charlie Shavers. Dizzy Gillespie. Now here’s another—Chet Baker.” And some nights there was live studio music—Mel Torme, the Art Van
Damme Quintet.
Minimalist commercials for Dial Soap were
casually dropped in—“Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everyone did?” And there were always surprises--opening with an unabashedly straight song—“Here
comes Buddy Clark walking with his big flat feet all over ‘A Great Wide Wonderful
World’” and, after a particularly haunting performance—Alex
Wilder’s “While We’re Young” by Peggy Lee—just a solemn non
sequitur: “James Madison was the fourth
President of the United States”—telling you there was
nothing that could be said equal to the wonder of the music we’d heard.
Other disc
jockeys might have become better known—there are jazz classics named for
Symphony Sid, Fred Robbins and Jimmy Lyons—but among jazz cognoscenti,
among deejays themselves, Garroway stood alone.
Jack Pollard, host of “Just
Jazz” on CKCK Regina, said, “I was devastated when he went to TV.” As Terry Garner
said of Duke Ellington, “Garroway first, all others far back.”
Iconic is a word
currently overused and often misused, but Garroway truly could have been
called iconic. And if there was any disc
jockey in Canada who deserved the
term, it was Bob Smith. Bob Smith, whose “Hot Air” on CBC Radio was and is
North America’s longest-running jazz program.
Originally from Winnipeg, Smith had been with the RCAF in the South
Pacific. He began his show in Vancouver
in 1947, and stayed with
it for thirty-five years, signing off each show with “God bless jazz fanseverywhere.” Fraser MacPherson said, “I used to listen to
him when I was in high
school. It seems I’ve always listened to him.”
He was also, as
Bill Phillips once wrote, a one-man cheering section for local musicians (he
called them “gladiators”) and welcoming party for visitors. When Miles Davis
played Howie Bateman’s Inquisition Coffee House, it was Bob who went out for the
Champagne. When Billie Holiday was
lonely and teary while working The Cave, Bob
carried a portable player and a stack of records to her room at the Georgia Hotel.
He liked baseball. He played behind the plate in the Vancouver Senior Men's Softball League, and,
the Vancouver Sun noted, he could “chomp on a cigar through his catcher’s mask while throwing out a runner at second base.” For several seasons, in pre-television days, he did play-by-play broadcasts of Big Four football games—without ever leaving the studio. He ad libbed his commentary, working from wire copy, while running a stadium sound effects disc. If the Teletype broke down, and he had no copy, he said,
the Vancouver Sun noted, he could “chomp on a cigar through his catcher’s mask while throwing out a runner at second base.” For several seasons, in pre-television days, he did play-by-play broadcasts of Big Four football games—without ever leaving the studio. He ad libbed his commentary, working from wire copy, while running a stadium sound effects disc. If the Teletype broke down, and he had no copy, he said,
“I’d have a dog
go out on the field.”
Bob was a
favorite at Puccini’s, a Main Street restaurant famous for its lasagna at lunch and its
steaks, pan-fried in olive oil with parsley and garlic, at dinner. He always had a
table in the back, near the kitchen, where the other preferred patrons were big-booted
cops from the beat. Downstairs was the
jazz club Hogan’s Alley, named for the
small black neighborhood around the corner.
Hogan’s Alley was where you found Vie’s
Chicken and Steak House, which had the best-stocked jazz jukebox
in Vancouver and
Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother Nora as cook.
“Hot Air” ran
only on Saturdays, but “After Hours” came on every weeknight at eleven on CKCK
Regina, introduced by the theme that gave the show its name, a slow, rolling,
earthy boogie blues, composed and played by Avery Parrish, pianist with the
band led by Erskine Hawkins, “The Twentieth Century Gabriel.”
“After Hours” may be the best theme ever for a
late night jazz show. And the music is
so dense, so knowing, so sure and determined, it’s a surprise to learn that its
composer was then only twenty-three years old.
But we should remember that jazz is, with a few exceptions—Dave Brubeck,
Stephane Grappelli, Marion McPartland—a young musician’s game. (Miles Davis was nineteen when he played with
Charlie Parker; Tony Williams was seventeen when he became Davis’s
drummer. Stan Getz was in Benny
Goodman’s sax section at sixteen; at sixteen, Gary Burton was touring with
Getz.)
We’re used to
knowing that Billie Holiday was eighteen years old when she made her first
recordings, and that in 1937, her best year, she was only twenty-two. But it’s another thing to
find that the other players on those dates—Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Buck Clayton,
Benny Goodman—were all aged twenty-five--that’s Wilson, the leader—to twenty-eight.
It was the middle
of the 1940s; I was probably thirteen, fourteen years old. For some reason, I was in
Saskatoon alone, between trains, and to use up an hour or so, I went to a record
store. What I found there was an album
called “Hot Trumpets,” and what I heard, what turned my
head around, what amazed me and made me a jazz follower forever, was Billie Holiday
singing “Why Was I Born?”
The excuse for
having a singer in an album labeled “Hot Trumpets” was the muted trumpet
introduction and open horn ending by Buck Clayton (who, Holiday would later tell Billy
Eckstine, “was the prettiest man I’ve ever seen”). Clayton is good, and so are Wilson and
Goodman and drummer Jo Jones, but the revelation was Holiday. (Also on that
life-changing album, which I did not have the three dollars and fifty cents to
buy, was Henry “Red”
Allen’s take on “Body and Soul,” a close second to the definitive version, by
Coleman Hawkins, of what is probably the most covered song in jazz. )
There were two
disc jockeys I thought came close to Garroway’s perfection. The first was the
deejay who came in over the “After Hours” theme on CKCK. His name was Jim
Grisenthwaite, and more than sixty years later, his play list and his patter
are still being replayed in my mind. I
would turn up in my Grade 10 class the next morning,
and say to my buddy, “Here’s what he played last night.”
What he played
might have included the young Sarah Vaughan’s “Mean to Me,” with spectacular
backing by Parker and Gillespie; Roy Eldridge’s “After You’ve Gone,” with Gene Krupa’s
band; Woody Herman’s “Apple Honey,” with its thrilling final trumpet burst by
Sonny Berman; and Will Bradley’s “Celery Stalks at Midnight.”
Grisenthwaite,
remembering how the show began, says, “Being just out of high school and the
rookie of the announce staff, I had been brashly arguing with the program department for some time that we needed ‘one of those late night disc jockey shows’ that were becoming popular in the States. With no success. Finally one day I was called into the front office and brusquely informed CKCK would be having a nightly DJ show and that I would be doing it five nights a week. Hello four to midnight and goodbye social life. One of the most played records was the Duke’s old singer Herb Jeffries doing ‘If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight’ for my girl friend.”
rookie of the announce staff, I had been brashly arguing with the program department for some time that we needed ‘one of those late night disc jockey shows’ that were becoming popular in the States. With no success. Finally one day I was called into the front office and brusquely informed CKCK would be having a nightly DJ show and that I would be doing it five nights a week. Hello four to midnight and goodbye social life. One of the most played records was the Duke’s old singer Herb Jeffries doing ‘If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight’ for my girl friend.”
(Grisenthwaite also had a country and western
show called “Ridin’ ‘Round the Range.” He remembers, “I conspired with sportscaster
Lloyd Saunders to stage our own chuck wagon
races on RRR—fictional, of course, with Lloyd doing the play-by-play. All fun and
games until the station receptionist had to explain ‘there really aren’t any races’ to a
chap who had driven up from North Dakota to enter.”)
The other program
on CKCK that could not be missed was “Just Jazz” on Saturday afternoons. Jack Pollard said for the theme music he
chose “two parts of ‘JATP Blues,’ the tenor of
Illinois Jacquet, and part two, which was the Nat Cole and Les Paul
section. Couldn’t decide
which one I liked best.”
Pollard had been
the piano player in a Regina combo called the Boptet, which featured
the flamboyant, musically risk-taking nineteen-year-old trumpet player Herbie Spanier,
the Dizzy Gillespie of Cupar, Saskatchewan.
When Pollard took over the
“After Hours” spot—Grisenthwaite having departed for the west coast—he surprised listeners by introducing Gabe Patterson, a Saskatchewan Roughriders running back, as a singer. Pollard says, “Al Edwards introduced me to him and we hung out a bit. I got Bob Moyer to come to the station and I recorded Gabe doing a number with Bob on piano. I played it several times, and people started asking for it.” Gabe Patterson, who played his college football at Kentucky State, was with the Roughriders for two seasons and picked for the all-star team both years.
It was on “Just
Jazz” that I heard the young Stan Getz, called by Whitney Balliett “the apotheosis
of Lester Young,” and almost as revelatory as Billie Holiday had been. And, among other
things, the George Shearing Quintet’s “September in the Rain,” which would
make the Shearing sound famous.
“Mr.
Sandman, bring me a dream,
Make
him the cutest I’ve ever seen”
That was the Chordettes song that
introduced “Sandman Serenade” and the other disc jockey who
deserved to be on the podium just under Dave Garroway: Jack Kyle, whose “breezy,
amiable personality,” to quote Chuck Davis, made his three hours on CKNW a nightly
event.
CKNW then had its studios over a paint
store near the old Pattullo Bridge in New
Westminster, and it had country and western roots, but none of that showed in Kyle’s smooth
sophistication, which was as casually worn as the flattop fedora he favored.
Working three turntables, tape machines,
remote switches and other control room equipment (most
private station DJs were their own operators) an unruffled Kyle would punctuate the
program with his signature phrases—“Cheers, customers” and “Let’s Kyle awhile”—and ad
lib commercials better than the copy department could write them. He had, Bill
Phillips wrote, “a deeper understanding of the radio medium than most of us ever had.”
Jack’s manner was that of a gracious host,
intent on his guests’ pleasure, refilling their
glasses, steering the conversation away from near argument to amusement keeping the party
going and the evening light.
I asked him who was the best disc jockey he
had ever heard, and he said,“Terry
Garner.” When I asked Garner the same
question, he said, “Jack Kyle. Kyle and Garner
had begun their broadcast lives in Victoria, and for a time, shared an
apartment. A scary moment came for
Garner when he dropped one of Kyle’s prizedDodo Marmarosa
records and it shattered. “I thought I
was going to have to move out.”
Early in his career, Garner had acted as
a jazz impresario, bringing to the Pacific Northwest the
bands of Duke Ellington and Woody Herman. He remembered Ellington drinking milk
with gin (“You have to look after your stomach, Sweetie”) and Ellington trumpeter-violinist-singer
Ray Nance coming through a hotel lobby at 3:00 a.m. carrying a basketball and
saying, “Wanta go shoot some hoops?” He
remembered Herman getting out of a
car in Vancouver’s Stanley Park to pick flowers for his wife.
And he remembered Billie Holiday. On a wall of his home was a framed photograph of them together,
Holiday in a wide-brimmed garden hat, and signed: “Terry—stay as fine as you
are. Billie.”
At fifteen or sixteen, I fell into the
deejay role almost by accident. The local radio
station—CHAB, Moose Jaw—had some programs directed to a high school
audience, and this was before the “youth market” stampede began.
One of these programs was called “Melody
‘n’ Stuff.” It invited students to come
on air for fifteen
minutes and play their favorite records.
Many teenagers were eager to be on the program,
but not many seemed to have any favorite records, and the same ones, probably from the
station library, were spun, as we used to say, over and over. “Dardanella,” by
Herbie Fields, Bunny Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started,” “Cherry,’ with the Harry
James band, “Cross Your Heart,” by Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five.
By this time, I had begun to build a small
record collection (early Esquire All-Stars sessions, “New 52nd
Street Jazz”) and I was reading Metronome
(Barry Ulanov, for whom Lennie
Tristano wrote “Coolin’ Off with Ulanov,” declared Charlie Parker “the greatest
improviser since Bach”) and DownBeat
(George T. Simon —The Big Bands—wrote about a Central Park
baseball game between the Benny Goodman and Count
Basie bands, Harry James pitching for Goodman, Lester Young on the mound for
Basie; please, somebody make the movie).
And somewhere I saw a photograph of
Woody Herman in a lapel-less jacket, which moved me to go to tailor J.C. Carley, who
had once worked in the same London, Ontario shop as Guy Lombardo’s father, and have
him make me one like it.
I wrote a script and had it approved—this
was mandatory—and did the show. I played things
that probably had never been aired on CHAB and used a lot of lines I probably had
stolen from Grisenthwaite.
Purvis liked it, and I was asked to come
back, so I did a second show. And then, enjoying the
feeling of being behind a microphone, and ready to let fly, I turned up a third
time. As usual, I had my script checked
before going on; and then, once on the air, I threw
it away and ad libbed. Purvis was furious. “You will never, never, he raged, “be on
this station again.” Two days later, the
program director called and invited me to
come in and audition for a weekly show.
I called the program “Some Like It
Hot”—another brazen theft; this was the name of DJ Fred
Robbins’s New York show. The theme I
chose was “Tippin’ In by Erskine
Hawkins. Purvis thought this was a bad
choice--”You should have used Count Basie’s
‘Swingin’ the Blues’.“ Purvis and I
never got along, but he did know how to listen to
music and analyze what he heard, and he introduced me to some tunes that were
important to me, especially “My Future Just Passed” by the Delta Rhythm Boys, which became
my personal theme as I worshipped from afar a girl two grades
ahead of me.
But disc jockeys were an attraction for
some girls. Carol Sloane, talking with Marc Myers
of JazzWax, said, “In the early 1950s I listened all the time to two local
[Smithfeld, Rhode Island] disc jockeys.
Those radio guys became my heroes.” In fact, Ms. Sloane, still one of the best
jazz singers around, at age 18 married a disc
jockey.
Most DJs were male then—it’s a more
gender-balanced airwave now--but there was a syndicated
late evening program called “Lonesome Gal,” with a woman purring into the
microphone as a kind of Tokyo Rose for lonesome guys. It was just sort of funny. Years later, CBC had a program in the same
time range with an announcer named Margaret
Pascu, who had a truly mysterious and dangerously alluring style.
Then along came Montreal’s Katie Malloch,
who had the sound of a bright. sometimes cheeky
kid sister (on one of her promos, she suggested that it was a da to go crazy, “put
vodka in the water cooler and run naked down the hall”) and she often called herself
“Sister Kate.” At the same time, she
delivered a masterfully composed, enormously
knowledgeable program on CBC Radio Two six evenings a week, or until the network began
to deconstruct and lurch back into the 1970s.
When it came time to switch off her
microphone, after a career that had moved from campus radio
to national network, she was at her most gracious. Introducing her replacement,
she played what she said was a forecast of the future: “This Could Be the Start of
Something Big.” It wasn’t. It was the end of something great.
One more story: In a farewell broadcast with Tom Allen, Ms.
Malloch was asked about difficult
interviewees she had encountered. She
told of a saxophone player who kept her
waiting all day for a meeting, agreeing to several times and then canceling the appointments,
one by one. The day was almost over, and
Ms. Malloch was to go for tea with her
mother. As she remembered that day, she
told Allen, “I said to my mother, ‘Let’s go
for tea.’ She said, ‘But aren’t you supposed to interview that musician?’ I said, ‘Eff him.’ And my mother said, ‘Yes, dear’.”
Somehow I caught up with my future, and
found myself one afternoon walkin to her house with
the hatbox record player I’d bought at Child & Gower and an armful of 78s. She was getting ready to travel to
Toronto. “What can I bring back for you? she said. I said, “See if you can find some Charlie
Parker.” She brought back Parker’s “Lover Man,” the
famous Ross Russell 1946 date when his breakdown began and the number was
carried out by trumpeter Howard McGhee. (Parker spent some recuperative time at Camarillo
State Hospital, near Los Angeles. He
called one of the first pieces he recorded after
he was discharged “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.”
Parker always had a sense of humor. And five years later, he re-recorded “Lover
Man,” with virtually the same 1946 arrangement,
strong and in control.)
I was beginning to define my life by music
(not always wisely). But in those summer days, it
was fine to strut out the door in iridescent slacks while my pretty little sister played
Dorsey’s “I’ll Take Tallulah.”
The record library at CHAB had some
surprises: early Chicago duets by Louis Armstrong and
Earl Hines, “Muggles” and “Weather Bird;” Ivie Anderson singing “Rocks in My
Bed;” Jackie and Roy’s intricate bop vocals (“Euphoria,” “East of Suez”) with Charlie
Ventura; and, on ET (16-inch electrical transcriptions) Boyd Raeburn’s experimental band
playing early Gillespie, Randy Brooks’s wild “The Honeydripper, and Basie’s
“Harvard Blues” with Jimmy Rushing, Mr. Five-by-Five, singing the George Frazier lyrics we
couldn’t play on the air: “I don’t keep
dogs or women in my room….”
For a time, while my future was at
university, I did a late-night show, using “When Your Lover Has
Gone” by the Shearing Quintet as a signoff theme. I would lean close to the mike, and
say, in my best Lonesome Guy baritone, “Your lover is going now.”
“Nothing better in the world you know,
Than lying in the sun with your radio.”
Skip Prokop wrote those lines for his song “Sunny Days,” and Sid
Boyling knew Skip was
right. When tiny, portable transistor
radios hit the market, Sid, CHAB manager and
idea guy, knew that listeners would carry their radio programs with them. So he
created a four-hour Sunday afternoon show called “The Beachcomber.” I was the guy
chosen to be lifeguard, surfboard concessionaire, and sand castle architect. All that summer
of 1949, with only my voice going to the beach, I was “The
Beachcomber.”
Art Pepper (Terry Garner: “Impeccable”) played The Cellar, a Vancouver
jazz club, in the late
1950s. His local backup was the Chris
Gage Trio. Thirty years later, at the Christ Church
Cathedral premiere of Peter Dent’s “Jazz Mass,” Stan “Cuddles” Johnson, bass player in
the trio, remembered the date. He said,
“Pepper asked us where to get drugs. We didn’t know anything about drugs back
then.” Sometime after that, Pepper, now clean and
leading the “Straight Life”—title of his Dostoevskyan autobiography—played at Hogan’s
Alley, with George (“I call him Mr. Beautiful”) Cables on piano.
Armando Peraza creating conga drum frenzy with Shearing at Isy’s. Richie “Alto Madness” Cole at the Hot Jazz Club singing “Stormy Weather,” changing it to “Leonard Feather.” Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen on a rainy afternoon in the intimate Simon Fraser University theatre. Duke Ellington giving the audience finger-snapping lessons. Herbie Spanier leaving Regina for Montreal and fame, carrying his trumpet in a brown paper bag. Billy Higgins looking at his watch during a long Charlie Haden bass solo, and looking at it again during his own long drum solo. Jim Perry, just back from his honeymoon, telling the Darke Hall audience, “What a lost weekend that was” before singing “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me.” Handsome Harold Grills on bass. Annette Bernard at the Studio A grand singing “Skylark.” The famous Miles Davis-Wynton Marsalis angry exchange on Vancouver’s Queen E. stage. Roy Kral’s urbane greeting at a San Francisco club. Gordie Ross doing a back flip into the Hobby Band sax section while singing “Orange Colored Sky.” Lovely Eleanor Collins coaching her four children to sing a jazzy jingle for Malkin’s Strawberry Jam,and then coming in on backup herself. Big Miller posing unhappily in a Santa Claus outfit for an Edmonton Sun front page. Tiny Michel Petrucciani being carried on stage by his bass player. Dave Frishberg puffing a borrowed cigarette outside a Granville Island club, taking what little pleasure he could find. Joe Williams in a CHQM hallway booming out “Hallelujah, I Love Her So.” Nat “King” Cole crooning “You Better Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie.” The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, featuring Charlie Shavers, at Moose Jaw’s Temple Gardens before the car crash that took away Ray Wetzel.
Jack Jones introducing Mel Torme: “I have all of Mel’s albums. He has one of mine.”
All that is now a millennium away. The last times I appeared on a disc jockey
show were as a guest
on “Dal’s Place,” a program put together by Dal Richards, the nonagenarian
Vancouver bandleader who has played every New Year’s Eve for the last
seventy-five years. Dal would always ask
guests to choose their dream band, made up of any
musicians, alive or, as Zoot Sims used to say, “on the road.” When he asked me, I
said, “Parker on alto; Herbie Spanier, trumpet; Niels Henning Orsted-
Pedersen, bass;
Buddy Rich, drums; Billie Holiday and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, vocals; and Johann
Sebastian Bach, keyboards.” Dal gave me
a puzzled look.
I suppose there are still disc jockeys
around, but I’m not hearing them any more. Except for Jack
Pollard, now doing a program called “Swing Session” for CFBX, the Thompson
Rivers University campus station. And I
realized that Jack, sixty years after
“Just Jazz” signed off, has acquired, consciously or not, the timbre and
delivery of his idol, Dave Garroway.
Keep on playing, Jack, because, to quote
Milt Jackson and Oscar Peterson,“Ain’t But a Few
of Us Left.”
*****************
