A Jazz Conversation with Doug Ramsey [In Memoriam 1934-2026]

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In the early days of developing content for my blog, a number of esteemed musicians, writers and critics came to my aid by consenting to be interviewed- among them - Ted Gioia, Gary Giddins, Bill Kirchner.

Doug Ramsey was the very first who volunteered to take the time to answer my questions so that I might prepare them as a formal interview for my readers. Once my blog was up-and-running, he would give me a plug on his own blog - Rifftides - if I was running something on my page that interested him.

When I called to thank him, he couldn't say enough nice things about my efforts. Needless to say, given the source, such encouragement meant the world to me.

Doug died in his sleep on May 19th at the age of 91.

I am reposting this interview in memoriam.

Douglas Arthur Ramsey 1934-2026 - Semper Fi, Marine.

I’ll try to keep this introduction brief so that my mumblings don’t detract too much from what follows.

Peter Keepnews succinctly stated: “Those of us who have tried writing about Jazz know what a daunting challenge it can be to do it well. Expressing an opinion about a given musician or recording is easy; explaining what exactly it is that makes that musician or recording worth caring about is not.”

Doug Ramsey has been brilliantly “explaining” the merits of the work of Jazz musicians and the qualities of Jazz recordings for over fifty years.

Doug’s writings about Jazz are so artfully done that opening an LP or a CD and finding that the descriptive notes have been written by him is the metaphoric equivalent of finding a real diamond at the bottom of a box of Crackerjacks.

Ray Avery once said of his colleague, William Claxton, that “some of us take photographs of Jazz musicians, but Bill is an artist.”

Those of us who write about Jazz feel the same way about Doug.

 How and when did music first come into your life?

I don’t remember it’s not being in my life. The first that I recall making music was as part of a chorus in, I think, the second grade. I took piano lessons, without notable success, from age 10 to 12 or so

 Did you play an instrument?

My next instrument, starting at 13, was the trumpet. To be more precise, it was a 12-dollar cornet that belonged to the junior high school band. Eventually, I saved enough from a paper route to buy a used Olds Special, an excellent horn that I still have but rarely play. Much later, Clark Terry got me a factory deal on a CT model Olds flugelhorn. For several years I’ve had the Bobby Shew Yamaha trumpet and the Shew model Yamaha flugelhorn. Lessons with Bobby during my L.A. years were invaluable. I’ve never stopped playing, despite many requests. The black and white picture shows me sitting in illegally at a club called the Crown Bar in the late 1950s when I was in the Marine Corps, stationed in Iwakuni, Japan.

The tenor player in the striped shirt is Sergeant Paul Elizondo, who went on to lead a big band famous in San Antonio, Texas, and become a popular Bexar County commissioner. The drummer was a corporal named, I think, Sears. The pianist and bassist had the gig at the club. Although the base at Iwakuni was headquarters of the First Marine Air Wing, my commanding officer was an Air Force colonel 450 miles north at Far East Network headquarters in Tokyo, an ideal arrangement. My job was to run the Iwakuni radio station of FEN, staffed by Marine, Army and Air Force enlisted men and a handful of Japanese civilian employees.

The commander of the air wing was Lt. General Carson Abel Roberts.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/caroberts.htm

One night when I was sitting in legally at the officers club on base, General Roberts introduced himself as a fellow player who as a youngster had known Bix Beiderbecke. On that thread, an unlikely friendship developed between the war hero three-star general and the greenish first lieutenant. If I had been under his command, that would have been unlikely. We were on a first-name basis; he called me Doug and I called him General. Sitting-in in town couldn’t have been too serious a violation of regulations; one night, General Roberts showed up at the Crown with his cornet and asked if he could play “Green Eyes,” which he did—a bit shakily but with the right changes.

It is my good fortune that there are outstanding musicians in my current hometown, Yakima, Washington, who allow me to play with them. We actually had a paying gig not long ago. Fifty bucks apiece. The way things are going, I know a few guys in L.A. and New York who would jump at that. World-class players come here frequently to play at The Seasons Performance Hall. A couple of Seasons Fall Festivals ago, Marvin Stamm invited me to play a duet with him. Actually, he informed me that I would play a duet with him. Bill Mays wrote a splendid arrangement of Freddie Hubbard’s “Up Jumped Spring” for trumpet, flugelhorn, violin, two cellos and rhythm section (Mays, Martin Wind and Matt Jorgensen). It was fun. No one in the audience threw anything.    

What are your earliest recollections of jazz?

My parents’ small collection of 78s was a mish-mash that included, among other things, records by Frankie Carle, the Andrews Sisters, Rafael Mendez, Eddy Arnold and Louis Armstrong. They had a record changer hooked up to the big Philco console radio in the living room. I played Mendez’s “La Virgen de la Macarena” a lot and wore Armstrong’s “Mahogany Hall Stomp” practically white. I’m not sure that I knew what Armstrong did was called jazz. I was perhaps 10 years old.

 Many conversations about jazz invariably turn to “impressions” and “favorites.” Why do you think this is the case?

As for favorites, most non-musicians and casual listeners develop them early on and maintain them as their standard for the rest of their lives. Here’s how Woody Herman put it when we talked following a dance job in San Antonio in 1974:

“Most of them stop listening as soon as they leave high school. That’s their last really firm connection with music. In that period of their lives, it’s all-important, and from the time of their first responsibility on, it becomes background to everything else, which is very natural and correct, I guess. But then they still want to tell me how the band isn’t making it now and it was so great then. And that really aggravates me. It’s about the only thing that does.”

One customer had asked that night for “Johnson Rag.” Another said to Woody, “Don’t you have any Russ Morgan pieces?”

“And they get some very terse replies,” Woody said, “like ‘No’ or ‘He quit the business’ or ‘I’ll play that when I get to the big band in the sky.’ It becomes a kind of standup routine. Certainly anyone has a right to ask for anything, but I can’t for the life of me think why I have to do those tunes.”

The quotes are from the Herman chapter in my book Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Okay, so let’s turn to “impressions; who were the jazz musicians who first impressed you and why?”

Armstrong, of course. The next jazz player I’m conscious of admiring was Muggsy Spanier. He led in a curious way to Charlie Parker. When I was 15 or so, I was in a booth at Belmont Radio & Music in my hometown, Wenatchee, Washington, the Apple Capitol of the World and the Buckle of the Power Belt of the Northwest, listening to Spanier’s Commodore recording of “Sugar.” The son of the store’s owner was the tenor saxophonist Don Lanphere, who not long before had recorded “Stop,” “Go” and those other Prestige 78s with Fats Navarro, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Max Roach. Don was home for a while, getting well and helping his dad. He opened the door, handed me a record with a yellow label and said, “Here, listen to this.” It was Parker on Dial; “Yardbird Suite” on one side, “Moose the Mooche” on the other. That introduction by Don affected my listening habits, expanded my horizons. At about the same time, I worked up the courage to introduce myself to the pianist Jack Brownlow, Wenatchee’s other great jazz musician, who helped Lanphere develop. I had heard him at high school dances and could sense, even in that context, that he was something special. He asked if I was a musician and invited me to his house to play. It was a disaster. I knew nothing about improvising and proved it. Still, he took me on, gave me ear training, played me recordings of all the right people and explained what they were doing. Among other revelations, he made me aware that Nat Cole was a great pianist—and why. Those listening lessons went beyond jazz. At Jack’s house I first heard Stravinsky, Villa Lobos and Shostakovich. One indelible evening at Lanphere’s, Don introduced me to the Boston Symphony/Charles Munch recording of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.” I could go on and on about what I owe Jack and Don. They developed the musical portion of my brain.

Staying with your impressions for a while, what comes to mind when I mention the following jazz musicians?

Louis Armstrong.

I’ve been listening to him for more than six decades. I’m hearing new things and rediscovering things that astound me. I recently put up on Rifftides his “Summertime” from the Porgy and Bess album with Ella Fitzgerald. His expression of the melody of that song is an apotheosis of pure music. His introduction to “West End Blues,” which I have heard 4,372 times, still devastates me. When Dizzy said, “No him, no me,” he wasn’t kidding. I’ll take it further; no Armstrong, no jazz as we know it.

Du Duke Ellington

A A magician. An alchemist. There’s a story that some of the most gifted Hollywood film composers were asked to listen to several complex pieces of music and analyze the chords. They nailed them, down to the last e-minor half-diminished 13th with a 9th on top (I made that up). There was an exception, the Ellington example. These composers with ears like sonar could not agree on what the harmonies were made of. Duke kept his band together through low-key leadership and management that are studied in business schools, and—no small matter—through the proceeds of his song royalties. With the indispensable help of Billy Strayhorn, he made his orchestra and its members extensions of himself.  They, in turn, helped to shape him. It is not possible to imagine outside the crucible of Ellington’s band, for example, the Johnny Hodges everyone knows, or Ellington without the inspiration and challenge of writing for his great individualists, Hodges, Cootie Williams, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, Rex Stewart, Paul Gonsalves and all the others.

Dizzy Gillespie

Bird called him “the other half of my heartbeat,” but to a large extent Dizzy was also the brain of the bebop movement. For him, teaching was a calling. James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Ray Brown, Mike Longo and countless others have recounted Dizzy’s patiently giving them insights into harmonies and structures central to the music. On the heart side of the equation, he was the embodiment of rhythm in all of its power, simplicity and complexity. He recognized the catalytic importance of Chano Pozo, and Afro-Cuban jazz became a part of the jazz mainstream. Let’s see, there must be something else. Oh, yes, he was the most gifted and influential trumpet soloist of his generation and a few generations since. No him, no Fats Navarro, Kenny Dorham, Conte Candoli, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, Idrees Sulieman, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Brian Lynch, Ryan Kisor. Feel free to complete the list. It may take a while. When you have time, listen to his solo on “Night in Tunisia” (RCA Victor, 1946). All of those guys did.

In 1962, I was working at KYW-TV in Cleveland, before those call letters moved to Philadelphia. Dizzy was the guest host for a week on The Mike Douglas Show, which was produced at KYW. He had the quintet with Moody, the 19-year-old Kenny Barron, Chris White and Rudy Collins. On the show, they played “Chega de Saudade,” the first time I had heard a bossa nova played with that intensity. They were playing that week at the Theatrical Restaurant downtown on Short Mary (I love that street name; had to work it in.) One night after the gig, Dizzy and I got to talking and he invited me to his hotel room to continue the conversation. We shared a bottle of red wine, had a serious discussion about music, acted silly and developed a warm acquaintance that lasted until he died.  

Stan Kenton

He had a great ear for emergent talent among players and arrangers and a dedication to massive sound. The two qualities often conflicted but, as in the Contemporary Concepts period, at their best his bands produced stimulating music of great importance. Kenton was a better pianist than he is generally given credit for, and some of his arrangements from the 1940s and 50s are superb.   

 Shorty Rogers

 He was a brilliant arranger and composer who synthesized the spirit of the big band era and the innovations of the Birth of the Cool band into a highly personal style. Those early 1950s Giants recordings with Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, Shelly Manne and all hold up as well as anything from the period, regardless of coastal origin. His work on the East Coast-West Coast Scene album he shared with Al Cohn, particularly “Elaine’s Lullaby,” is masterly. Rogers’ trumpet and flugelhorn playing was idiosyncratic, beguiling. His Atlantic and Pacific Jazz quintet albums are classics. “Martians Go Home” should have won a special award for economy and humor in the use of “Rhythm” changes.

Gerry Mulligan

His writing made the Kenton band swing regardless of its leader’s inclination. His charts for his own big band were brilliant, but he stretched himself so thin that he didn’t do enough writing for it. His pianoless quartet had a brief existence but is inspiring musicians more than half a century later. Mulligan was the baritone saxophonist who could sit in—and fit in—with anyone. His sextet with Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, Jim Hall and Bill Crow was a great band, and Night Lights is a masterpiece. He was restless in his curiosity and search for knowledge. He was a stimulating dinner companion. I miss him a great deal.

Horace Silver

I’ll refer to what I wrote not long ago on Rifftides about putting on the Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album as background music to begin the day.

I chose it because I wanted something that had solos I could sing, hum and whistle along with as I fixed breakfast. Every note of Horace Silver’s second Blue Note album, the first by the Jazz Messengers, has been embedded in my brain since shortly after it was released in 1955. My record collection then consisted of 10 or 12 LPs. This was one of them. I played it so often that Silver’s, Kenny Dorham’s and Hank Mobley’s solos and Art Blakey’s drum choruses became part of my mind’s musical furniture. Silver, Blakey and bassist Doug Watkins comprised a rhythm section that was the standard for what came to be called, for better or for worse, hard bop. Dorham and Mobley, with their deep knowledge of chord-based improvisation, constructed some of their most memorable solos. Silver’s compositions—and one by Mobley—are classics.

Horace’s own bands that followed—with Art Farmer, Clifford Jordan, Blue Mitchell, Junior Cook, Joe Henderson, the Brecker Brothers and Ryan Kisor, among others—comprise an important chapter in the history of the music. I am sorry to hear that he has been ailing.

Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaborations

Recently I contributed an historical essay to Bob Belden’s pending Miles Español project (http://vimeo.com/14698280). Working on it brought home again that the pervasive influence of the Davis-Evans Sketches of Spain has reached virtually all precincts of music, as Belden’s video and CD show. From his arrangements for the Birth of the Cool band through Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain and Quiet Nights, Gil’s understanding of Miles’ temperament, inclinations and leanings made it a perfect partnership. I wish that it had lasted longer, but what they gave us will endure.   

Mel Tormé

 A great singer. He sometimes went overboard in the melisma department, but his intonation, swing, diction and lyric interpretation were flawless. His collaborations with the Marty Paich Dek-tette, particularly Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley, and his duets with George Shearing belong in the vocal hall of fame. Is there a vocal hall of fame?

Maria Schneider

 She learned—absorbed—from Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer and developed a recognizable style. Now, she herself is an influence. Like most category-based criticism, assessments that she has gone beyond or outside jazz are meaningless. Forget labels; she writes wonderful music. If you’ve ever watched her work in front of her big band, you know that she is an inspiring leader. Sky Blue was terrific. I look forward to her next album.

What made you decide to become a jazz writer?

I’m not sure that I decided. It happened. In the eighth grade, a teacher told me that I should be a reporter. I considered law and architecture, but ultimately majored in journalism. The junior year at the University of Washington School of Journalism was total immersion in the newspaper process. We put out a daily paper. Music was one of the beats the editors handed me. I wrote frequently about jazz. I’ve never stopped, although three years in the Marine Corps slowed my output. My career has been in newspapers, broadcast news as an anchor, correspondent and news director; then as an educator of professional journalists. I have had a parallel career or sub-career as a writer about jazz and free press issues and as a novelist; one novel so far.

Is there a form of writing about jazz that you prefer: insert notes, articles, books …?

 No.

If you could write a next book about jazz on any subject, what or who would be the focus of such a book?

 I’m working on a book that will be, essentially, a collection of liner notes, which, done right, is a form of journalism. I’ve written a few hundred sets of notes. Some of them hold up.

You’ve accomplished many wonderful things in your life both personally and professionally. Why is it that jazz has continued to play a role in your life?

 Because it goes to the core of what I value: individuality, freedom of expression, human interaction, beauty.

Switching to the subject of “favorites:”

Why must we have favorites? Why not evaluate every book, film, composition, solo, or painting on its merits, without ranking it? For that matter, why must we have favorite musicians, actors or newscasters? (Gene Lees ‘ unisex term for them was “anchorthings.” Boy, do I miss him). That thought leads to popularity contests or, as the magazines call them, readers polls and critics polls. If publicity about winning poll results in more work, record sales and income for deserving musicians, perhaps polls are worth something, but I don’t trust them much; I get too many e-mail messages from musicians and their publicists pleading for votes. I have voted in many critics polls, but I’ve become increasingly skeptical of them.

I’ve come to dislike the very word “favorite,” but I can’t come up with a suitable synonym.

What are some of your favorites books about jazz?

There you go again. All of Whitney Balliett’s books, all of Martin Williams’, Gene Lees’ and Nat Hentoff’s. Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and The Swing Era. I’ve been waiting for years—make that decades—to Schuller’s book on bebop. Both of Louis Armstrong’s autobiographies. Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler, Gary Giddins, Andre Hodeir, Ted Gioia, Stanley Dance, Joachim Berendt, Francis Davis, Albert Murray, Larry Kart, Royal Stokes, Stafford Chamberlain, Jeroen de Valk, Ashley Kahn, Bill Crow’s books of anecdotes, Mike Zwerin. Wait a minute, this is a trap, you know. Sure as the devil, I’m leaving out 10 or 15 valuable writers about jazz.   

 What are some of your favorite jazz recordings?

Talk about traps! I’ll name 10, with the understanding that I could name 50 or 100. If you asked me tomorrow, it could be 10 others. Not in rank order:

Bill Evans: Portrait in Jazz

Duke Ellington: And His Mother Called Him Bill

Louis Armstrong: The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens

John Coltrane: Blue Trane

Dave Brubeck Quartet: Jazz at College of the Pacific, Vol. 2

The Sarah Vaughan 1950 Columbia’s with George Treadwell and his All Stars: Miles Davis, Benny Green, Budd Johnson, Tony Scott, Jimmy Jones, Freddie Green (or Mundell Lowe) and Billy Taylor.

The Curtis Counce Quintet albums on Contemporary, with Harold Land, Jack Sheldon, Carl Perkins and Frank Butler

“Flamingo” from Charles Mingus’s Tijuana Moods, with its perfect Clarence Shaw trumpet solo

Chick Corea, Now He Speaks, Now He Sobs

Ravel, Daphnis and Chloe (Munch, Boston Symphony)

You’ll notice that there is nothing recent on that list. Maybe it takes favorites a few years to develop.

Who are your favorite big band arrangers?

 (Not in order) Eddie Sauter, Fletcher Henderson, Bill Holman, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Gil Evans, Mike Abene, Jim Knapp, Frank Foster, Bob Brookmeyer, Darcy James Argue, Don Redman, Duke Pearson, Gerry Mulligan, Maria Schneider, Benny Carter, Ralph Burns, Slide Hampton, Bill Kirchner, Quincy Jones, Johnny Mandel, Sy Oliver, Gerald Wilson, Melba Liston, Neil Hefti, Oliver Nelson. This could go on a while. May I stop now?

Who are your favorite Jazz vocalists?

Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day, Carmen McRae, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Merrill, Nat Cole, Carol Sloane, Bill Henderson, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Ray Charles, Jack Teagarden, Teddi King, the young Ethel Waters, Mark Murphy, Meredith d’Ambrosio, Karrin Allyson, Fats Waller, Nancy Marano, Jeri Southern, Jimmy Rowles, Mildred Bailey, Chet Baker, Rebecca Kilgore, Johnny Hartman, Carol Fredette, John Pizzarelli, Nancy King, Daryl Sherman, Mel Tormé, Maxine Sullivan, Ray Nance, Blossom Dearie; Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. That’s the short list.

Who among current jazz musicians do you enjoy listening to?

An incomplete list: Ambrose Akinmusire, Bill Charlap, Steve Wilson, Kirk Knuffke, Bill Mays, Sonny Rollins, Diana Krall, Kenny Barron, Miguel Zenón, Jessica Williams, Wadada Leo Smith, Ed Partyka, Branford Marsalis-Joey Calderazzo duo, Gretchen Parlato, Matthew Shipp, Matt Wilson, J.D. Allen, Alexander String Quartet, Dubravka Tomsic and everybody on Bob Belden’s Miles Español project.  

 Of all your writings about jazz over the years, which ones are you most proud of?

 Recently, the notes for the MJQ Mosaic box and that Miles Español piece, but overall, probably the Desmond biography and the non-jazz novel Poodie James, because so much of my blood, sweat and being went into them.

What are you thoughts about blogs and websites devoted to jazz?

 It is clear that there are no rules for blogging. My conviction is that the standards of accuracy, fairness, thoroughness and reliability that go into any responsible writing must apply to blogging. Opinion should be plainly identified as opinion, if only by context and usage. The medium offers wide possibilities for sound, photographs, video, even a certain degree of interactivity. Many jazz blogs just sit there looking like pages out of an academic journal or a thesis.    

If you could host a fictional “jazz dinner,” who would you invite, and why?

 Good conversationalists. Most jazz musicians are good conversationalists.

If you could put on an imaginary three-day jazz festival in Yakima, WA, how would you structure it and who would you invite to perform?

 Fortunately for Yakima, it has The Seasons Performance Hall, which in addition to its regular schedule has a week-long festival in the fall. The festival has included James Moody, Jessica Williams, Bill Charlap, the Brubeck Brothers Quartet, Tom Harrell, Ernestine Anderson, Tierney Sutton, Marvin Stamm, Karrin Allyson, Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band, Eric Alexander, David Fathead Newman and the Bill Mays Trio with Martin Wind and Matt Wilson. The Seasons Fall Festival also incorporates classical elements. Maintaining quality hasn’t been easy because of the economic morass we’re in, and in recent regular bookings The Seasons has resorted to lesser music in an attempt to pay the bills, a familiar story in the arts these days. As a pro bono adviser to this nonprofit hall, I advise them to hang in there and aim for the standard of quality implied in that list of names. As for structure, The Seasons Fall Festival has always been linear. It does not put artists in competition with one another, a la Montreal, New Orleans and other festivals that have morphed into huge parties. You wonder how much they have to do with music.

If you were asked to host a television show entitled – The Subject is Jazz –  who would you like to interview on the first few episodes?

Sorry, Steve, Gilbert Seldes and WNBC-TV took that title half a century ago. We’ll have to choose another. How about The Steve Cerra Show? I would ask Sonny Rollins, George Wein, Branford Marsalis, Bill Mays, Dave Brubeck, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Miguel Zenón, Benny Golson, Marian McPartland, Cedar Walton, Gerald Clayton, Darcy James Argue and Matthew Shipp. That’s the first 13 weeks. Do you think we’ll be renewed?

 What writing projects about jazz have you recently finished? Are there any that you are currently working on?

I put up a new Rifftides post this morning. I recently wrote the Mosaic MJQ notes just mentioned, and a lengthy historical analysis of the musical connections among Spain, Africa, the Caribbean and New Orleans for the Miles Español project. There is another jazz book in the works, but it has a long way to go. A second novel that I started some time ago keeps calling to me from the depths of the computer, where it has been imprisoned.  

You have done a lot of writing over the years on the subject of jazz. Have you given any thought to “collecting” these and leaving them with a college or university library for future reference?

Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers is a collection. So, more or less, is the next book. That’s one way of making the work available beyond the moment. No university has been pounding on my door but all reasonable offers will be considered.

"Vanished Friend" - Richard Sudhalter In Memoriam

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

One of the wonderful things about Jazz is the number of great people it has inspired to write about it.

A primary focus of JazzProfiles is to periodically represent the work of these significant authors and critics on these pages in order to help bring their efforts to your attention.

Its our way of honoring them for their contributions to the music.

Occasionally, the passings of a Jazz literary giant is memorialized by other members of the profession.

Such was the case with the death of Richard Sudhalter [1938-2008] when Doug Ramsey, Terry Teachout and Gene Lees wrote the following tributes about Dick’s literary [and musical] gifts to Jazz and its makers.

March 2008

Jazzletter

Gene Lees, Editor

"Vanished Friend"

By Doug Ramsey

“Richard M. Sudhalter gave elegance and exactness to speech, writing and music-making. Dick's perfection of expression came in natural flows, whether he was writing, playing the cornet, or chatting over dinner. Gene Lees observed that Dick was the only person he knew who always spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs. Sudhalter's mastery of language is everywhere in his biographies of Bix Beidebecke and Hoagy Carmichael, and his monumental study Lost Chords. Currents of coherence, logic, passion and humor are equally evident in his playing.

A few years ago, a stroke robbed Dick of the ability to play and caused halting speech. Then a disease called multiple system atrophy (MSA) attacked him and. over a few years, shut down his body. He lost speech and the use of his limbs. The disease left his intellect intact but destroyed his ability to communicate, the thing he did extraordinarily well. Friends and admirers around the world donated to a fund for his medical expenses and there was a benefit concert, but MSA is progressive and incurable. Dick died in a New York hospital.

He sometimes used trumpet and he had a distinctive way with the flugelhorn, but he preferred cornet, the instrument his hero Beiderbecke stayed with despite the trumpet's having come to dominance in jazz. Dick was a man out of his time in other ways too. In an era of increasingly casual dress, he preferred the bespoke tailoring he learned to love during his London years as a UPI correspondent. He was open-minded about new developments in jazz, but had a firm attachment to the emotional and intellectual straightforwardness of Bix and the Chicago school. You can hear it on all three of his instruments in the CD Friends "With Pleasure" with friends including Dave Frishberg, Daryl Sherman, Dan Barrett and Bill Crow, among others. Sudhalter is exclusively on cornet in The Classic Jazz Quartet with Dick Wellstood, Joe Muranyi and Marty Grosz — a gathering of four spirits aligned in their love of music, writing, and clowning.

Because of its subtitle, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 was reflexively attacked by partisans who chose to see it as an effort to diminish the importance of black musicians. Had they bothered to read the book, they would have found that Sudhalter does quite the opposite while balancing the historical record of achievement in jazz and providing deep insights into the nature of the music. As a player, Bix was his hero and primary influence, but Dick also wrote beautifully about Louis Armstrong in, among other pieces, the notes for Hearts Full of Rhythm, Vol. 2, a CD with some of the music Armstrong recorded for Decca, a small sample of his ability to draw on the present in illuminating a performance from the past.

Pianist Bill Evans used to insist that excision of sentimentality yielded the purest form of romanticism. My bet is he'd have been delighted with what Louis does with Once in a While. Even on paper its lyric teeters precariously on the edge of bathos. Yet Louis manages (how? what's the secret?) to strip away the self-pity and make it affecting, even poignant.

A few months after Dick's stroke, I was in the lounge above the front lobby of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. His close friend Daryl Sherman was playing Cole Porter's piano and singing. She told me that Dick was going to try to be there, but not to count on it; he was having some bad days. Soon, though, I saw him making his slow way across the room to where our friend, pianist Jill McManus. and I were listening to Daryl. He was impeccably turned out in sport coat, slacks and tie, just the right late-afternoon outfit for the proper New York gentleman of the 1940s, a decade in which I think he would have preferred to live. When Daryl took a break, the four of us sat chatting. Dick's wit and incisiveness shined through the slow speech, but he tired quickly and returned to the apartment to rest. After that encounter, we talked by telephone a few times. Then, he could correspond only by email — then, only through relays from other people — then, not at all. One can only imagine how it was for this most articulate of men to be imprisoned within himself, unable to express ideas or emotions.

Dick wanted to go, I'm sure of that. His ordeal is at an end. Knowing that it was inevitable and coming soon did not prepare me for this depth of sadness. His music, his books, the good luck of his friendship, will enrich me for the rest of my life.”       

                                          

By Terry Teachout

“Dick Sudhalter wrote three of the most important books ever published about jazz and American popular music, Bix: Man and Legend; Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael. He was also a trumpet player of great elegance and distinction who didn't make nearly as many records as he should have, though Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet show him off to the best possible advantage.

In private life Dick was as dapper as his playing, and old-fashioned in all the best ways. He liked Chicago-style jazz, British tailoring, black-and-white movies, Marmite, and The New Yorker before Tina Brown got her hands on it. Not surprisingly he was a little bit at odds with much of the modern world, and I suspect that he would have been vastly happier had he been born in 1908 instead of 1938.

He was also a pessimist by nature, but like many such folks, he gave more pleasure than he got — and, I suspect, got more pleasure than he usually cared to admit.

Dick and I were close friends, and so it grieved me deeply when his body began to betray him a few years ago. First came a stroke that robbed him of the power to play his horn and left him increasingly slow of speech (though not of mind). Then he fell victim to multiple system atrophy, an appalling disease that in time made it impossible for him to talk at all. That such an ailment should have struck so brilliantly articulate a man was one of those horrific ironies with which life likes to remind us that it holds the whip hand.

I knew that Dick wanted to die — he told me so while he still could — and so I suppose I should be glad that his suffering is now over. Yet I find it impossible to greet the news of his death with anything other than black sorrow, thought it will some day be a comfort to have his books to read and his records to play. When I heard that he was dying, I sat quietly in my hotel room for a few minutes, then opened up my iBook and listened to the sweetly elegiac performance of Duke Ellington's Black Butterfly that he recorded with Roger Kellaway in 1999 (it's in Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet). It isn't given to many of us to write our own epitaphs, much less play them, but I can't think of a better way to sum up what Dick Sudhalter was all about than to listen to that song.”

Gene Lees’ reflections

“It used to be said, rather commonly in fact, that jazz musicians were not articulate. After exposure to almost every prominent jazz musician, I concluded that if anyone found one of them inarticulate, it was because the musician either didn't like or didn't trust the person or both and was disinclined to reveal himself; hence the occultation in an idiosyncratic slang. Jazz musicians used to speak in a laconic argot that, it occurs to me now, came not from being inarticulate but the opposite: a curious inventiveness with language. That's when a car was a short, an apartment or residence was a pad, harsh weather was known as the hawk, feel a draft meant to feel hostility (originally, racial hostility; Lester Young invented the phrase), latch onto meant take up or grab (usually ideas or viewpoints), and dig had so many nuances — to understand, to like, to have insight, to appreciate — that it led to a phrase in jest: You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig it? And it made sense. Groovy, crazy and gone meant good and led to a short tale (apocryphal or not; I first heard it from members of the Les Brown band) about a musician asking a waitress for the cherry pie listed on the menu. She says, "It's gone." He says, "Crazy. Bring me two pieces."

[Guitarist] Mundell Lowe once told me that he thought they spoke that way because of a kind of embarrassment at the low-life they had to deal with, such as gangsters, nightclub operators, and agents, and a consequent vague shame at their profession. That of course was well before universities added jazz courses to their curricula and ruined it. To teach anything, you have to codify it, which is why so many of the latter crop of jazz musicians sound alike, and certainly uninventive.

I found this argot so colorful, so interesting, so amusing, that I absorbed it into my own speech habits to the point where it became reflexive. Jazz slang has either disappeared or been absorbed into the general lexicon to the point where I saw latch onto in a New York Times editorial, and a U.S. senator say pick up on. The well-spring of that invention seems to have gone dry. I think it was the invention of black folk, and in its use by black musicians, white musicians found it engaging and took up its practices. From them, back in the days of network radio, it turned up on broadcasts by the likes of Bob Hope, and passed thence into American speech to the point where, no longer arcane, it lost its value. I find that I still say dig no doubt because, as Artie Shaw observed, in its broad ambiguities, it is useful.

One of the expressions that has passed into common usage is "cool" which originally meant restrained in expression, particularly as applied to the playing of Miles Davis and those musicians he inspired to understatement. Now it is used indiscriminately by young people to mean good, okay, acceptable, and it has spread so far that even the French use it. It makes me cringe when I hear, "C'est cool."

Thus too chops. Hamlet says of Yorick's skull that he is "all chop-fallen." How this came down to mean a trumpeter's lip, I don't know. But it passed from there to mean any kind of technique, including a pianist's. Now you hear Washington references to "political chops."

Hooked originally meant to be addicted, particularly to heroin, and it invoked a vivid image, as of someone hung up on barbed wire in World War I. But language tends toward dilution, to fading, and now it merely means to like or love something a lot, as in a program for children called Hooked on Phonics. No one, as I have observed before, who spent any time at the alas long-vanished Jim and Andy's on West 48lh Street in New York would ever have considered jazz musicians inarticulate; their conversation at the bar and in the booths was incessant and, I assure you, literate and funny.

Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was brilliantly intelligent and articulate. Al Cohn was so much so that in the late afternoon, we would all wait for him to show up with his latest lode of jokes, something like three new ones a day.

Al could put a spin on words. Denmark has a brand of beer called Elephant. When Al turned up at a club there to play, he was asked, "Do you want an Elephant beer?" Al said, 'No, I drink to forget." That was one of his most quoted quips, and so was this one: when a vagrant approached Al and said he was an alcoholic and needed a drink, Al peeled off some money, then as he gave it over said, "Wait a minute. How do I know you won't spend this on food?"

His remarks keep echoing down through the dwindling ranks of older jazz musicians. And just the other day I heard one new to me. Soon after he changed residence, he encountered a friend who asked, "Where are you living now, Al?" Al said, "Oh, I live in the past."

Paul Desmond aspired to be a writer, and his speech, as fluently inventive as his playing, reflected this. Artie Shaw abandoned one of the most prodigious talents in jazz history to take up the dogged pursuit of a writing talent that was marginal at best; but he wanted it. Dave Frishberg got a BA in journalism from the University of Minnesota and has written some elegant vignettes that I was privileged to print in the Jazzletter, as well as some breathtakingly original lyrics. Jimmy Raney could write. Bobby Scott wrote classic essays for the Jazzletter. Bassist Gordon (Whitey) Mitchell wrote a hilarious piece on what it was like to work for Lester Lanin. I printed it in Down Beat, Lenny Bruce read it, wrote Whitey a fan letter, and Whitey turned from playing to becoming a screen writer and, later, producer. Steve Allen, who began as a band piano player (he played piano better than he ever got credit for, and he was an astonishing vibes player) wrote something like 27 books. Dave Tough, a very bookish person, wrote a column for Down Beat. Eddie Sherman, who was a saxophone player, wrote a humor column for me at Down Beat under the pseudonym George Crater and ended up writing for That Was The Week That Was on television. Alyn Shipton in England is a bassist and author who wrote a fine biography of Dizzy Gillespie. James Lincoln Collier, a trombonist, and Ted Gioia, a pianist, have written two of the best histories of jazz and many other volumes besides. Ted has a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford and an MBA from Stanford. Because I wanted musicians who could write, I hired my friend from Louisville, Don DeMicheal, a fine drummer and vibes player, as my assistant editor. He became my successor when I left the magazine.

And that doesn't take into account all the musicians who have been amateur painters, including Miles Davis and George Wettling, some of them very successful ones at a professional level, as in the case of Les McCann. It has been my experience that talent in the arts is a sort of universal, with the individual settling on one of them as a profession.

These reflections arise on the occasion of the death of Dick Sudhalter, who was both a writer and a cornetist of considerable melodic grace, his playing unashamedly modeled on that of Bix Beiderbecke, of whom he co-wrote with Philip Evans a biography that is unlikely to be surpassed, Bix: Man and Legend. Dick told me he was working on his book when he learned that Evans was also researching one and they decided to pool their efforts. Evans later complained that he was the main author of the book, but in view of Sudhalter's other output, I hardly think he needed a collaborator. The evidence is in his 2002 book Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael.

But the most important of his books was the huge Lost Chords: While Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, published by Oxford in 1999. I read it first in manuscript, whether because Dick or Sheldon Mayer, our editor at Oxford, asked me to. The problem was its sheer size. Sheldon told me it simply was not practical from a cost standpoint to print so huge a book. He asked me to use whatever influence I might have (which was nil) to persuade Dick to cut it down. I discussed it with Sudhalter on the telephone, but he was inflexible — he was in fact a rather inflexible man — and I certainly could see his viewpoint. The very power of the book lay in the depth of its research and its exhaustive documentation in areas no one else had even touched. I thought it was a masterpiece, and told Sheldon so. Sheldon said it could not be published without subsidization, and since most of the granting foundations — particularly the MacArthur genius awards, which are a joke — are all but irrelevant, I had no idea where Dick might find it. But he did. Oxford published it in its full size and weight.

While he (and I and a lot of us) were awaiting the public response, I warned Dick to prepare himself, and reminded him of some of the response to my book Cats of Any Color. While most of my book dealt with the racial discrimination black musicians have experienced, the last third or so of it dealt with the anti-white attitudes manifest in Wynton Marsalis, the greatest politician in the history of this music, and his "critic" friend Stanley Crouch. It received a few reviews calling me a racist. Since Lost Chords was apostasy against the orthodoxy that everything of value in American music had black origins and no white man ever contributed anything to the art of jazz — a popular position among French critics; and Ralph J. Gleason actually said so in writing — I told him he could expect even a harsher assessment. He said he was prepared for it. But you can never prepare yourself for insult, and when it came, I think it hurt him. He called my house after the savage treatment of his book, but I was away. He talked to my wife, and he cried.

Dick defended himself in an interview with Contemporary Authors, saying, "The angrier the denunciation, it seemed, the less the writer had actually read." I'd had the same experience. Dick said his book was a history, not "a racial screed". He might have added that some of its castigators were on dubious ground, since few of them could read music or knew musical theory and Dick had made his points with notated transcriptions and chord changes. It was no more a book for amateurs than Alec Wilder's American Popular Song. They are books that require reflection and musical knowledge.

Lost Chords was and remains one of the most important books ever written about jazz. It is nothing less than brilliant. It did explore the black contributions to jazz; it did explore extensively major areas of the music's history that almost all its other chroniclers had ignored, partly, I suspect out of a fear of being thought illiberal. This had occurred to me repeatedly in an inchoate form. But I knew that jazz trombone had been revolutionized by Jack Teagarden and Tommy Dorsey, and no one overtook Teagarden until J.J. Johnson emerged in the early 1940s. And Dorsey changed the tessitura of the instrument, showing its possibilities as a maker of lyrical melodic lines, and influencing almost all trombonists thereafter, including those in symphony orchestras. It always seemed to me that there was an influence of Bix Beiderbecke in the playing of Miles Davis, and finally I asked him if he'd listened to Bix. He said, "No, but I listened to Bobby Hackett, and he listened to Bix." And of course Miles was a major influence on many other trumpet players, though none achieved the pervasive lyrical melancholy of his playing.

Lester Young and Charlie Parker attested to the influence of Jimmy Dorsey on saxophone. Gerry Mulligan too admired Dorsey. Since I never cared for Dorsey's playing, this left me baffled, but who am I to argue with those three worthies? He was an influence, and this cannot be questioned. And not only on saxophonists but also players of other instruments.

Then there was Red Norvo. the primary explorer of the vibraphone in jazz. There are those who would give that credit to Lionel Hampton, but part of it certainly belongs to Norvo. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were both powerful influences on saxophone and clarinet players. Sudhalter includes them in his chronicle, along with Bud Freeman, Bunny Berigan, Pee Wee Russell, and others.

I heard one or two tracks of the Benny Goodman 1928 Brunswick sessions when I was young, but their significance went right by me. I am deeply grateful to Art Hilgart for sending me a CD burned from an LP that was probably issued about 1949 or '50,with liner notes by Irving Kolodin. Kolodin was a rarity for his time (1908-88), a classical music critic —for the New York Sun and Saturday Review — who had an interest in and knowledge of jazz. Indeed, he knew much more about jazz than most jazz critics of the time knew about classical music. Kolodin also wrote program notes for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.

Artie Shaw told me once that the underlying factor in the evolution of what became his style was an attempt to play alto saxophone the way Bix Beiderbecke played cornet. He may have worshiped Louis Armstrong, and he did, but Bix was the influence on him. And in that time, he was, as these Goodman recordings show, far from being the only one to submit to that influence.

A British jazz critic once wrote that Bix made history but didn't influence it. This is blithering nonsense. But I had never realized until I heard these 1928 Brunswick sides how much Benny Goodman was also influenced by Bix. Kolodin writes in his astute liner notes:

"Turning back the clock is a pastime that has its fascination in any field, and particularly in the field of jazz. Here, in these selections which, more than twenty years ago, were shaping the careers of such noted jazz musicians as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Jimmy McPartland, Fud Livingston, Joe Sullivan, Bud Freeman, and others.

"Just what a prodigy the youthful Goodman was may be gathered from a matching of dates — his birth in May, 1909. and one on the work sheet of the session in which Wolverine Blues and Jazz Holiday were made: January 23, 1928. By any system of figuring this adds up to less than nineteen, truly a tender age in the tough school of dance music. And, as these selections attest, he was a gifted performer on the alto and the baritone sax and a better-than-fair trumpet player, as well as an amazing clarinetist.

"Since all of these recordings were made while Goodman was a member of the Ben Pollack band ... some documentation of that orchestra is in order. Pollack was a Chicago drummer who grew up under the influence of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, with whom he played for a while, and his roots were thus firmly embedded in rich jazz soil. He has won a place in jazz history for two things: the probable introduction into white jazz of four-beat drumming (most of his predecessors had been content to mark only the two main accents with the foot-pedals) and a talent for engaging young musicians of promise, from Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller through Ray Bauduc and Eddie Miller to Harry James and Freddie Slack.

"Though it is the general opinion that the Pollack band of the Goodman-Miller period (roughly from 1925 to 1929) was never quite as good as it might have been, it had a decisive effect on the career of these two men. Certainly Goodman learned a lot from those sessions between 'the two Bennys' as they were known in those days; and Miller had a first opportunity to exercise the arranging skill with which he has been associated ever since."

There are eight tracks on the Brunswick LP release, presumably the complete output of those Benny Goodman and his Boys sessions: Wolverine Blues, A Jazz Holiday, Muskral Ramble, After Awhile (written by Goodman and Bud Freeman), Room 1411 (written by Goodman and Miller), Jungle Blues, Blue, and the notorious Shirt Tail Stomp.

Kolodin wrote of Wolverine Blues and the other tracks: "They show Goodman, Miller, and McPartland to be completely under the spell of Bix — a fact reflected in the title as well as the music, for the band of Beiderbecke's early period around Chicago was, of course, the Wolverines. Nevertheless, each converts the influence in his own way into exciting music: Jimmy (McPartland) in his vigorous lead, Miller in his connecting breaks, and Goodman in his facile, sometimes raucous, clarinet. That influence, incidentally, was absorbed at first hand." Bix was very much a living presence in Chicago at that time. He lived three more years, dying in 1931 in Queens, New York, of complications of his drinking.

Goodman's solo on A Jazz Holiday sounds like a transcription of a Beiderbecke solo. So does Miller's eight-bar trombone solo, as well as the fills he plays behind other solos. Goodman takes one solo on alto, sounding much like Bix, and even one on trumpet. Then there is the notorious Shirt Tail Stomp, which I — as a kid — thought must be a joke. Nothing could be this bad unless it was a joke. And it was, with each musician playing in the worst taste he could muster. But the worst (and best) solo is by Miller, whose trombone seems to summon memories, as Irving Kolodin put it, of "the lowing herds of his native Iowa."

To hear Goodman and Miller at that period is fascinating, because of the growth of both musicians in the few years that lay ahead. From Blue, recorded June 4, 1928, to Moonlight Serenade, which Miller wrote as an exercise when he was studying with Joseph Schillinger and recorded in 1929, seems like a distance of a thousand miles. And Moonlight Serenade by its ubiquity causes us to lose sight of what a good and subtle composition it is.

I don't know whether you can get any of these records. I can't say that I'm mad about them, but they are of historical interest if only for their presage of the big-band era soon to come — and their documentation of the enormous influence of Bix Beiderbecke, an influence Dick Sudhalter recognized profoundly.

I met Dick in a peculiar way. After the Benny Goodman tour of Russia, I heard many of the musicians who had been in the band during that curious safari recount the cruelties of Goodman's behavior. He was already notorious for cancelling numbers when a featured soloist got more applause than he did, and there were legends about his almost catatonic insensitivity to others. He never bothered calling anyone by his name, addressing everyone as Pops, and the joke was that he even spoke to members of his own family that way. When Arturo O'Farrill first wrote for the band, Goodman addressed him as Chico, which is condescending in Spanish, the equivalent of "boy," and Chico got stuck with it.

One of the musicians who told me tales of the Russian tour was bassist Bill Crow, who was in the band at that time. Early in the days of the Jazzletter, I told Bill that I thought he should recount the adventure in full for the sake of future biographers and historians. To make the piece libel-proof, I advised Bill to use no adjectives whatsoever about Goodman, since they could be construed as evidence of bias, and to cite Goodman's cruelties and arrogance only in incidents that could be corroborated in court by other members of the band. I wanted the piece to be so bullet-proof that when Goodman took it to his lawyer or lawyers, he would be told that he had no case. Bill did all of this, and I divided the piece into three parts on which Bill worked hard.

And while I was having this material set in type, Goodman died. Since I doubted that the Jazzletter would survive beyond the end of that year, 1985, and in consideration of all Bill's work, not to mention the duty to history, I printed it.

I got a belligerent letter from Sudhalter, denouncing me and Bill Crow for such bad taste when Goodman had been dead only a matter of weeks. I found his reaction bizarre, and told him so. Goodman hardly cared. And what was the difference between intimating that Goodman was a prick and that Beethoven was a prick, even though the latter had been in the land of shades rather longer? We had a turbulent exchange and in one of his letters Dick launched a lethal assault on Dizzy Gillespie in particular and bebop in general, saying it was "nervous music." I pointed out to him that "nervous" was a subjective state in the recipient and not a description of the music. I told him the statement told me nothing about the music but a lot about him. I concluded eventually that Dick had a taste for the predictable, and Dizzy's sudden flights and excursions away from the center delighted me and a lot of other people but clearly unsettled Sudhalter. Dizzy was one of the greatest musicians in jazz or any other history, but Sudhalter simply would not acknowledge it or perhaps could not even hear it. His tastes were hermetically sealed in time, the era of what he heard in his adolescence, and they were armor plated.

I once had a conversation with Mel Powell about the evolution of jazz in the 1930s and '40s. Earlier jazz was largely triadic. It has been said that jazz follows the harmonic practices of classical music by about fifty years. Gradually jazz embraced the harmonic practices of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, and Bix was said to have had a particular taste for Paul Dukas. It began to use what I called additives, that is to say additions to or extensions of the chord, such as sixths at first, then major sevenths, ninths and thirteenths, or alterations, such as the flatted fifth or raised ninths and elevenths, and chromatic chord subscriptions. What was disconcerting to the traditionalists was not so much the flatted fifth as a chord but the practice of landing on it as a melody note. There is one chord that makes me think of Stan Kenton. I discovered it on my own, and when I asked Stan what it should be called he said it was a suspended fourth, and explained that the third was raised a half step. Johnny Carisi stripped it to its essence when he said to me, "The third is always moveable." I have a sort of permanent background taste for suspended fourths and minor ninth chords. In any case, all of this was known in European music even before the start of the twentieth century. Why did these practices, I asked Mel, come so slowly into big-band music and jazz? Was it because the public wouldn't accept them? "I'll surprise you," Mel said. "It was because the bandleaders couldn't accept them," and he told me of Goodman's screwing around with his charts and particularly those of Eddie Sauter.

He was born Richard Merrill Sudhalter in Boston on December 28, 1958. His father was a saxophonist with a large record collection and an adoration of Bix. Roger Kellaway, who was born in nearby Waban, Massachusetts, a little under a year later, on November 1,1939, remembers that much of his early exposure to jazz was in Sudhalter's basement, listening to his father's records.

He said, "It was the first time I heard Bix, the first time I heard Hoagy Carmichael's Bessie Couldn't Help It, and the first time I heard Joe Venuti's Barnacle Bill the Shithead. Dick's father was named Al, and he played wonderful alto. He played with us. Sudhalter's basement was one of the most important influences of my life." By the time they were in their teens, Sudhalter and Kellaway were playing in Boston night clubs. Sudhalter got a degree in English literature and music from Oberlin, Roger a degree from the New England Conservatory.

Then Dick became improbably a reporter for United Press International, A friend of his from that period, Michael Miner, media columnist for the Chicago Reader, wrote on hearing of his death that they'd met "in 1968 in London, when he showed me where Fleet Street takes lunch. A few weeks later he drove from Germany to Prague and was, by his account, the only Western journalist in Czechoslovakia when the Russian tanks rolled in and crushed Dubcek's reform government. His reward was the bureau in Belgrade, where in '69 he tooled me around town in his little car telling stories about Tito and how he'd covered a Communist Party congress in Bucharest knowing no Romanian.

"We were friends virtually by definition, both being overworked, underpaid, and happily put upon by the same wire service, me in Saint Louis. Sudhalter had gone to Europe to make music, but journalism always interested him too, and he asked UPI’s Frankfort bureau for a job after finding out that pretty much alone among major media in Europe, UPI would, if it could spoon a couple of beans from the bottom of the barrel, hire someone on the spot. By the mid-70s he'd left UPI and was back in the States."

A 1951 novel by Reynolds Packard, called The Kansas City Milkman, was read gleefully by reporters all over America, particularly the young ones, including me. It is a scathing picture of the operations of UPI, then called only UP. The title stems from the constant admonition to the reporters and rewrite men that all their stories be immediately comprehensible to the Kansas City milkman.

It is probably because of that novel, coupled with the shabby salaries they paid, that made me turn down a UPI offer in Paris in 1959. I wish I'd taken the job, and had stayed for maybe six months before switching over to writing in French for one of the French newspapers. Foolishly. I came home instead. Margaret Yourcenar translated her own novels from French into English, and incidentally taught herself Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and modern Greek. Her Memoirs of Hadrian remains one of the greatest novels I've read. The Irish scholar and poet Samuel Beckett, who spent the World War II years in the French underground, wrote most of his later works in French, including Waiting for Godot, and translated them into English. Jorge Luis Borges wrote in Spanish and English. Joseph Conrad made the transition first into French and then into English. Nicholas Nabakov wrote in English.

How I wish I'd taken that job and stayed in France. The road not taken. There are lots of those in everyone's life.

While Dick was researching his biography of Bix, he visited the library at Williams College to look at arrangements written in the 1920s for the Paul Whiteman band. He decided to organize a band to play these charts and on returning to London, where he was living during his tenure at UPI, he organized a band to play them under the title the New Paul Whiteman Orchestra. One of the matters on which Dick and I agreed was the Whiteman band, which was egregiously trashed by later jazz critics, perhaps because of his billing as the King of Jazz, a title he did not himself invent. Whiteman may not have been a jazz musician himself, but he certainly knew and appreciated the good ones, and he hired them, including Joe Venuti, Red Norvo, and of course Bix.

Under Sudhalter's leadership, this reconstituted band, staffed by some of the best British musicians, was applauded enthusiastically at a jazz festival, and went on to successful performances at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. Dick of course played the solos originally assigned to Bix.

These performances revealed just how good the writing for that band was.

I was much intrigued by it, including some charts in which Bill Challis used six saxophones. A few years ago, by now resident in California, I was in New York for a few days and went out to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to interview Bill Challis about his years arranging for the Paul Whiteman and his friendship with Bix. He was living with his brother, Evan Challis, and his wife. Evan was Bill's curator and protector. Bill had been married once but was divorced.

It was Bill Challis who transcribed Beiderbecke's piano compositions, including In a Mist and Flashes. He told me that he could never get Bix to play any of them the same way twice; without Bill's patience we would not have these jewels. I wanted to know more about Bix, but Bill said, "Well, he was a drinker and I wasn't, so I never knew him well.’

Everyone who knew Bix, including Joe Venuti, was reluctant to talk about him. They surrounded him with silence.

Artie Shaw believed that heavy alcoholism in a man usually is a manifest of the effort not to face his own homosexuality. He cited several instances, but I don't buy it. Further, heavy drinking is common among writers, particularly great writers, such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Dashiel Hammet, and, by some fragmentary testimony, Bill Shakespeare. A physician once wrote a book on why writers drink, but I found it fatuous. I think it is out of the desire to diminish the barrier between the left and right brain, to permit one to transfer spatial thought over into the mechanical region that permits execution, as in writing or making music. It is about the unending struggle in the artist to lower inhibition, to attain immediate and unhesitant expression. Something of this is captured in Joyce Carey's novel The Horse's Mouth. It is the yearning to achieve thought beyond thought, the haunting feeling that there is something Out There just beyond reach. You cannot play music or for that matter ride a bicycle until repetition has rewired the brain and conditioned the muscles to the point that one can act without thought.

When I asked Gerry Mulligan, who was a very consciously conscious person (and we were quite close friends) if he had to think about what he was playing, the chords and relevant scales and such, he said, "Sometimes. But when I'm playing well, I don't."

It is the yearning for that ecstatic state that permits free unimpaired expression - - what Roger Kellaway calls "getting out of your own way" — that causes artists of all kinds to drink or use drugs.

Dick Sudhalter, I think, was incapable of that, nor do I think he even aspired to it. When I said he spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs, I would add that he played that way too. His very lovely playing was premeditated. To some extent we all do this; otherwise we could not speak. We are always a few words ahead of ourselves, and Robin Williams at his best makes free-association into exalted comedy, switching thought directions on a dime, as it were. That's what Dizzy could do; he was one of the most gloriously uninhibited men I ever knew, which is perhaps what made Sudhalter uncomfortable, those Dionesian flights whose directions you could not even try to anticipate. Dick wanted life to be ordered and orderly, which was manifest in his impeccable London dress code. He wanted what the Germans call ordnung, order, and his name was German and. like my father, he spoke the language.

That sense of order is perhaps one of the reasons he spoke beautifully. He was a very handsome man, and his speech went with his looks and his careful perfect attire. But he lacked a sense of humor. I recall what Woody Herman said of Willis Conover: "Don't you know what's wrong with your friend Willis Conover? He has no sense of humor." I defended Willis's wit and beautifully constructed puns. And Woody said, "Wit and humor are not the same thing." It's a distinction I have never forgotten. Dick was a lot like Willis; and they were both very serious about everything. They lacked that inner laughter that illumines even the darkest thoughts, like Rembrandt's underpainting, without which you cannot write tragedy.

But he was a fine and graceful musician, and a good man, and had he never done anything else in his life — and he did — he would have a place in history for Lost Chords.”