I post a weekly diary of the historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I featured this past week in "Cheers & Jeers". For example .....
You might imagine that reality TV is (in actuality) some form of escapism. Not so fast ...
SEPARATED at BIRTH - retired philosophy professor David Ray Griffin (now a leading "Truther" conspiracy figure) and "Project Runway" star Tim Gunn.
As Heidi Klum might say, "You .... are out". OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
ART NOTES - a photography exhibit by photographer Tom Gundelfinger O'Neal - of 1960's-70's rock and blues musicians/album covers - is on display at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. through May 4th.
FILM NOTES - in the just-concluded, inaugural Sundance London film festival: founder Robert Redford hailed the premier of an environmental documentary from Prince Charles entitled "Harmony: A New Way of Looking At Our World".
MUSIC NOTES - a memorable 1971 National Press Club concert by trumpeter Louis Armstrong - recorded just a few months before his death - is being re-released widely after a very limited original pressing.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Piper the Cat - adopted by pilots at a small Illinois airfield a dozen years ago when she arrived and proved adept at keeping mice away. Recently, she went missing ..... and was found a month later ... in Panama, where they had sent a plane.
LATER THIS MONTH some rare footage of a Beatles concert lost for 48 years - filmed at the Washington Coliseum in 1964, the band's first full US gig - will be screened as part of a 92-minute documentary in New York (this coming Sunday) before going into wide distribution.
HAIL and FAREWELL to the veteran TV producer Bob Stewart who has died at the age of 91. Had he created just one game show such as "The Price Is Right", "To Tell the Truth", "Password" and the "$10,000 Pyramid", his career would be worth noting. But he created them all - dying, in fact, just weeks after Dick Clark, who was the host of "Pyramid".
MOTHER-DAUGHTER? - Bloomberg News reporter Margaret Carlson and Jackie Gingrich Cushman (Newt's daughter).
FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS the Frenchwoman Françoise Mouly has been the art director of the New Yorker; helping to choose the cover design along with editor David Remnick. Now, a new book entitled Blown Covers showcases the designs that didn't make the front page.
ART NOTES - an exhibition on loan from the Malba Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina- including works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera - are at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas through August 5th.
OF ALL THE stories one reads about bureaucracy in Russia: a correspondent for The Guardian tells how .... dry cleaning reaches an absurdly low point.
MUSIC NOTES - click this link to view a cavalcade of photographs of pop stars when they were in high school.
THURSDAY's CHILD is a Florida kitteh discovered on a telephone pole with .... a Doritos bag on its head. When firefighters attempted to rescue the kitteh, it fell to the ground ... and just dashed off into the distance.
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER the memories of the survivors of the devastation inflicted upon the Basque town of Guernica are still fresh.
ART NOTES #2 - a watercolor not seen for nearly sixty years painted by Paul Cézanne - part of a Card Player series - was sold at auction for $19 million.
BRAIN TEASER - try this week's Weekly World News Quiz from the BBC.
FRIDAY's CHILD is Paris the Cat - adopted three years ago by an Illinois woman, who has since become an animal welfare volunteer.
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... with the death of Abbey Lincoln, my favorite living jazz performer is the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders .... and yes, like many others I was originally drawn to him as one of the last links to the iconic John Coltrane. But while he can raise-the-roof playing avant-garde music like his mentor did in his final years (and over the years, he features many Coltrane favorites in his set-list) - Sanders carved out his own path in the late 60's and can play quite tastefully, in any setting.
He was born Ferrell Sanders in 1940, the son of two music teachers in Little Rock, Arkansas. As a teenager, he played as a house musician for travelling blues musicians, such as Bobby "Blue" Bland and Junior Parker, and one still hears that sound in his playing today. He moved to Oakland, California after high school and was known by his nickname Little Rock - and was a future role model to a part-time tenor saxophonist from Hope, Arkansas. Sanders gained experience in the Bay Area clubs before making his way to New York in 1961 to break into the larger jazz world.
He struggled mightily, often sleeping in the streets and pawning his horn, before meeting up with the avant-garde player Sun Ra - also from the South via Alabama (although he claimed to be actually from Saturn). And he is one of two people reputed to have named Ferrell Sanders as Pharoah: in Sun Ra's case deliberately, and for the poet Amiri Baraka (the former LeRoi Jones) due to mishearing his real name.
In either case, performing with Sun Ra was his big break, and when he formed his own band in 1963, someone who took notice was John Coltrane. Although he was never made a formal member of Coltrane's last band from 1964 (until his death in 1967) Pharoah Sanders became a frequent sideman. The 60's were the heyday of avant-garde, and Sanders continued it after the death of Coltrane.
His magnum opus was the 1969 album Karma - featuring an epic-length (32 minutes) song The Creator Has a Master Plan - a song later covered by King Crimson - and which featured Leon Thomas on vocals. Thomas had been a vocalist for Count Basie, and in 1973 even toured with Carlos Santana. On this track, he sings in a sweet voice .... until he breaks into near-yodeling umbo weti, which is an acquired taste. Either way, Pharoah Sanders was now a cult figure in jazz, as this album (improbably) became an FM classic.
He continued in that vein for a time in the 1970's, before veering into Quiet Storm style R&B with Love Will Find a Way in 1978 (around the height of the disco era). That was a brief interlude, but many of his earlier blues and soul-jazz influences returned, and his music today is quite diverse (having seen him several years ago at the Montreal Jazz festival).
As mentioned, he often features the music of John Coltrane (both Coltrane's originals as well as standards he performed). Especially beginning in the mid-80's and continuing into the 90's, a series of albums featuring ballads were well-received by critics. He could still let loose: this gentle yet often searing version of the John Coltrane slow blues Equinox was a request I made of a local DJ in the 90's, and at its conclusion simply said, "Wow". In 1987, he appeared on a tribute album to John Coltrane led by Trane's pianist McCoy Tyner - and Pharoah Sanders shared in the 1988 Grammy Award for jazz instrumental album.
Pharoah Sanders will turn age 72 this coming October, and is still an active player. Perhaps the best description of his place in avant-garde jazz came from a third tenor saxophonist practitioner, Albert Ayler - "Trane was the Father...Pharoah was the son...I am the Holy Ghost".
So many of his songs to recommend .... let's start with Light at the Edge of the World - a 1971 film (based upon the Jules Verne novel) with music by the Italian composer Piero Piccioni - one of Italy's first jazz composers. This eloquent performance by Pharoah Sanders is one that I hope is played at my funeral.
Next .... well, I gotta feature The Creator Has a Master Plan - his magnum opus. The original recording is of epic length (32 minutes) and this video is just part one: it begins with dissonance, followed by that hypnotic riff (at the 2:00 minute mark) followed by Leon Thomas' vocals (at the 7:45 mark) which cascades into his ... yodeling (an acquired taste to be sure). Starting at the 2:00 mark (and going up to the end at 11 minutes) is all anyone needs to hear.
Lastly, here is a bouncy, vocal performance from him, with the song Save Our Children - collectively, these three tunes paint a nice portrait of the man.
Save our children
Dead or dying
Love our mothers
love our fathers
Now's the moment
for salvation
All we need
is inspiration