Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR BUD POWELL His assumption of an authoritative tone notwithstanding, Albert Goldman reveals large gaps in his knowledge and understanding of both jazz in general and his...
...Who, one wonders, looks to Calcutta as their Mecca...
...Powell has not "been wrapped in a sullen stupor" in recent years...
...By the simple device of quoting me out of context, James makes me say that both groups were identical and hence that Castro belonged to the fellow-traveling wing of the Ortodoxo party...
...New York City Benjamin Protter ELLISON AND HOWE I have come late upon Irving Howe's article in Dissent...
...Nevertheless, the extraordinary fertility of the soil and the unique beauty of the natural surroundings make life under minimal conditions possible and even desirable...
...Castro's deceit cannot be duplicated...
...For the rest, Mr...
...I say "unfortunately," because I am quoted out of context and made to say something I did not say...
...I stand by my statement that an undefined segment of Bengalis would prefer to be reunited with India...
...Morgenstern raises that is central to my article, the question of Powell's recent life in Paris...
...The intellectuals in the Ortodoxo party, including Marta Frayde and Vincentina Antuna...
...The "hotheads" did not even control the Youth Section (its last President, Max Lesnik, fled Cuba in January 1961...
...There is always a danger in expressing unpalatable truths...
...In his "Preface to Algerian Reports," Camus repeats that same thought: "if anyone . . . still thinks heroically that one's brother must die rather than one's principles...
...New York City Dan Morgenstern Co-editor, Jazz Albert Goldman replies: Mr...
...If it did so, it would become a very insignificant, subjugated part of India, whereas it is now the major part of Pakistan...
...Albert Camus must be seen in the perspective of a man attached to the soil on which he was born, to his home, to his family...
...New York City M. Mahfuzal Huq John E. Owen replies: Mr...
...Secondly, why should the East Pakistanis want to be united with India...
...one made up of intellectuals some of whom—Marta Frayde, Eduardo Corona...
...Even this early, though, the mismanagement of huge sums for the Karnafuli Dam project was a public scandal...
...And if they could find those books, and find the passages Charlie was doing, they would play like Charlie...
...Why, then, was U.S...
...And now to come to the one point Mr...
...DEAR EDITOR BUD POWELL His assumption of an authoritative tone notwithstanding, Albert Goldman reveals large gaps in his knowledge and understanding of both jazz in general and his specific subject in particular in his article on pianist Bud Powell ("The Living Legend," NL, December 9...
...Prio and his Cuban Revolutionary party...
...Camus was not interested in principles as such, in particular those principles that boil down to high-sounding slogans...
...Nor can his affliction with tuberculosis be laid at the door of "colossal self-neglect...
...The other people he lists (and a great many he does not include, like Erroll Garner, the boogie woogie pianists, etc) were not on to the harmonic innovations of Bop, as anyone can tell from their recordings and from their own statements...
...aid funds would be similarly misused...
...In one place, he speaks of East Pakistan's resentment of India, and remarks: "Western arms aid to India has aroused bad feeling against both the U.S...
...Looking back on the experience, together with many other Americans, I often wonder how any Westerner survived...
...It is part of his bias, a bias that makes his book worthless...
...Lay off jazz, Mr...
...Again, East Pakistan has nothing to gain and much to lose by unifying itself with India...
...Morgenstern is either laying down the law on matters of opinion, or he is simply talking about things of which he has no direct knowledge...
...To those of us who belonged to the Ortodoxo party, his singling out of three unimportant members to smear the entire organization appears as a deliberate attempt to build up Dr...
...At that time the army of American technicians had not yet arrived, the Consulate (it was not yet a Consulate-General) had only four or five staff members, and there wasn't an inch of sidewalk in the entire capital...
...Owens claims to have been in East Pakistan for the last four years as a visiting Professor at Dacca University...
...I do not gather, however, that Howe is attempting to elevate Wright or make villains of Ellison and Baldwin...
...Is it not a fact that Bengali Moslems fought for partition...
...despised and feared the violent "hotheads" of the Castro group and did their best to keep them from control of any of the party's sections...
...Black Boys and Native Sons...
...As one of James' informants I was, unfortunately, given credit in his book...
...In Robert Reisner's Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Citadel, 1962) there is a long interview with Earl Hines, for example, in which the pianist constantly refers to certain "books" (evidently books of exercises) which he naively insists contain all the secrets of the ParkerGillespie style: "I didn't hear anybody else play that way then...
...His statement that in the mid1940s "Negro pianists were self-taught naifs who could swing and play melody but were harmonically crude" is laughable and an insult to such living examples to the contrary as Teddy Wilson, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Billy Kyle, and the late Art Tatum (Powell's idol), not to mention Clyde Hart, Clarence Profit and James P. Johnson...
...In the same breath, he writes: "An undefined segment of Bengalis would prefer to be re-united with India...
...This kind of aid is likely to have more constructive consequences than massive appropriations which cannot be used wisely and cannot be absorbed into the economy safely...
...The misquotations are important because they serve James' preconceived idea that Castro was always a Communist and that the Ortodoxo party was Communist-oriented...
...If Mr...
...If Mr...
...I shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance...
...Owen also makes some unwarranted remarks against Islam and its relation to cooperative endeavor without having any knowledge of that religion...
...It is in the context of this simple, natural feeling that we must place his declaration, quoted by Carruth: "I love justice, but I love my mother more...
...I believe that the kind of aid which Pakistan needs most is that given by Israel...
...And only through deception could the Communists win popular support in Latin America...
...The other I described as the young "hotheads" of the Ortodoxo party...
...As for Powell himself, Goldman is entitled to his aesthetic assumptions—whatever their merit may be...
...As for resentment against India, Mr...
...aid poured into the Province without adequate safeguards...
...checking my sources, I find in an article by George Hoefer in Down Beat (February 28, 1963, p. 38), the report that "[Cootie] Williams was appointed Powell's guardian and wouldn't let the pianist leave the band in January, 1944, when Dizzy Gillespie organized the first bop group . . ." As Morgenstern must be aware, Negro jazz musicians often regard one another as members of one family, the older men looking out for the younger ones...
...The opposite is true...
...Professor Owen, for example, writes: "Outside the family circle...
...And the "elders" who supposedly kept Bud from joining the first bop band in 1944 by forcing him to go "on the road" with the Cootie Williams band must be as mythical and crafty as those of Zion...
...And as Owen suggests, without an adequate public morality the wisdom of giving foreign aid is doubtful...
...Their enmity stemmed from differences that led to the murder of Manolo Castro, President of the Federation of University Students, by a group with which Fidel Castro was associated...
...If this is indeed the case, I don't know how "500 Americans," including Owen, could survive for so long a time at Dacca...
...In the course of the debate Draper refers to James' book, Cuba: First Soviet Satellite in the Americas as an "intellectual monstrosity...
...Huq asks how I survived for such a long time under the "jungle code" of East Pakistan...
...As an experienced sociologist and impartial observer of Islam and the East Pakistani scene, I am among those who recognize that danger...
...Huq's letter is one more example...
...His devoted wife, known to one and all as "Buttercup" (now there is a name to make a radical intellectual wince), never leaves his side, and she is a good cook and housekeeper...
...all of them failed to make headway...
...DRAPER-JAMES May I join the debate between Daniel James and Theodore Draper (NL, "Dear Editor," November 11 and December 9, 1963) concerning Draper's article, "Bosch and Communism" (NL, October 14, 1963...
...As for Jean Cau, mentioned by Roditi, Camus answered him effectively in the same "Preface": "my family . . . being poor and free of hatred, never exploited or oppressed anyone...
...If there is so much love for India and desire for unification among East Pakistanis, why is there any resentment of India...
...it looks to Calcutta as its Mecca...
...And is it not also true that the first Moslem League Cabinet committed to partition was formed in Bengal...
...The statement about Negro pianists in the mid-l940s was qualified in my article: it read "most Negro piansists . . .", and the qualification was intended to exclude a few obvious exceptions like Ellington and Tatum...
...Morgenstern is right on two minor points: "Wallingford" was a slip of the pen for "Wallington," and Powell was with Cootie Williams in New York when the Gillespie offer came through...
...Before I wrote the article I had an interview with Oscar Goodstein (the owner of Birdland and a long-time friend and patron of Bud Powell's), during the course of which I was allowed to read a considerable file of correspondence from everyone concerned with Powell in recent months, including his "wife," Altivia Edwards (alias "Buttercup"), an official of the American Embassy in Paris, friends of Goodstein in Paris, and a French artist with whom Powell was living when he fell ill...
...I assume that the "George Wallingford" mentioned by Goldman is supposed to be George Wellington...
...American officials were aware of the situation and had good reason to believe that U.S...
...Bud, you see, had joined Williams in 1943, and the band was then in residence at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom...
...His forthright comments are very much to the point...
...But I wonder how an educator could write such a shallow article without having any regard for objectivity and intellectual honesty...
...Is it not a fact that the Moslem League, which was responsible for the creation of Pakistan, had its origin at Dacca in 1906...
...in fact, I gather very little of anything from Howe except that he has considerable respect for James Baldwin the essayist, and, as the saying goes nowadays, "spokesman for the Negro intellectuals...
...Asst...
...Morgenstern peddle in the jazz trade press and the men's magazines...
...In an unsolicited letter to James, answering a questionnaire he had handed to Raul Chibas, I mentioned the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxos) to which Fidel Castro belonged in his early '20s...
...In his enthusiasm to draw as black a picture of East Pakistan as possible, Owen also makes many contradictory statements...
...Suffice it to say that epics of man-mating do not make a novelist nor do old-time sermons cadenced to bowel-rhythm rhetoric make an essayist: the first is a contradiction in traumatic terms, the second a form of diarrheal ism...
...and then to Ralph Ellison's blistering response to Howe (NL, December 5...
...I find the causerie quite significant, partly because Ellison clarifies the nature and extent of his relationship to Richard Wright, but mainly because he punctures the posture of Olympian hauteur most members of the American Critical Establishment assume when they deal with the works of the "outsiders...
...In any case, I was not concerned with Negro pianists per se, but with their general inability to provide the harmonic support Parker needed...
...The population problem in East Pakistan is enormous and the prospects for adequate economic development exceedingly limited...
...And now Maxwell Geismar has come along to confirm much of this...
...Henry F. Winslow, Sr...
...Islam has failed to produce such a morality, and Western influence has not given rise to one...
...As everyone familiar with Havana University politics knows...
...and India among many Bengalis...
...Pakistanis can learn in Israel, as hundreds of Africans are now doing, the essentials of a public morality as well as techniques appropriate to their own economic level...
...The degree to which the Jamesian invaginators and Jacobite litterheads have buried the head of the ostrich is directly proportionate to the elevation they have made of his oil pouch...
...I might add the names of George Handy and Joe Albany to the list in the article...
...Vincentina Antuna, etc.—turned out to be fellow travelers or simply Communist party members who infiltrated the Ortodoxos...
...CAMUS I am rather amused by the controversy over Albert Camus between Edouard Roditi and Hayden Carruth (NL...
...In brief, he was more interested in human beings than humanity in the abstract...
...On the basis of my own experience in two nations...
...From Owen's description it appears that matters have grown progressively worse since I taught at the University some 12 years ago...
...East Bengalis live by a jungle code...
...The most serious impediment is the utter lack of a public morality capable of uniting the people in a common effort to cope with common problems...
...Perhaps he will recollect, too, that Dacca University students demonstrated before the office of the Indian Deputy High Commissioner against that incident...
...But as recordings made in 1963 will bear out...
...The fact that such views are taboo and cannot be publicly expressed in Pakistan's present atmosphere of defensiveness and inferiority vis-à-vis India does not refute the existence of such views...
...Dear Editor," December 9), for they both seem to show a similar incomprehension of the man and the reasons for his stand on the Moslem and Algerian rebellion...
...If Castro had been known as a Communist his fate would not have differed from that of the Peruvian, Venezuelan and Dominican guerrilla leaders...
...a genuine "intellectual monstrosity...
...Baltimore, Md...
...They weren't playing out of the books this guy [Parker] had...
...He would also be welladvised to look into the comparative figures of both wings before he comes to the conclusion that the cooperative movement has failed in East Pakistan...
...His passing comments on The Outsider and The Long Dream tell me that he never heard of such realities as Eichmann, Oswald, Cosa Nostra, Beckwith and the long line of corrupt judges running from the birth of human greed to last week's bribe...
...Howe will have to do his homework much better than he has yet done if he would tell us something about boys and sons...
...Kibbutz Maayan Zvi Stanley Maron Israel I was very much surprised to read John E. Owen's "Letter from East Pakistan" in your November 11 issue...
...I am really at a loss to understand Professor Owen's motive in writing such a onesided and thoroughly biased article under the guise of a field worker for Unesco...
...Owen recounts many recent incidents, but how could he afford to forget the treatment meted out to the Dacca University students at Sialdah Station in Calcutta only a year ago...
...It does not, as Carruth wishes to imply, mean that Camus may have wanted to save his mother from any possible reprisals...
...Many more names could be cited...
...As for the "elders," they were not "mythical" or "crafty...
...Neither realizes that, for Camus, Algeria was his homeland and French his nationality...
...That's "wiggy" writing, old boy...
...Hugo Blanco, Fabricio Ojeda and Manuel Tavarez started guerrilla warfare as Communists or pro-Communists...
...Morgenstern really wants the facts, let him go to the sources and stop parrotting the party line...
...Morgenstern disagrees on this point, how does he explain the presence of so many schooltrained white pianists in Negro Bop outfits...
...Castro was a personal enemy of Eduardo Corona...
...New York City Antonio de la Carrera EAST PAKISTAN Congratulations on publishing John E. Owen's "Letter From East Pakistan" (NL, November 11...
...Any book on Cuba that devotes so much space to portraying Castro as a Communist or as a man so enmeshed in Communist politics as to make his affiliation obvious fails to explain the success of the insurrection led by him as well as the popular support he received after his victory...
...But three quarters of the French in Algeria resemble them and, if only they are provided reason rather than insults, will be ready to admit the necessity of a more just and freer order...
...I didn't want to hurt or offend anyone, so I described the causes of Powell's condition as "collosal self-neglect...
...Prof., English Morgan State College...
...I referred to two groups within the Ortodoxos...
...when students and a university professor were beaten and their train hauled up...
...These communications gave me a penetrating glimpse into the horrid conditions of Powell's recent life—and they also gave the lie to the sort of middle-class fantasies which people like Mr...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 1
