Tuning Out Black History
Hentoff, Nat
Tuning Out Black History Frank Martin of the Island Trees school board on Long Island was the leader of the seemingly endless and losing battle to expel nine books from his district's libraries....
...The music is almost rhapsodic at times, as well as invitingly mysterious on other passages...
...Subtle and supple as are the McGarrigle sisters, Betty Carter is even more slyly inventive...
...Roy EldridgelJazz Masterpieces—part of a new Franklin Mint Record Society series of jazz archives released in conjunction with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers...
...An elementary school...
...And elsewhere, in fresh twilight colors, the sisters muse on what Bessie Smith used to call the empty bed blues...
...This composition (available on Nonesuch 70943-1) is an evocation of those days, one of those glorious summer days when, during the rowing, Carroll first began to improvise his fantasies...
...And they sing those songs in a knowing, quiet, but sometimes lethal way that resembles certain French chansonniers more than most American pop singers...
...For information, write Stanley Walker, The Franklin Mint Record Society, Franklin Center, PA 19063...
...The student body was nearly all black, and in the halls were pictures of Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, W . E . B . Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and other distinguished black Americans...
...I play what I feel on it...
...We require serious role models for our children...
...Some years ago, a black principal was showing me around her elementary school in a Midwestern city...
...Well, that day I heard Roy, and I've been hearing him in my head ever since...
...For a list of previous releases, contact Bet-Car Productions, 117 Saint Felix Street, Brooklyn, N Y 11217...
...That she has her own record company is one of the indices of how determined a survivor Carter is...
...A man of strong, deeply focused emotions— shaped by a prodigious technique— Michelangeli keeps on making rather extraordinary musical demands of himself...
...But he hardly ever gets invited to schools...
...In their new set, love over and over (Polydor 810- 042-1-Y-l), the McGarrigles have created short stories, epiphanies, and vignettes, as well as what are customarily called songs...
...That's jazz...
...Another seriously playful musical sensibility dealing in gentle surprises is that of composer David Del Tredici...
...A particularly compelling event of the musical month is a performance by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli of Beethoven's Fifth "Emperor" Concerto (Deutsche Grammophon 2531 385) with Carlo Maria Guilini directing the Vienna Symphony...
...There was a time, years ago, when Roy was asked to come to a black high school in Los Angeles...
...Those are entertainers," she told me coldly...
...Michelangeli seldom makes public appearances—or recordings, for that matter...
...This kid was impressed by white musicians, and he was saying that Roy wasn't trained at all...
...Roy looked at me, pointed to his horn, and said very forcefully, 'You see this horn...
...But mamma keeps on driving for the Star Cab C o . ("Don't throw the meter, mamma...
...Maybe someone will donate one or two of the albums to a school...
...He is a perfectionist, but not in the fussy sense that term occasionally connotes...
...Where is Mr...
...You'd better find out about the music of your people...
...These six works are among those rare musical experiences that deepen not only your way of listening but also, to some extent, your way of understanding your journey in the world...
...Afterwards, I told Roy what that kid had been saying about him...
...Not widely publicized, however, was the fact that during this struggle between Martin and Island Trees students suing for the right to read, Martin also reviewed and rejected a social studies text that cited Louis Armstrong as a renowned black artist...
...Twenty-four of his sides (ranging from "Heckler's Hop" to "I Remember Harlem") are included in Louis Armstrong...
...Eldridge's room?' I'd ask...
...I told the principal I was somewhat surprised that Duke Ellington wasn't up there, and Louis Armstrong, and Roy Eldridge...
...Meritt 502, The Meritt Record Society, P.O...
...Eldridge.' 'What...
...Eldridge's bill?' 'We have some mail for him...
...Who checked you in?' " Roy has a lot more to tell, first-hand, about black-and-white social studies...
...You can't start appreciating American classical music too early...
...The mesmeric soloist is soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, and Leonard Slatkin conducts the St...
...And there is irony and, of course, fantasy...
...If you are looking, in advance, for a Christmas or other seasonal present for someone who needs music almost as much as food, I would suggest a new recording by the Amadeus Quartet of Beethoven's Late String Quartets (Deutsche Grammophon, four LPs, 2740 265...
...Bet-Car Records MK1004...
...And as for social studies, Roy was one of the first black musicians to travel with white bands...
...Indeed, the vast majority of kids—black, white, and all the others—have no idea who Roy Eldridge is and what he's done...
...One of the kids, Charles Mingus, never forgot that visit...
...I would suggest instead Whatever Happened to Love...
...There is the child whose daddy left long ago, having "tied the knot again with a younger and smaller wife...
...And she, too, can't be trapped in anybody else's category...
...It keeps drawing you into that question Duke Ellington often asked: "What am I here for...
...Also very much worth having are: Roy I Roy Eldridge—The Early Years (two LPs, Columbia C2 38033, including "Let Me Off Uptown" with Anita O'Day...
...Louis Symphony...
...And even if Lewis Carroll is not a regular companion of yours, the music is enchanting all by itself...
...In this respect, Frank Martin speaks for the vast majority of those who decide what is and isn't important for kids to learn — school boards, textbook publishers, teachers, administrators...
...The scrofulous books ranged from Alice Childress's A Hero Aint Nothin* But a Sandwich (flunked because a character says George Washington owned slaves) to Bernard Malamud's The Fixer (offensively anti-Semitic, said the school board...
...Tuning Out Black History Frank Martin of the Island Trees school board on Long Island was the leader of the seemingly endless and losing battle to expel nine books from his district's libraries...
...Box 156, Hicksville, N Y 11802...
...Most hotels were closed to him so, as he said on Like It Is, "the way I got in was by being my own valet...
...In fact, her utterly personal phrasing and sound, her intimately playful relationship with time are exceedingly difficult to approximate in words...
...A guy in our school band, a black guy," Mingus once told me, "was putting down older players like Roy...
...Someday you're going to thank me for talking to you like this.'" Because of the current abundance of jazz reissues (they cost the record companies less), many of Roy Eldridge's most dramatic and soaring performances are available again...
...All this came to mind when Roy Eldridge, seventy-two, recently appeared on a New York television program, Like It Is, one of the very few in the area aimed specifically at black audiences...
...If, like me, you are a life-long reader of Alice in Wonderland, you ought to find his In Memory of A Summer Day—part one of Child Alice— beguilingly congenial...
...T want to take his bags up there.' Then the next morning, I'd always let them know it was me because when we'd leave, I'd say, 'Can I have Mr...
...Carter is the most original jazz singer since the early Sarah Vaughan, and that just barely begins to describe her...
...Where is he?' 'I'm Mr...
...For decades, Roy was the most daring trumpet player in jazz—a ferocious competitor whose aggressive imagination created solos so astonishing that his recordings have lost none of their seizing immediacy...
...All the Cats Join In (1943-1946 sessions, including "I Can't Get Started," Jazz Heritage Series, MCA 1355), and Roy Eldridge—The Krupa Years 1941-42 (previously unavailable airchecks with the band performing in front of audiences...
...Hey, I like Louie Armstrong's music," Martin told a Washington Post reporter, "but dammit, it doesn't belong in a social studies textbook, especially when they're taking space away from the Second World War or American history...
...Choice Cuts Kate and Anna McGarrigle are sisters, in Montreal, who write songs unlike anyone else's...
...And when they were written, Carroll dedicated the original manuscript of the book to Alice: " A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day...
...Carroll much enjoyed taking Alice and her sisters on rowing expeditions up the Thames...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
