Dizzy Gillespie, Ignacz Paderewski, Sonny Rollins, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Vito Marcantonio, and the Benjamin Franklin High School Riots of 1946

Further to “Vote for Jordan for President!” …

Dizzy for President

During the 1964 US presidential election, I spent a few days handing out leaflets urging voters to bypass Democratic and Republican candidates Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater and write in the name of be-bop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as their choice for president instead. Promoting “Dizzy for President” was a late-beat-era fringe protest against the the dryness of mainstream politics but, as I look back, Dizzy’s beret-in-the-ring might well have augmented the political field. A brilliant innovator, a disciplined and inspiring orchestra leader, and an African -American whose adopted Baha’i faith strengthened his inherent humanism, Dizzy had much to offer.

Should musicians run for president? Legendary classical pianist Ignacz Paderewski, the only musician I am aware of ever having been a head-of-state, served only a single year, 1919, as the premier of newly-independent Poland before he was pressured to resign — but Paderewski was a soloist and not a seasoned band leader like Dizzy.

For me, a musician in the White House would be no less unthinkable than an aging B-movie actor as president or a one-tine professional body-builder as governor of California. In contemporary Russia, even former chess grandmasters entertain political careers. Musicianship, like other endeavors, can generate requisite empathy and responsibility. My friend Ben Salzano — himself one of the generation of young Italian-American jazz musicians that flourished in the 1950s in the Rochester, New York — relates the following anecdote about how jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins discovered the social responsibility of musicianship while a high school student in New York in 1946.

East Harlem 1946

1946 saw the opening of an immense new high school building in working-class Italian East Harlem just north of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The school, Benjamin Franklin High School, like much of the infrastructure and services of East Harlem, was a product of the perspicacity and idealism of the neighborhood’s long-time congressman, Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio’s power-base was rooted in East Harlem’s insular Italian-American community and also in the neighborhood’s growing Puerto Rican and African American populations. A socialist, an egalitarian, and a political realist, Marcantonio ensured that Benjamin Franklin High would admit both local white students and black and Hispanic students from throughout Harlem, in the process accelerating racial integration of schools city-wide. Residents of Italian East Harlem, however, thought otherwise. When the first black students (Sonny Rollins among them) showed up at Benjamin Franklin for the start of the school year they were greeted with catcalls and a rain of bricks, bottles, and garbage thrown from the roofs of neighborhood tenements. Fracases erupted between Italian and black teenagers and the atmosphere remained tense for weeks. To calm the situation, Marcantonio and the principal of Benjamin Franklin High invited Frank Sinatra to perform at the school.

Sinatra and Nat King Cole

In 1946, Frank Sinatra was not yet the cynical rat-packer and Nixon hanger-on of later decades. He still had the crystal-clear voice and dark good looks of a young working-class urban crooner. He also had ideals and didn’t hesitate to express them. He had just recorded and performed in a film short of him singing “The House I live In,” New York City leftist school teacher Abel Meeropool’s ode to an egalitarian vision of post-war America, a country-wide hit that came to be an unofficial second US national anthem in the years between the defeat of fascism in Europe and the chill of the McCarthy era back home. From the stage of the auditorium at Benjamin Franklin High, Sinatra told the students, white and black, to knock off the violence and learn to live together, advising, as Sonny recalled it: “… you don’t have to love everybody but you don’t have to kill them either.” A few days later, according to Rollins, Nat King Cole showed up at the school to give a concert of his own and make the same appeal for peace. The violence soon ended and integration of Benjamin Franklin High School was underway. This, Rollins claims, taught him what musicians can and should accomplish.

Coda

Recently, Ben Salzano told me that he had recounted Sonny Rollins’s tale to a fellow musician, a native of Italian East Harlem who attended Benjamin Franklin High School at the same time as Sonny and who remembered the 1946 disturbances clearly. Was Sonny Rollin’s narrative accurate? Salzano asked. His colleague answered in an accent and tone once characteristic of the neighborhood: “Sonny? Nah! Sonny’s full-a-shit; Sinatra and Nat played Benjamin Franklin on the same day.”

More…

Additional entries on Vito Marcantonio and on the social, economic, and ideological roots of the ethos and infrastructure of New York will follow in subsequent postings.

For more on the life and music of Sonny Rollins including, I am told, a tighter retelling of his recollections of Benjamin Franklin High School anno 1946, see Eric Nisenson’s “Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation”, St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

For a timely posting by my friend and colleague Doc Searls, a long-time independent-voter, on his decision to support Barack Obama in the present primary elections click here.

An Obama Endorsement and … “Vote for Jordan for President!”

(Warning: Partisanship Ahead!)

For the last six weeks or so, the pressure of finalizing new commercial projects had kept me from posting to this site. Now that the crunch is past, I’ll try to get back to posting more regularly. For the moment I’ll begin with the US presidential primaries….

As an unabashed leftist, I’ve followed the Republican primaries with detachment and schadenfreude, breathing a sigh of relief that the authoritarian and divisive former mayor of New York, the self-styled hero of “9/11″, has logged a poor showing and left the race and that the proposed candidacy of Mike Huckabee has hinted at the collapse of the axiomatic live-poor-vote-rich behavior of America’s Evangelical Christians.

Obama

As to the Democratic primaries, I’m for … Obama! The logic is simple. Two fault lines of inequality continue to divide and poison America: Poverty and income disparity on the one hand, and race and the unattended legacy of the three centuries of slavery on the other. The candidacy of John Edwards attempted to address economic inequality while the candidacy of Barack Obama, at least symbolically, addresses the issue of race. Now that Edwards has stepped aside, for me the choice is clear.

As to the third democratic candidate: Hillary Clinton is half of a duo that helped push the Democratic Party to the right, more distant than ever from its New Deal-era commitments to egalitarianism, security, and opportunity. Hillary attacks Obama for his lack of experience, awkwardly rhyming that Obama offers “inspiration and not perspiration.” What hypocrisy! Hillary’s current campaign hatchet-man and prospective “first-laddie,” ex-president Bill Clinton was no less inexperienced and displayed no less of a reliance on “inspiration” and charisma when he stood for his first campaign. Under the veil of gender politics, Hillary is a mainstream politician, and not just in her initial support for the misadventure in Iraq. Throughout her first-lady-ship as throughout her career, she has dedicated a good portion of her “perspiration” to the good of corporate interests. Both her “inspiration” and her “perspiration” flagged miserably in her loudly-publicized but ineffectual short-lived campaign to provide Americans with health insurance coverage worthy of citizens of an economically developed nation.

This said, I truly hope that Obama indeed proves to have the integrity and wherewithal to confront in words, policy, and deeds the evils of the economic and racial divides that handicap America and compromise its quality of life, potential, and image in the eyes of the rest of the world.

“Vote for Jordan for President!”

To US citizens who work or reside abroad, the American electoral process appears increasingly and appallingly sophomoric and ineffectual at shaping the informed electorate on which a well-functioning democracy rests. Candidates’ positions are pushed in 30-second-length self-serving television advertisements and in so-called “debates” that are really little more than TV-talk-show-like trades of one-line platitudes and limp barbs. Candidates in both parties — Obama included, unfortunately — tout themselves as agents of “change” without clarifying what they want us to change to or how. Most US journalistic coverage focuses more on the “horse-race” spectacle of who’s ahead rather than on analysis of candidate’s programs, approaches, and qualifications. Worse, “horse-race” coverage has also enabled the press to arbitrarily isolate and derail candidates that it feels will not sell papers or boost broadcast ratings.

A depressing scenario? I have my own panacea for election-induced blues. To keep my humor and my objectivity tip-top during US primary and election seasons, I blow the dust off of my scratched copy of Louis Jordan’s ever-timely 1952 hit “Vote for Jordan for President!”

Louis Jordan was a band leader, saxophone virtuoso, rich-voiced crooner, lyricist, and, for a short time, cinema cowboy. He was also the father of rock and roll and a great-grandfather of hip-hop as well. From the 1930s to 1950s Jordan recorded a steady stream of hit songs that kept black feet and white feet tapping and fans of all races memorizing complexly rhyming humorous lines from his “Choo-Choo-Cha-Boogie”, “Caldonia”, “Peckin’ and Pokin’”, Beware”, “Coleslaw” and other hits. At one time in the late-1940s, several of Jordan’s tunes simultaneously competed against one another for the top place on the charts.

In “Vote for Jordan for President!” Louis Jordan satirized the vapidity of campaign rhetoric. After announcing that he is ready to move “… from the phonograph record to the ‘Congressional Record’”, Jordan promises to help listeners “… get straight on all the candidates” and “… make the proper selection in the coming election.” His generous characterization of competing candidates anno-1952: “… if you want a man with an offer, vote for Kefauver … if you want the man of the hour, vote for Eisenhower … if you want no graft, vote for Taft … if you want a hipster who takes no sassin’, vote for Stassin … if you want to hustle with Russel, go ahead … but don’t sob, ’cause Truman don’t want the job.” The alternative? “For an administration that’ll move you, groove you, and keep you fit” and “… to walk on the sunny side of the street with the candidate with the beat … vote for Jordan for President!” Jordan’s electoral promises: “Every American will get his portion — after I get mine” and “… we’ll all serve — time!”

Underlying Jordan’s light-tongued satire was a crueler humor. In 1952, only a half-century ago — even with the emergence of Negro local and congressional office holders in a number of northern cities and states, not least my native New York — it was laughably absurd to even think of a black man as candidate for the highest national office in the US. An Obama candidacy and presidency will render this one-time shameful reality as dead and buried as Louis Jordan’s lyrics, humor, and music are alive and timely. It may also prove to Americans and the world that this country is the inclusive democracy it purports to be.

Post-Hiatus Notes: Kudos and Quixote, Markets and Soup-Kitchens, Hip-Hop and Zoot Suits, Podcasts and Dante

During the September to October hiatus in my postings to this site (see Turkey’s Ban on WordPress), I was unable to respond to a number of links and comments …

Kudos and Quixote

In a September 28 posting to his weblog, Doc Searls delved into the dichotomy between individuals’ and society’s passive acceptance of manipulative “marketing” and the possibility of “consumers” actually raising their voices and marshaling emerging technology to turn the tables on corporations and “marketeers” by articulating, broadcasting, and demanding responsiveness to their own needs and desires. Doc ended his post by pointing to our conversations and collaborations over the past four decades. In Doc’s words:

“By the way, when I want to talk to somebody about what a real market is, my first source is Stephen Lewis. Like me, he has in his life labored far too long in the mines of marketing. Unlike me, he has lived in, and studied deeply, real markets in the real world. We need more of that.”

My thanks to Doc for this acknowledgment. Doc has always been generous in his references to me. In a piece he penned seven years ago, he compared me to both Raul Julia and Lenny Bruce, an honor that I still try (albeit ever more quixotically!) to live up to.

Markets and Soup-Kitchens

At the moment, Doc and I are examining the human and infrastructural aspects of traditional markets and marketplaces as models for using the internet to reestablish the modes of interaction and responsiveness that were once the hallmarks of face-to-face commerce. Traditional markets were tangible physical places, powered by the integrity and quality of goods and running on reputations and trust. In the modern age, however, the word “market” become a metaphor for statistical abstractions and the word “marketing” for the artificial creation of demand and the manipulation of the economic behavior of individuals and groups. Doc dug into this theme in his contributions to the 1990’s business bestseller Cluetrain Manifesto. For the subjective underpinning of my own take on the issue look at Markets and Marketing, Fishes and Faces on my alter ego weblog Bubkes.Org.

My part-time studies and work at the fringes of the field of Ottoman history has kept me close to the vision of markets as accretions of individual interactions, conversations, and trust. Over the course of more than a half millennium, the Ottomans evolved physical infrastructure and institutions that enabled commerce and information exchange as well as conquest. One facet of this infrastructure was the Imaret — a publicly- or foundation-financed combination of travelers’ lodge and soup kitchen — a veritable “internet” of which dotted the roadways of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Middle East and North Africa. Those interested in this aspect of the dynamics of Ottoman infrastructure, travel, and trade should turn to a newly published volume of essays edited by historians Nina Ergin, Christoph Neumann, and Amy Singer: Feeding People, Feeding Power; Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2007).

Hip-Hop and Zoot Suits

In a comment on this post, hip-hop commentator Rafi Kam expressed surprise at “being on my radar.” As they used to say in the Bronx in the 1970s: “What can I tell you?” I may prefer Louis Jordan to Fifty Cent — and certainly have more of a weakness for Borsalino hats and zoot suits (reat-pleat, stuff-cuff, drape-shape and all) than for sagging jeans and baseball hats worn backwards — but I am still open to new music, ironic humor, good writing, and all that cuts through common wisdom and accepted ideology.

Apropos of both Kudos and Markets above, Rafi Kam’s and Dallas Penn’s YouTube clip Bronx Bodega (which I have mentioned previously on this site and on Bubkes.Org) is not only disarmingly humorous but in its 7-minute length portrays exactly the same point that Doc Searls and I are trying to examine in our far more pedantic styles, i.e. that marketing in its extreme is a one-way affair that targets people’s’ weaknesses rather than strengths. Marketing reduces people to “consumers” and attempts to dictate what they can buy and limits their access to competing outlets, goods, and services — a demographics-driven twist on plain old imperialism.

The same combination of wit and debunking that go into the Bronx Bodega clip also characterizes the weblog of Rafi’s fellow self-styled “Internet Celebrity” Dallas Penn. Dallas Penn’s blog lights up the integrity of street-driven hip-hop and pinions the marketing-driven cynicism of the music industry; his takes on the marketing of political “personalities” (e.g. US Republican presidential “wannabe” Giuliani) are delightfully unsparing. Most remarkably, Dallas Penn seems to have the rare talent of being able to write exactly as he speaks (or is it the other way around?).

Podcasts and Dante

To close: A confession. I have not always been as kind to Doc Searls as Doc has been to me. Three or four years ago, I was vocally skeptical when Doc was amongst the first to enthuse about the Copernican revolution podcasting was about to occasion by liberating content from limits of time and geography and by enabling listeners to choose and pull broadcasts rather than having them pushed at them. At the time, I saw podcasting as technology without worthy content. Events proved me totally wrong; I now live from podcasts. I reload my I-Pod daily, supplementing my usual mix of Bartok, Turkish and Armenian Oud virtuosi, Monk and Ellington, Aretha Franklin and Rev. James Cleveland, and the like with the latest podcasts from the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg, PBS’s Bill Moyers, the New Yorker magazine, NPR’s Car Talk Plaza, and WNYC’s Sara Fishko, Leonard Lopate, Brian Lehrer, and John Schaeffer. A few days ago, I admitted to Doc that if there isn’t a special circle in the Inferno for those of us who doubted podcasting, there should be. With magnanimity, Doc offered to release me from such a fate if I posted my confession on this site … thus this entry!

Singing Cowboy and Early-Adopter, Movie Idol and Media Mogul

Singing cowboy Gene Autry was an icon of the early years of commercial country music, 1930’s and 40’s Hollywood, and the so-called “golden ages” of radio and of television. But Autry was also an entrepreneur with a keen eye for new media, even before their business models became clear. An early investor in television broadcasting, what would Autry have made of the internet? For Autry’s life story, interspersed with excerpts from his songs and a film soundtrack lament for his dying horse “Champion,” go to the May 1st edition of WNYC New York’s Soundcheck. For those interested in the roots of R&B and rock-and-roll, I’d also recommend recent Soundcheck broadcasts on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the cross-over gospel and R&B vocal and electric guitar great who inspired Elvis Presley, and Doc Pomus, a New York Jewish kid invalided with polio who was a popular blues musician amongst black audiences in Brooklyn during the 1940s and who went on to become one of the famed pop music writers at the Brill building on Broadway in the early-1960s. Finally, to bring us back full circle to the realm of tech innovation, do listen to Sara Fishko’s recent broadcast about the Theremin, the Science-Fiction-like musical instrument that was a creation of 1920s Soviet science and later gave mid-twentieth-century American Sci-Fi movies their characteristically Sci-Fi sound.