Search Results for: New York magazine

The Mr. Memory of Jazz

AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy

I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorker article “Bird Watcher.”

In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”

In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”

When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.

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We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Reckons with Fame

(Monica Schipper/WireImage)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published three novels and a short story collection; she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008, and her latest novel, Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. Still, when Beyoncé quoted from Adichie’s TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists” for her song “Flawless,” the author ascended to a new level of fame. In a wide-ranging profile written by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker, Adichie addresses the increased scrutiny of her interviews and public statements, dives deep into the sights, sounds, and places that have inspired her work, and considers her legacy.

When she talks about feminism or gay rights in Nigeria, she knows what she’s getting into, and she does it on purpose. But her celebrity is such that even an offhand remark can set off a fracas that she did not anticipate. A few years ago, when asked by a journalist to comment on the shortlist for the Caine Prize, an English award for African fiction, she said she had no interest in the topic, although one of the nominees, she said, was “one of my boys in my workshop.” Her antipathy to the Caine Prize was long-standing, due to her dislike of a former administrator of the prize, whom she had found sexist and patronizing, and whom she venomously fictionalized in her short story “Jumping Monkey Hill.”

as though God, having created him, had slapped him flat against a wall and smeared his features all over his face

Asked where she went instead to find the best African fiction, she said, “My mailbox,” where she received her workshop students’ stories. On Nigerian Twitter, all hell broke loose. “It doesn’t take much brain juice to realize from her interviews that Ms CNA’s ego can sink an island,” wrote Manny. “So the best African fiction is in Chimamanda Adichie’s inbox?” Abubakar Ibrahim, a novelist, wrote. “I hail thee, queen-god mother. Go fuck yourself, Chimamanda.”

Earlier this year, Chimamanda commented to a reporter in France, “Post-colonial theory? I don’t know what it means. I think it’s something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs.” Nigerian academics reacted with hurt and outrage. “That’s it!” Difficult Northerner wrote. “We need to put Chimamanda in rice. How can you shit on postcolonial theory while claiming not to know what it means. The same postcolonial theorists who assign your books & videos in classes.”

She is O.K. in principle with not being liked: she thinks that the desire to be liked is something that women need to get over. A male friend of hers told her that Ifemelu, the main character of “Americanah,” was Chimamanda without her warmth, and she bristled at this, even though she thought it might be true. Why the hell are you judging her like that? she thought. If Ifemelu were a male, would you expect and want warmth? All the same, it is painful to be attacked. “Ta-Nehisi Coates said to me once that what hurt him the most, becoming successful, was how much it was black intellectuals who seemed to be out for him, and I know what that’s like. I told him that there’s a circle of Nigerians who are resentful of my international success, and it’s very hurtful, because I want my people to wish me well.”

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‘Unfettered Glamour’: The Legendary Career of André Leon Talley

NEW YORK, NY - 1979: Diana Ross and Andre Leon Talley dancing at Studio 54, c 1979 in New York City. (Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

New York Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman profiles former Vogue creative director André Leon Talley upon the launch of “The Gospel According to André,” a feature-length documentary on Talley’s life. The film includes interviews with friends and former colleagues of Talley, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Fran Lebowitz, and Anna Wintour, and traces his love for fashion back to his early days in segregated Durham, North Carolina. It was the number one limited-release movie in box offices sales last weekend, according to Page Six.

For much of his career, Talley was the only black male editor of a top tier fashion publication. Goldberg says in the film that he was “so many things he wasn’t supposed to be,” but for most of the years of his rise, Talley did not publicly acknowledge the isolation and emotional strife that came with his influence. In a 1994 story for the New Yorker, Hilton Als described Talley, hauntingly, as “the only one.” Friedman’s profile illuminates the costs Talley paid for breaking ground.

When he tells this story in public, he often defangs it by rolling his eyes and pursing his lips, and then appending a joke about wanting to be in designers’ beds without the actual designer to see what kind of fancy sheets they had. But when he tells it in private, he doesn’t add the comic flourishes, and the muscle between his eyebrows contracts in an involuntary spasm.

For all the talk lately about the need for diversity on fashion runways, there has been much less about the fact that its executives and designers and editors in chief have been, and are still, largely white.

“Where are the black people?” Mr. Talley said. “I look around everywhere and say, ‘Where are the black people?’ I think fashion tries to skirt the issue and finds convenient ways to spin it. There are examples of evolution, but they are few and far between. The biggest leap of faith was Edward Enninful becoming editor of British Vogue — that was an extraordinary thing. Virgil Abloh getting Louis Vuitton men’s wear.”

Still, as far as progress made in the more than three decades Mr. Talley has been letting the insults bounce off his caftans, it doesn’t seem like very much. “As the world turns, it does not turn very fast,” he said.

He is hoping the film speeds it up. Mr. Enninful, for one, thinks it will. “It will mean a lot to a new generation to see that there was this man who grew up in the South and through all obstacles made it, because it will give young black kids hope and the aspiration to be in this industry,” he said.

Mr. Talley is also hoping it provides a platform to vault him to the next stage in his life.

“I could see myself being an Oscar Wilde and going on the road and sitting on stage and talking,” he said. When he said this, he was having lunch at Majorelle, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side that he loves because of its flower arrangements, its pistachio souffle and because it shares a name with Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakesh.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Handcuffs on the ground
Martyn Aim / Corbis via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jennifer Gonnerman, Evan Allen, Britni de la Cretaz, Jen Banbury, and Gordon Edgar.

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The Hole in My Soul

Good Salt / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)

Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch. Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.

***

The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.

“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.

A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.

Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.

“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.

“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.

I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.

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Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

David Mirzoeff/PA Wire

A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.

In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?

No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.

Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.

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The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

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Rita Dove on Creating a ‘Collage of American Consciousness’ with Poetry

American poet Rita Dove. (Photo by Emaonn McCabe/Redferns)

At Columbia Journalism Review, Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a new poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.

My first feeling is not to consider what might constitute the audience’s blinders. In other words, to assume that they are going to be open—that’s for the first read. Something that moves me, I will immediately put into the pile to be considered later.

But there is something else to consider, and that’s something I’ve thought about a lot. That is to imagine what my audience’s lives might be like when they’re not reading my poem. What they bring to whatever venue or event or magazine. To imagine how much time or energy they can devote, and how to pull them in.

I would hope that what would emerge would be a kind of portrait or collage of American consciousness. Which means, there would be poets from the west as well as the east coast as well as the middle, and men and women, and that would shake out, hopefully, to some kind of parity, representative of what the population is like at large. Poems from all races and all cultural ethnicities. But there will not be bad poems because I need a woman or I need an African-American. No. There are so many amazing, beautiful poems out there that we don’t get to see. That’s going to be my goal. Bring a few of them out there.

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Stacey Abrams’ Historic Win in Georgia: A Reading List

ATLANTA, GA - MAY 22: Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams takes the stage to declare victory in the primary during an election night event on May 22, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. If elected, Abrams would become the first African American female governor in the nation. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, former state representative Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia, becoming the first black woman gubernatorial nominee of a major political party in U.S. history. She defeated her opponent handily, beating Stacey Evans with a three-to-one margin with a platform calling for Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform, gun safety measures, affordable childcare, and universal pre-K.

Abrams faces a tough general election in November. Only four African-American politicians have served as governor in the U.S. ever, with none in the Deep South since Reconstruction. A run-off election will be held in July to determine the Republican nominee, and of the candidates likely to oppose Abrams, both support looser gun laws, tax cuts for high earners, and defunding sanctuary cities as part of a “crackdown on illegal immigration.” Abrams hopes to win by building a multi-racial coalition of progressives (including new voters) that taps into Georgia’s shifting demographics.

Abrams is part of a national wave of women running for office in record numbers, as well as a galvanizing energy among progressives partly inspired by opposition to President Trump. Her candidacy has drawn national attention; should Abrams win, one of the most populous red states could be in play for progressives seeking national office for the first time in decades. It could also signal a significant shift in values and priorities for the Deep South.

For a deeper dive, here are a few pieces that smartly contextualize Abrams’ victory, as well as what’s at stake in the fall.

On Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Primary

“Stacey Abrams Wins Democratic Primary for Governor, Making History.” (Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns, New York Times, May 2018)

Martin and Burns consider the history-making moment of Abrams’ primary win and why the candidate has drawn support from Democrats at the federal level. The reporters also note other primary successes among progressive Democrats Tuesday night, especially women candidates like Amy McGrath of Kentucky.

“Stacey Abrams Makes History in the Georgia Primary.” (Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, May 2018)

Bethea talks to a cross section of conservative and progressive Georgia political insiders about Abrams’ chances in the general election.

“America Has Never Had a Black Woman Governor. Stacey Abrams Has Something to Say About That.” (Jamilah King, Mother Jones, April 2018)

Reporter Jamilah King profiles Abrams, capturing the candidate’s appeal to black women voters and her push to assemble a “rainbow coalition.”

On Change in the South

“Reverse Migration Might Turn Georgia Blue.” (Alana Semuels, Atlantic, May 2018)

Young, unmarried blacks and single women are moving to the South, especially Atlanta and its suburbs, in large numbers. Searching for lower housing prices and better quality of life, transplants tend to be more progressive than other residents. They could be instrumental in helping Abrams achieve victory.

“Racism is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” (Reniqua Allen, New York Times, July 2017)

Allen takes a closer look at why black millennials like her are flocking to southern cities.

“Slavery’s Southern Legacy.” (Sophia Nguyen, Harvard Magazine, May 2018)

Nguyen reports on a new book (by researchers Avidit Acharya and Matthew Blackwell), which claims that political attitudes in the South, especially on issues of race, can be predicted by how deeply individual counties relied on slavery prior to the Civil War.

 “’Please God, Don’t Let Me Get Stopped’: Around Atlanta, No Sanctuary for Immigrants.” (Vivian Yee, New York Times, November 2017)

According to Yee, “the regional ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.” The Republican contenders in Stacey Abrams’ race have run strident anti-immigration campaigns.

“When the South Was the Most Progressive Region in America.” (Blain Roberts & Ethan J. Kytle, Atlantic, January 2018)

Roberts and Kytle, both historians, discuss how the post-Civil War’s South created multi-racial democracies based on state constitutions that were more progressive than many in the North. Reconstruction era activists and politicians, the authors contend, “[provide] a blueprint for a liberal resurgence that may already be under way in the 21st century South.”

On National Trends

“Red State, Blue City.” (David A. Graham, Atlantic, March 2017)

Graham posits that U.S. politics are growing increasingly polarized along a rural/urban divide.

“A Progressive Electoral Wave is Sweeping the Country.” (John Nichols, The Nation, June 2017)

Nichols details the importance of down-ballot victories, across the country, that signal a rising tide of resistance to the policies of President Trump.