It was on this day in 1934 that Ella Fitzgerald headed to the Apollo Theatre in New York for Amateur Night. It was a weekly event that had only been started earlier that year and to get onto stage, your name had to be drawn from a hat. Ella was just 15 and had gone on a bet with two friends. She had intended to dance, but the act preceding her was a dance duo; she didn’t think her dancing would measure up, so on the spot she decided to sing instead. She sang “The Object of My Affection” and brought the house down.
Within a year she joined Chick Webb’s band with whom she scored her first big hit “A Tisket A Tasket”. The rest is jazz history.
In my world/head, I don’t play holiday music or turn on holiday movies until the day after Thanksgiving, although every few years I might listen to holiday music in the car on the way home from Thanksgiving dinner. This rule is mostly just to keep the Christmas/Solstice season within some kind of boundaries. I think 5-6 weeks is plenty of celebration – no need for it to spill out into October and early November.
So I was surprised to come home from picking up pizza yesterday to hear holiday music playing. Loudly. As we sat down to our pizza, I gave YA grief about playing Christmas songs. Without missing a beat, she said “oh please – you’ve been doing holiday stuff since March”. I have to admit that she is correct. In the spring, when we all thought covid would be history by this time, I was expecting to be extremely busy at work, with all my spring programs bumping into the fall. Since this was my mindset, I figured I should get all my Solstice stuff done early, so I wouldn’t be stressing out about it in October and November. I did all my cards, my egg ornaments and my calendars in the spring. I also worked on the family gift throughout the summer. The last week I’ve done what I consider my “last-minute” stuff: the newsletter, wrapping, labels, cookie selection, etc.
I consider all this holiday prep, but not holiday celebration. No music or movies for me yet. But I’m all ready for next Friday…. all my holidays movies are in a separate bin so I can get to them fast and YA’s “Alexa” will be on call every day (and I’ve finally figured out how to get her to play Radio Heartland).
Will you be celebrating this year? When will you start?
Lately Pennsylvania has been in the news a lot. I keep hearing the name of the state and it triggers a musical memory. It was on the morning show. Was it Connie Kaldor? Priscilla Herdman? Anne Hills?…YES! Anne Hills.
We’re counting on you. Pennsylvania!
Do you have a favorite song, poem, or book about a state?
We had church choir rehearsal yesterday for the first time since March. Our county is a Covid hot spot, and the idea of rehearsal made me somewhat nervous. Choir rehearsals have been superspreader events across the country.
I really had little to worry about, as there were only six singers, plus the director and the accompanist. We sat in the pews instead of the choir loft, two singers to a pew, socially distanced, with two pews in between each twosome. The church bought these plastic dealies that go under our masks and prevents the masks from being sucked back against the lips when you inhale. We all wore masks. We were all glad to sing. We expect more to join us in the coming weeks, but I think we can distance and sing and perform. We really have to listen carefully since we can’t sit right next to each other, and the tenors aren’t right behind us and the sopranos aren’t right in front of us. It is a musicianship challenge.
I have always considered myself a risk take, but this was a little scary until we got started and I saw how things would go.
What kind of a risk taker are you? Has Covid changed your risk tolerance?
That is line from a 1963 Bayer Children’s aspirin commercial. The little boy makes an inquiry of his playmate’s health and receives reassurance from her mother that things will be fine. His delightful response? “Mothers are like that. Yeah, they are.”
With the C-19 pandemic, many of us have heard similar screening questions. “Pain? Temperature?”
My construction work at medical facilities requires a negative response to gain entrance into the building. I’m quite sure that over these past months that I’ve had my temperature taken a hundred times and it has consistently been 97.5. This is a surprise, as I recollect normal body temperature being 98.6 or did Keith mis-inform me with the lyric in his 1967 song:
“Hey, 98.6, it’s good to have you back again! Oh, hey, 98.6, her lovin’ is the medicine that saved me! Oh, I love my baby!”
With 4th of July events cancelled all over the country and the current political unrest and unhappiness, it seems hard to celebrate Independence Day with enthusiasm.
For many years, Child and I took part in two parades every 4th – the Tangletown Parade and the Richfield Parade. The Tangletown is a homegrown parade in which kids dress up their bikes and dogs sport their best red, white and blue bandannas in order to follow a firetruck through the neighborhood, followed by a big party at Fuller Park with games, music, face painting and a big picnic. The last few years I’ve gone up to the high school parking lot where the parade starts to see everybody in their finery and then I head home. Then later, YA and I go down to Richfield to watch their more traditional, candy-throwing parade. I got hooked on this parade when YA was in gymnastics and her team was part of the parade line-up.
No parades this year. Richfield unilaterally cancelled all the 4th of July stuff and Tangletown cancelled the parade and party, but is doing a decoration contest and neighborhood scavenger hunt. I hadn’t though about decorating (besides putting out all my flags) because I didn’t really want to put any money into it but then something I saw yesterday changed my mind. In walking Guinevere, we found a house up on the water tower hill that had outdone themselves with their chalk decorations. Their entire driveway was filled with a huge chalked American flag and then the sidewalk all long their property was covered in fireworks. Such a low-cost and low-tech way to decorate – I think I’ll get my chalks out in the morning (before it gets too hot). And I might even have enough Independence Day spirit left over to do the scavenger hunt with Guinevere on our morning walk!
How have you traditionally celebrated the 4th? What’s different this year?
My nextdoor neighbor, Brian, is a school music teach and band director. The last time he saw his “kids” was when they said good bye for spring break. Then schools began to close, so they have had online classes but as you can imagine, band class isn’t quite the same and since Brian is changing schools this fall, he felt a little bad about not seeing them again.
The kids apparently felt badly as well because on Monday, the brass section, along with a drummer, showed up in the front yard and serenaded him for about 15 minutes. It was a big surprise to Brian; the kids had set it up with his wife, Sarah. By the end of the performance, quite an audience has gathered, on both sides of Lyndale.
I know that other entertainments and festivities are happening in people’s front yards. A young friend of mine had a drive-by college graduation and Tuey, a juggler that I like, has also been doing his show on front sidewalks during shelter-in-place.
I think this is a great way to celebrate even while social distancing.
In the early 1980’s, I was a budding classical music audiophile who lived on a graduate student income. Winnipeg had a number of good record stores for classical music albums, and I wanted to make sure that I got the best albums for my measly disposable income. I was able to do that with a handy dandy guide courtesy of MPR and Mr. Bill Parker with Building a Classical Music Library. It was very helpful identifying good recordings and performers.
I hadn’t thought about this book for quite a while until Thursday night, when Husband brought it up out of the basement as we were trying to figure out what was so important about our vinyl recording from 1981 of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition. Paging through the book, I realized how many treasured recordings we have that Mr Parker suggested.
One favorite recording from that period of my life is that of Percy Grainger playing Grieg’s A minor Piano Concerto. Grainger was long dead by the time of the recording. He made piano rolls of the concerto in the 1920’s, and a piano set up to play the rolls was recorded with the Sydney Symphony. Here is the same set up with Andrew Davis conducting at the London Proms in 1988.
Today marks the anniversary of two important milestones in the history of the Blues- the birth in 1896 of the Reverend Gary Davis, and the death in 1983 of Muddy Waters. I never really listened to the Blues until I met Husband. One of our first dates was at a concert by James Cotton at the University of Manitoba.
Here is the Reverend Davis:
And here is Muddy Waters. (Husband’s suggestion)
Here, too, is Leadbelly, just because it is a Blues number I have always liked.
The things he sings about going on in Washington, DC are still happening!
Here are the lyrics in case it is hard to understand.
Lord, in a bourgeois town
It’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Home of the brave, land of the free
I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs
We heard the white man say “I don’t want no niggers up there”
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Well, them white folks in Washington they know how
To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow
Lord, it’s a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
I tell all the colored folks to listen to me
Don’t try to find you no home in Washington, DC
‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
What are your favorite Blues numbers? Got any good Blues lyrics for Baboons this week?
Daughter phoned this week to ask, or rather, to demand, that we send an Easter basket to her. She said she thought she deserved one because she had been stuck in her apartment for a month and hadn’t seen any of her friends, and, well, could we send milk chocolate and some sour things, please? I said that we would of course send her an Easter parcel, but she wouldn’t get it until the middle of next week.
We also sent a parcel to our grandson containing old Curious George books we had here, and The Golden Egg Book, which is a sweet story by Margaret Wise Brown about a bunny who finds a mysterious egg and who ends up with a duckling for a best friend. Son and DIL thought our grandson would appreciate pretzel fish rather than candy, so he got those, too, as well a teddy bear. He will be two at the end of the month.
This is the first Easter in my memory that we haven’t been doing music in church. I usually complain how exhausting all that performing is, but I hope we never have another Easter like this one, and I would welcome that sort of stress right now.
