Archives for August 14, 2006

In case you’re curious, I wrote a good-sized chunk of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong last week, and I plan to do the same thing this week. I also have two Wall Street Journal deadlines to hit and five plays to see, one in Connecticut, one in Massachusetts, and three in New York.

Get the idea? See you later. Over to you, OGIC.

I posted earlier this year about the plight of Richard M. Sudhalter, a distinguished jazz musician and scholar whose health has betrayed him:

Dick (he’s a friend) suffered a stroke three years ago. Though he subsequently recovered from many of its effects, he has now fallen victim to a rare, equally debilitating illness of the nervous system called multiple system atrophy. It’s hitting him hard, and his medical bills are piling up.

Alas, good works don’t always reap financial rewards, and Dick has spent the whole of his long, productive life laboring in important but unrenumerative cultural vineyards. He is the author of such essential works of jazz and popular-music scholarship as Lost Chords and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael. In addition, he co-wrote Bix: Man and Legend, one of the first truly scholarly jazz biographies, and has played on any number of fine recordings, including two of my favorite jazz albums, The Classic Jazz Quartet: The Complete Recordings and his own Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet. Needless to say, Dick didn’t make a whole lot of money out of any of these undertakings, but he thought they needed doing, so he did them anyway.

The terrible irony of Dick’s condition is that while he can no longer talk intelligibly, he can still read–and write–as well as ever.

What can you do to help?

– If you’re a friend who’s fallen out of touch with Dick, don’t call–send him an e-mail. He’d love to hear from you.

– If you’re an editor, Dick needs work. Don’t be scared off by the fact that he’s unable to talk. Check in with him via e-mail and give him an assignment. You won’t be sorry.

– If you’ve got a few bucks to spare–or more than a few–send him a check. Dick is scheduled to go to the Mayo Clinic in two weeks, and he needs immediate assistance in order to pay for the trip (among many other urgent things).

– If you want to hear what promises to be one of the most exciting jazz concerts of the year, mark your calendar for Sunday, September 10, when Dan Levinson and Randy Sandke will be putting on an all-star benefit concert at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. The bill includes (among others) Harry Allen, Dan Barrett, Eddie Bert, Bill Crow, Jim Ferguson, Dave Frishberg, Wycliffe Gordon, Marty Grosz, Becky Kilgore, Bill Kirchner, Steve Kuhn, Dan Levinson, Marian McPartland, Joe Muranyi, David Ostwald, Nicki Parrott, Bucky Pizzarelli, Scott Robinson, Randy Sandke, Daryl Sherman, and the Loren Schoenberg Big Band. That’s what I call a big bunch of very heavy hitters.

The address is 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street and the music starts at seven o’clock sharp. Admission is $40, plus whatever else you care to chip in.

To order a ticket to Dick’s benefit concert–or if you simply want to contribute to the cause of keeping him alive–send a check made payable to RICHARD SUDHALTER BENEFIT CONCERT to the following address:

Dorothy Kellogg

P.O. Box 757

Southold, NY 11971

You can also order tickets online with a credit card by visiting PayPal and using this account:

danlevinson@aol.com

As I said in June, I don’t make a habit of posting appeals like this, but Dick’s case is special. Even if you aren’t familiar with his indispensable work, take my word for it–he deserves your help.

Pass the word.

Having written a biography of H.L. Mencken, who is, like Abraham Lincoln and Dorothy Parker, one of those people who gets credited with having said a great many things he didn’t actually say, I’ve long been suspicious of the provenance of a quote that is almost always attributed to A.J. Liebling, usually in this form: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” (Not surprisingly, I’ve also seen it credited to Mencken.) It’s a great line, and it’s the sort of thing Liebling would have said if he’d thought of it–but did he?

I thought of asking the New Yorker-obsessed proprietor of Emdashes if she could shed some light on the matter, but then it hit me that as a happy owner of The Complete New Yorker, I might be able to use that unwieldy but nonetheless invaluable tool in order to pin down the quote. So I popped in a CD-ROM and started clicking away, and within minutes I had the facts in hand.

Sure enough, Liebling really did say it, or something very much like it: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” The remark was a parenthetical throwaway tucked into a “Wayward Press” column called “Do You Belong in Journalism?” published on May 14, 1960, and his subject, it turns out, was the rise of the one-newspaper town.

Here’s part of what he wrote:

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and evening newspaper under the same ownership, is like a man with only one eye, and often the eye is glass….

What you have in a one-paper town is a privately owned public utility that is Constitutionally exempt from public regulation, which would be a violation of freedom of the press. As to the freedom of the individual journalist in such a town, it corresponds exactly with what the publisher will allow him. He can’t go over to the opposition, because there isn’t any. If he leaves, he ends his usefulness to the town, and probably to the state and region in which it is situated, because he takes with him the story that caused his difference with the management, and in a distant place it will have no value. Under the conditions, there is no point in being quixotic….

In any American city that I know of, to pick up a paper published elsewhere means that you have to go to an out-of-town newsstand, unless you are in a small city that is directly within the circulation zone of a larger one. Even in New York, the out-of-town newsstands are few and hard to find….The news magazines–without going into their quality, which would explode me–carry little news, in the course of a year, of any one particular state or city, and what they do carry is usually furnished by a stringer who works on the local paper. News broadcasts offer even less, because often the newspaper owns the radio station, and because television and radio have been pulling steadily out of the news field and regressing toward the animated penny dreadful.

Plus

“A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.”