SST Blog

3/18/18   “May you live in interesting times” has hit us with a vengeance. How else can you describe a society waking up to its misogyny and ending the careers of allegedly offending men without trials while electing a president who bragged about how he sexually assaults women? Nuts, right?   I’ve been preparing an arrangement of an old novelty song, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, for publication. I bought a recording of it when I was about 12 or 13 and thought it was funny and loved its relationship to the blues, although it technically is not...

3/11/18   This morning I watched a video on YouTube by Fred Sturm. Fred wrote Changes Over Time, a book about how jazz arranging evolved over the 20th century. He analyzed a number of arrangements of four pieces; three jazz compositions and one standard (All Of Me). In the video Fred very briefly describes the overriding characteristics of All of Me arrangements by Benny Carter, Billy Byers, Thad Jones and Manny Albam. Benny’s arrangement embellishes the melody. Billy’s uses rhythmic displacement and simplicity. Thad pushes the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic boundaries while still keeping the form. Manny’s chart references the...

I first became aware of Bill Cosby when I was 14 and Gregory played me his first record, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, Right! We loved the routine about Noah. Gregory memorized it. We became fans. Over the past 30 years I’ve worked with Bill a number of times and was always impressed by his comedic genius (not a word I use lightly.) Needless to say, I was distressed and disappointed to learn of his alleged sex crimes. Should I never re-watch the TV show I made with him? I’ll admit that I haven’t watched it since it...

2/21/2018   You know the old saying:  Even a broken clock is right twice a day. So, I’ve got to say it: I agree with the Republicans in Congress. That’s right. You read me correctly. I’m not sure we agree for the same reasons. Actually, there were two seemingly unrelated articles in this morning’s New York Times that yanked me out of my liberal live-and-let-live mindset and made me look at the relationship of the past and future that exists within all of us.   Basically, Conservatives want to resist change and return to the past, Liberals want to build...

When Mercer Ellington sold his father’s artifacts to the Smithsonian Institution they included clothes, newspaper clippings, tapes, films and about 250,000 sheets of music.  Over the next decade Annie Kuebler archived all this material.  I had the great privilege to look at thousands of pages of the music and, over time, I became friends with Annie.    Besides housing the Ellington archives, the Smithsonian conducted hundreds of oral histories with older jazz musicians.  Each was interviewed on tape for a few hours.  Annie had access to these tapes and listened to all of them.  She enjoyed the stories that they...