Posted 6:36 PM by Gene

Yesterday I mentioned jazz. Today Terry Teachout tells us that Richard Sudhalter, the distinguished jazz writer, performer and Bixologist, whose intelligent booklet notes have graced many albums, is gravely ill, and his friends are organizing a fundraiser. I wish I had five bucks to spend on this. The mention of Bix led me (again) to RedHotJazz, to hear Paul Whiteman's band play on an indifferently transferred file of an alternate take of the strange and sublime "Washboard Blues", with Bix' eternal friend Hoagy (Whiteman reserved Bing Crosby as insurance in case he didn't work out; it wasn't necessary), and the Dorsey brothers in the complement; and from there to the Bix site, to a discography, and to learn that Whiteman's majestic premiere recording of Gershwin's Concerto in F (remastered for a now-discontinued Sony anthology; those dolts don't know music from ROOTKITS) took at least an astonishing 34 takes over three sessions to commit to six 78-rpm sides, and that Bix and Frank Trumbauer were there -- as was Lennie Hayton, now best known as an MGM arranger, on cello -- as was Gershwin on the last session. (The omni-lingual liner text doesn't mention this.) Forgive this discursive sentence, but we would not know these facts without people who loved this grand music. It is a great tragedy that jazz is but a carcass, a teeming preserve of scholars and scholars only, but if we are to have jazz scholars, let them all be Richard Sudhalters.