Gummi Puppen?

This post is dedicated to the memory of a friend.

            A long time ago I abandoned the idea of ever making any money writing or that anything I had to say was of much interest to anyone. This blog is evidence of that, more or less. Despite this I always write with the idea of trying to please some unknown someone (writing for your readers) but this one is for me. I have nothing more in mind than pleasing myself as I remember a dear friend whose worth to me became even more apparent after he'd gone. So I'm warning you now that this post has a bunch of video clips attached to it and I have no idea how it'll turn out. The idea occurred to me sometime before June as we were approaching the 70th anniversary of D-Day but between travel and preparing a presentation on the trombone for Bordeaux-USA, I'm only getting around to it now. In putting together my trombone project, I learned how to use Imovie and went a little nuts making videos. The same thing happened again and for the past week or so, I've been working on clips to stick into this post.

Il y a 70 ans (70 years ago)

             Last week marked the seventieth anniversary of D-Day; I'm sure you heard about it. Another 70th anniversary that probably didn't get much publicity outside of France took place four days later in a little village in the Limousin. The opening paragraph of Sarah Farmer's book, Martyred Village, tells the brief yet complete story of what happened:

            

            Among German crimes of the Second World War, the massacre of 642 women, children and men of Oradour-sur-Glane by SS soldiers on June 10, 1944 is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings on Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the men from the women and children. The men were marched off to nearby barns and shot. The soldiers locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building (and then the rest of the town) on fire. Those residents of Oradour who had been away for the day, or had managed to escape the roundup, returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation.

Incident At Milepost 49

The HoJo at Oakmont looked just like this

             Lately, I haven't been posting much for reasons that really don't matter but have resulted in my going through some of the essays and other writing that I've had laying around for a long time. Over the years, I've accumulated a trove of mediocrity that I once thought was pretty good. At some point, everyone even semi-serious about writing imagines their masterpieces being featured in the New Yorker or some other lofty publication and I was no different. But most of my stuff was written with no idea where it could possibly find the light of day. I paid no attention to any of the advice every aspiring writer gets on researching markets and how to appeal to editors or anything else that might have at least gotten me some encouraging rejection slips. So now I've decided that if none of this stuff is ever going to make me a member of the next Algonquin Round Table, I'm foisting it off from time to time on whoever runs across this blog accidentally in the course of surfing for pornography.
       
           The first of these I've rewritten so many times I can't stand it anymore. It was intended originally for some now defunct online magazine in Pittsburgh and I think I was encouraged by most of the previously published pieces being worse. I'm not sure Thurber would have gotten very far, either, if his mantra had been, "Shit, I'm not that bad."

Duke's Place

Duane "Duke" Wareham

            This is a post I've been meaning to do for a long time. If you've read my "About Me" page, and made it to the end, you would know that at Springdale, Pennsylvania, High School I played in a jazz big band that was then known as the "Mellowmen" and for every member it was the musical equivalent of being a star athlete. I made it into this group my sophomore year and by the time I graduated in 1970, the continued presence of females meant the band would eventually have to find a new name since "Mellowpersons" just wouldn't cut it so later editions were known simply as the Jazz Ensemble.

            It's not a stretch to say that being a part of this outfit is what got me through high school. (Most memories of these years that don't involve music cause a state that can only be relieved by judicious applications of medicinal spirits.) Of all my life's experiences, playing in the Mellowmen has probably had the most lasting and profound effect, except for the ones that filled me with bitterness and resentment so I guess I should say it had the most positive effect. It helped to create a passion for music, particularly jazz, that's never left me and was a big part of the reason I retired early to earn the music degree I'd wanted all along. Most of this was thanks to one guy in particular.

Steve Turre

           

           When we lived in New Jersey in the early '90s, I got to hear Steve Turre a lot since he played all the time at a club in Montclair. Being around New York and all the jazz clubs was one of the big reasons I starting thinking about getting back into my horn and Steve was a big part of that. It wasn't just that I dug his playing or that he's, to me, a direct descendant of J.J. and Curtis Fuller. Possibly because of his gig on Saturday Night Live, he was pretty visible at the time and was always being interviewed. In one of these he talked about the history of the instrument and how important players like Vic Dickenson, Lawrence Brown and Dicky Wells were. These were guys I'd never heard of before so I started checking them out which sparked an interest in the trombone's place in jazz that hasn't diminished.