Weekend Wax Bits

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

In the wake of my posts earlier this week on Sonny Rollins and the New Yorker (here and here), I was thunderstruck by the sheer number of emails clicking in every few minutes in support of Sonny and upset with the magazine. There were a few urging me to lighten up, but as I pointed out to those readers, "lighten up" is what we tell others but never ourselves when we've been misrepresented. Among those outraged by the New Yorker's odd sense of humor was Barrie Walker in Paris:

"Satire is a kind of caricature intended for the public good. It's also based on truth, however skewed, not lies. The stuff in the New Yorker was weird, gruesome and nauseating. And totally dishonest. Sonny Rollins is a great artist who gives love to the world. To treat him like this is to spit on his gift to us. Thank you once again, Sonny, for all the pleasure you still give us."

In case you missed other posts in the blogosphere on the Sonny Rollins Affair, see Larry Blumenfeld here, Tom Reneyhere and Howard Mandel here. And don't forget Bret Primack's historic video chat with Sonny on the subjecthere. One for the books.

Jan Lundgren. Anton Garcia-Fernandez posted a fine interview with Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren [above]. To read the post, go here. And here's a gorgeous track by Lundgren...

Free Art Pepper. This month, Laurie Pepper's free download is Over the Rainbow, with with Duke Jordan, David Williams and Carl Burnett in Copenhagen in 1981. And be sure to buy a copy of Laurie's terrific and soulful new book,Art: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman here. I will be reviewing in the coming weeks.

Jazz photographer Herb Snitzer [above] is now on Facebook. Like Herb here.

Blood on the Trumpet was a radio drama from 1950 starring William Holden and the bending notes of hornman Ziggy Ellman. Go here. Thanks to John Cooper for finding and sending along a link...

The Civilized Cinema. Dreams That Money Can Buy(1947) was an experimental color film directed by surrealist artist Hans Richter and produced by Peggy Guggenheim. Among the writers was May Ray, with music by John Cage, Darius Milhaud and others in the art-music world. Here you go...

Oddball album cover of the week.

I'm not a shrink, so I'm not sure what all of the "female models aflame" covers of the late 1950s were all about. There must be at least two dozen of them, if we include the exotica albums. All I keep hearing the model say is, "Honey, are you warm or is it just me?"

Used with permission by Marc Myers