https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-OVgbD0yko

“Don’t worry about Barney, he’s used to it.”

Boston-born Teddi King was another excellent jazz and ballad singer from New England. While listening to the Terry Gross piece, I realized that I actually have the 1977 LP (“…This is new”, Inner City #1044) of Dave McKenna and King that has “Fun to Be Fooled”. Picked it up years ago at an estate sale for a buck. The LP was recorded in October 1977, less than a month before King’s untimely death from lupus. Here she is in the late 1950s, on Hugh Hefner’s late-night TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFb_JV0gkM0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqAMA076bD4

I can’t explain southern New England’s strange prominence in jazz history. Possible factors? Urban centers and port cities (Boston, Bridgeport, Providence): check. Lively (you might even say “vibrantly diverse!”) ethnic mix: check. Rich catalytic stew of high (WASP, Brahmin) and demotic (Irish, Italian, Jewish, French Canadian, Portuguese, [freed] African American, Cap Verdean etc.) cultures: check. Strong working/middle-class economy (manufacturing and textiles) and enough people with money in their pockets to provide an audience: check. Clubs, dance halls, and above all radio were more important than college campuses, which were never very friendly venues for jazz. Oddly enough, even small and medium-sized New England cities had at least one jazz club. Here’s a link about the jazz scene in Worcester, Massachusetts–a gritty industrial city–in the 1960s and 1970s from the NEPM site:

https://www.nepm.org/jazz-world/2019-03-12/memories-of-worcesters-jazz-royalty

Check out the handbills for the Kitty Kat Lounge–and those stylin’ 1970s threads!

Which brings me to politics. You have argued repeatedly on this forum that multinational, multi-racial societies can’t work over the long run. Those of us who remember this country as it was until fairly recently reject that argument. The history of jazz shows that it can and has worked, and worked brilliantly. Jazz wasn’t just a musical phenomenon; it was a social, economic, class, and racial solvent as well. There are other mundane examples of people getting along and working together that you wouldn’t know about unless you lived here. This is not South Africa–although I will concede that there are people on both sides who are working very hard to turn it into South Africa, or Lagos-on-the-Chesapeake. I’m betting they won’t succeed in the end. That said, I think we’re in for some very bad times. 1930s bad.

Finally, for people who still have vinyl, a product plug. Get a Pro-Spin acrylic turntable mat, preferably through the Amazon link on Neo’s site. I got one a few weeks ago for my 47-year-old Thorens turntable. The improvement in sound quality is astounding, even with old and beat-up LPs.

I clicked on the YouTube link in the sidebar of the Terry Gross link you posted above. Music aside, if you haven’t seen the comments, there’s some gold in there from people who knew or met and interacted with McKenna.

My thoughts exactly when first saw the introduction to this Anna K.

Good tip about McKenna thanks. Didn’t know any of them were New Englanders except for Corea who I’d read up on a bit in the past. Suppose shouldn’t be so surprised — there must have been a huge college and also club scene before the 60’s deluge shoved jazz to one side.

Just fired up the Dave McKenna Quartet featuring Zoot Sims. It’s got the head nodding and the neurons doing their own happy things.

Here’s a recommendation I’ve been listening to a lot since finding it in Tidal last week:

Heartfelt with Arne Domnérus on clarinet. It’s one of his 70s recordings in a church with pipe organ. Antiphone Blues is another of these. As well as the organist there’s a guy in there with guitar, too. Worth it just for the opening track.

Carol Sloane’s early career was derailed by Barbra Streisand, rock and roll, and the British Invasion. I wish I had seen her live in the 1980s-1990s or caught her radio programs. BTW: there’s some good jazz radio in New England:

https://www.nepm.org/show/jazz-a-la-mode

And an impressive list of jazzmen from the region: Chick Corea, Paul Gonsalves, Joe Morello, Phil Woods, Ruby Braff, Max Kaminsky, Johnny Hodges, Roy Haynes, Sonny Stitt, and Rhode Island-born jazz pianist Dave McKenna, heard here in a memorial by Terry Gross on NPR:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97485041

I remember listening to that episode in a chilly motel room on Cape Cod when it aired on Thanksgiving Day 2008. I didn’t know then that McKenna had lived and played at clubs on the Cape.

Cue John Lennon and “Imagine” although substitution of “aliens” for people doesn’t work in the lyrics. Maybe Yoko is a space alien, imagine that.

Thus, some species of aliens trying to help us in some way, some species trying to rip us off, and quite willing to take advantage of us defenseless primitives and buy the equivalent of Manhattan island from us for the technological equivalent of a shiny string or two of worthless beads.

Players moreover able, one would think, to intervene in human affairs at will.

I say “players” because the great variety in size, shape, color, and speed of UFOs that have been spotted suggests that there may well be more than one species of aliens moving through our skies and in our oceans.

Moreover, once you admit to the reality of a phenomenon you previously ignored as non-existent, and take a hard look at the prevalence of UFO sightings, you also have to realize that such sightings have been occurring in great numbers all over the world i.e. that these UFOs are flying with impunity over every continent and virtually every nation, in the oceans of the world and–who knows–perhaps in near Earth orbit, over the Moon, Mars, and throughout our solar system.

Admit, as well, that they are a world-wide phenomenon whose numbers and visibility seem to be increasing.

The question of supreme importance then becomes, why are they here, and what do they want?

One imagines that a lot of effort, organization, and resources have gone into getting the UFOs and their masters here and, then, into enabling them to travel all over our world.

What, then, is the payoff for them?

Mineral or genetic resources? Knowledge? Land—a place to settle? Burning curiosity? Conquest? They’re bored, and just like to mess with us primitives, or to observe us and laugh? They are trying to warn us off our present technological course, preparing us for “Disclosure,” or to enter the “Galactic Federation”? They’re searching for something that is of great value and/or perhaps of critical importance to them?

I believe she’s correct. Anyone care to dispute this?
https://pjmedia.com/columns/victoria-taft/2022/01/14/the-supreme-courts-incoherent-covid-mandate-rulings-n1549426

Not at all impossible.

There appears to be a connection between The Bubonic Plague and AIDS, such that people of European descent, whose genetic stock are likely to have some level of resistance, are much much more likely to be able to resist exposure without contracting AIDS. This is one reason why it rips through Africa so horribly, but is confined mostly to fools and idiots in the West…

Yeah, I’d forgotten about that — yes, it’s a major reason why the generation of kids raised in the 60s had much much better teeth than the prior decades.

I had 10 cavities filled when I was 18 (I confess, did not brush much when younger).

Haven’t had a significant tooth issue (except for needing a crown about 5y ago) since — no cavities, nothing. In over 40 years. This despite having a sweet tooth for soda instead of tea or coffee, Mountain Dew has always been my caffeine source of choice.

Thank you, Mr. Fluoride!!