Milt Hinton

I think my second post had fewer mispellings, stray commas, and grammatical peccadillos than the first, but I seem less sure of what I wanted to write about than I was when I contemplated this project. As for the little miscues I see writers of repute are plagued by them, too. I'm a technophobe so I don't yet know how to do links or photos but that will come. Far more important is it to try to find the right voice and possibly to clear out the kind of huge log jamb I suppose many frustrated writers accumulate over the years.
Yesterday I peeked into my thin little purse to see if I had a sufficiency of ducats for the purchase of a digital camera and decided after excruciatingly painful deliberations that, yes, I had enough. So now I have a little Pentax. And already I see that I should have waited until I had more to spend. The biggest problem is that it doesn't have a viewfinder. I didn't know this would be a problem until I tried to use it in direct sunlight. Impossible to see anything on the display. The next problem is that I like to take pictures in funny lighting conditions- backlighting, strong contrast between light and shade, artificial light- and with only the preset exposure contols to work with these are almost impossible. I suppose with practice I'll learn how to get what I want. At least my mistakes won't be so expensive as with film.
On my personal profile I listed Milt Hinton as one of my favourite musicians. In case you aren't familiar with the name I'll tell you a little bit about him. He was a jazz bassist who grew up in Chicago when jazz was just a youngster like him. Over the years he played with almost everybody at one time or other, but his main gig was with the Cab Calloway Band. I don't think there has been any other bassist who could swing a band like Milt Hinton. My knowledge of him comes almost exclusively from a CD set he put out when he was in his eighties called Old Man Time. Made with various musicians he had worked with over the years, these sessions included greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Doc Cheatham, Cab Calloway and many others. One great track has Cab singing the great song Good Time Charlie. You just don't hear singing like that anymore. Another of my favourites is when Milt and long time Calloway band guitarist Daniel Moses Barker sit down together doodling on their instruments, talking about old times and playing old tunes. Just the two of them. Talk about musicianship. And the wonderful songs, good melodies, lyrics with feeling, played by two masters with more musical knowledge between them than the entire crop of rappers put together. Milt was also a camera bug who took lots of photos of his musician pals that are now of historic as well as artistic importance.
Thanks to Jonathan Ives, Steve Jobs and a cast of thousands I am able to provide musical entertainment for my customers. I mean with my iPod, of course, which I route through the cab's stereo. This experience has led me to the conclusion that my young customers from the university campus have been deprived of something they yearn for without knowing it: beauty. They all seem to have lots of money, and expect to have more of it after graduation, and they all seem cool and clever, the girls pretty and well dressed, and definitely not sexually repressed, (as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls said of Las Vegas girls, they all have nice teeth and no last names) but about beauty they are surprisingly ignorant. Typically, after a little bevy of young things, or a couple are travelling in my cab for a block or two they start to notice the music. What radio station is that? Who is that singer? What is that genre? And the best response, when we arrive at the destination: I don't want to get out of the car. Not always, of course. The boys are a little afraid of seeming faggoty if they are with out with their friends pounding beers. (Yes, even after years and years of conditioning by the schools and the media that it's all right to be gay, most boys want to make it perfectly clear that they are hetero not homo.) Possibly one of the factors in the decline of popularity of classical music is that it has become associated with effeminate men.
That reminds me of an article I saw but didn't read about Billy Strayhorn where he was described as living in the shadow of Duke Ellington. More like living under the protection of Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was the composer of some of the most popular songs that came out of the Ellington band. One of them, Take the A Train, used for a lyric a set of directions the Duke gave him of how to get to Harlem. Strayhorn grew up in a dirt poor black working class neighborhood in Pittsburg and
was unabashedly gay. Musically precocious, he managed to get to meet Ellington when he came to town on tour and was offered an audition if he could find his way to Harlem. From then on, he was Ellington's most notable composer, arranger, song writer, and without that support there would have been no career for a stridently gay, black musician in those days.
We had a little snow this afternoon in Victoria. It was coming down pretty good but it wasn't sticking. Global warming, where are you?