Saturday Music Club: mostly jazz, a lot of keyboards, some singing...

Teo Macero and the Prestige Jazz Quartet: "Just Spring"

Randy Weston: "African Village/Bedford Stuyvesant"

Blossom Dearie Trio and Quartet: "I Wish You Love"; "Bag's Groove" 


Aretha Franklin Band: "Won't Be Long"


Toshiko Akiyoshi: "The Village"


Toshiko Akiyoshi 2007 interview:

from the same interview: on being a Japanese jazz artist

Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra: "Drum Conference"


Thelonious Monk: "Don't Blame Me"


Lenny Bruce's tv series pilot The World of Lenny Bruce 

Two tributaries to our overlooked cultural flow, or Toshiko Akiyoshi, Jacques Plante, Cyd Charisse and Ann Landers walk into a studio to eulogize Fred Allen, and Mimi Perrin writes and performs noirish jazz lyrics in French with her sextet before turning to translating Le Carre, Erdrich and Sheckley...

The Fred Allen Show: 1945-1949  (Internet Archive file #23), "King for a Day" with Jack Benny (essentially the end of their looong-term "feud" running joke), was the first episode I heard as a kid, on a library cassette ca. 1974...at that point, I wasn't aware that the insurgent Stop the Music game show (not quite the same sort of series as the lachrymose Queen for a Day, the target of Allen's parody, but in the same ballpark) had pulled Allen's NBC Radio show from the #1 rated national series to out of the top 20 in audience size; Allen, whose health was suffering from his over-work on the series (and some ratings-related stress), chose to leave the series by the end of the next season (Edgar Bergen's series on NBC also suffered enormously in timeslot competition with the ABC Radio hit). Mark Goodson was the producer of Stop the Music, and (amusingly enough) was the co-producer, with his partner Bill Todman, of What's My Line?, among many other game shows and a few other sorts of television series over the next several decades.

Ad-libbing in the sketch: Jack Benny, to Allen, while trying to retain his trousers from the stooges pulling them from him: "You haven't seen the end of me!"

Fred Allen: "Well, it won't be long now..."

1. The What's My Line? taped the day after the death of panelist Fred Allen, a giant of network radio comedy, among much else...oddly enough, as the cast of regulars, at Allen's widow Portland Hoffa's request, proceed to do a regular episode, as much as possible, with a single famous "Mystery Guest"(actor/dancer Cyd Charisse this week), the three other guests were all public figures as well, two of whom, at least, have become over the years at least as famous as Charisse: newspaper advice columnist Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers, only some months into her career; and jazz pianist and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, newly matriculated at the Berklee School of Music (Steve Allen invites her to be on his The Tonight Show when the panel learns of her budding career). The first guest is Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante, at that time probably better known, if not to the panel, than all the women except Charisse...and, as I didn't know until recently, as I append this in 2022, the inventor of the modern goalie's mask, the one that actually helps survive a slapshot puck to the face.

2. Jeannine "Mimi" Perrin, 1926-2010. Having studied jazz piano and the English language in her youth, her first public career was as accompanist and backup singer for the likes of Blossom Dearie when the latter played in France...in 1959, Perrin put together the first version of her vocalese choral sextet Les Double Six, inspired by King Pleasure and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross among others. This ran though about 1966, recording frequently with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones and on their own (the Swingle Singers was an offshoot of Les Six); she loved to write noirish lyrics for the jazz arrangements she and the Six recorded, noting that French "doesn't swing", or at least it doesn't have the same sort of bounce in that context English does ...and a recurring tuberculosis led to her giving up public singing. So, she turned to translation of literature as her primary career by 1972. Among those whose work she translated into French were Robert Sheckley, Roger Zelazny, James Blish, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Nicola Barker, Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, Ha Jin; in the 1990s, she was the default translator of John Le Carre. She also was particularly inclined toward translating the biographies of performing artists (Nina Simone's among the less surprising examples) and related folk. 

Les Double Six: "Four Brothers"; "Moanin'"

Saturday Music Club on Memorial Day: random acts of video: Toshiko Akiyoshi on WHAT'S MY LINE, Twinkle and The Who on the last SHINDIG; 2 war songs

A young, newly emigrated Toshiko Akiyoshi had the unfortunate timing of appearing on the episode of What's My Line? memorializing Fred Allen, who'd passed in the week before taping (and whose last regular gig WML was).

The Dangerous Minds blog, in Richard Metzger's post yesterday, points us toward a video from the last segment of the last episode of Shindig!;  Metzger is highlighting "Twinkle" (as teen Lynn Ripley initially billed herself), and in this segment of the tv program, Twinkle is clearly lip-synching (and the backing track is probably of the most musical interest); the Who are clearly playing live, and Keith Moon threatens to blast the others off the stage (see here for better audio and worse visual of all three of the Who performances from that episode).


A historian on WHYY's Radio Times this week was rather cheerfully nominating "Over There" as the best war song ever, as it was ever so peppy and all...I'll countersuggest that at least these two are among the not actually antiwar songs that I might offer first:

Overlooked Films (and/or Other A/V): Jazz Is My Native Language (1983/84)

Jazz is My Native Language: A Portrait of Toshiko Akiyoshi (1984) is an hourlong documentary about Toshiko Akiyoshi, the jazz pianist and bandleader and composer/arranger, and her family (her husband, featured soloist Lew Tabackin, and her daughter, Michiru Mariano, from her first marriage to another saxophonist, Charles Mariano), as they cope with a move from Los Angeles, where Akiyoshi is abandoning her beloved Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tababckin Big Band, to New York City, where Tabackin feels he's more likely to be stimulated, and Akiyoshi will soon establish her Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra.

As I wrote it up some years ago for IMDb:
This documentary, often seen on US public television stations in the mid-1980s [initially as part of the brief, loose series of Asian-American-experience documentaries, Silk Screen], documents both the last days of the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band (largely made up of jazz musicians making their rent money in the likes of The Tonight Show orchestra and movie session work, and working part-time on Akiyoshi's challenging and groundbreaking innovations in orchestral jazz), and the married couple's move from LA to NYC (where the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra has done impressive work, but not quite to the level the first Big Band was able to achieve). Akiyoshi comes off well, if unsurprisingly harried at the prospect of moving; Tabackin, who refuses to drive a car (in LA) and otherwise must be catered to, comes off rather badly (it is apparently he who wants to move to New York much more than his wife) when not demonstrating his brilliance as a woodwinds player (on saxophone and flute). Akiyoshi's daughter, Michiru Mariano (later to professionally dub herself Michiru Akiyoshi, and the product of her mother's previous marriage to saxophonist Charles Mariano), also has some input. Some excellent music, and a lovely introduction to Akiyoshi's work and life.


from the Newport Jazz Festival, 1956...NHK coverage, with some work by Akiyoshi's band featured in a spliced film/radio segment (or, at least, the sound folks kept recording even when the camera folks didn't):


from a French television performance in 1965:


From concert recordings:


And a 2000 performance by the later ensemble (definitely not in the film):


Akiyoshi seems willing to put up with Tabackin's intransigence without much complaint, but it is telling how morose she seems about the prospect of moving; this present-day (1981, I think) footage is interspersed with accounts of Akiyoshi's birth and childhood in Manchuria, in the Manchukuo days of the Imperial Japanese occupation, her early passion for jazz which leads her in her early adulthood to emigrate to the US, where she meets and marries Mariano and appears on What's My Line? (wearing a kimono and signing in on the chalkboard in kanji, she stumped the panel); even after their 1965 divorce, Akiyoshi and Charlie Mariano would occasionally play together, as Akiyoshi established herself as an engaging soloist and composer for small groups, and eventually in the early '70s with her new husband at the head of probably the most innovative of 1970s jazz orchestras. (Mariano died in 2009.) Michiru Mariano is a little frustrated, as a young woman on the verge of adulthood, with the family dynamic, but also can be seen playing a flute duet with her stepfather, as brilliant a flautist as he is a saxophonist. Michiru went on to her own musical and acting career, and is known professionally as Monday Michiru; a year older than I am, she inspired a bit of crush on my first viewing of the film. But, then again, Akiyoshi inspired a bit of a crush from my purchase of the first album I heard from the Big Band, Insights, wherein Michiru makes her singing debut.

I'm not sure if director Renee Cho, who seems to have no other a/v credits I can find, is the currently active environmental journalist by that name, but shall attempt to find out. The 58-minute film was offered on VHS, but has since appparently vanished, at least as a personal-use video (one can get institutional copies via the Center for Asian-American Media website, or *Update* they will sell copies for personal use for $24.95...but you have to email or call them, they don't offer that purchasing option on the website).

Monday Michiru in her adult career: