A tale of two Johns
January 2018
On March 7, 1963, two jazz musicians were riding in a car on the Palisades Interstate Parkway in New Jersey, having just crossed the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. The two had been in the music business since the 1940s but had never worked together.
The younger man, John William Coltrane, was riding a successful career as a jazz saxophonist and composer. He had played with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The other man was a singer named John Maurice Hartman. Three years older than Coltrane, he had also worked with Dizzy Gillespie (although not at the same time as Coltrane) as well as with Erroll Garner and Earl Hines.
Coltrane had heard Hartman sing at a 1950 Apollo Theater performance at which they shared the stage. He thought that Hartman’s lush sound would go well with his soulful saxophone. But Hartman had to be convinced. Producer Bob Thiele encouraged him to hear Coltrane play at Birdland.
By 1963, Coltrane was playing with a quartet consisting of McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, as well as Coltrane on sax. Hartman liked what he heard at Birdland, but still had to be convinced that they were a good match. So after the club closed, Coltrane and McCoy Tyner ran through a few songs with Hartman. What they heard was good enough to convince Hartman to set a recording date.
So on March 7, 1963 the two got into a car and headed for the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where many great jazz albums were recorded. It was owned by Rudy Van Gelder, an experienced engineer who had recorded several of Coltrane’s earlier albums.
Coltrane and Hartman had agreed to try ten classic ballads to highlight Hartman’s rich baritone voice. These included Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “You Are Too Beautiful” by Rodgers and Hart. But on the way, they heard Nat King Cole on the radio singing Billy Strayhorn’s marvelous “Lush Life” and they decided to try that one as well.
Only six songs made the cut to the finished album. In addition to the three previously mentioned, there was “Dedicated to You,” “Autumn Serenade” and what has become the definitive version of Guy Wood and Robert Mellin’s “My One And Only Love.” The entire album, released that July, runs less than 34 minutes. As Spencer Tracy said of Katherine Hepburn in Pat and Mike: “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is ‘cherce’.” The album, entitled simply John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, has become a jazz classic.
Sadly, Coltrane would die just four years later in 1967, at the very young age of 40. And Johnny Hartman would live only until 1983, when he died at the age of 60. Both men were victims of cancer. But they left behind one of the best interpretations of American Songbook tunes in the jazz repertoire. If you have never heard it, you are in for a treat. For the rest of us, there’s nothing finer than pouring a glass of scotch on a cold winter’s night and listening to John Coltrane accompany the mellifluous tones of Johnny Hartman. It’s truly a work of art.
Americans are raising their voices at last
March 2018
Among the very first rights set out in the U.S. Bill of Rights is “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” We Americans don’t use that right enough in my opinion. We are complacent, lazy sheep most of the time – happy to just get along by going along.
But this week was different. This week I participated in two demonstrations in the streets of New York that reminded me just how important the right of protest is. For too long, politicians have been able to ignore protests as aberrations from the fringes of society. I think this November, they will learn otherwise.
On Monday, I participated in an event to mark the 15th (that’s right 15th) anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Of course, the war in Afghanistan goes back even further, more than 16 years now. But since there is no draft or any visible sign that this country is at war, it’s hard to raise any outrage. And just this week, as we noted 15 years since what is now regarded as a major mistake, one of the men who not only advocated it but still thinks it was a good decision, John Bolton, was named National Security Advisor.
As a small group of us gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library on Monday morning, it was disheartening to note: (1) the small number of people who came out to mark the anniversary, and (2) the even smaller number of young people who came out. But this small group of peace proponents marched through the streets of New York (with a helpful police escort) to stand in Times Square outside the military recruitment office. There, many people came over and were shocked to think how long we have asked young people to serve and be killed or injured in Iraq. The endless war that began in 2001 is now the entire lifetime memory of the new recruits serving there.
The week ended on a more hopeful note with hundreds of thousands of young people marching for gun control. In truth, many of the same people who were demonstrating to mark the 15th anniversary of the Iraq War were also, like me, marching against gun violence. That’s what being Pro-Life means. But the difference this time was that we were joined by the young people who bring energy to any cause. Young people, who have not yet become cynical about change like their parents, are the key to successful protest. The challenge is to overcome the propensity for attention deficit disorder. The challenge is to keep the fires of outrage burning. But this time, I think there are enough dedicated young people involved that change may come.
I was especially delighted to see the army of young people at the marches registering their peers to vote. If half of them get to the polls in November, this country will see a wave of change that we have not seen in the last 50 years. This is what democracy looks like.
Jimmy Hanley – Tin Pan Alley journeyman
March 2018
Popular music of the 20th century was dominated by Tin Pan Alley songwriters who gave us the memorable hits that have collectively come to be called The American Songbook (although some of the great songwriters were actually English, Canadian and Australian). Many of these songwriters are well-known like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. But others are more obscure like Herman Hupfeld (“As Time Goes By”) and Jack Strachey and Eric Maschwitz (“These Foolish Things”).
I would like to spotlight one of those more obscure songwriters. His name is James Hanley. Born in Indiana in 1892, Hanley’s first hit was, appropriately enough, “Back Home Again in Indiana,” with Ballard MacDonald as lyricist. After that 1917 success, the team of Hanley and MacDonald went on to have hits in the Roaring Twenties with two songs written for Fanny Brice – “Rose of Washington Square” and “Second Hand Rose.” Hanley wrote for vaudeville and Broadway throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including several editions of the Ziegfeld Follies.
By 1934, Hanley had not had a hit for several years. So when a catchy tune came to him, he decided to be his own lyricist, something very few songwriters of this period other than Irving Berlin ever did. The song was “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” Hanley wrote it for a Broadway revue called Thumbs Up! and it initially went nowhere.
Then something significant happened. A teenager named Judy Garland sang it in a 1938 film called Listen, Darling and she recorded it the next year while she was working on The Wizard of Oz. Just as Herman Hupfeld’s song “As Time Goes By” was little known until it was chosen to be the song that Ilsa tells Sam to play in Casablanca, so too Hanley’s song came into its own thanks to the budding popularity of Judy Garland.
Garland recorded it several times in her career. But the upbeat recordings from later in her life are the ones I like best. Try the one on YouTube from The Judy Garland Show. If you want to just enjoy the tune, listen to the recording by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. It’s on Spotify and other digital music services.
Sadly, Hanley did not get much time to enjoy his success. He died of a heart attack in 1942 at the age of 50. But “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” went on to be recorded by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and
many others. And Hanley was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
How about a long overdue conversion?
March 2018
Question: What do Myanmar, Liberia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Samoa have in common with United States? Answer: They are the only countries in the world not to have the metric system as their primary system of measurement.
However, most Americans would be surprised to know that the United States authorized use of the metric system for use in U.S. commerce back in 1866. (The system had originated in France in 1797.) And in 1875, the United States was one of the original 17 signers of the Treaty of Metre, which established the metric system’s International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) that sets the standards for metric measurement.
Most surprising of all would be the fact that in 1893 the metric standards set by the BIPM were adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States. The official definitions of all the conventional units we use, such as the foot and the pound, have been based on their relationship to metric units like the meter and the gram ever since. So a pound is officially defined as 0.45 kilograms and a yard is defined as 0.91 meters.
So why hasn’t the metric system come into common use? The answer is simple. Politics and special interest groups like the construction and clothing industries have blocked it from being mandated.
In order to understand it, we have to look back exactly 50 years ago. In 1968, Congress authorized a study by the Commerce Department about whether the U.S. should mandate the use of the metric system. The resulting U.S. Metric Study, issued in 1970, recommended that the U.S. transition over to the metric system in 10 years. And in 1975 Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, which established a United States Metric Board (USMB) to guide the transition. But no deadline was put into the law and when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 the tide began to turn against the metric system. The USMB was disbanded in 1982.
Meanwhile, many industries, feeling the need to compete in a world marketplace that was increasingly metric, began to voluntarily convert. The photography industry had been metric for decades with its film stock in 8, 16, 35 and 70 millimeter sizes. The pharmaceutical industry converted all of its measurements to grams. We began to see two-liter soda bottles and 10K (kilometer) races. Even the automobile industry switched from describing engine sizes in cubic inches to liters. But for important things like road signs and thermometers, the old system remained.
Congress amended the Metric Conversion Act in 1988 to designate the metric system as the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” and required federal agencies to use the metric system in its “procurements, grants and other business-related activities.” However, conversion by the private sector was kept voluntary. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Instead of showing leadership and mandating conversion to the metric system as the 1970 Commerce Department study recommended, Congress has accepted that metric is the superior system and mandated it for government use but has not had the political will to mandate its use for everyone. So that’s why in 2018, metric use is still suggested but not required. Why would we not simply adopt the system that is acknowledged to be the best one?
We didn’t adopt the English money system of shillings and pounds, yet we cling to the English measuring system that the English themselves abandoned decades ago. Is metric really a better system? Clearly it’s simpler. Like our money, it’s based on units of 10. So a thousand grams is a kilogram.
Let’s take some everyday examples. We speak of distance in miles, but how long is a mile exactly? It’s 5,280 feet, of course. It’s also 1.6 kilometers. All these numbers are hard to remember. But if I ask how far is a kilometer, the easy answer is that it’s 1000 meters. So a 5K race is 5,000 meters with a meter being just about 10% longer than a yard. And 100 kilometers per hour is equivalent to 60 miles an hour. If you’ve ever traveled abroad you know that it doesn’t take long to adapt.
Probably the clearest example of the superiority of the metric system is temperature. Fahrenheit is simply arbitrary. But a Celsius temperature tells you immediately whether it’s above or below freezing and whether it’s above or below the boiling point of water. If it’s a negative number Celsius, the temperature is below freezing. If it’s in the 20s, it’s a pretty comfortable temperature. If it’s in the 30s or above, it’s hot. And if it’s at 100, water is boiling. It’s pretty easy to remember. It beats the hell out of remembering 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
While I think there are much more pressing problems before Congress, perhaps we can someday soon pass legislation that again starts the clock on conversion to the metric system. While more and more of our goods are voluntarily measured metrically these days, they still usually contain the crutch of stating the English system equivalent. We have been bilingual in our measurement systems long enough. It’s time to choose the best there is. America deserves the best.
Blame it on the
Supreme Court
March 2018
Well here we are in 2018 with the country as divided as I have ever seen it (and I remember the division of the Vietnam War era). How did we get to this place where mass shootings dominate the news, our Congress is dysfunctional, and an incompetent megalomaniac is in the White House? I put a substantial part of the blame on our third branch of government.
The U.S. Supreme Court was once respected as an impartial arbiter of societal disputes and guardian of the rule of law. But its decisions in the 21st century have shown it to be as politically partisan as Congress, and its judgment as ill-considered as those early morning tweets from our President. I will present just three examples.
a) Bush v. Gore (2000) – In November 2000 the presidential election came down to the electoral votes to be cast by Florida. An initial tally showed George Bush winning by 1,784 votes over Al Gore, a margin of less than one half of one percent. Under state law a recount was required since the result was so close. The recount began and irregularities were found in the vote count in Miami-Dade County.
The Florida Supreme Court, relying on Florida election law, ordered a manual recount there of 9,000 ballots on which the voting machine had failed to detect a vote. But before this could be finished, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order stopping the recount. It acted despite a mountain of precedent dictating that the court defer to the judgment of state courts to interpret state law, especially in political cases.
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Bush v. Gore in which by a 5-4 vote the court essentially ruled that the election was over and Bush had won.
The decision to interfere with a high state court’s interpretation of state law was rightly perceived as completely political with the five Republican-leaning justices – Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O’Connor and Kennedy – voting to overrule the Florida Supreme Court, and the four Democrat-leaning judges – Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter – voting to uphold the judgment of the Florida high court.
Justice Stevens wrote in dissent “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
b) District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) – And the partisan split continued eight years later when the five Republican judges ruled for the first time in the history of the United States that the Second Amendment provided an individual right to bear arms. Up until this time, no Supreme Court had ever viewed the Second Amendment as doing anything more than restricting the federal government from interfering with state militias. But in a case involving a prohibition of handguns in the District of Columbia, Justice Scalia writing the court’s opinion, found for the first time that the Second Amendment provided an individual right to possession of a handgun for self-defense.
Justice Scalia was joine
d by Justice Thomas and Kennedy, as he had been in Bush v. Gore. These three were also joined by Justices Roberts and Alito, who had since replaced Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor. On the losing side were the same four justices who were in the minority in Bush v. Gore – Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter. The decision was again widely viewed as contrary to long-established federal precedent.
In light of the current controversy over gun control, it is interesting to note that Justice Scalia did not say in Heller that the Second Amendment was absolute in its grant of the individual right to bear arms. He noted that Congress and the states could pass laws prohibiting concealed weapons, prohibiting gun possession by felons and the mentally ill, prohibiting firearms in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, imposing “conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” prohibiting “dangerous and unusual weapons,” and regulating firearm storage to prevent accidents.
c) Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) – Finally, in 2010, the exact same five justices who were in the majority in Heller overruled prior Supreme Court precedent to find that corporations had a First Amendment right to make political contributions. The effects of this decision have been seen in every election cycle since. The vast treasuries of corporate America have been unleashed to wreak havoc on the political process.
The Citizens United case has been much reviled from politicians on both sides of the aisle and this hatred of what the decision has unleashed has resulted in calls to amend the First Amendment to overrule Citizens United. The calls are usually expressed in terms of getting money out of politics. But despite the apparent effect of corporate money in elections, no serious challenge to Citizens United has yet gained any traction.
Tales of the Tarantula Page 22
