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(Clifford Brown - one of the brightest lights in Jazz, gone all too soon)

Something special tonight. A live broadcast from CBS Radio on May 6, 1956 featuring The Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet and The Errol Garner Trio performing at The Basin Street in New York.

As I mentioned several months ago in a previous post, the 1940s and 1950s were a heyday for live broadcasting of Jazz throughout the U.S. Almost every night and on almost all the networks, some club or some concert was being broadcast from just about every section of the country.

It's certainly a lost art now. And just to show how significant these live broadcasts were, this particular broadcast was one of the last Clifford Brown did before his untimely death on June 26th of that year, quite possibly the last. I don't know if this has been reissued or has made the collectors circles - that is certainly something Clifford Brown fans will know about.

At any rate - enjoy the moments, around thirty of them.

And don't forget . . .

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(Budapest on November 4 - Waking up to smell the sulfur)

Just when the world thought the Cold War wasn't going to get any colder, this happens. Only twelve days earlier, Hungary went through something of an upheaval with anti-Soviet riots springing up all over the country and a return to power of Imre Nagy (pronounced: Imray Nahj), the moderate who was ousted by pro-Soviet Premier Andras Hegedus in 1955.

So on the morning of November 4th, 1956 when you fell out of bed, it sounded like this:

Bob Pfeiffer (CBS News announcer): “ The latest word from Budapest is that Soviet armored forces seized Budapest in a surprise attack today and captured the government of Premier Imre Nagy. According to communications from Vienna the last words at 8:24 am from the . . .one of the news bureaus in Vienna was – ‘we shall leave our post, we shall leave our post’, according to the Budapest operator ‘goodbye friends, goodbye friends. God save our souls, the Russians are too near’. And then the line from Budapest went dead. Repeating – the Soviet armored forces seized Budapest in a surprise attack today and captured the government of Premier Imre Nagy.”

The Russian army quickly captured Budapest and within days the revolt was crushed and the pro-Soviet hardline regime of Janos Kadar was installed. Hungary would slip back into the Soviet Bloc and not really re-emerge until the collapse of the Soviet Union some 30 years later.

At the time the situation was worrisome as it came hot on the heels of a number of violent clashes in 1956 - the Suez Canal crisis, the Algerian conflict and the anti-communist riots in Poland. It also came at a time when Russia, under the leadership of Nikita Khruschev, was denouncing the Stalin regime and the hope was the new leadership would reflect a moderation on the hardline policies of the past.

No such luck.

Oh . . .the fabulous fifties.

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(Yes, even in the future - getting sick and paying for it will be painful)

It's always amazing to hear what the future is going to look like, as viewed from the past. Invariably, all manner of convenience will be commonplace, all menial labor will vanish, all worry about getting sick will still be around.

And who is going to pay for it? Even in 1956, they were scratching their heads. The writing was on the wall - more people on the planet, and more of them getting older and well . . .sicker. The good news was the leaps on modern medicine would be greater (that's happened), but people going broke over receiving those leaps would plague us seemingly forever.

In September of 1956, on the occasion of their annual convention, NBC Radio, via their Monitor series, hosted a panel discussion with members of the American Hospital Association (Albert W. Snoke, Lowell T. Codishall and Chicago Daily News Science Editor Arthur Snider), discussing just what this thing was going to be looking like in the future.

Arthur Snider (Chicago Daily News): “ I think foremost, is and has been for some time the matter of costs. For a considerable time people . . the anger was directed towards hospitals, but now with the introduction of hospital bill . . or hospital insurance plans, we have the matter of increasing premiums. And people now are being a little bit unhappy about that. They say, when they get their bills they could have enjoyed a nice couple of weeks at a fancy hotel for that price. I’m sure that argument is fallacious, I’m sure Dr. Snoke has a thought on that.”

Albert W. Snoke (American Hospital Association): “Everybody gets irritated over having to pay any kind of money for anything. They just don’t enjoy paying out money. I don’t blame them for being concerned about hospital costs and hospital charges. The thing that I’d like to first get clear is that there are two different problems we’re talking about. One is how much does it cost to run a hospital. And next, how much does the patient have to pay when he comes into the hospital. And cost and charges are two different things.”

Bear in mind in 1956 Health Insurance was a relatively new thing, but even in 1956 costs were spiraling out of control. Of course at the time no one thought to lay some blame at the feet of the insurance companies - they were still the new kids on the block.

So now that they've become the bullies of the neighborhood . . .

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(Not too terribly far off the mark)

At the height of Cold War paranoia and subversives seemingly everywhere, the question over whether or not to make Wiretapping a legal procedure got a lot of attention in the 1950s.

So in 1956, part of its American Forum series, the question was posed to a Senator and Congressman - both Democrats, but one casually known as a Dixiecrat.

Emanual Celler (D-New York) favored Wiretapping but only in cases of National Security (the definition of National Security got a bit loose and fuzzy by 2002) while E.L. Forrester (D-Georgia) wanted everything wiretapped. Forrester, it should be noted was one of the early signers of the Southern Manifesto from the Alabama Council of Conservative Citizens . . .nuff said.

Emanual Celler: “I simply want to make wiretapping per se` a crime in the federal courts when it’s done across state lines. And in that sense, every wiretap would be illegal, except . . and the exception would be in the interests of national security. I would surrender some privacy and the right of privacy in the interests of preservation of our great nation and in the interests of national security. So that where the federal officials are running down malefactors against our espionage laws or sabotage laws or Atomic energy act or National security laws, I will say ‘alright, wiretap’ and use that evidence in the court, But anything beyond national security, I know I would say no, I would interdict that."

E.L. Forrest: “Now of course I wouldn’t agree with you. I would say that the states should have some laws on the subject. And that evidence of wiretapping should be admissible in courts. Now let me show you what you’re doing - Now I say to you that it is completely possible that a man could, in his own home here in the city of Washington, by using his telephone as his agent, that he could carry on all over the world a conspiracy dealing in narcotics. His agent in Atlanta could sit in his own home and he could talk to him on the phone, he could tell him to meet a plane and to go down and take the narcotics off of the plane – all right. Now that agent in Atlanta could call the messenger boy, over there in his own home and tell him to go down and meet that plane. What you’re doing, you are just giving the criminal a one way street and you’re not giving the police officer any opportunity to catch him.”

And so it went in 1956. The relentless dilemma.

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(Jazz in Paris in the 1950s - it was definitely happening)

In the 1950s the Jazz scene in France exploded. It was Mecca for visiting Americans and it was a reservoir of French talent that assimilated Modern Jazz and added their own points of view. The studios in Paris were working overtime with sessions featuring a mix of Americans and French sitting in on each others projects.

A lot of talent came out of those sessions - the Algerian born pianist Martial Solal became an international name. Americans like Lucky Thompson, Gerry Mulligan, Kenny Clarke, Dexter Gordon and countless others found enthusiastic audiences and an instant fan base and some even settled in France, making the Paris scene their home.

Typical of the sessions that came out of Paris at that time was one featuring the drummer Gerard Ponchonet leading a quartet that consisted of Martial Solal on piano and Lucky Thompson on Tenor sax and Jean Pierre Sasson on guitar. This track, Undecided is also augmented by Pierre Michelot on Bass and Michel Hauser on vibes. The session was recorded on March 14, 1956 and released on the French Swing label.

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(Health Care - as the rest of the world views us)

On January 29, 1956, NBC Radio, as part of their "New World" series ran a debate on the state of Healthcare in the world and asked the BBC to participate with their take on it. Representing all the interested parties were Aneurin Bevan, Member of Parliament and Labor Party Secretary for Health, Dr. Walter Elliot, Member of Parliament, E. A. Van Steenwyck, spokesman for Blue Cross and Milton Friedman, economist.

Right away, Bevan and Friedman jump into it. Friedman has a condescending tone that drives Bevan right up the wall and clearly there is no willingness on the U.S. to even consider a National Health plan.

Aneurin Bevan: “If you rely upon financial anxieties to keep people away, or to use your own words, ‘not to overuse the scarce services”, such anxieties do not exist for the rich. So they will have access to the services first of all. Is that equitable?

Milton Friedman : “Mister Bevan, I think you are confusing two very different problems. One, is the problem of the general distribution of income among people, which arises with the respect to food, clothes, housing and everything else. Medical care is a minor item . . .

Bevan: “A minor item??

Friedman: “Medical care accounts in your country as well as mine for no more than five percent of the total expenditure on consumption. It accounts in your country as in mine for less than the cost of tobacco plus alcohol”.

Walter Eliot: “Now wait a minute – I’m holding myself in with the greatest of difficulty. I was a doctor. I was on the gate. I compiled these waiting lists, and I can assure you that in a good many cases, people who urgently needed treatment weren’t getting it because there wasn’t a hospital accommodation there. Now, one of our difficulties was this very expansion of hospital accommodation. Do you think in America you can look after this enormously increased hospital accommodation which will admittedly be necessary . . .

Friedman: “We don’t rely on donations to run our hospitals. About 90 percent of all the money spent by our voluntary hospitals comes from patients.”

It more or less slides downhill from there. Needless to say, there is no compromise to be had in this debate, but it's interesting to hear just how enmeshed, even in 1956, the lobbies of big Insurance, Big Pharma and the AMA were with the question of Health for the U.S.

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(The Robins - a nice change of pace for an insane world . . sort of)

Not one of their better known or better selling singles, it's still a great track by this pioneering group. The Robins are synonymous with early rock n' roll and one of the best vocal groups to come out of that era.

"Out Of The Picture" was from a series of sessions the group cut in Los Angeles between late 1956 and early 1957 and was issued on Gene Norman's subsidiary label Whippett.

The 1950's were full of interesting things - not just Sputnik.

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(In its last gasp, radio got really creative)

If I was to tell you there was a time people paid more attention to radio than anything and that Television was the stuff of experiments and shrugged shoulders, you would call me insane. Listening to radio now bears no resemblance to radio of even 20 years ago, let alone over 50 when this broadcast first appeared.

But radio was an important part of culture, and in some parts of the world it still is - America just abandoned it and left it for the wasteland to consume. Too bad.

But when radio was in its twilight, it did do some interesting things. It's that mentality that says "when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose" where sometimes brilliant events occur.

One was a short-lived radio series produced in conjunction with Galaxy Magazine, one of the more popular Science Fiction periodicals of the day, and NBC Radio.

Before technology made all things possible in the visual arts (i.e. Science Fiction film), radio was the perfect medium to convey that sense of mystery and suspense. You could say the world was destroyed by an atomic war and, through the use of sound effects, it was destroyed. Imaginations ran rampant and everyone had their own visual concept of just what a devastated world looked like.

And so X-Minus One took advantage of that - and did it wonderfully well with virtually no budget - it doesn't cost anything to imagine.

Tunnel Under The World was an adaptation from a short story by Frederick Pohl which appeared in the January 1955 issue of Galaxy. This broadcast, from September 4, 1956 adds all the elements of drama, sound effects and mystery to make it one of the most memorable episodes in radio.

If you're going to go out, you might as well go out with a bang.

When I first heard then-Senator Barack Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic convention, I was instantly reminded of another Presidential Candidate, Adlai Stevenson - a poised, articulate former Governor of Illinois who ran two unsuccessful bids for the Presidency. How, in our soundbite culture would a man like that have a chance today? Where flash and a certain low common denominator would win out over substance and inspiration. But the 1950's were filled with fear and paranoia; change was only beginning to creep out in pockets by way of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and the looming Baby-Boom generation. Stevenson comes to mind as the Right Man at the Wrong Time. The difference today is our fear and paranoia comes as the result of 8 years of a failed Bush Administration based on deceit and destruction, masking itself as flash and "gee-whiz" charm.

So I guess it comes as no surprise that what most people remember Stevenson now for is the famous "shoe photograph", and that perhaps the coincidence between the Obama shoe and the Stevenson shoe is more than meets the eye.

Here is an excerpt from February 4, 1956. When Stevenson began his 1956 campaign in Fresno California as a reminder that it's perfectly okay to have a brain.

There are two ways, it seems to me, of looking at America and its future and that the role of government in meeting it. Yes, and in shaping that future. One is to look at today with frequent side glances at yesterday. To think in terms of hanging on to what we have and of staying where we are.

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