Sunday, June 21, 2009

Catching up: 11 through 18


11: Reminisching in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, Stuart Nicholson
I'd read and liked Nicholson's biography of Ella and Ellington's birthday was coming up (April 29th). The book is structured like Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: all in the words of people who interacted with Ellington, and of Ellington himself. Excellent.


It contains Sonny's take on my favourite anecdote from Hear Me Talkin' to Ya:


You know how guys stand on the corner, him and Claude Hopkins, Toby 'Otto' Hardwick, standing on the corner, they was talking some jive, they started talking about New York. He said, "Sonny can tell you about New York. He's from New York." So I come in there and started that jive talk, that funny old talk, telling them cats about New York, painting a glorious picture about New York, and right away them cats were on me like white on rice.


Duke on Will Vodrey:

Boss musician baby!


Finally, I learned that Sidney Bechet recorded with Duke Ellington, but the session was never released and the masters are probably lost. What a shame!

12: Famous Magic Secrets, Will Dexter
No secrets here—at least, none revealed. History of magic. O.K. little collection of columns.

13: This Is Magic: Secrets of the Conjurer's Craft, Will Dexter
More of the same, but a little more interesting than the previous volume.

14: The Great Chess Automaton, Charles Michael Carroll
Good history of the Turk.

15: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom DeMarco
Mark lent this to me. Terrible airline magazine prose. Some interesting ideas that are bleeding obvious, some that were new to me and made sense, and some that were presented without proof.

16: Turk Murphy: Just for the Record, Jim Goggin
A collectiong of interviews between TM and JG. Interesting Bay Area jazz history. Clint told me that when this came out, lots of people were upset, because Turk was very honest in his answers to Jim's questions, and Jim didn't edit at all. There's some critique of people, though nothing terrible. The jazz world has its little infights, too.

17: The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Bestselling Puzzle, Jerry Slocum
And David Singmaster. And Wei-Hwa Huang. And two guys I've never heard of. Anyway: cube. Whatever. It's O.K. Nostalgia is fun.

Has algorithms for solving nxnxn cubes for n=2 to n=7.

18: An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew about Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge, Richard Zacks
The subtitle suggests that Zacks either is really full of himself or spent too much time reading the title pages of 18th century sources. Or both. Anyway: amusing read, lots of trivia, some poorly researched (or misunderstood by Zacks). Just look up things that sound too odd.


And that brings me to the present: June 21.