George Russell

Forty years ago, almost to the month, the revolutionary jazz album by Miles Davis, and the best selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue was released. George Russell, the jazz musician who laid down the theory of modal jazz which created the possibility of Kind of Blue, passed away last week.

From Swing to Bebop

Prior to World War II, swing jazz was the popular music of America. Swing was based on large bands playing tightly orchestrated arrangements with individual musicians playing improvised solos based on the underlying melody. During the war these large bands became financially difficult to maintain profitably. Music shifted to smaller clubs and smaller bands. At the same time, younger musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, developed and popularized bebop, which stripped down the melody to a basic bed of chords which the soloists aggressively improvised over, chopping the standard four beats per bar into a whirling 16 beats. The solos increasingly wandered from the underlying melody. Bebop became the dominant style among technically accomplished musicians but lost its popularity among traditional fans.

Attack on the Chord

George Russell came to New York in 1945 while in his early twenties to play drums in a jazz band. Shortly after his arrival, Russell contracted tuberculosis and took up residence at a sanitarium for his recovery. At the sanitarium, he found an unused piano and began exploring alternatives to chord progressions as the basis of jazz. In 1953 he self published his new approach to jazz entitled “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation'. In Russell's approach to jazz, the dominance of the chord was replaced by the scale or “mode”, in this case the Lydian scale. This new “modal jazz” provided new opportunities for improvisation, all based on a reassertion of melody into the music. Compared to bebop, modal jazz was less technically challenging and more approachable, more contemplative and less pyrotechnic.

Russell and Davis were close friends since the mid-forties. Both were among the handful of musicians who gathered regularly at freelance arranger Gil Evans' Manhattan apartment to discuss and play jazz. Davis, who had started playing trumpet alongside Charlie Parker, had never completely accepted the dominance of bebop. By the late 1950's, Davis was actively looking for an alternative.

In 1958 Russell was near completion of an expanded version of The Lydian Chromatic Concept. Davis immediately realized the potential of the new approach. In the same year Davis released Milestones in which he began to experiment with modal jazz. He then assembled a group of musicians who he felt would embrace the scale over the chord. In the spring of 1959 they began the recording sessions for Kind of Blue. Released that summer, the album brought both melody and fans back into jazz.

Russell Lead his own bands throughout the '50's and '60's, but became frustrated by his failure to earn recognition or financial reward. He moved to Scandinavia in 1964 and had more success. Russell became a teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1969, where he stayed until 2004. His 1985 recording of "The Africa Game" received two Emmy nominations. But few in the general public know of him or his seminal contribution to contemporary jazz.

=========================

This post could conclude with a sample of modal jazz from Davis or saxophonist John Coltrane, but many would likely be familiar with that music. Instead, we offer up “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop”, performed by the Dizzy Gillespie band, featuring Chano Pozo on congas. Gillespie commissioned the 23 year old George Russell to compose the piece.

Cubano Be, Cubano Bop

Little Fugitive

"Little Fugitive" is a 1953 film by Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley that many credit as the beginning of the American independent film movement.

The Studio System

Prior to the 1950's film production and distribution were controlled by six major studios. The films of this "studio system" were almost exclusively well-budgeted, shot on a set, and included star performers whose carefully nurtured popularity helped market the finished product. The limited variety of the stories and plots of these films were chosen for their broad appeal to assure the financial return on the investment. Very few producers, directors and actors had the resources to create films which didn't fit in the studio system business model.

Morris Engel, Street Photographer

Morris Engel was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, the city that he loved, inhabited, and photographed for his entire life. Engel joined The Photo League in the year of its founding, 1936. The Photo League was begun in New York by Paul Strand initially to provide radical newspapers with photos of trade union activities. It quickly broadened its mission to photographing working-class communities. It was as an assistant on the production of Strand's 1942 film "Native Land" that Engel received his first and only lesson in film making.

Though he also worked as a protographer for popular magazines, Engel is best know for his photography of everyday street life in New York. Engel worked with a Hasselblad camera which allowed him to hold the camera discretely against his chest and photograph his subjects without intrusion. He pointed his camera at unknowing pedestrians, merchants, and children capturing undramatic but endearing moments of everyday life.
Engel's ambition was to create this same effect on film, which was impossible at the time because the tripod needed for 35mm movie cameras was both immobile and distracting to his subjects. Engel and fellow photographer Charles Woodruff modified a standard 35mm camera to make it lighter and attached a single strap which Engel wore around his neck and shoulder allowing him to hold the camera under his arm.

The Story of a Boy

"Little Fugitive" is the story of seven-year old Joey and his adventures in Brooklyn and on Coney Island. Joey is in the care of his twelve-year old brother Lennie, while their mother visits a sick relative. To break the boredom of a summer day, Lennie's friends persuade him into tricking Joey into believing that he shot and killed his brother.
After being taunted with the possible punishment he could expect, Joey takes the family food money and escapes to the amusement park at Coney Island.

Little happens at Coney Island that constitute plot, but Joey is followed scene by scene as he lives out his fantasies and learns to navigate the adult world. There is very little dialogue in the movie, all of which had to be added during editing. The power of the movie comes from the personality of Richie Andrusco, who portrays Joey, and from Engel's remarkable eye and patience in capturing street life. Each scene is filmed in such a way that individual frames could stand alone as photographs.
Engel also takes advantage of several instances in which situations unexpectedly occur which would otherwise have no purpose in the story. In one scene, Engel captures the reaction of the crowd as the body of drowned boy is brought to the beach. In another, Engel captures the chaos as a sudden storm sends the crowds running for protection. As the storm lifts, he uses the opportunity to great effect to film Joey walking the abandoned beach.

International Attention

"The Fugitive" inspired other directors, such as John Cassavettes, to pursue their vision for flim making outside of the studio system. Stanley Kramer, then a young director working on "The Wild One" reportedly wanted Engel's camera for himself. Most famously, Francois Truffaut credited Engel for inspiring the French New film movement: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with [this] fine movie.” The impact of Engel's spontaneous approach to filming can be scene in Truffaut's 1959 masterpiece "The Four Hundred Blows".

The movie went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for writing and won a Silver Lion at the venice film Festival.

References

For articles about "Little Fugitive", click here and here.

For a gallery of Engels photographs, click here.

Below is the link to the trailer for "Little Fugitive"

The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book by biologist Richard Dawkins. The book generated a controversy because of its argument for a gene-centered theory of evolution. It also is owed a debt by students of culture for the establishment of the concept of the meme as a unit of cultural evolution.

The Gene-Centered Theory of Evolution

The two established theories of evolutionary biology prior to The Selfish Gene were organism-centered and population-centered. The former argued that the dynamics of evolution occurred at the level of the organism, with the outcome being the survival and reproduction of the organism. The later argued that evolution occurred at the level of the group, similarly for the survival and reproduction of the characteristics of the group.

Richard Dawkins took a position which at the time was, and somewhat until today is, a source of controversy. To Dawkins, the scientific observations associated with evolution were best explained by placing the gene at the center of the evolutionary dynamic. Evolution is a process by which genes as “replicators” increase their chance for biological survival by creating “survival machines” ranging in complexity from the amoeba to the human that best serves their purposes. Behavior of these greater survival machines can be interpreted as purposeful strategies by the genes. Referring to genes Dawkins writes

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The name of the book is a reference to the observed behavior of organisms which is typically called “altruistic”. Altruistic behavior, actions which are consistent with the success of others, is often cited as evidence that evolutionary processes are centered on the organism or, more likely, the group. “The Selfish Gene” alludes to the possibility that altruism may be only one strategy arrived at by genes which which serves its own, selfish, needs.

The Meme as a Unit of Cultural Evolution

The Selfish Gene has extended its impact well beyond the field of evolutionary biology and into cultural analysis. In the book's last chapter, “Memes: The New Relicators”, Dawkins introduced a cultural analog to the gene, and inspired an academic discipline which applies the principles of evolutionary biology, especially Dawkins' own ideas, to the transmission and survival of cultural ideas.

Dawkins explains the coinage of the new word:

I think that a new kind of replicator has emerged on this very planet...It's still in its infancy, still in it's primeval soup...The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a name which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

As examples of memes, Dawkins offers “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”. Analogous to genetic evolution, memes “propagate themselves in the meme-pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense can be called imitation”.

Dawkins describes three qualities of a meme which can lead to successful replication. The greater a meme's “longevity”, that is the longer it exists, the greater is its opportunity be imitated by another. More important than longevity to Dawkins is the meme's fecundity or ability to reproduce. In this case, the meme of a cloying advertising jingle may replicate successfully because of the contagious nature of the tune. The third quality of a successful meme replicator is copy fidelity, the ability to create relatively, stable and faithful reproductions. It is his in discussion of this third quality that Dawkins insightfully describes how a meme may be successful not because of the overall complexity of the idea it represents, but because of the essence of its idea or the strength of one of it's parts.

The Propagation of an Idea

Of course the idea of a meme, is itself a meme, and as such will be expected to evolve and flourish or perish. The Selfish Gene inspired a new discipline in cultural analysis called Memetics. Memetics has flourished somewhat, but not without the opposition of critics. An explananation of this criticism will be left to a forum other than KultureKat.

Bettie Page

This week marked the passing of Bettie Page, perhaps the most famous of 1950s pin-up models.

Career

By the late 1940’s Page had become a popular model with New York photography clubs. These clubs gave a cover of legitimacy for the production of erotica. In 1950 Page developed a professional portfolio that lead to her appearance in glamour magazines such as Wink, Titter, Eyeful, and Beauty Parade. Page worked as a model until 1957.

In 1952 Page began doing bondage material with Irving Klaw, who distributed her photos and short films through his mail order business. In 1954 Page modeled for Bunny Yeager, herself a former pin-up. This collaboration produced a very popular series of “jungle” photos of Page posing in a leopard skin bikini and with live cheetahs. An example from the Klaw bondage material is below, as is one of the Yeager jungle photos.

In 1955, Hugh Hefner featured Page as the holiday centerfold for the two-year old Playboy magazine. Given the time of the year, we thought it appropriate to include that photo also.

More Than a Pretty Face

Recent coverage of her death refers to Ms. Page as a “secretary turned model” which may be misleading. She had moved to New York in the 1940’s with the aspirations to be an actress, using a job as a secretary for income while she looked for acting jobs.

Page faced many difficulties before her fame. She was born in Tennessee to an impoverished family. Her parents divorced and her father began molesting his young daughters. Page was sent to an orphanage after her father was sent to prison for stealing a police car.

Page began acting in high school, where she was also a successful student, and received a college degree in dramatic arts. This was an unlikely outcome for a woman of her time and situation.

Lasting Impact

Many credit Page with helping to lay the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Page, perhaps more than anyone, helped move erotica from low-quality, clandestine productions to the higher-quality, more socially acceptable material which followed her career. Page also communicated her personality in her photos, seeming fun and flirtatious instead of tawdry.

Page regained a cult following in the 1980s and 90s, leading to two biopics Bettie Page: Dark Angel (2004) which focused on the Klaw years, and The Notorious Bettie Page (2005). The documentary Bettie Page Reveals All, is scheduled for release in 2009.

===================================

For obituary coverage of Page's death in the Wall Street Journal, click here, and from the New York Times, click here.

Factotum

Factotum is a 2005 movie inspired by Charles Bukowski’s autobiographical novel of the same name.

The Movie

Factotum is the story of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter ego. The movie covers several years of Chinaski’s life, as he struggles to be recognized for his writing. His greatest struggles are with his own demons. Chinaski is an alcoholic. He enjoys the pleasures of women, but not the commitment of a relationship. He despises work, and holds his jobs just long enough to pay for alcohol. He is constant only to his writing.

Matt Dillon portrays Chinaski, in an unlikely role that is not motivated by his natural good looks or charm. His performance is fantastic, maintaining a suppression of any emotion other than anger. Dillon’s looks are the only incongruity of his portrayal, as Bukowski was in life unattractive to an extreme, bearing a face pock marked by severe acne and left slack by his alcoholism.

Two other exceptional performances round out the movie. Lily Taylor portrays Jan, the woman who loves Chinaski. Marisa Tomei is Laura, one of Chinaski’s brief affairs. Both Taylor and Tomei find a hopelessness for their characters, capable of physical movement but otherwise dispirited.

The movie is directed and written by Bent Hamer, a Norwegian film maker. Enthusiasm for Bukowski has always been greater in Europe than in America. Perhaps this explains why it would be a Norwegian director that brought this film to life.

The Poet Laureate of Skid Row

Bukowski was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Germany in 1920. His family escaped the economic dissolution of his birth country in 1924, eventually settling in Los Angeles, Bukowski’s home for most of his life. As a teenager, Bukowski began his love affair with alcohol, and shortly after, his affair with writing. Bukowski was always the outsider, alienated from others by his accent, the anti-German bigotry of the war years, and the scarring on his face.

In his early twenties, Bukowski published two short stories. Becoming quickly disillusioned with the publication process, Bukowski began what he calls his “ten year drunk”. He only achieved recurring success with his writing in 1969, at the age of 49.

Most of Bukowski’s work is written from the perspective of the alienated outsider. His style was raw and unsympathetic. He wrote most often of the hopelessness which binds together the lowest rung of society, thus earning the title “The Poet Laureate of Skid Row”.

Below is a short sample of Bukowski’s writing from Chapter 43 of Factotum. It's the novel's version of the opening scene of the trailer above.

I was too sick one morning to get up at 4:30 a.m. -- or according to our clock 7:27 and one half. I shut off the alarm and went back to sleep. A couple of hours later there was a loud noise in the hall. "What the hell is it?" asked Jan.

I got out of bed. I slept in my shorts. The shorts were stained--we wiped with newspapers that we crumpled and softened with our hands--and I often didn't get all of it cleaned off. My shorts were also ragged and had cigarette burns in them where the hot ashes had fallen in my lap.

I went to the door and opened it. There was thick smoke in the hall. Firemen in large metal helmets with numbers on them. Firemen dragging long thick hoses. Firemen dressed in asbestos. Firemen with axes. The noise and confusion was incredible. I closed the door.

"What is it?" asked Jan.

"It's the fire department."

"Oh," she said. She pulled the covers up over her head, rolled on her side. I got in beside her and slept.

Factotum The Book, The Life, The Film

Factotum the book was published in 1975 and set in Los Angeles in 1944 at the outset of Bukowski’s “ten year drunk”. While we cannot be sure how much of the story is based in the facts of Bukowski’s life, we can be confident that in the broadest strokes, the novel parallels his life.

Hamer’s film version is set in an unspecified time and location, though clearly much later than 1944 and clearly not in Los Angeles (it was filmed in Minneapolis).

Transgressive Art

Factotum, like all of Bukowski’s work, are near perfect exemplar’s of transgressive fiction. In many ways, the common achievement of works of transgressive fiction is to create a discomforting disorientation by having the character the reader sympathizes with violate accepted social norms and act in unsympathetic ways.

Bukowski and Chinowski belong to what sociologists call the Bachelor Subculture. They both violate the accepted values of the domesticated male because they indulge in anti-productive behaviors such as drinking and gambling, are unable to hold jobs and save for the future, and are unfaithful to women and disinterested in raising children. It is the violation of these accepted values that causes some to retreat in revulsion, and others who question these values to see Bukowski as giving voice to their feelings.

Jack of All Trades

Factotum is a person who has many responsiblities, and implies a person with many skills and trusted reliability. It might be most similar to expressions such as “Man Friday” or “Jack of All Trades”. The movie is often referenced as “Factotum (A Man with Many Jobs), which is perhaps accurate but doesn’t capture the spirit of the original definition.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

At the end of the movie Dillon summarizes Chinoski’s transgressive outlook on his life. We provide a link to this audio below:

"Isolation is the gift"

Owsley Stanley

Owsley Stanley was the eccentric and obscure engineer, who as much as any other figure, created what we today remember as the 1960’s.

Passing the Acid Test

Stanley’s greatest contribution to popular culture was his ability to mass produce a very pure form of LSD which was distributed by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their Acid Test tour of the West Coast in 1965.

In the early Sixties, LSD use had begun its spread into popular culture from the labs of psychiatry, the Army, and the CIA. Previously produced only by Sandoz of Switzerland, LSD’s increased popularity required an increased supply. Using an academic article he found in the library at Berkeley, Stanley began an underground lab capable of producing a form of LSD more pure than otherwise available. The Bear Research Group (“Bear” was the nickname given to the young Stanley who developed body hair much earlier than his friends) produced, by conservative estimates, 1.25 million hits of acid between 1965 and 1967.

It was this Owsley Acid that proved to its users that what most accepted as one objective reality was in fact only one of many possible realities. This simple but profound insight brought into question the social reality which was accepted by American society at that time, and allowed many to believe that an alternative social reality could be created by changing the perspective of individuals.

Patron of the Dead

Of course it was LSD that was so influential in giving direction to the fashion and music of the Hippie culture, and it is in music where Stanley most directly left his imprint.

Entertainment for the Acid Tests was provided by The Warlocks, who soon changed their name to the Grateful Dead. Stanley used the engineering skills he acquired in the army to create a massive PA system, the Wall of Sound, which powered the Dead performances. Stanley went as far as to use the profits from his LSD business to purchase much of the Dead’s early electronic equipment. Bob Weir credits Stanley as the first person ever to treat concert sound production as a serious art.

The Reclusive Bear

Understandably, Owsley “Bear” Stanley shied away from publicity. He spent much of this time avoiding arrest, failing once and spending two years in prison. He can be seen in the picture above leaving a court room after a 1967 arraignment, or in this video of a 1971 Grateful Dead sound check. He surprised the San Francisco Chronicle by allowing and interview in 2007 on a rare return to the US from his adopted home of Australia. The Wikipedia article on Stanley also covers his training in ballet (sometimes known as "Dancing Bear") , his contribution to Grateful Dead graphic imagery, and his current unusual lifestyle.

He occasionally is referenced by musicians, such as in 1975s Kid Charlemagne by Steely Dan.

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes

And because its such a great song, we’ve also provided this link to the full original version.

The Mitchell Brothers' O’Farrell Theatre

The Tenderloin

I recently had the chance to visit San Francisco, a city with an endless supply of pop culture closets to open. On this trip I decided to take a late night walk from the tourist hotels of Union Square into and through the Tenderloin, as it is officially named on city maps.

San Francisco is a city of many neighborhoods, many of which have been gentrified in recent decades by the need for livable and affordable space. The Tenderloin is not one of these.

I walked along O’Farrell Street on my trip to meet the city’s fringe dwellers. All are teetering on the edge of the social grid. Many of the area’s African-Americans are mired in a mix of alcohol, drugs, poverty or mental illness. They sit the stoops or hurry along to somewhere no better than the place they’d just left. Others, such as the Thai, Chinese, and Pakistani families whose modest but sincere restaurants disproportionately anchor the street corners, are the pioneers who forever forgo their own pleasures so that their children can someday own apartments in the Mission or the Haight.

The Theatre

The Tenderloin is a spinning top whose axis wobbles on The Mitchell Brother’s O’Farrell Theatre. The theatre is the birthplace of modern pornography culture and industry. And by providing strippers and prostitutes, is the sole draw of men with wives and children scattered somewhere across the towns of the vast eastness that is not San Francisco.

I am told later by a talkative cabbie that like the men who are their customers, the women of the O’Farrell come from the same eastness to make their fortunes at the legendary theatre. All are young, and all have the attractiveness of untarnished expectations which only the young can claim. Each walks through an uninspired routine which includes half-hearted gestures at the three brass poles which are mounted to the stage. They collect the tips of ones and fives from the audience knowing that each of these men is a candidate for sexual services costing hundreds of dollars. By comparison, there is more authentic humanity in the street smells of sweat, alcohol, curry and urine.

Artie and Jim

Artie and Jim Mitchell opened the theatre on July Fourth, 1969 in the very city which has warmly welcomed those unable to live by the rules of others at the very moment when the rules of others had come under question. The brothers revolutionized pornography by creating films with the pretense of plot and impolitely marketing their shows without a blush of shame.

And of course there was luck. When it was revealed that Marilyn Chambers, the star of their film “Behind the Green Door”, was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow Soap, the brothers received the attention of main stream media and audiences that had previously refused to acknowledge porn.

The brothers publicly defended themselves against the attacks of then SF mayor Diane Feinstein, who made the closing of the theatre her very public cause. The brothers earned the admiration of many who may not have otherwise approved of their business when they listed Mayor Feinstein’s home telephone number on the theatre marquee under “For Show Times Call”.

The Mitchell celebrity spectacularly crumbled under the weight of drug abuse in 1981 when Jim shot and killed Artie. Jim escaped a significant jail sentence to eventually die from natural causes in 2007.

References

The Mitchell Brothers were the subject of serious treatment in "Rated X" (see at Amazon Rated X (Unrated Version)) a Showtime film starring Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. In my opinion it is certainly worth a watch. For more information on the brothers, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed their legacy with an article on the occasion of Jim’s death. And then there is always Wikipedia… And when in San Francisco, ask the doorman at your hotel for directions to the theatre, and he’ll provide you with pass representing a modest discount for you, and a modest reward for him.