Podcast • February 20, 2009

Dave McKenna: My Private Collection of the Master

Dave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great collaborator Bill Evans found in Dave McKenna the only pianist who could teach him anything. Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker magazine called Dave the hardest swinger among all the jazz piano giants. George Shearing called Dave simply the best.

 

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Dave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great collaborator Bill Evans found in Dave McKenna the only pianist who could teach him anything. Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker magazine called Dave the hardest swinger among all the jazz piano giants. George Shearing called Dave simply the best.

In everything Dave played, you heard a song line, then a left-hand bass line that might be singing, or dancing, or thundering on its own. And then in the criss-crossing of what sounded like 40 fingers you could think you were hearing an ensemble like the Basie or Ellington band. You also heard a complete master of the American songbook in the hands of a man – rather like Frank Sinatra – who respected the songs as written and at the same time made them his own.

In the golden age of Dave McKenna, he played six nights a week in under the grand arched and painted ceiling of the giant Oak Bar of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. And everybody came to listen: the New York Philharmonic conductor Kurt Masur always stopped in when he was guest conducting the Boston Symphony. Dave’s friend and mine, the great WGBH deejay Ron Della Chiesa, told me today that Maestro Mazur had asked Dave to play “Rhapsody in Blue” with the New York Phil; Dave must have worried that he’d play the piano part differently each performance, and he demurred. Tip O’Neill used to catch Dave at the Copley when he was Speaker of the House in the Reagan years. There were usually a few gangsters, and cops, in the audience, too, and the actress Faye Dunaway and stray jazz stars like Zoot Sims and Ruby Braff. Dave played to the clink of drinks, but then a hush would descend as he strung tunes together — blues, or whole band arrangements, or his signature medleys of songs with the word “lucky,” or “dancing” in the title, or colors, or seasons, or girls’ names. One night I took our teenage middle daughter Amanda, a.k.a. Amy, in to hear Dave at the Copley, and even before we got to our seats Dave segued into Frank Loesser’s tune, made famous by Ray Bolger, “Once in love with Amy…”

I’m posting here, in belated tribute, a thank-you gathering-up of lost-and-found McKenna sounds: from one of many house parties he played on my Grotrian grand piano; from a radio conversation we did on the piano bench; and from an extraordinary session in the early Nineties when I asked Dave to record Leonard Bernstein’s “Lucky to be Me” as theme music for a new series of television conversations we were starting. He gave us, as it turned out, six distinctive takes on the tune. Listening to them now feels like watching Matisse or Picasso toss off six drawings of the same alluring model. Prodigious and guileless, Dave McKenna shared his life and his gift with abandon. It feels like a great privilege to fall under his spell again. Thank you, Dave McKenna.

Podcast • July 3, 2008

What would Roger Williams say… and do?

Roger Williams In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both ...
roger williams

Roger Williams

In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both in the pleasure of rediscovering Roger Williams (1603 – 1683) as a neglected American model of real religion, real freedom, real tolerance. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, Roger Williams was English-born, a friend and contemporary of John Milton. He came to America — and from Massachusetts to the colony he founded in Providence, Rhode Island — in flight from meddlesome Puritans. His affinity for the Narragansett Indians, and his sense of the injustice that the settlers were inflicting on Indian property and humanity, sharpened his educated understanding of the rights of the individual spirit.

And so he developed a view of conscience – which I think is really attractive – which is that every human being has within themselves something very precious which he called conscience, which is a capacity to seek for the ultimate meaning of life in your own way. And the thought is that we all have this equally; whether we’re using it right or wrong, it ought to be respected. And respecting it means giving it lots of space to pursue its own way and not establishing an orthodoxy that squeezes it. He had two really neat images for religious intolerance. One of them was imprisonment, as consciences were imprisoned all over the world. And the other, even more striking one was rape. Consciences were being raped. He called it “soule rape” when somebody sets up a religious orthodoxy and denies a space to others to find their own way.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum of Liberty of Conscience in conversation with Jeff Sharlet and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.
Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet

We’ve gone irreparably too far. I don’t like the word theocracy; I

don’t think we ever will be a theocracy, but we have severe establishment and we will have establishment of a religion that’s very comfortable with the status quo. It’s a religion of what is, and it’s a religion that shuts down dissent and it’s a religion that shuts down prophetic voices as well. Yes, I think we’ve gone irreparably too far in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we stop speaking and living and dissenting – and for those of us who feel religious, speaking in prophetic terms, and for those of us who don’t, speaking in political terms. Hope is something that you have when you have a situation that reason doesn’t quite support, so we have to be hopeful. We have irreparably established a certain kind of religion in American life so there’s no going back. I think there’s only moving forward until we get to a country that Roger Williams would like to live in.

Journalist Jeff Sharlet of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and The Revealer in conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.

September 21, 2006

Elections ’06: Rhode Island Senate

This fall we’ll go state by state, examining some of the most contested Congressional and gubernatorial races in the country. Tuesday we start with the Rhode Island Senate race between Republican incumbent Lincoln Chafee and ...

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This fall we’ll go state by state, examining some of the most contested Congressional and gubernatorial races in the country. Tuesday we start with the Rhode Island Senate race between Republican incumbent Lincoln Chafee and his Democratic challenger, former state Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse.

Chafee is sometimes seen as a maverick – he was the only Republican Senator to vote against the Iraq war, and wrote in George H.W. Bush for President in 2004 – but his primary campaign was staged with the full weight of Karl Rove and the Republican party behind him. Strategists consider Chafee’s seat, one of 55 held by Republicans, among the most vulnerable of 15 GOP-held spots up for grabs. But Election Wiki contributor Old Doc Keller writes:

[The race is] too close to call, since Rhode Islanders value Chafee’s independence while disliking the policies of the administration his party supports, but do not yet have faith that Whitehouse will be able to change the balance of power in Washington.

Old Doc Keller, on the ROS Election Wiki, 9/19/06

Can Whitehouse win “the Chafee seat”? Will Rhode Islanders choose Chafee for his politics or reject him for his party’s? Is this an opportunity to re-invigorate the state’s small but feisty Republican party?

If you’re in Rhode Island and you’d like to weigh in, leave a comment here and contribute to our Election Wiki here.

Scott MacKay

Political Reporter, The Providence Journal

Chuck Nevola

Blogger, The Senescent Man

Matt Jerzyk

Editor, Rhode Island’s FutureFormer organizer, Rhode Island Jobs With Justice and SEIU 1199

Kiersten Marek

Blogger, KmarekaSocial Worker

Update, 9/26/06, 5:51 pm

We recorded Blogger Gail Murray, Common Sense Evangelist, earlier today. She’s been living in West Greenwich, RI for 34 years and she has great insight as to how things have changed. We love the tape but we couldn’t figure out how we would integrate it into the show. We encourage you to take two minutes and ten seconds out of your day to give Gail’s interview a listen.

Click to listen to Gail Murray (1.2 MB MP3)

Update, 9/26/06, 8:02 pm

Special thanks to David Ivanick, who recorded our Providence sound.

Extra Credit Reading
For a full reading list, check out the The 2006 Election Wiki.Chuck Nevola, A Modest Proposal, The Senescent Man, September 14, 2006: “I agree that we’d be better off with a Democrat who is at least vulnerable in 6 years as opposed to 6 more years of Chafee. I mean, I’ll have wait 12 years to see a chance at a real Republican in that seat. By then I’ll be gumming my food and too arthritic to write a word.”

Jim Baron, Difference between Senate candidates likely too subtle for average voters, The Woonsocket Call, September 18, 2006: “Whitehouse’s One Big Issue is that if you elect Lincoln Chafee, you are voting to put Republicans in charge of the Senate for two more years to advance the agenda of President George W. Bush and the right wing. I hate to break it to you folks, but that is not only the One Big Issue of this senatorial campaign, it is virtually the only one.”

Matt Jerzyk, And So Begins the War: Chafee v. Whitehouse, RI Future, September 14, 2006: “Can the Democratic education effort aimed at convincing voters that Chafee is pro-Bush and Whitehouse is anti-Bush actually work?”

Mark Comtois, Lessons Learned, Anchor Rising, September 13, 2006: “I guess that perhaps I did learn one lesson: while not ideologically conservative, Rhode Islanders are functionally conservative. They go to the polls and reafirm their support for the Kennedy’s and the Chafee’s every 2, 4, 6 years. They like their patricians.”

Brian McGuirk, A Democrat critiques Chafee’s progressive apologists, briSite, April 30, 2006: “Chafee’s deal with the Senate Republican leadership is this: given the small Republican majority in the Senate, Chafee allows bills and amendments that…he personally opposes to get to the Senate floor anyway, and, after that, he’s free to vote as he wishes while the Republican majority passes the legislation.”

Lexington, The independent man Lincoln Chafee is one of the last of a different kind of Republican, The Economist, September 14, 2006: “Thus Mr Chafee has survived to fight another day with the help of cash from a party where he is not at home and with the votes of 14,000 or so people who belong to the other side.”

John Dickerson, Chafee the Bruiser: The incumbent’s win in Rhode Island is a sign of the tough fight to come, Slate, September 13, 2006: “A leaflet reportedly distributed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee criticized [Chafee’s opponent in the Republican primary] for his choice of car interior: ‘Apparently, a regular interior isn’t good enough for Steve Laffey.'”