Terry Kelly

...in action!

The World of Wes Anderson...

Wes Anderson with models from Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s Worlds

Michael Chabon

The New York Review of Books

31 January 2013

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

Fantastic Mr Fox

Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”Touchstone Pictures

Moonrise Kingdom

From Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom (shamefully neglected by this year’s Academy voters), Wes Anderson’s films readily, even eagerly, concede the “miniature” quality of the worlds he builds, in their set design and camera-work, in their use of stop-motion, maps, and models. And yet these miniatures span continents and decades. They comprise crime, adultery, brutality, suicide, the death of a parent, the drowning of a child, moments of profound joy and transcendence.

Vladimir Nabokov, his life cleaved by exile, created a miniature version of the homeland he would never see again and tucked it, with a jeweler’s precision, into the housing of John Shade’s miniature epic of family sorrow. Anderson—who has suggested that the breakup of his parents’ marriage was a defining experience of his life—adopts a Nabokovian procedure with the families or quasi families at the heart of all his films, from Rushmore forward, creating a series of scale-model households that, like the Zemblas and Estotilands and other lost “kingdoms by the sea” in Nabokov, intensify our experience of brokenness and loss by compressing them. That is the paradoxical power of the scale model; a child holding a globe has a more direct, more intuitive grasp of the earth’s scope and variety, of its local vastness and its cosmic tininess, than a man who spends a year in circumnavigation.

The Darjeeling Limited

Grief, at full scale, is too big for us to take it in; it literally cannot be comprehended. Anderson, like Nabokov, understands that distance can increase our understanding of grief, allowing us to see it whole. But distance does not—ought not—necessarily imply a withdrawal. In order to gain sufficient perspective on the pain of exile and the murder of his father, Nabokov did not, in writing Pale Fire, step back from them. He reduced their scale, and let his patience, his precision, his mastery of detail—detail, the god of the model-maker—do the rest. With each of his films, Anderson’s total command of detail—both the physical detail of his sets and costumes, and the emotional detail of the uniformly beautiful performances he elicits from his actors—has enabled him to increase the persuasiveness of his own family Zemblas, without sacrificing any of the paradoxical emotional power that distance affords.

Anderson on the soundstage with a cutaway model of The Belafonte from The Life Aquatic

Anderson’s films have frequently been compared to the boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell, and it’s a useful comparison, as long as one bears in mind that the crucial element, in a Cornell box, is neither the imagery and objects it deploys, nor the Romantic narratives it incorporates and undermines, nor the playfulness and precision with which its objects and narratives have been arranged. The important thing, in a Cornell box, is the box.

Cornell always took pains to construct his boxes himself; indeed the box is the only part of a Cornell work literally “made” by the artist. The box, to Cornell, is a gesture—it draws a boundary around the things it contains, and forces them into a defined relationship, not merely with one another, but with everything outside the box. The box sets out the scale of a ratio; it mediates the halves of a metaphor. It makes explicit, in plain, handcrafted wood and glass, the yearning of a model-maker to analogize the world, and at the same time it frankly emphasizes the limitations, the confines, of his or her ability to do so.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The things in Anderson’s films that recall Cornell’s boxes—the strict, steady, four-square construction of individual shots, by which the cinematic frame becomes a Cornellian gesture, a box drawn around the world of the film, as in Moonrise Kingdom’s dressing room scene, with the little bird-girls framed by strips of light bulbs; the teeming, gridded, curio cabinet sets at the heart of The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, and Fantastic Mr. Fox—are often cited as evidence of his work’s “artificiality,” at times with the implication, simple-minded and profoundly mistaken, that a high degree of artifice is somehow inimical to seriousness, to honest emotion, to so-called authenticity. All movies, of course, are equally artificial; it’s just that some are more honest about it than others. In this important sense, the hand-built, model-kit artifice on display behind the pane of an Anderson box is a guarantor of authenticity; indeed I would argue that artifice, openly expressed, is the only true “authenticity” an artist can lay claim to.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Anderson’s films, like the boxes of Cornell or the novels of Nabokov, understand and demonstrate that the magic of art, which renders beauty out of brokenness, disappointment, failure, decay, even ugliness and violence—is authentic only to the degree that it attempts to conceal neither the bleak facts nor the tricks employed in pulling off the presto change-o. It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s x:y scale version of the world.

“For my next trick,” says Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, “I have put the world into a box.” And when he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, tokens and totems of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss. And you say, leaning in, “The world!”

Adapted from the introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection by Matt Zoller Seitz, to be published in October by Abrams Publishers.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/01/31/wes-anderson-worlds/

Michael Chabon's new collection, Bookends, is out now: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062851291/bookends/

Wednesday night's set lists at The Habit, York

Ron Elderly: -
Just My Imagination
Wild Horses
Sweet Virginia

Da Elderly: -
You've Got A Friend
Hurt

The Elderly Brothers: -
Mailman (Bring Me No More Blues)
Bring It On Home To Me
Chains
When Will I Be Loved
I Saw Her Standing There

York was very quiet on a raw and bone-freezing January night. Nevertheless there was a very good turnout from both punters and players. Ron was joined by local harmonica virtuoso Tim Williams on his set. Service at the bar was temporarily curtailed (with everyone's agreement) so that barmaid Hollie could sing for us all. Her renditions of Valerie and Summertime brought the house down. Tim joined the Elderly Brothers for our first outing of 2019 and we finished with the audience asking for more.....what more could we ask for?

I can reveal that there will be another Elderly Brothers show at The Habit on Saturday 9th February, 9pm -12 midnight. Free entry and a well-stocked bar!!

The Louis Armstrong Archives

Louis Armstrong’s Life in Letters, Music and Art

Step inside the mind of one of America’s great virtuosos, thanks to a vast archive of his personal writings, home recordings and artistic collages.

By Giovanni Russonello
Photographs by Nathan Bajar

The New York Times
16 November 2018

Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era — the man whose earliest releases set the tune for America’s love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history’s most famous entertainers?

Those questions aren’t rhetorical. There’s actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them. For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of personal writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month, you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them. Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation — run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American — the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public.

Armstrong wrote hundreds of pages of memoir, commentary and jokes throughout his life, and sent thousands of letters. He made collages and scrapbooks by the score. Over the final two decades of his life, he recorded himself to reel-to-reel tapes constantly, capturing everything from casual conversations to the modern music he was listening to.

One of Armstrong's trumpets

Armstrong Plays Along With a Ray Martino RecordingA moment caught on Armstrong’s reel-to-reel tapes.

All told, Armstrong’s is not just one of the most well documented private lives of any American artist. It’s one of the most creatively documented lives, too.

“Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and make tapes and catalog everything,” said Ricky Riccardi, the director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and a noted Armstrong scholar. “He was just completely aware of his importance and wanting to be in control of his own story.”

And it wasn’t just posterity. The same things that drove him as a performer — faith in unfettered communication, an irreverent approach to the strictures of language, the desire to wrap all of American culture in his embrace — course through his writings, collages and home recordings.

Armstrong’s home office features a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett


The Armstrongs in their den. Louis Armstrong Archive

Armstrong had been largely responsible for shaping jazz into the worldly, youth-driven music it became in the 1930s. He emerged as a symbol of racial pride, crossing Tin Pan Alley gentility with street patois, and sometimes singing directly about black frustrations. But as his career went on, his grinning stage persona — an expansion on the minstrel shows and New Orleans cabarets of his youth — fell out of step with most African-American listeners’ tastes. (“I loved the way Louis played trumpet, man, but I hated the way he had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks,” Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography.)

With jazz’s identity solidifying as an art music in the 1950s, Armstrong became especially unfashionable to the critical establishment. The autumnal hits he scored in the mid-1960s, “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World,” seemed only to confirm the media consensus that the times had passed him by.

But these archives contain the tools for a better understanding of Armstrong: as idiosyncratic an artist as any, one whose creative instincts only grew deeper and broader over time.

A Christmas card from Richard Nixon became a collaged cover for an Armstrong recording. In the background: the wall of the Armstrongs’ living room.

In part, we see a man attuned to race and politics, who took his role seriously as a global ambassador for American culture and kept a close eye on the achievements of fellow African-Americans. When he spoke out against school segregation in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, he surprised the nation. Some activists said it was too little, too late. The archive, however, shows that he considered it both a proud moment in his career and wholly of a piece with his life up to that point. In the collection is a telegram he wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower on the day Eisenhower announced he would be sending Army troops into Little Rock, urging him “to take those little Negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops.”

And as solicitous as he was, Armstrong was unwilling to let critical judgments define him. He kept a close eye on reviews, but he wrote acerbically about music critics and sometimes taped his interviews with them — perhaps for evidence, in case they misreported something. On one tape, from 1959, he barks at a journalist after being asked about changes afoot in jazz. “I just live what I play, and I can’t vouch for the other fellow. As long as I feel and hit the notes and I’ve got my own audience, then no critic in the world can tell me how I should play my horn,” he says.

A few of Armstrong’s handmade scrapbooks. In the background: the wall of the musician’s Queens den

Raised in New Orleans, Armstrong came to fame in his early 20s after joining King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago; his early recordings as a leader, with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, established jazz as a soloist’s music, and made him one of the first pop musicians of the radio era. By the 1940s and ’50s he was regularly included on lists of the most admired Americans.

Starting in his 20s, Armstrong frequently clipped newspaper articles about himself and bundled them into scrapbooks. The books began as a tool to convince club owners of his legitimacy, but they turned into a historical record. The dozens of scrapbook binders contained in the archive are a window into his self-image as a celebrity: Armstrong looking at us looking at him.

Armstrong with a teenage trumpeter in a Mexico City dressing room in 1968. In the background: the wallpaper in his hall closet

Armstrong began his career as an idol to many African-Americans. Watch the well-circulated video clip of him performing in Copenhagen in 1933 — bountiful and aggressive as he scats over “Dinah,” then carves his way through “Tiger Rag” with a sweltering trumpet solo — and you’ll get why. But as time wore on, many younger people, particularly musicians of the bebop generation, expressed misgivings about his genuflecting stage persona.



Armstrong’s scrapbooks make it clear that he kept a close eye on how he was perceived, as an artist and as a black statesman. When he traveled to Baltimore in the winter of 1931, he donated 300 bags of coal to residents of a needy black neighborhood, and privately saved the news clipping from The Baltimore Afro-American. When his band was arrested in Arkansas simply for traveling in the same bus as its white manager, he saved the article reporting it.

And when a blatantly racist British critic referred to him as “Mr. Ugly” the following year (“He looks, and behaves, like an untrained gorilla,” the article read), Armstrong kept a copy of that too. Reading what arts journalism was like in the late ’20s and ’30s, it becomes obvious how narrow the berth was for a public figure like Armstrong to emerge onto the national stage.

Pages showcasing Armstrong’s unusual notation and script

Armstrong wrote constantly — mostly letters and short stories about his life, but also in the form of limericks and pages-long jokes. He wrote in a galloping, oddly punctuated style, treating literature almost as an outsider art. Commas turned into apostrophes; jive talk collided with standard English; words were underlined all over. His musical originality is matched on the page.

When Armstrong joined King Oliver’s famed band, he brought along a typewriter. By 1936, when he was in his mid-30s, he had already published an autobiography. Over the course of his career he wrote more than 10,000 letters to fans, hundreds of pages of personal memoirs and enough lengthy jokes to fill an entire book.

In 1969 and ’70, with his health failing, Armstrong set about writing a long essay about his relationship with the Karnofskys, a Jewish family in New Orleans. When he was 7, he worked as a servant in their house, and they recognized his musical talent early, advancing him a small amount of money to buy his first cornet.

In this essay, which stretches on for 77 pages, Armstrong enshrines a number of other elements of his personal mythology. He reports his birthday as July 4, 1900, an apocryphal but symbolic date he was fond of using. And he describes the importance of the Storyville neighborhood where he was raised, and where much of early jazz was developed.

Just months after he wrote this piece, he died in his sleep at age 69. This story would be collected in a posthumous book, “Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words,” that featured essays from across his career, many of which are included in the Armstrong archive in their original, handwritten form.

Armstrong’s collage of Jackie Robinson images

Armstrong’s creative hobbies outside writing were less easily wrangled for posterity or publication. One example: the hundreds of collages that he made over the course of his life, cutting out and combining photographs, illustrations and text.

An Armstrong collage featuring both King Oliver and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the background: Armstrong’s Queens bedroom

Starting in the early 1950s, few pieces of paper were safe from the blade of Armstrong’s scissors: magazines, risqué photographs, even a Christmas card from Richard Nixon wound up cut and collaged. Most of the time, he taped his collages onto reel-to-reel tape boxes; they were purely decorative. Elsewhere, he turned larger pieces of paper into what amounted to a personal hall of fame.

Louis Armstrong in his den in 1958. In the background: a rug in the guest bathroom at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens

In one such collage, he crammed a page with almost a dozen photos of Jackie Robinson. On another, Duke Ellington and Kermit Parker, the first black man to run for governor as a Democrat in Louisiana, gaze toward each other from across the page.

And on the collage above, a photograph of King Oliver is pasted inside an image of Armstrong’s head, as if to make clear how much Armstrong felt he owed to Oliver. To their left are two other trumpeters: Bix Beiderbecke, a prominent jazz star of the 1920s, and Bunny Berigan, who drew heavily from Armstrong’s influence, both as a trumpeter and a vocalist. Other musicians pictured include Duke Ellington, the R&B vocalist Ruth Brown, and Big Sid Catlett, an influential early drummer who played with Armstrong’s big band at the height of its popularity.

In a far corner of the image, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been president around the time when most of these musicians were stars, looks on.

Armstrong in one of his most beloved rooms in Feb. 1971. In the background: the bathroom today

When Armstrong died in 1971, his wife, Lucille, ensured that the house they shared in Corona, Queens — the place where he recorded his tapes, made collages and wrote his manifold letters and notes — remained exactly as he had left it.

At first, Armstrong didn’t want the house. But Lucille bought it in 1943, the year after they married, while he was on a lengthy tour. He eventually fell in love with the narrow two-story brick home, and with the working-class block into which it was tucked. Armstrong — whose four marriages never resulted in a child — proudly became an avuncular presence on the block, and bragged in a 1971 manuscript that he had watched three generations grow up around him. Years later, when Lucille eventually wanted to upgrade, he insisted they stay. So she made improvements. The ornate, Fifth Avenue-rate bathroom is a prime example. And the “Throne,” as Armstrong called it in his writing, was of prime import.

Armstrong endorsed the herbal laxative Swiss Krissly with his own slogan. In the background: a staircase in his Queens home

Armstrong took health and diet very seriously, partly because of having been raised by a single mother who focused, for lack of a doctor, on keeping her children healthy with natural remedies. After Lucille introduced him to Swiss Kriss, an herbal laxative, he became a zealous proponent and offered his endorsement for free. The couple wrote a diet plan that called for regular consumption of Swiss Kriss, and they circulated it among friends and fans along with a comical photo of Armstrong seated on his decked-out Queens toilet, with his “Satchmo-Slogan” printed below: “Leave it All Behind Ya.”

Armstrong was fanatical about his recordings, capturing everything from music to conversations documented with meticulous track lists

Starting in December 1950, Armstrong used a tape recorder to capture casual conversations, ambient road hangouts, interviews with journalists, radio broadcasts he liked and more. Most often, though, he would simply record his shellac and vinyl discs to tape, consolidating the music and making it easier to carry. He kept careful documentation of the track lists, and together the tapes and their accompanying lists provide a revealing glimpse into his broad music tastes.

Ever the careful documenter, Armstrong wrote out a playlist anytime he recorded music to tape — whether it was a recording of his own concert, a dub of an entire album or a more piecemeal mixtape.

The range of his listening is striking. He was as likely to listen to the Beatles as he was to Rachmaninoff. On one playlist, the old vaudeville singer Al Jolson and Miles Davis butt up against each other. “The man was obsessed with all kinds of music,” Riccardi said. “Anywhere he’d go — if he’d go to South America, he’d bring back South-American records. If he went to Africa, he’d bring back African records. He’d go to record stores everywhere.”

On a disc marked “Reel 24,” he is listening mostly to the bebop musicians that had succeeded him in the jazz spotlight of the 1940s and ’50s. On the audio of the tape itself, you can hear him announcing the tunes like a radio D.J.

After that tape plays, Armstrong introduces another: a bootleg recording of a jam session at Minton’s, the venue where bebop was born. After he plays it, he expresses approval. “Cats jumpin’, man,” he says, apparently unperturbed by the beboppers’ sometimes-ambivalent relationship to his own legacy. Later on, he jumps to a track of his own, “Among My Souvenirs.” In the handwritten playlist, Armstrong closely notates each turn in the tape, including the moment when he pauses to mention the children playing outside.

These are the children that Armstrong said he was thinking of when he sang his most famous song, “What a Wonderful World.” Here we have their very voices, documented for all time.

One of Armstrong’s recording reels, with a collaged cover

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/arts/music/louis-armstrong-archive.html

The O'Kanes at The Split Chimp, Newcastle

Harpo Marx or Pablo Picasso?

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #478

Daryl Dragon RIP

Daryl Dragon, singer and pianist from the Captain and Tennille, dies aged 76
Former wife and other half of the easy listening duo, Toni Tennille, was by his side when he died of kidney failure in Arizona

Agencies

The Guardian
Thu 3 Jan 2019 00.28 GMT

Daryl Dragon, the cap-wearing “Captain” of easy listening duo the Captain and Tennille, died Wednesday at age 76.

The singer and pianist died on Wednesday of kidney failure in Prescott, Arizona, publicist Harlan Boll said in a statement. Toni Tennille, his partner in music and wife for nearly 40 years, was by his side.

Dragon and Tennille met in the early 1970s and soon began performing together, with Tennille singing and Dragon on keyboards. Their breakthrough came in 1975 when they covered the Neil Sedaka-Howard Greenfield song Love Will Keep Us Together, for which they won a Grammy in 1976.

They had further hits with the song Muskrat Love in 1976, and Do That to Me One More Time in 1980. They also hosted their own television variety series from 1976 to 1977.

“He was a brilliant musician with many friends who loved him greatly. I was at my most creative in my life, when I was with him,” Tennille said in a statement.

Dragon and Tennille divorced in 2014 after nearly 40 years of marriage but remained close. Tennille said in a 2010 blog post that Dragon was suffering from an unspecified neurological condition that gave him hand tremors, seriously affecting his ability to play keyboards. Dragon said in 2017 that his problems were a result of medication and that he was better. Tennille had moved back to Arizona to help care for him.

A Los Angeles native, Dragon was the son of Oscar-winning composer Carmen Dragon. He was a classically trained pianist but preferred to play blues and boogie music instead of Bach and Beethoven. He played with Fats Domino and BB King and was also a backup keyboard player for the Beach Boys in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. It was with the Beach Boys that Dragon got his stage name, thanks to his habit of wearing a ship captain’s hat while performing.

He met Tennille when they both toured for the Beach Boys, and they began performing together. They signed a record deal in 1974, releasing Love Will Keep Us Together, which held on to the number one spot on the charts for eight weeks in the summer of 1975. Captain and Tennille also toured England, Australia and Japan. In 1976, they sang at the White House during the bicentennial celebrations of the American Revolution.

Dragon is survived by his older brother, Doug Dragon, and two nieces, Kelly Arbout and Renee Henn.

Wednesday’s obituary notice said that at Dragon’s request there would be no services, and suggested donations to organisations conducting research into neurological conditions.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/03/daryl-dragon-singer-and-pianist-from-the-captain-and-tennille-dies-aged-76

The Beach Boys, including Daryl Dragon, on the cover of this Dutch/German release of Marcella

Daryl Dragon: The Cat in the Hat

Frank Black

21 October 2010

Singing and playing to a backing tape on the Old Grey Whistle Test, 1972

There’s more than one hat here, but the one we’re interested in is that worn by the piano player (though he didn't play on the actual track...)– the one that’s not Dennis Wilson. Daryl Dragon, son of the composer and arranger Carmen Dragon, was a member of The Dragons, a psychedelic jazz rock group, along with his brothers Dennis and Doug in the 1960s (see http://www.myspace.com/thedragonsbfi). Around 1967, Doug was asked by his friend Bruce Johnston, to audition (in front of Carl Wilson) to become members of the Beach Boys’ touring band. Although Doug did play with the band, it was Daryl (who had played on Bruce and Terry (Melcher's) version of Four Strong Winds in 1965) who ended up contributing more and almost became a fully fledged Beach Boy. They were later joined by their brother Dennis, who played percussion.

With Carl Wilson

In 1970, Daryl became the band’s ‘musical director’, putting together brass sections and arranging brass for the tours and brass and strings for songs on albums, as well as contributing keyboards. Although he was offered a more permanent position with the band around the time of Holland, he turned it down. Daryl is on 20/20 (Bluebirds Over The Mountain - marimba), the Cotton Fields single (keyboard) and he and Denis Dragon are on Sunflower (Daryl plays vibraphone on Deidre, possibly tubular bells and harpsichord on This Whole World, piano on Got To Know The Woman, vibraphone on Tears In The Morning and piano on Cool Cool Water).

According to people who knows far more than I do (that'll be Craig Slowinski and Andrew G. Doe), Daryl probably played  the 'boogie-woogie' piano on Got To Know The Woman, H.E.L.P. Is On The Way, Sound Of Free and played on several songs from Surf's Up: Don't Go Near The Water, Student Demonstration Time (bass and possibly keys), A Day In The Life Of A Tree, 'Til I Die, and two from Carl and the Passions: Cuddle Up and Make It Good. See http://endlessharmony.boards.net/thread/171/daryl-dragon-passes-away

He is profusely thanked on the sleeve of the Holland album for his earlier work. http://earcandy_mag.tripod.com/ddragon.htm

Although he’s not credited in the liner notes, he’s more than likely on the 1973 In Concert album, because some of it was recorded over the Winter 1972 tour when both he and his future wife, Toni Tenille, were with the band.

During this period, Daryl worked a lot with Dennis Wilson and is credited as helping him develop his piano playing. In 1970 the pair released a single in Europe, Sound of Free/Lady, credited to Dennis Wilson and Rumbo and he worked extensively on Dennis' unreleased solo project from the early 70s.

http://www.danaddington.com/denny/dragon.html

“My real function with Dennis was to give him encouragement. The band didn’t see the value in his writing because they didn’t see it as commercial. They were looking for the next hit, because this [1969-72] was when the hits had stopped coming. Dennis didn’t think on those terms. My contribution to his songs has been somewhat overstated, to be frank. My relationship with him was more like Salieri’s with Mozart. I’d sit there and try and write down what was coming out of his head. There was never any thought but that we were shaping his musical inspiration. If I did anything, it was really just to help him commit to his ideas, which was not always easy for a guy with his constant energy overload.” (http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/ben-edmonds-dennis-wilson-the-lonely-sea-2002/)

In 1972, his future wife, Toni Tennille joined the Beach Boys’ tour to play keyboards alongside Daryl, who had been christened Captain Keyboards by Mike Love because of his penchant for wearing a sea captain’s hat. Later that year, rather than accept an invitation to join the band on a permanent basis, he left with Toni to form the sub-Carpenters soft-rock/pop duo, the Captain and Tennille.

The Captain and Tennille, with prog-rock keyboards, sing Neil Sedaka's Love Will Keep Us Together

Their first album, Love Will Keep Us Together (1975), included material by their former employers: God Only Knows, Cuddle Up and Disney Girls; it also had the first released version of Johnston’s I Write The Songs. The Captain and Tennille are still married, although Daryl has unfortunately recently been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s Disease.

Tennille doesn’t seem to have recorded much with the Beach Boys during her tenure with the band, but she did provide backing vocals to Mike’s Everyone’s In Love With You on the 15 Big Ones album in 1976.

Here’s a rare photo of her playing keyboards with the band, sitting behind a Mike in a hat at the University of Georgia in 1972

For good measure, here are two more photos from that gig: Dennis at the keyboards

Dennis and Carl

(http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,8977.0.html).

Daryl’s name turns up as arranger for that song and as keyboard player (with Dennis on drums) for Susie Cincinnati; the latter, however, dated from the Sunflower sessions in 1969. Daryl and maybe Dennis are probably on Good Time from 1977’s Love You, but only because it was recorded during the Sunflower sessions too. The last Beach Boys’ album Daryl receives any credit for is Keeping The Summer live (1980); he played keyboards on the new track Some of Your Love and probably featured on When Girls Get Together, another track from the Sunflower period. Part of the album was recorded at his Rumbo Recorders studio.

On 3 June 1972, the Beach Boys played Crystal Palace Bowl in London. The cats in the hats are Al Jardine and a a elderly-looking Mike (all of 31 at the time); that’s Dennis Dragon playing percussion behind Al. The other Beach Boys present were Carl and Dennis Wilson, Blondie Chaplin and Rikky Fataar. Elton John and Keith Moon appeared with them that day, but Elton’s appearance at the start of this clip doesn’t seem to be related to the song. Carl and Daryl are on keyboards.

Some “Rock Family Tree” moments for those in a Pete Frame of mind:

1/ This shot from the Crystal Palace show in the Getty Archives shows Elton with the band, and emerging from his head is Billy Hinsche, Carl’s brother-in-law, who had been part of the band Dino, Desi and Billy, which also featured "Dino" Martin (Dean Paul Martin, son of Dean) and Desi Arnaz, Jr. (the son of television stars Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball). Although he turned down an offer to replace Bruce Johnston in the late 60s, he was a key part of the Beach Boys band from 1967 onwards, singing Sail On Sailor on stage and being given the first crack at the vocals of Honkin’ Down The Highway for the Love You Album (1977) before being replaced by Al Jardine. He has toured with Al Jardine and been his musical director and has recently played in Brian Wilson's touring band, appearing alongside Al, Blondie Chaplin and Brian.

2/ After Carl’s marriage to Annie Hinsche broke up, he remarried Dino Martin’s sister, Gina.

3/ Back in the 60s, a young guitarist Tim Weston auditioned for the band that became Dino, Desi and Billy, but was turned down; thirty years later, an accomplished jazz guitarist, he produced and played on Wouldn’t It Be Nice: A Jazz Portrait of Brian Wilson (1997).

4/ Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Toni Tennille and Billy Hinsche sing backing vocals on Elton John’s Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me (1974).

5/ One of the Dragons’ sisters, Kathy, played flute on Bruce Johnston’s Going Public album (1977). The other, Carmen, was an accomplished harpist, as is Mike Love’s sister Maureen, who played on the Beach Boys’ Catch a Wave and In My Room and on presently unreleased material by her brother.

6/ The Dragon’s father, Carmen, wrote music for a number of movies, the most famous being Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Here's a recent - 2016 - interview with Toni in which she discusses her relationship with Daryl and briefly discusses The Beach Boys:

"Very saddened to hear of the passing of Daryl Dragon. Toni Tennille and Daryl joined The Beach Boys in the late 60's and met each other in our band. They then became The Captain and Tennille and love kept them together all these years. Darryl was a great musician and songwriter (he co-wrote Cuddle Up with Dennis Wilson) and a very special person but what I value most, he was always a true friend. Rest in peace Darryl."

- Al Jardine on Facebook

For further indulgence about matters Beach Boys, see: http://www.beachboysarchives.com/ 
and http://bellagio10452.com/

Pegi Young RIP

Pegi Young, Bridge School Co-Founder With Ex-Husband Neil Young, Dead at 66

Singer-songwriter succumbs to yearlong battle with cancer

By Andy Greene

Rolling Stone
2 January 2019

Pegi Young, the singer-songwriter who was married to Neil Young for 36 years, died Tuesday after a yearlong battle with cancer. She was 66. “[She] passed away surrounded by her friends and family in her native California,” reads a short statement on her official Instagram account. “We request that the families’ privacy be respected at this time.”

Young was working as a waitress at a diner near Neil Young’s ranch when they met in the mid-Seventies. “Never saw a woman look finer,” Neil Young wrote in his 1992 classic song “Unknown Legend,” one of several songs about their love that also include “Harvest Moon” and “Such an Angel.” “I used to order just to watch her float across the floor.”

In the early years of their marriage, Young devoted herself nearly full-time to raising their daughter Amber and son Ben, the latter born with cerebral palsy. But in 1994, she began singing background vocals for her husband, starting at the Academy Awards when she joined him on “Philadelphia.” Six years later, she hit the road with him on the Friends and Relatives tour and became a mainstay in his band over the next decade. “When I started touring with him, I get treated pretty much like any other band member,” she told Songfacts in 2011. “He certainly doesn’t cut me any more slack than anybody else. If he wants to hear something a certain way, he’s the clear boss, leader of the band.”

In 2007, Young recorded her self-titled debut LP with keyboardist Spooner Oldham, guitarist Anthony Crawford, bassist Rick Rosas and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. She went on to record four more albums and tour extensively. “I think it’s somewhat of a natural progression,” she told the Boston Herald in 2010. “I was writing and singing and playing a bit in my own fashion when I was younger, before Neil and I got together [in 1974]. It was a return to a longtime love of mine. I think it is up to me to do the best job I can do. I don’t take it casually. I’m not the next young hot thing.”

In addition to her music career, Young devoted much of her time and energy to the Bridge School. She founded the esteemed institution in 1986 to help kids like Ben that have severe speech and physical impairments. The annual Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California continually attracts A-level talent and helps raise money for the school. David Bowie, the Who and a Temple of the Dog reunion have all highlighted the annual event.

“It was my idea to have Bruce Springsteen play that first year,” Pegi told Rolling Stone in 2010. “He was just coming off a three-year rock and roll tour with Born in the USA and I thought that if he was anything like me, he’ll want to do something completely the opposite now. We’ve been so blessed over the years with artists donating their time. Looking back at that first year, it seems like an exercise in simplicity compared to what it is these days.”

In 2014, Neil Young filed for divorce from Pegi. “We were having a rough patch,” Pegi told Rolling Stone. “But I never would’ve thought in a million years we would be getting divorced. So, yeah, there was a bit of a shock value there.” She poured her heartbreak into the songs on her last LP, 2016’s Raw. “It told a story,” she said. “I kind of look at it as a soundtrack to the seven stages of grief. You’ve got anger, then shock and disbelief. As we go through the album, the later songs show my growth and … I can’t say total acceptance, but I think the last song, that wonderful Don Henley song [“The Heart of the Matter”], talks about forgiveness. That’s really where it’s at, you know?”

She wanted the album to convey to others going through a similar situation that they are not alone. “We go through things we may not’ve expected, what we thought was maybe our future,” she said. “But even if we get the shock of our lifetime, life goes on. You figure out who you are again, and you just keep going on. I’m a living persona of that.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/9053062ac.jpg?crop=900:600&width=440

A Great Day in Harlem: Art Kane. Harlem 1958

A Great Day in Harlem: behind Art Kane's classic 1958 jazz photograph
The Guardian

Monday 17 December 2018

The young art director’s idea to photograph as many of the luminaries of the New York jazz scene as possible together for Esquire’s 1959 Golden Age of Jazz edition began his career as a photographer. Police closed the road to all but residential traffic, and 57 musicians duly assembled in Harlem between Fifth and Madison Avenues. The group included Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan and Count Basie.

Art Kane: Harlem 1958 is available at Wall of Sound Editions


(From left) Eddie Locke, Jay C Higginbotham, Charles Mingus, Ernie Wilkins, Bill Crump. ‘ Eddie Locke told me he rounded the corner of 126th Street … and nearly fainted. The giants of jazz! His heroes. Right there! Basie, Dizzy, Monk, Pres, The Hawk, Blakey, Joe Jones and on and on. Knees knocking, he said he almost fled … not feeling like he belonged in that gathering of titans. But then he spotted another young lion, Horace Silver, who he had gigged with, so he made his way over and stood with his friend, taking his place in that historic moment’ –Jonathan Kane (Art’s son)

Front row, from left: Bill Crump, Stuff Smith, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins. At their back you can spot George Wettling, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, Buster Bailey, Oscar Pettiford. Behind them, Sonny Greer, Jimmy Jones, Charles Mingus, Osie Johnson

Front row, from left: Marian McPartland, Lawrence Brown, Emmett Berry, Mary Lou Williams (turned back to the camera), Vic Dickenson, Thelonious Monk. Top left, Oscar Pettiford

Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce. ‘ Black and white: two colours forbidden to be in close proximity, yet captured so beautifully within a single black and white frame. The importance of this photo transcends time and location, leaving it to become not only a symbolic piece of art but a piece of history’ – Quincy Jones

From left; Benny Golson, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk. ‘ There was going to be an unusual shooting of a photograph for Esquire Magazine and I was being invited to be a part of it. I couldn’t believe it! Nobody really knew me that early in my career. But zippo, I was there on the intended date. When I arrived, there were all of my heroes’ – Benny Golson

Luckey Roberts, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith

Front row, from left: Stuff Smith, Marian McPartland, Miff Mole, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Rushing, Roy Eldridge, Max Kaminsky, Hilton Jefferson. Laughing on the right, up the stairs, is Dizzy Gillespie. ‘ It would be sort of a graduation photo or class picture of all the jazz musicians. After I thought about it some more I decided they should get together in Harlem. After all, that’s where jazz started when it came to New York’ – Art Kane

Dizzy Gillespie crossing the street with a camera. ‘ The fact that all 57 musicians agreed to show up for a 10am photoshoot is a true testament to how dedicated they were. These musicians did not gather together on this early morning because they thought they would be paid or instantly be made an international superstar. Rather, they did it to celebrate the golden age of jazz and all that it stood for. Jazz was never just a genre, it was a way of life. And it still is’ – Quincy Jones

‘I have no idea how they decided to stand where they did, and with whom, but they did. Slowly they formed themselves into a big group … and I saw they couldn’t have got themselves into a better position’ –Art Kane

Count Basie’s hat was repeatedly stolen by local kids until Kane surrendered and put them in the shot too. ‘ So here you have a non-professional photographer, who’s got an assistant who’s never loaded a camera before, taking this picture which 30 years later is probably the best-known group photograph ever taken if jazz musicians’ – Art Kane

Art Kane: Harlem 1958 – the 60th anniversary edition

Foreword text by Quincy Jones and Benny Golson, Introduction by Jonathan Kane, original text by Art Kane. Published 12 November 2018 by Wall of Sound Editions

Louis Armstrong, Mojave desert, 1958

The individual Esquire jazz portraits were included in the Golden Age of Jazz essay that featured Harlem 1958 as the centrepiece. Kane’s vision for his photo of Louis Armstrong was of a genius taking a rest from the musical revolution he had started. He flew Armstrong from Las Vegas to a location in Death Valley, to remove him from his usual environments. He wanted Armstrong seated in a rocking chair such as he had made famous in the hit song. He asked Armstrong to put his trumpet down, and the setting sun aligned with Armstrong’s eye

https://www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2018/dec/17/a-great-day-in-harlem-behind-art-kaness-classic-1958-jazz-photograph


“ART KANE. HARLEM 1958”

“I cannot envision a more beautiful parallel for jazz and art in general; in the moment, you may not realize the impact that you have through your creations, but as this photo demonstrates, the effect and significance will outlast any lifetime. Not only is this photo important to the people in it, but it should be a reminder of where we need to be: together.” Quincy Jones

ART KANE. HARLEM 1958 marks the 60th anniversary of one of the most celebrated images in American history. Now commonly known as A Great Day in Harlem, the famous shot of 57 jazz musicians gathered outside a brownstone in New York is one of the most imitated images in popular culture, by one of the world’s greatest photographers.

ART KANE. HARLEM 1958 is a visual history of an iconic image including, for the first time, virtually every single frame from the historic shoot. With original text by Art Kane, forewords by Quincy Jones, the legendary Benny Golson, who appears in the photo, and an introduction by Kane's son, musician and photographer Jonathan Kane, the 168-page hardback volume is the story behind the shot.

“I came up with the idea of getting as many musicians together in one place as we could. It would be sort of a graduation photo or class picture of all the jazz musicians. After I thought about it some more I decided they should get together in Harlem. After all, that’s where jazz started when it came to New York.” Art Kane

In 1958 fledgling photographer Art Kane pitched the idea to Esquire - invite the musicians of New York’s jazz community to come together for one photo. Esquire agreed and Kane sent requests via agents, record labels, managers, clubs, anywhere he could spread the word. “There was going to be an unusual shooting of a photograph for Esquire Magazine and I was being invited to be a part of it. I couldn't believe it! Nobody really knew me that early in my career. But zippo, I was there on the intended date. When I arrived, there were all of my heroes.”Benny Golson

57 jazz musicians, from the unknown to the world famous, duly assembled at the unlikely hour of 10am at 17 East 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. The group would include Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie - whose hat was repeatedly stolen by local kids until Kane surrendered and put them in the shot, too. Esquire magazine published the photo in its January 1959 Golden Age of Jazz special issue, along with a series of Art Kane’s portraits of other jazz giants including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young and his famous shot of Charlie Parker's grave. These portraits are also included in the book, with outtakes and other jazz-related images of gospel groups and a young Aretha Franklin, and on set photography of the film "Pete Kelley's Blues”.

“Black and white: two colors forbidden to be in close proximity, yet captured so beautifully within a single black and white frame. The importance of this photo transcends time and location, leaving it to become not only a symbolic piece of art, but a piece of history. During a time in which segregation was very much still a part of our everyday lives, and in a world that often pointed out our differences instead of celebrating our similarities, there was something so special and pure about gathering 57 individuals together, in the name of jazz.” Quincy Jones

Released in November 2018 by Wall of Sound Editions, ART KANE. HARLEM 1958 honors a pivotal moment in American history through the work of one of its most celebrated photographic voices. The launch of the book will be accompanied by a series of events and exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London and in Italy.

https://www.wallofsoundgallery.com/en/art-kane/