bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Fully Interactive (Bill Charlap)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In making his brief for Kipling, Randall Jarrell wrote of those oppressively mighty figures in politics and art upon whose leave-taking the world—”tired of being their pedestal”—gives “a great oof of relief,” only to elevate its own personage of equal weight. Jazz’s last Napoleonic (or Kiplingesque) figure was Miles Davis, and no one since has offered a plausible succession—certainly not Wynton Marsalis, whose musical impact withered in direct proportion to his aspiration. Yet if jazz no longer presents an orderly chain of command, it holds out the possibility of contrasting empires. During the past couple of decades, the best and largest part of jazz struck with teeming, clamorous urgency: the legacy of hard bop as multiplied by the avant-garde, fusion, and the swinging strut of recycled repertory. The net effect was to drown out, marginalize, and even belittle middle-aged desires like Lyricism, Sentiment, and Nostalgia.
Almost Peas in a Pod (Tony Bennett / Sarah Vaughan)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Tony Bennett is a pop singer who records extensively with jazz musicians but always comes off as a pop singer with a keen appreciation of jazz. Sarah Vaughan was a jazz singer who made dozens of pop records but always came off as a jazz singer who could never quite take pop machinations seriously. I don’t mean to use the terms qualitatively, not here anyway, because Bennett and Vaughan are among my favorite singers and I’m less inclined to endorse their separate pigeonholes than recognize their many similarities. Although Vaughan’s career is associated with the obstetrics of modern jazz (1944) and Bennett with the post-noir hit parade (1951), she was only two years his senior; both came of age with the big bands and the seminal trinity of Armstrong, Crosby, and Holiday. They sang the same songs and shared the same arrangers and musicians, recorded for Columbia in the period of novelties and schmaltz, worked with Basie on Roulette. They came from solid, New York–area working-class backgrounds (he Astoria, she Newark) and never lost an innate skepticism for the romance of stardom—she protecting herself with wicked irony, he with ingenuous geniality. Both walked away from major record companies when they could no longer abide compromises; both subsequently triumphed on their own terms.
Lionel Hampton, 1908–2002
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Putting aside the probability that in the fullness of time every musician, from Palestrina to Perry Como, will be looked upon as a precursor of rock and roll, in the instance of Lionel Hampton the claim has much validity—indeed, it’s surprising to discover that he isn’t yet acknowledged in most reference works on the subject. Along with Lucky Millinder he practically invented orchestrated rhythm and blues. Both men arrived at Decca in 1941, two years after the label signed Louis Jordan, and restructured swing to accommodate voluble rhythms, raucous blues, and shameless showmanship. Millinder, however, had nothing like Hampton’s breadth or appeal. Nor did he have “Flying Home”: The moment Illinois Jacquet began his tenor saxophone solo with an extended quote from the 1847 opera Martha, jazz and pop were headed for a new kind of conciliation. The age of the honking tenor had arrived; on its heels came the JATP jousts, to one side, and, to the other, Tiny Bradshaw, Johnny Otis, Earl Bostic, and others, all (like Jordan) undistinguished veterans of swing bands who found their places in the sun with r&b. In 1954, Decca would seal the deal by signing Bill Haley.
Genius (Charlie Christian)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“Legend” is the tribute we pay artists we’d prefer not to confront. A universe of legends and living legends inclines us to feel less awed than fatigued, and hyperbole ultimately masks indifference. In the absence of divinity and heroism, of a demiurgic unreality, even dictionaries surrender to fashion and concede that a legend may be merely a “superstar” or “celebrity.” Thus we are brought short in the presence of the real McCoy. Charlie Christian, like other world-shaking artists who died absurdly young, radiates a mythological aura. It isn’t that we lack biographical specifics. But the growing multiplicity of facts and dates do not bring us any closer to knowing the laconic, universally liked and admired, but strangely passionless Prometheus who took hold of electricity and gave it a voice. In a career of Orpheic brevity (23 months in the national limelight, 1939–41), Christian utterly transformed the DNA of jazz and popular music, and his innovations are matched by the stillwaxing power of his art.
Christmas Gilt (Ella Fitzgerald / Johnny Smith / Grant Green / Others)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The annual profusion of Christmas albums suggests a bottomless appetite for the same dozen or 15 songs done in every conceivable fashion, and a hapless record industry eager to oblige. When in doubt, shake up the backlist, develop a seasonal pun, and leave the rest to nostalgia. It is often noted that most of the good American Christmas songs, beginning with Berlin’s “White Christmas” (1942, not so very long ago) are by Jewish composers. They have secularized the revelry to the point where even unlapsed Catholics must at times struggle to recall that all the fuss commemorates their Savior’s birth and not merely ASCAP and BMI annuities involving sleigh bells, drummer boys, chipmunks, reindeer, chestnuts, Santa, Frosty, and, most crucially, snow—of which there was a dearth in Galilee. Why those songwriters could not bestir themselves to write a decent Hanukkah song is a mystery for the ages. Hath not a Jew snow, snowmen, bells, singing animals, Buddy Rich? Secularist that I am, I don’t need chain-rattling Marley to muster my belief in miracles, for example, the sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in 1960, when she recorded Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, recently reissued by Verve. Her instrument was pearly—perhaps at its apogee— and her time, well, what is there left to say of her time, a musical Greenwich Mean? “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is near perfect, so near that for the duration of her vocal I am inclined to close the book on singers and concede that paradise is lost.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (The Best Jazz Records of 2002)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
As the wheels of Capital grind remorselessly to the tune of impossible profit projections, jazz grows increasingly irrelevant to the dominant record labels. Atlantic vanished; Columbia recycled Miles; Concord Jazz did singers; BMG and Warner hardly mattered; and even Verve tightened the noose. Blue Note kept the faith, revived by the improbable triumph of Norah Jones in a non-jazz setting. Yet good jazz records proliferated, some better than good, and often on labels like Palmetto, Justin Time, Pi, Aum Fidelity, and others yet more obscure. Something like consensus coalesced around half a dozen titles. One dares to imagine the divided jazz tribes rising above ever-thinner layers of air to converge. For example, if the audience for Bob’s Pink Cadillac were also to buy The Music of Bob Haggart, and vice versa, two little tribes might surprise themselves and turn into one with clout. Shhhhh—let me dream, albeit alphabetically. Five entries are asterisked: CDs that, like it or not, you must hear.
Hot (Louis Armstrong)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1 If Louis Armstrong had never lived, the world would be a different place—as radically different as if, say, Archduke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated or the United States hadn’t unleashed nuclear weaponry. In recounting those who shaped history, we invariably focus on conquerors or politicians. But cultural heroes also define our lives. Born to severe poverty in New Orleans, in 1901, and armed only with his cornet, voice, and personality, Armstrong conquered American music, erecting the foundation for the prevailing music of the last century. Before Armstrong, jazz was perceived as a clamorous urban folk music, wedded to duple rhythms that had more in common with parade bands and African polyrhythms than the clear-sailing of what we call swing. It was a social music that favored collective embellishment over solitary virtuosity. To many, it wasn’t an art at all, only a resource from which “legit” composers might borrow a thumping beat (as in Rite of Spring) or a blue note (as in Rhapsody in Blue). Jazz would surely have developed eminent soloists without Armstrong (it already had in Sidney Bechet), but its progress as an art in its own right would have been slow and chaotic. Armstrong was the visionary who grounded jazz as the music of a new world. In his hands, it became a calling of unlimited potential and universal appeal.
Aqui Se Habla Espanol (David Murray)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
No career in jazz during the past 30 years has proven more consistently unpredictable and rewarding than that of David Murray. When he first showed up in New York—a 20-year-old student on furlough from Pomona College, playing “Flowers for Albert” in Stanley Crouch’s Bowery loft—he had two big things going for him. First, he didn’t sound like anyone else, certainly not Albert Ayler, though one could imagine that Ayler’s example encouraged his penchant for the split-tones and squeals of the so-called hidden register. The classic Texas tenor Buddy Tate, who also favored upper-register cries, once advised young musicians to find their own sound, which isn’t only easier said than done but almost impossible to do. The sound is you and not something out there awaiting discovery. But Tate came up in the ‘20s, when every saxophonist—every musician—of note had a distinctive sound. That Hawkins, Webster, and Young existed in the same world indicated the tenor saxophone’s extraordinary range; if those three and others (like Herschel Evans, Bud Freeman, and Chu Berry) represented unmistakably distinctive attacks, the spaces between them offered all kinds of possibilities. Tate, for one, started out blending Evans and Hawkins before finding his own place. The ‘70s offered a parallel challenge: the post-war tenor hierarchy had handed down alternatives no less distinct in the work of Gordon, Gray, Getz, Rollins, and Coltrane. Yet for a while it looked as if the tenor would be buried in a welter of Coltrane imitators. Murray, however, proved to be merely the youngest in an influx of musicians who demonstrated that many “sounds” were yet to be had—especially, for some reason, on alto sax (no fan could confuse Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake), but that’s another story.
French Music, Not Necessarily Freedom Music (Louis Sclavis)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A certain kind of melody is embedded deep in the DNA of silent movies. It’s a melancholy diatonic waltz, the love child of “After the Ball” and Charlie Chaplin, whose genius extended to sentimental themes that nudge us to smile through our tears. The living master of the idiom, which is not so much composed as recycled, is the born-and-bred New Yorker Carl Davis, a workhorse of ‘70s British cinema who scored several new films while finding his true métier in re-scoring silents and TV series about the silents. The last place you expect to find an outstanding example of that kind of melody, which has done more for Kleenex than the flu, is in the work of a musician and composer closely associated with the European jazz avant-garde. And my first response to Louis Sclavis’s Dans La Nuit, his commissioned score to Charles Vanel’s longforgotten 1929 film, was indifferent disappointment.
Masters of Time (Roy Haynes / Max Roach)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At 78, Roy Haynes is only a year younger than Max Roach, yet jazz history pigeonholes them, respectively, as secondand first-generation bebop drummers. Each was a wunderkind who initially made his reputation with swing titans: Roach with Benny Carter, Haynes with Lester Young. But Roach was the first to assimilate Charlie Parker’s radical redesign—”Koko” was as much a coming out for him as for Parker and bop itself—and by 1949, when he asked Haynes to replace him in Parker’s quintet, a chair Haynes held until 1952, Roach’s influence was pervasive and absolute, as Haynes readily acknowledges. Roach had changed everything. It took nothing away from Sid Catlett’s rolling authority or Buddy Rich’s heart-stopping stickwork or Jo Jones’s majestic hi-hat tattoos to realize that they were all inadequate to a music that demanded the drummer’s increased collaboration in shaping themes and propelling soloists. Stylish timekeeping was now supplemented by simultaneous rhythms (and independent limbs that made them possible), which redefined and deconstructed time while keeping it steady and resolute.
Overview and Meditation (Art Ensemble of Chicago)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Nearly four years ago, Lester Bowie blew his last blat and took with him a sensibility that is as much mourned as his trumpet playing. With no worthy heir to his white lab coat, jazz suffered an irreplaceable loss in theatrical wit, surgical strikes, massed brasses, pan-generic repertory, and nostalgic caprice. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, however, refused to lay down its little instruments, appearing periodically as a trio and, with the return this year of founding member Joseph Jarman, a quartet. Ending the post-Lester recording drought, two new CDs, one by each configuration, have now shown up at the same time. True believers will want both; those, like me, with limited patience for plunking and grinding percussion melees, will rejoice without cavil at the arrival of the majestic Tribute to Lester (ECM). Recorded two years ago, it is unlike anything else in the AEC’s catalog, beginning with a compact summary of the band’s first 30 years. Famoudou Don Moye’s “Sangaredi,” first recorded in abbreviated form in 1987, is treated to a definitive rendition, its African rhythms smartly bubbling from the start and quickly weighted with bass, gongs, and bass saxophone. Percussion feature though it is, the piece builds with compositional discretion until the chiming close, which suggests Big Ben tolling for the dead. An extended silence leads to Roscoe Mitchell’s “Suite for Lester,” a tripartite masterstroke of concision that opens with an allusive, poignant soprano saxophone melody reminiscent of his “For Lester B,” recorded in three variants in 1997, most memorably as a hymn on Mitchell’s Nine to Get Ready. This melody, backed by empathic drums and the bowed bass of Malachi Favors Maghostut, gives way to a serene full-bodied flute invention in the manner of Bach, complete with variation, that is in turn supplanted by a partying swing number on bass sax—all this in little more than five minutes.
Jumping Off
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sitting in her tent on the soft grass of a prairie spring, Tamzene Donner contemplated the vast expanse of wilderness she was about to enter and decided to bid her sister one last goodbye. She reached for a fresh sheet of stationery and carefully noted the date—May 11, 1846—and the location: Independence, Missouri. The next day she would begin a journey as exciting and dangerous as any that could be imagined.
Pleasure Trip
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Virginia Reed swung into the saddle of her pony and galloped out onto the prairie. She loved getting away from the dull plod of the wagons, out into the high grasses where the wind whistled through a girl’s hair as she rode. She stopped from time to time and gathered wildflowers, the bright sunshine glinting off a dazzling palette of colors in her growing bouquet.
A New and Interesting Region
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The young rider bounced off his mount and thudded sickeningly into the hard earth of Wyoming. The fall knocked Edward Breen out cold, and when he regained consciousness his left leg throbbed with pain. Adults arrived and examined the boy and found a bad break between the knee and ankle. There was no doctor in the company, but they were only a little ways beyond Fort Bridger. Perhaps someone there boasted medical training. A rider galloped off, and in time he returned with the nearest thing to a doctor the fort had to offer, ‘‘a rough looking man with long whiskers’’ who had probably acquired what medical knowledge he had through long experience on the frontier. He unrolled a small bundle he was carrying and produced a short saw and a longbladed knife, obviously the tools of amputation.
Unearthly
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If the Donner Party received any brief encouragement as it struggled against the Wasatch Mountains, it must have come from the startling realization that other emigrants were even farther behind. At some point during the Wasatch ordeal, newcomers unexpectedly rolled up from the east. The three wagons belonged to Franklin Graves, a big, amiable man whose life had been a fitting prelude to the deprivations of the California Trail. In Illinois, where Graves and his wife had carved out a hardscrabble life in a one-room cabin along the banks of the Illinois River, Graves had gone shoeless in summer and hatless in winter. The family kept chickens and bees, and every morning Graves crossed the river in a handmade canoe to trade game, furs and buckets of honey with settlers in town. In the afternoon, the equally resourceful Elizabeth Graves showed up in the same boat with butter, eggs and soap. When the river froze, she kept up her errands by walking across the ice. They were cheerful, happy people, and it isn’t entirely clear why they decided to make the journey west, especially since Franklin was in his late fifties.
Abandoned
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The old man struggled to keep up. The sterile terrain and the long journey had weakened the draft animals until they could no longer bear the extra weight of passengers in the wagons, so everybody was walking, even children and the elderly. Hardcoop, a Belgian whose first name is lost to history, was struggling along as best he could, but the muscles and bones and joints that had carried him through sixty hard years were finally giving way.
The Mouth of Hell, the River of Life
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Down the dwindling waters of the Humboldt, they set their course by taking aim toward Lone Mountain, a desert butte that reminded some emigrants of pictures they had seen of ancient Mayan pyramids. A broad, open meadow provided good fodder for the stock—the coarse grass ‘‘as thick as hair on a Dogs back’’—and then they were at the Sink, the strange and somber spot where the river died. In wet years it formed a broad, shallow lake; in a drought it simply vanished into the desert. Most years it was something in between, a boggy marsh that one slightly poetic Gold Rusher described as ‘‘a veritable sea of slime, a slough of despond, an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison,’’ all of which created ‘‘the appearance of utter desolation.’’ Given the conditions of 1846, the Donner Party almost surely found little or no water in what was sometimes called, too optimistically, Humboldt Lake.
This Prison
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
James Reed reached Sutter’s Fort just as his family and the others were approaching the Sierra. The first storm of autumn greeted Reed’s arrival, sending a torrent of rain down upon John Sutter’s keep. At the fort, Reed found William McCutchan, the tall, bushy-haired man who had left his wife and daughter with the main party six weeks earlier to ride ahead for supplies with Charles Stanton. McCutchan had been too sick to go along when Stanton returned, but now, his health restored, he was ready to go back for his family. He talked with Reed, and the two men—both fathers with children in the mountains—decided to set out on a desperate mission of rescue. Sutter offered a discouraging assessment.
The First Death
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Patrick Breen took out a few sheets of paper that had somehow survived the cross-continental journey and folded them so as to fashion a small booklet. Inevitably, human beings record the circumstances of their existence—we paint our stories in caves or write them in books or record them on film—and Breen had decided to make himself the chronicler of the Donner Party’s entrapment.
Our Present Calamity
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Patrick Breen began the new year with a plea for divine relief: ‘‘We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present Calamity if it be his Holy will,’’ he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day. But the failure of the Reed family escape attempt soon dimmed whatever flickering optimism the holidays had generated, and on Friday, January 8, the day after the bold little group returned to the lake camps, Breen summed up the company’s situation with candid pessimism: ‘‘prospects Dull.’’ A new blizzard started cascading snow upon them, and by the fifth day of steady accumulation the threatening walls of white had climbed higher than the cabins.
None for Tears
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Nicholas Clark, the sturdy rescuer detailed by James Reed to stay with the Donner families, made sure he was out of earshot of the tents. He was outside with Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who had also been taking care of the Donners. Clark confided that he planned to leave, perhaps at the arrival of the next rescue party, perhaps even sooner. Nobody could blame him. George Donner was already half dead, and surely incapable of ever leaving the mountains. The three little Donner girls had been sent off with Stone and Cady, and Clark, who was at Alder Creek, had no way of knowing that the tots had been abandoned at the Truckee Lake cabins. The girls’ mother, Tamzene, was healthy enough to go whenever she wanted. The only other people at Alder Creek were Betsy Donner and two of her children, Samuel and Lewis, but they too were all but dead. For Clark to stay any longer would be to risk his own life just so he could chop firewood for people who were going to die anyway. He admitted he was afraid he might starve to death, a reasonable fear given the struggles faced by the other rescuers in getting back down to civilization.
A Day of Renown
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the California Star peered through a green eyeshade and a wafting helix of cigar smoke and approved a story for that week’s paper. Typesetters bent over their trays, and ink-stained fingers soon began laying down the metal letters that would spell out the horrors of the Donner Party.