The Grand Forks Interview
Wynton Marsalis is retiring from Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Monterey's 69th is his last appearance there with the orchestra. Then Sekou tells the story of the student reporter who asked Louis Armstrong the one question his editor told him to skip.
LioraDownBeat reports Wynton Marsalis is retiring from Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Monterey this month is his last time there with the orchestra. Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter play a duo set they have never played before. And a student reporter who asked Louis Armstrong the one question his editor told him to skip. It's Sunday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Sunday, September 13th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: DownBeat reports Wynton Marsalis is retiring from Jazz at Lincoln Center
LioraToday, a goodbye, and a first.
DownBeat reports that Wynton Marsalis will make his final Monterey appearance with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, because he is retiring from Jazz at Lincoln Center. The 69th Monterey Jazz Festival runs the 25th through the 27th. He and the orchestra play Friday at seven, with Cecile McLorin Salvant.
Monterey honors him the night before. The festival's own pages say Marsalis receives its 17th Jazz Legends Award at a gala on the 24th.
The weekend carries a new theme, "Only in Monterey." Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter play their first ever duo set, "For Miles," for Miles Davis's centennial year, Sunday at seven forty five. The festival calls it a one night only event you can only see at the 69th. Both men came out of Davis's band.
LioraMeshell Ndegeocello makes her festival debut and premieres a commission, America 250. The Charles Lloyd Quartet marks sixty years of Forest Flower, which Lloyd cut at the 1966 festival.
Jason Olaine, who consulted on the programming, on that Hancock and Carter set: "If you're there, you're there. And if you're not there, you're going to wish you were."
Two. Listen to This: Ezra Collective's fourth album, Here Because of Hope, is out on Partisan Records
LioraToday's record came out Friday. Here Because of Hope, Ezra Collective's fourth album, on Partisan Records.
Femi Koleoso on drums, TJ Koleoso on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, James Mollison on saxophone, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet. Seventeen tracks in three movements, broken by spoken interludes the actor Letitia Wright reads.
The band's question on the page is why so much Black music born out of pain sounds so joyful. Its answer is hope, "the belief, carried across generations and oceans, that something better is possible."
The tip. Play it in order, all three movements, and let the interludes sit.
Now the release desk. Salt Catchers also landed Friday, on ECM, from Andy Sheppard with Rita Marcotulli and Michel Benita: nine tracks, eight Sheppard tunes and Carla Bley's "Lawns."
LioraGrand Forks, North Dakota. September 1957. Louis Armstrong plays a concert at the high school, and afterward a 21 year old gets into his hotel. Larry Lubenow, journalism student, moonlighting for the Grand Forks Herald at a dollar seventy five an hour. His editor told him to stay off politics. He asked anyway. Armstrong answered, then signed off on every word. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: Grand Forks, North Dakota, September 1957: a 21 year old student stringer asked Louis
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouGrand Forks, North Dakota. September 17th, 1957. Louis Armstrong plays a concert at the high school, and afterward a 21 year old gets into his hotel. Larry Lubenow, journalism student, moonlighting for the Grand Forks Herald at a dollar seventy-five an hour. His editor told him to stay off politics.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, the governor called out the National Guard to keep nine Black children out of Central High School.
How Lubenow got upstairs is told two ways. One says he posed as a room service waiter. One says he carried up a lobster dinner as a pretext. Either way, he is in the room, and he asks about Little Rock.
LioraAnd Armstrong answers.
SekouArmstrong answers. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." He calls President Eisenhower two-faced, and says he has no guts. He calls Governor Faubus an uneducated plow-boy. That phrase is a substitute. The word Armstrong used was profane, and the reporter and his editors settled on a softer one.
Then he says he is pulling out of a State Department good will tour of the Soviet Union. "People over there ask me what's wrong with my country, what am I supposed to say?"
LioraWhat does the paper do with it?
SekouHis editors are startled by the copy and send him back the next morning to confirm it.
He finds him shaving. Armstrong writes one word on the page. "Solid." And signs it. "Satchmo Louis Armstrong."
September 18th, front page of the Grand Forks Herald. The next day the Associated Press moves it nationally, dateline Grand Forks, under a headline reading in part "Government Can Go To Hell." The New York Times runs it September 19th, page 23. The Pittsburgh Courier runs it as "Satchmo Tells Off U.S.," and Armstrong calls the Courier himself to say he meant it.
LioraDoes anyone try to walk it back?
SekouHis own road manager does. Pierre Tallerie tries to soften the remarks to the press. Armstrong contradicts him in public and holds his ground.
The reaction splits. Jackie Robinson backs him. Sammy Davis Junior criticizes him, saying Armstrong plays to segregated audiences himself. The charge later reaches Congress: in 1958, a member references Armstrong's "two-faced" charge on the floor.
Then, September 23rd, the Herald prints the signed copy, "Solid" in Armstrong's own hand. That same day Eisenhower issues a proclamation ordering the obstruction in Little Rock to cease. The next day he federalizes the Arkansas Guard and sends in the hundred and first Airborne.
LioraSix days later. Did Armstrong cause that?
SekouThe sources give us the order of events, not the cause. One reputable account says plainly that the question remains debated.
What we know is what Armstrong did next. September 24th, the day the troops go in, he wires the President. It sits in the Eisenhower Library files. The exact wording varies from book to book, so hold the words loosely. In one historian's version it reads: "If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you."
He never took back Grand Forks.
And Larry Lubenow billed the paper two hours. Three dollars and fifty cents.
LioraA kid who talked his way upstairs and asked the question his editor told him not to ask. Sometimes the record turns on the person nobody sent. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: Joshua Redman closes a four night run in Seattle, and the night runs on through New York
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's Seattle. Jazz Alley closes a four night run with the Joshua Redman Quartet. One set, seven thirty, doors five thirty. Forty seven dollars, including a twelve fifty handling fee.
LioraNow the sweep. In New York, the Village Vanguard finishes a run with the Bill Charlap Trio, eight and ten by the club's own FAQ house times, with no set time on the event page and no price anywhere on the club's own pages. In Oakland, Yoshi's has Kamasi Washington twice, seven and nine, both sold out. In New Orleans, Preservation Hall runs the Preservation Legacy Band featuring Will Smith, four sets from five to eight forty five. In Nashville, Rudy's Jazz Room has Wendy Burns on the music of Doris Day at six, eighteen dollars, then the house jam at nine for twelve.
Three rooms out. New York's Jazz Gallery lists nothing tonight. Jazz St. Louis lists nothing either, and its own season page opens November 4th with Cyrus Chestnut. Cambridge's Regattabar we could not read: its site's only calendar blocked us.
Five. One More Note: September 13th holds Chu Berry's birth in 1910
LioraSeptember 13th, and three entries from one calendar.
The Smithsonian's Today in Jazz History calendar puts the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry's birth on this date in 1910, in Wheeling, West Virginia. It credits this date in 1937 as the day Billie Holiday recorded "He's Funny That Way." It also puts Tadd Dameron's recording of "Lady Bird" on September 13th, 1948.
Chu Berry played tenor. Put one on today.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Sunday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.