The Band Inside the Ghetto
Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves bring their John Coltrane centennial record to Carnegie Hall, and the Library of Congress has the concert music written inside Theresienstadt. Silas tells the story of the Ghetto Swingers, a swing band inside a Nazi ghetto.
LioraBranford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves made a record out of John Coltrane's ballads for his hundredth year, and tonight the tour reaches Carnegie Hall. Later, a swing band inside a Nazi ghetto. It's Tuesday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Tuesday, October 27th. 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: Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves take their Coltrane centennial record Dedicated to
LioraBranford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves spent this year inside John Coltrane's songbook, and tonight the tour reaches Carnegie Hall.
Blue Note has the story. The label shared the single "Dedicated to You" on September fourth. It is the title track of their Coltrane tribute, and the album came out in September, for the centennial.
The record remakes the six standards from the 1963 Impulse album "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman." Behind the two of them is Marsalis's longstanding quartet. Joey Calderazzo on piano, Eric Revis on bass, Justin Faulkner on drums.
"At first I thought about male singers," Marsalis says, "but I decided to sleep on it, and when I woke up the first thing I said was 'Dianne Reeves.'"
LioraReeves grew up with the original, because her parents loved Johnny Hartman. Her schooling came from Clark Terry. "Standards and good melody, that's what we did. He knew every lyric and every melody. That's my foundation."
Marsalis on Coltrane himself: "John Coltrane was not about trying to destroy the norm. He came up like Picasso. He knew the tradition and then saw how to expand it."
Forty five dates on the tour, and Marsalis's own calendar puts tonight at Carnegie Hall at eight.
Two. Listen to This: Terezin: The Music, 1941 to 44, two discs on Romantic Robot
LioraToday's record belongs to tonight's story.
"Terezin: The Music, 1941 to 44." Two discs on Romantic Robot, London, 1991. The Library of Congress holds it and keeps the note flat: works composed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Nothing on it is by the Ghetto Swingers. This is the concert music written inside the same walls.
The library prints the program with the clock on it. Gideon Klein's piano sonata, eleven minutes and two seconds, Varda Nishri at the piano. Viktor Ullmann's third string quartet, twelve fifty seven, the Martinu Quartet.
Here is the tip. The set shipped with twenty seven pages of notes in English, Czech and German. Find a copy with the booklet.
LioraOne new one. Friday, Mack Avenue puts out "Points of Light," the first record by Christian McBride and Ursa Major, twenty seven ninety nine, with Nicole Glover, Mike King, Ely Perlman and Savannah Harris.
Now the hard one. A swing band inside a Nazi ghetto, with Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" as its theme song. Silas has the story of the Ghetto Swingers.
Three. The Bridge: Silas tells the story of the Ghetto Swingers, a swing band inside a Nazi ghetto
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Silas tells it, I ask the questions. Silas, where are we?
SilasTerezin. The Germans call it Theresienstadt. In November 1941 the Nazis make it a ghetto. By April 1945, about 140,000 Jews from across Europe will pass through it.
January 1943. Eric Vogel, an amateur jazz trumpeter, asks permission to start a jazz band. By one account, the yes comes within days. The band is "modeled on the American big bands of the swing era." They call it the Ghetto Swingers.
LioraA swing band, inside a ghetto. What do they play?
SilasBenny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Tin Pan Alley. Their theme song is Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." They play the ghetto café. In January 1944 a pianist, Martin Roman, arrives and takes over as leader. Under him the band grows: violins, saxophones, four trumpets, accordion, bass and drums.
Vogel later said, "We were obsessed with music and were happy that we could play our beloved jazz." He added that they did not realize they were "tools in their hands."
LioraTools.
SilasIn 1944 the Red Cross is coming to inspect, and the SS dresses the ghetto up. It is renamed a "Jewish settlement," with shops, a children's playground, a coffee house, and a bank with notes one history calls "worthless pieces of paper." Prisoners whose bodies show the marks of long imprisonment are sent to Auschwitz. In all, about 7,500 people go from Terezin to Auschwitz before the visit.
June 23rd, 1944. The commission tours for about four hours. By one account, it can hear the Ghetto Swingers.
LioraIs that when they make the film?
SilasNo. The main filming comes after, August 16th to September 11th. The camp commander orders a prisoner to direct it, the German Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron. The title is "Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film About the Jewish Settlement Area." The Ghetto Swingers appear in it and play parts of the soundtrack. They "were ordered to sound American."
Coco Schumann, a young musician from Berlin in the band, later said that afterward many were "immediately deported to Auschwitz, many of us straight into the gas chamber."
LioraWho made it out?
SilasIn autumn 1944, on a date the sources don't agree on, the band's members are sent to Auschwitz. That fall more than 18,000 people leave Terezin for Auschwitz on eleven transports. Gerron is on the last one, October 28th, and is murdered on arrival. Fritz Weiss, a clarinetist and arranger who played in the ghetto, went, in one history's words, "directly from the train to the gas chambers."
The sources don't agree on how many from the band survived. One names three: Vogel, Roman and Schumann. Another names only Roman. Schumann was freed by American soldiers on a death march in April 1945. Vogel, The New Yorker reports, "leaped from a transport train" headed for Dachau.
SilasThe film was shown to Red Cross representatives in Prague in April 1945, and never to the public. Of about ninety minutes, about twenty-three survive.
In 1961 Vogel told the story in Down Beat, in three parts titled "Jazz in a Nazi Concentration Camp." He called it "a story of horror, terror, and death but also of joy and pleasure, the history of a jazz band whose members were doomed to die."
LioraOrdered to sound American, for a film that was a lie. The music was still theirs. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: Johnny O'Neal plays two sets at Dizzy's Club for his seventieth year
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket is in New York, and it is a birthday celebration.
Dizzy's Club has Johnny O'Neal, billed by Jazz at Lincoln Center as celebrating his seventieth year of life. Two sets, seven and nine, with Luke Sellick on bass and Willie Jones the Third on drums. Thirty to sixty dollars, and a twenty five dollar food and drink minimum on top.
Now the sweep.
In Chicago, the Jazz Showcase gives the night to public radio. The WDCB fundraising concert has the Isaiah Spencer Quartet with Jon Irabagon, a tribute to John Coltrane. Sets at eight and ten, twenty two dollars and thirteen cents.
Also in New York, Birdland has the Alexa Tarantino Quartet at seven and half past nine, and the Birdland Theater has Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks at half past five and half past eight.
LioraIn Minneapolis, the Dakota has Judy Collins at seven, from a hundred eight ninety.
In Los Angeles, Catalina gives the room to a gala. The Angela and John Witherspoon Foundation honors Bill Bellamy, show at half past eight, and the club names no musician for it.
Five. One More Note: Kid Ory cut a San Francisco session on this date in 1957
LioraOne more date. Sixty nine years ago today, Kid Ory cut a session in San Francisco. The French national library prints it as a single day, on a Verve record called "Song of the Wanderer," with Darnell Howard on clarinet, Marty Marsala on trumpet and Cedric Haywood on piano.
One more birthday, in the same city. Barre Phillips, the bass player, was born in San Francisco on this date in 1934. The Library of Congress takes that from Grove. ECM, which issued him for half a century, says only California.
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 Tuesday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.