4/8/2019 Ginger #008 - Google Docs
GINGER: (transitive verb) \ jinjer \ t o make lively: pep up.
Hello and welcome to Ginger, a weekly newsletter by me, Justin Maiman. If you missed last week, g o here to discover some new habits for happiness and a live barn cam featuring baby goats. Also, you can now find Ginger on Twitter h ere. And finally, if you like what you read, please tell all your friends and family to subscribe today. Thanks in advance.
Alright, here we go. Music and musicians are inspiring me this week.
The summer of 1958: Coincidences leading to pop miracles Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. All born, in that order, the summer of 1958 in the Midwest. That’s right. All born within a few months of each other. So close to each other, in fact, that if you had been family friends with each of their parents, you could have spent a long weekend in early September driving to each house — from Minneapolis, MN to Gary, IN to Bay City, MI — to present the proud parents with onesies. A purple onesie for Prince, of course. Matching fingerless lace gloves for Madonna. Michael’s onesie would have to include sequins or a hat.
Anyway, here’s the route you would have taken as that close family friend:
How does it happen that three future pop superstars were born into the world virtually at the same time? Is it like: If Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were born during the same hot AustroGerman summer?
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Or if Kepler, Newton, and Galileo were born the same year?
I don’t know. I can’t think of a comparison that works perfectly. But I encourage all of you to go down this rabbit hole. I feel like it’s the most impressive “Did You Know?” I will ever come up with. And I promise much more coming from me in the future about this.
An iconic photo: “A Great Day in Harlem”
Photo by Art Kane.
Meanwhile, that s ame summer in NYC, and speaking of musical superstars all in one place ...
17 East 126th Street in Harlem looks like any other brownstone these days but back in 1958, dozens and dozens of jazz musicians were encouraged to show up at 10am in the morning to get their picture taken for Esquire. (Someone overheard a musician say he didn’t realize there were two 10 o’clocks in a day.)
For about two hours, jazz greats like Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Count Basie (he got tired of waiting and sat down on the curb next to the kids), Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie (on the far right with his tongue out, purposefully and successfully making Roy Eldridge turn his head and miss the snap of the camera shutter), Pee Wee Russell, and Stuff Smith wandered
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around, saying hello, catching up, wondering what the hell they were doing there. See the full list h ere of all 50+ jazz artists there that day.
The guy who took the picture was Art Kane — it was the first photo he ever took! He was already a successful art director, but he was not a photographer. His friend and assistant initially loaded the film for him backwards.
Luckily, bassist Milt Hinton brought his own camera that day and took a bunch of photos. So did his wife Mona. And they both shot some 8mm film too. All of that can be seen in the doc “A Great Day in Harlem,” which came out in the mid90’s.
Near the end of it, tenor sax player Sonny Rollins talks about the hard lives he and some of his jazz buddies were living at the time: “What’s the point in living to be a hundred if you don’t do anything in life?” For the record, Sonny is still alive today he’s 88.
One year later, in 1959, Miles Davis made “Kind of Blue” and changed the course of jazz, again, forever. Between Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Art Kane’s miraculous picture, and everything that happened next, perhaps, something was in the air, or water. This world of ours breeds wonder.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDctoNltfDGpR4MZ2rrTxZiAq_PEhSkc0oEtbZOZNTs/edit 3/6 4/8/2019 Ginger #008 - Google Docs
From ‘58 to 14
Photo by Lily Prince.
Her own radio s how at 12. C olumnist at 14. Is there anything that Stella Prince can’t do?
Well, she can’t drive yet.
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N and I listen to WGXC in the Catskills and came across her show last year. It grabbed our attention, both because the music is great — with a focus on singers from the 1930s and 1940s — but also because there’s an obviously smart, confident and polished young voice leading you in and out of the songs.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Stella last week in the Hudson, NY studio where she does her weekly show, “Get Happy.” It just happened to be Doris Day’s 97th birthday. Day is Stella’s second favorite singer. Judy Garland is her first.
“I first wanted to do a radio show just with women singers, I thought that would be interesting, but there’s so many great male singers too that I couldn’t exclude them. (Stella laughs.) But I do tend to play more women than men.”
Here are some more things I learned about Stella. She got in to this kind of music because she heard it around the house. Her parents played a lot of CDs and records at home when she was little. She thought it would be a cool idea to get a radio show when she was 12, that’s when she found WGXC and started the show as a youth programmer. She also plays music herself — voice, guitar and piano — and likes to act and perform. Also, she’s not on social media.
Here’s an example of one of her recent set lists Stella sent to me:
That's how rhythm was born Boswell Sisters Paper Moon nat king cole the very thought of you Ray Noble Tennessee Waltz connie francis If I had you Rudy Vallee Born to be with you Chordettes I can't love you anymore Bebe Daniels Till there was you Helen O'connell The Music goes Round and Round Tommy Dorsey
Listen to “Get Happy” and a full archive of all her shows h ere on the WGXC site.
Even more things I enjoyed reading and watching and listening to
● #Winning the internet: Lil Nas X ● The most important point is acceptance, says a Z en master and chef ● Meet duendita: NYC s oul music singer and avid birdwatcher ● Dizzy Gillespie d oc called “To Bop or Not To Be: A Jazz Life”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDctoNltfDGpR4MZ2rrTxZiAq_PEhSkc0oEtbZOZNTs/edit 5/6 4/8/2019 Ginger #008 - Google Docs
This week in goats
Meet O llie.
Have a wonderfilled week. jm
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