A historic concert from Germany this weekend. Drummer Max Roach and a quartet featuring Clifford Jordan, tenor sax; Coleridge Perkinson, Piano; Eddie Khan, bass; and Abbey Lincoln, vocals, performing at the Sendessal in Bremen.

Recorded by Radio Bremen on February 15, 1964, this concert features the complete Freedom Now Suite for the next hour and 10 or so minutes.

'nuff said.

Another look at the CBC Transcription Service and a set of discs issued late 1964 by famed pianist Marek Jablonski in recital at the 1964 Jeunesses Musicales du Canada.

Featuring the music of Mozart, Chopin, Albeniz and others, this 90 minute concert is another one of those series of discs slated for destruction after 1965.

Luckily, it didn't happen to this one.

Enjoy.

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A curious mix of optimism and pessimism for this week, ending on April 26th in 1964.

On the optimistic side - President Johnson announced to the world that the U.S. would make substantial reductions in Nuclear Weapons and Uranium enrichment production. Simultaneously, it was announced by Nikita Khruschev via Radio Moscow, that the Soviet Union would do the same thing. The news was greeted with a sense of relief and UN General Secretary U Thant offered an evaluation on what was deemed a hopeful sign towards an easing of Cold War tensions.

On the Pessimistic side - tensions were brewing between the U.S. and Cuba as Cuban Premier Fidel Castro vowed to down any U.S. Reconnaissance planes flying over Cuban territory as it had been doing since 1962.

On the optimistic side - Sec. of State Dean Rusk returned from a fact-finding mission to Saigon and offered an upbeat assessment of the situation in Vietnam, saying the South Vietnamese Army could handle themselves nicely.

On the Pessimistic side - Defense Secretary Robert McNamara conceded it will "take time" for any progress to be made in Vietnam and that the South Vietnamese Army is running a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Oh well.

Meanwhile - the four year long negotiations between the Railroads and the Unions was finally at the settlement stage. And just in the nick of time, as the settlement averted a threatened strike.

President Johnson went on a brief tour of the Appalachia region, hitting the towns and cities worst hit by poverty and unemployment, touting his War on Poverty legislation. He was greeted with waves of enthusiasm.

Not so enthusiastic were reports from Capitol Hill saying the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was at a standstill, making the future unclear for passage of the Legislation.

And the much publicized "Stall-ins", threatened for Opening day of the New York Worlds Fair on April 22nd, didn't materialize. But that didn't stop some 300 Civil Rights demonstrators from being arrested from the Fair opening anyway.

All this in one week, ending on April 26th 1964, as reported on the ABC Radio Voices In The Headlines program.

Somewhat hard to imagine this week 47 years ago Barry Goldwater was considered the epitome of the right-wing fringe element of the Republican Party. The fringe element that hi-jacked the party at the convention and set in motion the changes that would make it the party it somewhat is today. But, truths to tell, listening to Goldwater in this 1964 Paid Political Campaign talk and hearing the insanity passing itself off as political rhetoric this past week, one almost imagines Goldwater as something of a moderate or, dare I say, Liberal in comparison.

Take, for example this extract regarding his views on Social Security:

Barry Goldwater: “During my twelve years in the United States Senate I have voted for every improvement in the Social Security Act. I voted against those amendments that I thought would be detrimental, which would have been detrimental to the Social Security. Now this year, the Senate and the House both voted nice increases for the recipients of Social Security. We added a great many people who have not been covered and I voted for these things. Now the real enemy in my mind, on Social Security is the man who didn’t allow this bill to become the law and that’s the President of the United States, who wanted his way and he didn’t get it, so he just said to the conferees ‘stop everything’. So those people on Social Security or who were receiving Social Security will not receive these improved benefits this year. And it’s not Goldwater’s fault. It’s Johnson’s fault.

No getting around it - Goldwater wasn't a saint. His views on Civil Rights were legendary and his stand on military spending and Vietnam were in lock-step with the John Birch Society. But you really have to wonder what Goldwater would be thinking about this current lineup of Republican hopefuls.

Perhaps the sound of engines we hear in Arizona are actually those of Barry spinning in his grave.

Possibly.

When Newstalgia first started (over 2 years ago), I ran a landmark piece of electronic music, conceived by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop headed by Delia Derbyshire who was not only a founder of the workshop, but one of the first women involved in Electronic music. Her contributions however, have gone sadly overlooked even though they were wide ranging (she did the original theme music for Doctor Who - elements of that theme are still used) they have been uncredited. Only in recent years, unfortunately after her death, has she been rediscovered and slowly being given the recognition she has deserved.

The piece I ran two years ago was The Dreams (which you can still hear). It was issued on disc via the BBC Transcription Service. The other side of that disc, also from 1964 is Amor Dei, another invention for Radio, with spoken word montage by Barry Bermange and electronic music score by Delia Derbyshire.

I've been meaning to run it for months now. It's just a coincidence that it happens to be on Easter weekend. I also ran across my friend Pati's mesmerizing photograph and thought the two more or less belonged together.

Maybe no coincidence.

Enjoy - and if you do, please consider making a donation to keep Newstalgia running.

Technical note: The piece gets very quiet in places for long periods of time. It's not over until the BBC Announcer comes on at the end. It's about a half-hour.

(Nancy Wilson - Nat "King" Cole - In a word, magic)

October 4, 1964 saw an extraordinary group of people assembled on stage at the Hollywood Bowl to raise funds and awareness for defeating a Proposition on the November ballot. Proposition 14, or the attempt by Realtor groups and the John Birch Society to nullify the Rumford Fair Housing Initiative that passed in 1963. A veritable who's who of Hollywood, with orchestra led by none other than Nelson Riddle and emcee's Joey Bishop and Milton Berle introducing a lineup of talent that included Nancy Wilson and Nat "King" Cole.

I've extracted the Wilson and Cole sets out for this segment.

This goes under the heading of "previously unknown concert tapes", as I don't believe any commercial (or otherwise) copy of this concert has been available before today.

You get to hear it first.

With the amount of routine trashing the Canadian Health Care system has received at the hands of their corrupt and greedy neighbors to the south, you'd think a typical day at an average Canadian hospital would be scenes of battled scarred triage. Walls spattered with blood, patients screaming in hallways - waiting rooms littered with corpses.

Well . . that's the picture the health insurance lobbies would like you to see. The reality is something of a different picture. And reason the Canadian healthcare system has achieved its level of success is due in no small part to the crusading efforts of Canadian Supreme Court Justice Emmett Hall.

It was Hall whose Commission on National Health Care arrived at the conclusion in 1961 that the Canadian Health Care System was in dire need of overhaul and implemented a series of changes by which all Canadian citizens be entitled to decent health care.

Needless to say, the CMA (the Canadian AMA) and the drug companies did their level best to paint pictures of horror and endless lines and three year waits to see unfamiliar doctors - all which proved to be untrue.

In 1964, as Hall's report was released and while the Health Care Plan was being discussed, the CBC as part of it's Farm Forum Radio Program ran an interview with Hall where he discussed the then-current state of Medical care in Canada.

Continue reading »

A special post this week. On the occasion of the annual United Nations Day Concert, held on October 24th. This one is from 1964 and features the London Symphony conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Issac Stern, solo violin. The LSO, playing the United Nations General Assembly as part of their 1964 world tour play music of Max Bruch and Benjamin Britten. The Bruch Violin concerto (with Stern) and the Britten Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra. After the music is a short address by Secretary General U Thant.

Something a bit different this week, and probably not heard in a very long time.

(Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames - In 1964 riding the epitome of cool)

(The Rolling Stones - in 1964 - not fooling anybody with the squeaky clean act)

If I haven't already screamed the praises of BBC 6 Music on an almost daily basis, forgive me. Without them a lot of incredible and incredibly rare material would probably never see the light of day. Because of that, you really need to bookmark their site and refer to it every few hours or so and prepare to be amazed.

This weeks installment of the Backstage Weekend takes us back to 1964 and a recently discovered program that hasn't been heard since it first aired on the BBC World Service March 18, 1964. Called The Mike Raven Rhythm & Blues Show it featured, at the time, many of the up-and-comers from the British Invasion period. As far as I can gather, Mike Raven is actually a pseudonym for Alexis Korner who sings one song with the Blue Flames. The half hour show is pretty evenly split between Georgie Fame and The Rolling Stones. Georgie Fame is probably not as well known now as the co-billed band, but in 1964 he had a top ten hit in the U.S. (Yeah-Yeah) and a pretty good following in Europe. The Rolling Stones were slowly evolving. Still very much in the Chicago Blues mold and featuring co-founder Brian Jones on guitar, they played mostly covers of other songs and hadn't really hit yet in the U.S. (It's All Over Now, they're first big hit really didn't until around August, if I remember). So this is an interesting, and very historic glimpse of a band on the way up and what the scene was generally like in the U.K. on a typical March day in 1964.

And it's in stereo.

(" . . .oh those transgressions")

With the current wave of scandals hitting Tiger Woods, I have come to realize Sports and Scandal have become synonymous . . .at least for the past hundred or so years.

I suppose what's different now is the nature of our society and the ever-scrutinizing media; our need for scandal, our obsession with icon-bashing, not to mention the element that fame and power are aphrodisiacs. Sports certainly has no exclusivity rights on that one - politics jumps to mind quicker. It all comes down to the spectacle of seeing the mighty fall, feigning shock and revulsion while poring over the tabloids for more.

But the whole issue of Sports and Morality has been a subject of discussion with a lot of people over the years. This particular clip is one I located from May of 1964. A discussion featuring sports figures Joe Garagiola and Jackie Robinson on the subject of Morality and Sports. Although by todays standards the discussion is quaint and surface and the product of a different time - barely mentioning the issue of personal codes of ethics since, at the time an athletes personal transgressions were kept carefully hidden from public view.

Joe Garagiola: “Jackie, how would you define morality in sports?”

Jackie Robinson: “Well I think, Joe, that we’d have to define it by saying whether the athlete knows the difference between right and wrong. And then we’d have to go a little bit further and say there are circumstances, even though there are rules on the books that an individual do certain kinds of things that are perhaps are not within the law, but he is circumventing it, as you pointed out a short time ago before we came on the air. And my estimation is that morality is just simply knowing right from wrong, whether its in sports or our everyday life.”

Jimmy Carter once indicated that America had lost its moral center. I'm not so sure that hasn't always been the case. What is different now as opposed to scandals in history is the level of scrutiny we have at our disposal today. Were there just as many moral indiscretions in 1964 as there are today? Probably.

We just chose not to notice them.

It's That Time Of Year

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