Monday, July 7, 2014

Dodo's and Subversive History




Flying down to Shanghai today.  I wish I were taking the high-speed train again.  This time I’ll drop in, have my meeting and then catch an onward flight tonight down to Shenzhen.  It’s hot out.  I’ll be traveling from hot, humid Beijing to stifling Shanghai on to presumably even hotter, more jungle-like, Pearl River delta. By Thursday night I’ll be back home with a flight from Hong Kong.  Perspiring just thinking about it.

I’ve taken to pushing for new music on Rdio but just pulling up some of the people I’ve loved for years and seeing who they suggest such people are paired with.  Herbie Nichols is a bop pianist I’ve adored since my days on Pitt and Delancey.  Yesterday I plugged him in and noticed a reference whom I’d never heard of, but whose name stood out rather prominently:  Dodo Marmarosa. 

Michael “Dodo” Marmarosa, was born in Pittsburgh in 1926 he would die there in the VA hospital seventy-six years later.   The folksy obit from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette tells his story from an appropriately local bent.   A child prodigy with a big head on a small body, that earned him the nickname, he set out young to master the keys.  Snapped up by the visiting Johnny “Scat” Davis Orchestra, he’d begun touring by the wee age of fifteen in the year 1941.  . http://old.post-gazette.com/obituaries/20020920marmarosa0920p2.asp



Listening to the first tune “Moose the Mooch” on this album “Pittsburgh, 1958”, many years after his first days on tour, it almost sounds, wonderfully, like the piano is out of tune.  I’m enthralled listening to these choppy fills and effortless two-handed runs in opposite directions.  This sound is immediately distinguishable, not unlike Joe Albany who always sounded unique.  And like Albany, Marmarosa was a young pianist who got to play with Diz and Charlie Parker and a whose-who of swing and bop luminaries as they grew up fast with the best men in the business. 

The article suggests that Dodo was drafted, served and that it had an unsettling affect on him.  The quote is unclear as it suggests he served in the army during the “mid fifties” but given his age, I would assume that he served in the same conflict referenced yesterday.  This, even though the Korean War armistice was declared early in the decade in 1953. 

“In the mid-1950s, Mr. Marmarosa was drafted into the Army. Military life had an emotional effect on him and he was discharged after spending several months in the hospital.”

One can only wonder at what transpired.  Whatever it was, he didn’t end up playing out much, afterwards.  I actually took some time to try to find references to Korean War Vets who were jazz musicians, but the site I found profiled mostly sports heroes and movie stars.  It can only be a deep alumnae pool, given the dates and the draft.  And where Dodo’s career was interrupted, so likely went quite a bit of other what-if talent.  

Xi Jinping’s a gamblin’ man.  He’s having a go at some ‘what-if,’ himself, this week, this term.  What if Japan confronted its wartime past?  Interesting question.  He is spearheading an all out amplification of remembrance for the “War of Japanese Aggression” The New York times article I read last night outlined how, where as Hu Jintao had only commemorated the large international days of WWII remembrance, this would be a unilateral event that China would forcefully orchestrate and memorialize. 



As I sat down on my Air China Flight this morning and considered the editorial page of the China Daily, it was rather clear that an all out barrage of signification was mid-orchestration.  There were cartoons and three pieces worth of invective about how people should never forget history.  “History can never be suppressed!”  One can’t help but consider the ‘what-if’ beckoning were this message to actually taken seriously by the Chinese middle class.  When will the Party allow for its own history to be examined and analyzed publicly, without restriction beyond liable?  What if Xi’s initiative unwittingly or otherwise finally forced up this reckoning?  

Perhaps the most subversive thing Abe could do would be to take Xi up on his challenge.  Every nation then 千古罪人[1]




[1] qiāngǔzuìrén:  sb condemned by history (idiom)

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