Howzit Howard

Music Post: Jazzing or rocking the classics

In one of the "Thin Man" movies, Keenan Wynn plays a jazz musician. Crazy, man. He calls a clarinet a licorice stick and anyone who doesn't understand is a square. And at one point, he mentions that most jazzmen "take their classics straight." The idea of jazz and classical music meeting to create what Gunther Schiller named a "third stream" of music has often been regarded with disdain by people who are, uh, squarely in one camp or the other. It's not that never the twain shall meet but that when they meet the results are often not good. There is a bit more broad mindedness in this median strip of art music today, partly because we've learned more about Baroque music and know it bears some significant similarities to jazz, including a strong pulse and more adlibbing than we realized in Keenan Wynn's day. Everybody loves Gershwin but he always seemed to be the exception that proved the rule, since French composers tried jazzing up their compositions with uneven results. But then, for a long time their straight jazz didn't swing so well. The middle space between jazz and the classics has produced, not only original classical music that has a jazz feel - Bernstein's "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs," John Adams' "The Chairman Dances," and so on - but a variety of jazzed-up versions of pre-existing classical music. I have a soft heart for the Swingle Singers, the Jacques Loussier Trio, and other ensembles that made Bach swing, because this was the wick that led me into the straight classics. But I'm coming late to some other examples of classical music that has been syncopated. On my radio show Saturday I will play four consecutive versions of the "Overture in Miniature" to "The Nutcracker" - Tchaikovsky's original, then a novelty arrangement for a quartet of tubas, then Duke Ellington's big band swinging it, and finally Emerson Lake & Palmer covering "The Nutrocker" from their album morphing "Pictures at an Exhibition." Ellington arranged both "The Nutcracker" and Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite for his band, and you kind of have to be in the right mood to enjoy it, because sometimes he's bent on swinging and sometimes he seems to be looking for humor by showing where the original music permits the insertion of some of his band's sonic trademarks. I'll just mention in closing that the show Saturday will put Paul McCartney and Mahler together in the first half hour and I'll also throw in an authentic "Third Stream" composition, a piece by Charlie Mingus called "Please Don't Come Back from the Moon." "Howard's Day Off" airs live on Hawaii Public Radio, 5am-7am Saturdays, featuring "classical music and related material, packed in authentic juices," and can be heard on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku, Maui, and KANO Hilo, Hawaii, as well as online through streaming audio on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Visit the Howard's Day Off Appreciation Page in Facebook.

View from the North Shore

North Shore businesspeople met at Turtle Bay this week and I drove up to the resort to give them a customized economic update. It was interesting to hear their view of current economic conditions. Turtle Bay Resort itself is weathering the slump well. It has cut room rates up to 25%, wiping out most profit, but as a result it is running 85% full or better, keeping its work force employed and its regular clientele happy. The lobby and the beach were busy even at midday Wednesday. Restaurants are suffering everywhere, but North Shore restaurants still get a bump when surf's up, and the main concern of some of them is competition from people serving food out of trucks, who are parking closer to Haleiwa than usual, sometimes next-door or across the street from restaurants. North Shore agribusiness people are finding new markets as a result of the growing patronage of affluent locals and visitors going to farmers' markets, and an incremental increase in fine dining restaurants giving custom to local growers. This trend is small compared to the megatrend of people jumping from Star Market to Costco to save money, but it helps some farmers. (Does it really help that much to go to Costco? Many people I know who buy from big boxes seem to wipe out their savings by buying too much.) This weekend, with high surf expected, North Shore businesses should fare reasonably well. I hope so.

Migrating email to a new address

When I was a kid, my dad took the family to the Super 170 Drive-In (I was a teenager when Judy Bowen took me to Alfred Hitchcock's "Topaz," in a regular theater, appalled I had never seen the inside of one before) where loud local ads played for Odenton TV & Radio. The man who had that business later went into the business of renting movies. His chain, Erol's, was all over the Washington, D.C., by the time he sold it to Blockbuster. Then Erol became an Internet service provider, and hdicus@erols.com was my first Web address. Not until I was ready to move full-time to Hawaii did I abandon this regional ISP and sign with AOL, and I still have an AOL address mainly for communicating with family members on the mainland. It's been years but I still remember the nuisance of migrating email traffic off the Erols account. The same thing happened when I moved from Pacific Business News to KGMB two years ago. Now I'm going through it again as a result of the creation of Hawaii News Now. If you've been writing me on hdicus@kgmb9.com it's time to change that to hdicus@hawaiinewsnow.com. Joe Toy, can you shoot me the hotel stats? As of this writing I haven't seen it on old account or new! More "new business" - if you are going to be a guest on Sunrise, that means you'll be coming to the KHNL facilities on Waiakamilo Rd. rather than to the old KGMB studios that were for so long at 1534 Kapiolani Blvd. From Nimitz turn mauka, or from Dillingham turn makai, on Waiakamilo, and look for Kalani St., at a traffic signal. Our building is on the ewa-makai corner, without an obvious sign. There is a door on Kalani St. that opens only from the inside but is only a few steps from the studio. Whoever books your interview can provide you with more details. It has been a long but exciting week, jumping into the maelstrom of a new studio. That sounds like it's from a KGMB point of view, but staffers who came from the KHNL side are learning a new set and some new equipment that came over from the other facility, so all of us are on a learning curve. One thing I like better about the new facility is that the soda machine is on the second floor and the most convenient way to get there is to climb stairs. This is better for waking you up than the caffeine you're climbing the stairs for in the first place. More later, but in the meantime, be sure to rent "Topaz," which is a very good thriller, and I hope Judy Bowen is doing well. The last I heard, she married a guy who was also named Bowen and was living happily ever after.

I ' m baaack (from the new station)

It took four days, but I finally caught up sufficiently on learning the ropes of the KHNL studio facility on Waiakamilo Rd. to resume blogging. Let me bring you up to date on the move. As you know, the owner of KGMB and the owner of KHNL/KFVE figured out that they could position themselves to survive the recession by having a unified news operation produce news programs for all three channels. There was more to it than that - swapping KGMB and KFVE programming meant lower expenses for one of the owners and higher ratings for the other - but for those of us joining the unified news team, this was mostly about learning. KGMB personnel had to learn the KHNL facility while KHNL personnel had to learn the technologies moved over from KGMB. In my last post I told you about reporting to work before midnight for the launch. Since then I've been coming to work at 3 a.m. We've been learning new camera paths - when and where you can't walk without getting in someone else's shot - and slight but important differences between the stations' versions of the software we write our news in. I could tell you such stories about what's been happening backstage - but that was then, this is now, we're getting used to things. There is still the excitement of putting on a new production, and if we're not literally swinging from trapezes there are still some metaphorical aerobatics going on. More later.

Transition, and opportunity, in broadcasting

Thirty-one years ago, almost to the day, the radio station I worked for signed off its all-news format forever, to sign back on the following morning with a music format and a new staff. The incoming disc jockeys were excited because they were putting a new format on the air called "The New Wave," while the outgoing news staff, including me, considered it the end of an era. I'll never forget the complex mood in the station, whose studios were on the top floor of a small office building with a spectacular studio view of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol across the Potomac. The contrast between the wired incomers and gloomy departers was strange. I remember being filled with a sense of lost opportunity. A second all-news station had quickly overtaken WAVA in the ratings, and a third one pushed us farther down into last place. All-news programmers today recognize the importance of never breaking format, because an all-news station is a utility that needs to be there when you want it, like an electric light. WAVA used the slogans "News the Minute You Want It" and "All News, All the Times," but broke format for the Northern Virginia High School Football Game of the Week, Northern Virginia Meets the Nation, ethnic programming, entertainment shows, and political commentaries some of which were so far to the edge of the spectrum that they tuned out most of what audience we had. The other stations didn't do this, so they were more reliable services. In the final few months, no staffer who left was replaced, until a handful of us were keeping the station on the air. We came up with creative ways to maintain a listenable product on the air. We would record one really good hour of news and play it back for hours, "covering" outdated stories with new information so that the hour evolved. We made damn sure it was a quality product because we wanted to continue to work in the same market after we left the station. Later we learned that the last ratings were the best the station ever had. On the final night, we decided to invite several former staffers to come to the station, where we would pass a microphone around and let everyone do one final tag. Dozens of people working in Washington, D.C., radio and television had passed through WAVA, including Bob Edwards, Carl Kassell and Nora Raum of National Public Radio, the AP Radio broadcasters Cynthia Hecht, James Limbach and Alan Schaertel, and people working for NBC, ABC, CBS and Mutual. More than two dozen showed up for the final goodbye. I delivered a story on the format that was longer than some of our other stories but deliberately devoid of emotion or editorial comment. Everyone passed the mike around and said his name while the endless loop recording of a teletype machine played underneath us. Then we turned the volume on the teletype noise up all the way, until it was deafening. And punched the transmitter off. In one sense I was out of work for eight months. I found immediate freelance work with both AP Radio and the Mutual Broadcasting System, but it took eight months to be offered a full-time position. Mutual used me as an overnight newscaster. AP Radio used me for vacation fill-in, which meant I worked nonstop one month and not at all the next, depending on who was taking time off. John Holliman, who later found fame on CNN, was the agriculture editor, and had a lot of unused leave because no one wanted to do farm reports. I wanted to do farm reports, because I wanted to work, so Holliman took a five-week vacation and I learned a lot about soybean futures, barrows and gilts, and other farming esoterica. Finally, in June of 1978, within a week of marrying my first wife, I started work full-time at Mutual News, where I would stay for seven years. This all comes to mind, of course, because tonight, Sunday night as I write this, the KHNL newsroom will hand off its operations to a new team that includes a combination of KHNL and KGMB news personnel. We all know about the economic circumstances which impelled this, and we all know how this alliance, which cost a third of the combined jobs of the two stations, will prevent what likely would have been more draconian cutbacks by one or more of the component stations. As I well know from past experience, that realization, and even the prospects of great jobs to come, does not eliminate the sadness as no longer working with amiable colleagues, and such feelings about what might have been done differently as I had when WAVA became a music station. For myself and my colleagues on Sunrise, we're going to do our level best to produce an even better more news show. We're going to do it for Ramsay Wharton, and Tina Chau. We're going to do it for Dash and Diane. We're going to do it for all the wonderful KGMB and KHNL staffers who will soon, I hope, be writing to tell us where they're working next. The better their next gigs are, the more delighted I will be. And we're going to do it for you.

Music Post: Evolution of a few great tunes

Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans pianist of the early 1900s, claimed he invented jazz, and what was once dismissed as a wild claim  is now gently said aside as slightly exaggerated. He does appear to have been one of the early adopters of syncopation and swing. Morton, whose real name was Ferdinand, will forever appear in the first chapter of books on jazz partly because he really was around at the beginning, partly because he lived long enough to describe those days to historians, and partly because he wrote the "King Porter Stomp." Jazz musicians and listeners alike love "King Porter" for its swagger, its cool modulation to a different key for the second and more important theme, and the exciting big band finish. Ah, but wait a minute. Morton had nothing to do with that last bit. That came from the most famous arrangements of "King Porter," done years later by Fletcher Henderson, first for his own band, and later when Benny Goodman hired him to do arrangements for his band. Ever since, "King Porter" doesn't sound complete without Henderson's additions. On my radio program Saturday morning, and despite the fact that the music in this segment won't be classical, I'll play six versions of "King Porter Stomp" all in a row, starting with the Jelly Roll Morton original as recorded by Smithsonian Folkways, the original big band arrangement by Fletcher Henderson & His Orchestra with a young Coleman Hawkins on tenor, the Benny Goodman update with Bunny Berrigan playing the opening trumpet solo and Gene Krupa on drums. Three very different later versions will follow: a virtual recomposition of the piece by Gil Evans that includes a noisy opening based on the same sequence of notes that Bach used in "The Art of the Fugue" to represent the letters of his name; a scaled-down version by Wynton Marsalis and Marcus Roberts that recaptures the pieces as "chamber music" but keeps the feeling of the bigger arrangements; and a vocalize version of the Benny Goodman chart by the Manhattan Transfer, where the use of voices in places of some instruments transforms the composition in a different way. For listeners who prefer straight classics on the show, I'm also going to play music by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Copland, Dvorak and Bach, but the show will end with Yellowjackets. "Howard's Day Off" airs live on Hawaii Public Radio, 5 a.m.-7 a.m. Saturdays, and is billed as featuring "classical music and related materials, packed in authentic juices." The music comes from Howard Dicus's personal music collection and is aired live. Facebook members can join the Howard's Day Off Appreciation Society, created by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Will Walter Dods finally get out of running errands?

When I read the announcement that Walter Dods will become chairman of Alexander & Baldwin Inc., my first reaction was to think that maybe now his wife will stop asking him to run errands. In case Mrs. Dods reads this and wonders what in the Wide World of Sports I am talking about, let me explain that this has to do with a casual remark he made to me a couple years ago. Dods, whom most people know from his days of running First Hawaiian Bank, retired as CEO, and then later as chairman. Then he joined several boards and became chairman of Hawaiian Telcom. I interviewed him soon after joining KGMB and made a remark about how he seemed busier now than before his "retirement," having joined several boards. "Not only that," he said, "but now my wife assigns me errands - since I'm retired!" People like Dods don't retire, really, and they don't fade away, either, if they can help it. They like to keep busy, and they don't like to say no to interesting challenges or opportunities to pitch in and do some good. Whether the whole Hawaiian Telcom thing works out or not remains to be seen, but Dods was a prime mover in the creation of a local phone company, and a big part of his thinking was to bring back all the back office jobs Verizon had moved to the mainland. Most of what has gone wrong with Hawaiian Telcom so far has been a combination of colossal blunders by one contractor, now gone, and the wider difficulties faced by the entire legacy telecoms industry. The company is trying some interesting new ideas and may yet reinvent its business and prosper. At Alexander & Baldwin, where Dods has been a board member for 20 years, part of his mission has been the same as it was at First Hawaiian Bank, to create an orderly transition in the top management. Dods ascended at First Hawaiian on a predecessor's fatal stroke and never forgot the avoidable stresses that came from there being no succession plan. Since A&B head Allen Doane has been planning his retirement since 2007, it seems clear Dods continues to be a man on a mission, in addition, if the joke contained a grain of truth, to often being a man on an errand.

Does anybody know a trade wind dance?

For two months now we've had more days with faint winds than days with robust trades, and we're all getting pretty tired of it. Usually when one says one is pretty tired of something, one is speaking metaphorically, but in this case it is literally true: the lack of winds, which both creates more heat and humidity and makes you feel it more, causes actual fatigue. It requires more exertion to move through soupy humidity - this is analogous to the suspected and partially documented link between depression in times of low barometric pressure and the increase in exertion required for all movement when the barometer is low. At times like this, the barometer isn't the problem, the chemical composition of the atmosphere is. What makes it even worse? The dry air you're breathing in an air conditioned room, and the dehydration that is exacerbated by drinking caffeinated beverages to perk yourself up. Coffee, soda and anything else with caffeine in it is a diuretic that dries you out. Which makes you want to drink more coffee or soda. (I know: I drink a six-pack of Diet Coke per day, and this represents cutting back from years past.) For your information, a can of caffeinated cola has roughly half the caffeine of a cup of coffee; tea varies a lot but generally is in the middle. I confess to you that on three occasions over the past three months I went for a drive with Bernadette, ostensibly to run an errand, but really to feel intense AC right in my face. My condo building does not have air conditioning - individual units have their own air conditioners - and most years I use mine fewer than a dozen days. This summer the unit, which was old when I moved in, broke down. I've been wondering, though there hasn't been time to research it, whether it would be cheaper to put tiny units in three or four rooms and only use one at a time. I have a small portable unit in my bedroom but it stops when a removable one-gallon water container fills, and restarts only after it has been emptied. In this weather it fills in two hours. It doesn't contribute to restful sleep to be interrupted by a beeping sound like a microwave makes! Yet that is better than sleeping through it and waking in 90-degree heat feeling like you've had a heat stroke instead of a nap.

Who ' s going to start building your rail system?

Kiewit Pacific may not be familiar to everybody, so when they won the first design-build contract for Honolulu rail - for $90 million less than anticipated - I thought I would fill in the blanks a little. Kiewit Corp. is one of the world's largest contractors, an employee-owned company based in Omaha but with operations all over the place. Kiewit's international claim to fame is building the global Internet backbone network that was later spun off as Level 3 Communications. Kiewit Pacific has been based in Kapolei for a generation, does a lot of military construction work, and built the H-3. One advantage of the contract going to these guys is that because they already have contracts in Hawaii they already have a substantial local work force. I suspect that their experience with the H-3 will also sensitize them to issues they could encounter laying down rails for the first six and a half miles of the rail line, from Kapolei to Pearl Highlands near Leeward Community College.

Nonprofits say: let ' s put on a show!

It may be a coincidence, possibly even a harmonic convergence, but some of my favorite nonprofits are busy this week preparing entertaining events to raise funds. Hawaii Public Radio, which lets me play around on the radio Saturday mornings between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., is slogging through its twice-yearly fundraiser. Give them a call and give them some money. They operate quite economically and put on a great show every day. Even the pledge drives can be fun when the right people are on. The Society for Professional Journalists, in its annual attempt to raise funds for paid internships at broadcasting and publishing outlets, stages its Gridiron shows this week, with the dress rehearsal that's really a semi-opening night on Thursday. My role this year is limited to being an emcee but from what I hear it's going to be hilarious again. The Hawaii Council on Economic Education, in its annual fundraiser at the end of the week, will do it popular dinner with a stock exchange, with pretend stocks fluctuating in response to pretend news developments as the people at each table buy and sell the stocks. I taped my three pretend business reports for the evening today at PBS Hawaii. Lanakila Meals on Wheels is doing its own thing Thursday, when more than 50 restaurants from Alan Wong to Zippy's will let people buy tables with proceeds going to feed elders in need. Nonprofits are generally having a hard time of it in this recession. It's a good time to make a difference by writing a check for an organization whose work you admire.