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Swing State Blues

Twice a year, every spring and fall, Ithaca, New York hosts one of the biggest used book sales in the United States. Staffed by a legion of volunteers who work for months accepting and organizing the steady stream of donations, the event supports the Tompkins County Library and runs over three successive weekends. As the sale proceeds, prices sink while the shelves in the large warehouse dedicated to the sale are plundered and replenished until stores are almost totally exhausted. On the tacked-on Tuesday that closes out the proceedings it will cost you one dollar “for all the books that will fit in a medium-sized paper grocery bag.”

On the first morning and across the opening weekend long lines run down the sidewalk outside the warehouse. Dealers, collectors, and bibliophiles are savvy to the riches inside. Others just love a good sale and relish grabbing copies of this or that oddity, old familiar, long-lost paperback for the bedside table or cheap, yet thoughtful gift.

Joining the early scrums also counts as an anthropological foray into Ithaca culture and a walk-about archeological excavation of the state of that durable, but increasingly doubted technology, the book

Treasure and trash await. Home to Cornell University and Ithaca College on neighboring hills looking down on the flats where the warehouse stands, Ithaca is a bookish place because of its thousands of students, the grizzled professoriate and a populace that boasts a high density of novelists and poets.

Last Sunday, on the sale’s final weekend, I decided to stop in at the sale late in the afternoon. Residents and visitors were still filing in. The shelves had to be emptied; supply was down, but demand for what remained was too. Fire-sale prices were in effect.

I cut past “Collector’s Corner,” long since sacked for first editions and other goodies, and made my way along the east wall of the warehouse where I ran into a friend who was mulling over some Michener. “Pretty well picked over,” he said, shrugging as he put back a worn copy of Hawaii.

I turned right past a case of dictionaries, mostly Webster’s Collegiate like the one I took, fittingly enough, to college in 1983. It was a volume I didn’t just consult, but loved to read. It’s still on my shelf, but I haven’t cracked it in at least a decade, probably two. The warehouse dictionary bookcase was utterly packed, as if not a single copy had been bought, even as a relic to be had for a few pennies. “Siri, where do old dictionaries go when they’re no longer loved?” She responds in bland tones: “They are pitched into furnaces and flame up real pretty as they feed the Cloud with electric joy juice.”

A few rows farther on I came to a clearing in the forest of bookshelves where the record bins were. Flipping through the “Organ Hits” and “Folk Medleys,” one gets an inkling of just how much offal was pressed into vinyl by the music-packing industry. Exhibit A in the “Blues and Naughty” bin was Rusty Warren’s Knocker’s Up.

To be sure, there are orders of magnitude greater quantities of ear-damaging, health-threatening fare on YouTube, but that doesn’t take up as much space, at least not on your shelves (the above-mentioned server farms are not visible out your living room’s picture window).

I checked out the comedy bin and found a single Bob Newhart record among at least a dozen by Bill Cosby, his mugging on the covers now presenting as sinister, not silly. Cosby may have beaten his conviction on three counts of aggravated indecent assault on a technicality, but he remains in the prison of infamy and public condemnation at the Friends of Tompkins County Public Library Sale!

I sidled along to Movie Music. All the LPs were now ten cents apiece, but soundtracks didn’t seem to be selling well either. I grabbed Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Patton. A white oval against the blue background of Old Glory and just over the left shoulder and a mass of medals on the general’s uniform proclaimed that the LP “includes, uncensored, George C. Scott’s full rendition of Patton’s address to his troops.” Now, there’s the stuff of a romantic evening at home!

I also grabbed Elmer Bernstein’s nerve-slashing, addiction-addled soundtrack for The Man With The Golden Arm with its combined ranks of jazz and classical soloists. Shelley Manne makes a cameo in the movie and takes the solo pantomimed by the film’s protagonist, the junky and would-be percussionist played by Frank Sinatra. The cover’s purple and blue rectangles, like fat prison bars enclosing the craving arm and straining fingers of the title character, echo the angles and edges of Saul Bass’s jazz-jolted credit sequence. his is music that swings and stutters, groans and shouts, blasts and bleats. And I got have my fix of Elmer B for only a dime.

The Jazz bin is nearby. It’s now sparse and sad, but the cover of the last of its LPs bursts with exuberant, color extolling the “The Exciting New Trombone Sounds of the Kai Winding Orchestra” in The Swingin’ States released by Columbia Records in 1958.

Ithaca is a blue bastion in a sea of red, its congressional district stretching two hundred miles to the western border of a swing state—Pennsylvania. A sense of dread hangs over liberal Ithaca and the book sale offers not only much-needed distraction but of affirmation through this sustaining and proudly local twice-yearly ritual. No wonder the clientele passed over Winding’s unwitting reminder of the election results coming a few days. His trombone may be alloyed, but his optimism isn’t. That mood strikes a sour American note on the last Sunday of October 2024 in Ithaca, New York—not a swing state.

On the LP cover, Winding lounges in leisure wear on the flipped-down tailgate of a red 50s station wagon next to a map-reading, smiling woman showing shiny shins above high-heeled shoes. The trombonist holds his instrument and grins back at his road trip partner. They are not off the interstate but on (more accurately, pasted into) a rural route. Eisenhower had just started in on his infrastructure program of the future.

Winding emigrated from his native Denmark to the U. S. with his parents in 1934 when he was twelve. He took up the trombone a few years later, and by his early twenties had become one of the first bebop trombonists, jamming after hours with Charlie Parker at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and contributing to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool in 1949. Winding could deftly manage the brisk bop tempos with skill and imagination, and there is much of that unabashed showmanship to be heard on the Swingin’ States. For several years he partnered with another founding bop trombonist, J. J. Johnson. On their recordings from the 1950s and into the 1970s, it is sometimes difficult, at least for me, to figure out who is playing.

Winding was also a talented and prolific arranger, as he virtuosically demonstrates in Swingin’ States in his treatment of his trombone quartet backed up by a scintillating rhythm section featuring the furiously fast, yet feathery fine pianist Hank Jones. Winding gives Jones space to shine on the third track of the A-side: “California, Here I Come.” Winding spent years touring, but also worked as a studio musician, and even broke into the Billboard top 10 in 1963 with “More”—proof that he could write captivating melodies and package them for the American taste.

Winding’s own humorous liner notes to Swingin’ States embrace the joys of touring “through the various states, absorbing the scenery and meeting interesting people.” This curiosity and warmth led him to the idea of a travelogue of songs about states. Winding remained eager to share the wealth of his talent and his love of his instrument not just with jazz aficionados: “The wide appeal of the sound [of four trombones] is evidenced by the fact that aside from the idiom of listening and concert-type engagements the group is in ever-increasing demand for college dances, school hops and ballrooms.”

First on the itinerary is “Indiana,”; whose chord progression was a favorite of the boppers, famously providing the framework for Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee.” Winding’s 1958 band takes a loping Midwestern pace far less taxing than that of Parker’s big-city sprint. The next number, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” crosses the Mason-Dixon Line to the Jim Crow South. Winding’s was an integrated ensemble. Long-time Basie drummer Gus Johnson swings as robustly on this unwoke, down-south song as he does across the other stops in Land of the Not-So-Free.

After a trip to “Louisiana,” the group bathes in “Moonlight in Vermont,” and then thinks about, if it doesn’t actually visit, the only current swing state hymned on Swingin’ States—“Georgia on My Mind.” The B-side kicks off with “Jersey Bounce,” before shuffling into the ballad, “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Then it’s out to Idaho where Winding serves up some spirited exchanges with another trombone legend, Frank Mehak.

“At Last Alaska” points the trombones’ slides way out west to the newly admitted 49th state, before rolling around in the “Mississippi Mud.” The finale is a bongo-boosted, wittily Latinized “Oklahoma!”

This album swings with a huge smile. Swing State was a term coined in the 1950s, a few years before the nearly eponymous Winding LP. Whatever way Pennsylvania and the other swing states swing on Tuesday they’ll never swing like Winding and company.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)

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