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THE BELL CURVE:A week of contrasts: one joyful event, the other sad

This week, the Bell Curve is a clueless but enthusiastic music critic.

That’s because on last Sunday, I was blown away by a very special kind of spiritual music called jazz at the Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church in Corona del Mar. If there were any atheists in the audience that day, they have to be wondering if the music we heard could possibly have been less than divinely inspired.

It was generated by a group under the direction of Norm Freeman (on the vibes), with Theo Saunders (piano), Putter Smith (bass) and Kendall Kay (drums), each of whom offer musical resumes of their work individually over several decades, with many of the greatest musicians in the business, from pop to Broadway to classical. Name dropping would fill the rest of this column and need more space.

But last Sunday, we could just be grateful that they have settled in nearby parts of Southern California, both to work at their music in our blessed environment and to have fun by playing gigs like St. Michael’s just — if I can be permitted a bad joke — for the hell of it. Father Freeman has another, closer connection. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1997, and is now priest-in-charge of St. George’s Church and Academy in Laguna Hills.

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Last Sunday, the musicians — improvising much of the time — had almost as much fun as we did in the audience, converting such ballads as “Pennies from Heaven” and “It Might As Well Be Spring” and the operatic “Summertime” to a jazz beat in arrangements they often created themselves. The music offered islands of jazz between Biblical commercials by Pastor Peter Haynes, and somehow Duke Ellington and Ecclesiastes didn’t seem at all incompatible. As Father Freeman says: “Jazz gives voice to the human spirit through a musical language that transcends the limits of speech.”

Over and beyond the inspiring program — or rather because of it — the thing that struck me most about this Sunday afternoon Jazz Vespers was the abundance of empty seats. Church members said this was actually a good crowd, but from my perspective there should have been jazz aficionados piling up at the door. I would gladly have paid concert rates to hear this music, and to see it performed gratis before empty seats seemed like a great waste to me.

I hope that reporting here on my Jazz Vesper Sunday will help get the word out. This group of musicians will be back about the same time next year, and they’re worth a note on your calendar. So is the entire Vespers season at St. Michael’s, called “First Sundays at Five,” that mostly features choral music and runs from October to June. And oh, yes, there is food and wine afterward, and a chance for members of the audience to meet and converse with the artists.


There was another editorial bloodbath last week at the Los Angeles Times, and this time some of the victims refused to go out with a shrug and a team player “best wishes” to those of their comrades still standing. This was especially true of Al Martinez.

I hope you’ve read him. If you haven’t, you’ve missed some of the most graceful writing I’ve ever read in a newspaper. The Martinez column appeared twice a week, up to his demise, in the Calendar section of the Times. He was mildly out-of-place there, but then he would have generated the same unease in any other section. He belonged in none of them — and all of them.

Unlike Jack Smith, he could be very tough. And unlike Art Buchwald, he was seldom given to satire. He took the temperature of the human condition in every column. And he did it with such grace and style that he could make the smallest nugget of subject matter compelling.

He got dumped last week, ungraciously and peremptorily, along with 60 other good journalists.

But unlike the others, Martinez didn’t go quietly. And I related to him on two counts. First, because I admire him copiously as a writer and thought killing his column to be a terrible mistake.

And, second — although I don’t put myself in his class as a writer — my Times column some years ago was buried alive in the same take-no-prisoners way as his.

In his final column, Martinez wrote: “I don’t know how to say good-bye. The need to do so has been thrust upon me suddenly, like the quick strike of summer lightning from a non-threatening sky. I wasn’t prepared.

“The editor of the section … telephoned to say that my column, in its present form, is ended, and that I’m being given a buyout. No one asked if I wanted it. I would have said no. I would have said I’m not ready yet. My prose is strong, and my mind is clear … But they didn’t ask.”

Maybe profits will go up when Martinez is dropped from the payroll. What will suffer is the quality of the newspaper. I feel that loss today. And I salute Al Martinez.


  • JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Santa Ana Heights. His column runs Thursdays.
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