Two cultural icons with roots in the 1930s are about to celebrate big birthdays: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon turns 75 on Valentine's Day, and the Village Vanguard turns 70 this year and is holding a week-long party Feb. 14-20. "Falcon" is a fine book, certainly Hammett's best-known, and if its 75th anniversary brings him any new readers, all the better. (Jesse Hamlin has a fine piece in yesterday's S.F. Chronicle on Hammett's rough life-and-times.)
But "Falcon" pales alongside "Red Harvest," a relentless book that left me staggering. The story of a nameless detective-agency operative dispatched by his company to an utterly corrupt town, "Red Harvest" has a surprisingly contemporary, unsentimental--even amoral--ethos. But it's also laced with reminders that the 1920s and '30s were a different era from our own, when telephones were still novel and important news traveled by telegram.
Jazz and bloody pulp fiction don't seem to have much in common anymore, now that the music's acquired a high-toned patina. But it's useful to keep in mind that jazz was originally the real-life soundtrack for the sort of people who featured in books like "Red Harvest." Ashley Kahn recounts the Vanguard's history in today's Wall Street Journal, and he notes that the club had previously been a speakeasy, and that when Vanguard founder Max Gordon opened his doors in 1935, the location was suitable because, among other reasons, it satisfied legal requirements by being "two hundred feet from a church or synagogue or school."
I've never been to the Vanguard, but I can testify to the accuracy of Kahn's quote from Bruce Lundvall, the head of Blue Note Records: "The words, 'Live at the Village Vanguard' do have a direct and positive influence on an album's sales." This isn't just hype--saxophonist Joe Lovano says that the club's unusual triangular shape makes it "the best venue on the East Coast for recording jazz, period." (Uh, Ashley, the natural follow-up question would be, "So there's someplace better on the West Coast? Where is it?" Not all WSJ readers live in NYC. Hell, some of us live in California.) And the club's magic shines through in recordings of John Coltrane's November 1961 sessions there, captured on Live at the Village Vanguard and Impressions. Check out Sonny Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 2, too.
