Better Late Than Never, Mr. Williams
What's the longest time you've ever waited to receive something that you've ordered online? As of this past Saturday, I now have a new answer to that question --- 187 days.
As a child of the Seventies, I have fond recollections of Sesame Street's Pinball Number Count, which debuted when I was five years old. I've long wondered just what role the show played in the wholesale gentrification of Manhattan. After all, the idea behind Sesame Street was to show dirt-poor ghetto kids an environment that was familiar to them. Imagine being a child growing up in New York to disadvantaged parents. Chances are you've never seen any green space besides Central Park. A television program like Leave It To Beaver might as well have been on Mars. It only made you feel more forgotten by the world.
The brilliance of Sesame Street was that it incorporated the difficult parts of city life at a face value that was neither saccharine nor alarmist. Oscar The Grouch lives in a trash can; every kid who grew up in Manhattan's Alphabet City, on which "123 Sesame Street" was based, would have known of a few bums or homeless people. They were neither saints nor automatically child molesters, they were just grumpy and often best avoided. The world of Sesame Street wasn't squeaky clean. It was ethnically diverse in non-self-conscious fashion. The kids didn't look particularly prosperous or camera-ready.
As a vehicle for reaching out to disadvantaged kids, Sesame Street was brilliant. The knock-on effect, one that was almost certainly unintended by its creators, was that it gave suburban and rural kids a non-threatening look at New York City years before they would have the chance to move from the Midwest or Southwest to Brooklyn like every other hipster douchebag in America. It had to have been a aid to gentrification.
The result? If you want to live in the real world of Sesame Street nowadays, you'll need to budget $2,500 a month or more in rent. If you want the same kind of room that I have at Casa Baruth in Powell, Ohio, you should plan on spending closer to $7,500 a month, plus another $1,500 for parking. Looked at in reverse: for what you'll pay, including tax aspects, to have a decent three-or-four-bedroom place on Sesame Street, you can have this absolute stunner of a million-dollar, 6,270-square-foot home down the street from Les Wexner and the other Columbus, Ohio petit bourgeois. Actually, by the time you do all the tax math, the New Albany place is cheaper. Enough so that you could fly to the East Village six times a year, stay in a great hotel, and catch all the shows before returning to your mansion and relaxing on the lawn in the evenings, secure in the knowledge that the New Albany cops will pull a Rodney King on anybody even vaguely threatening who loiters around the gates between you and the outside world.
Alright, enough with Sociology Lectures Given By A Converted Midwesterner, and back to "Pinball Number Count". I was idly wondering if anybody had ever used the theme song from that segment as a basis for a jazz tune, and YouTube helpfully delivered a take by Brandon Williams and Nicholas Payton. Nicholas Payton, of course, is the brilliant trumpeter and activist who declared that jazz music died in 1959 and has been outspoken in opposition to the Wynton Marsalises of the world. Brandon Williams, on the other hand, is a Detroit-based producer and musician whose album, XII, is intended to be a sort of final statement regarding his musical vision and ideas. It makes perfect sense that he opens the album with Pinball Number Count; many people his age, and mine, had our first exposure to jazz or fusion through Sesame Street.
I was impressed enough by what I heard to buy XII, but the only way to buy it is through Brandon's label, Soulasis Music. They take PayPal, so last September I paid nearly twenty bucks for the CD in the expectation that it would arrive. I did that even though YouTube has the whole album for free, because I want to support musicians who are trying something beside the usual run of radio-oriented garbage and I don't mind spending a few bucks in that cause.
Twenty-five days later, the CD hadn't arrived. I emailed the label and got no response. I opened a dispute with PayPal and was told that the CD would be put right in the mail. It never arrived. I let the dispute expire because at that point I was too annoyed with the situation to devote any further time and personal agitation to it.
What a surprise, then, to have a Priority Mail envelope from Brandon himself on Saturday with my long-delayed copy of XII. I've been listening to it ever since. As far as "producer" records go, it's an uneven but satisfying effort. I have to say that it doesn't sound that great, even through my Parasound amp and a set of Larsen Model 8 speakers. A few of the synth parts have an odd buzz to them and it kind of sounds like it was mixed in a basement. Much of the muddle that I ascribed to the YouTube compressor is actually part and parcel of the Red Book CD audio.
I'm still glad that Brandon finally came through. It's a legit record and a real pleasure to hear. If you want a copy of your own, contact Brandon and order it. Just be patient. Patience is a virtue. After all, anybody who was patient enough to stay in Sesame Street eventually found themselves living the modern NYC-as-theme-park high life, right?