Dick Golden: “A deejay with ears!”
Editor’s Note: SD METRO Associate Editor Douglas Page interviewed SiriusXM Real Jazz channel host Dick Golden. He hosts “American Jazz,” which can be heard between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday morning and, again, at 9 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday. Dick talks about what makes jazz valuable and unique to the United States, his friendship with the late, great singer Tony Bennett and the letters he exchanged with Frank Sinatra. This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview is found on the SD METRO website, sandiegometro.com.
SD METRO: How did jazz develop?
Dick Golden: In America, it was the immigrant experience. I heard something recently where Richard Nixon, when he had Sinatra at the White House as a guest to entertain the president of Italy, commented that early in our nation’s history, we didn’t have a lot of musicians. So, when the US Marine Band recruited members to join that elite group, they went to Europe to recruit musicians. So, this is the early part of the Republic’s history, and I trace it up to American popular music up to a point, say, in 1826, the year that Stephen Foster was born. It seemed to be our first American folk music, but it wasn’t really until after the incredible immigration of people from Europe, primarily Jewish people, trying to escape tyranny in Russia.
And then this other group of people who came here against their will, the African Americans, the slaves. When those two groups arrived and started intermingling, we came up with this incredible music, jazz. Some of the rhythms are from Africa, some from South America.
Louis Armstrong’s first integration with family, as we know it, was when the Karnofsky family, Jewish immigrants in New Orleans with a scrap dealer business, hired him at 9 or 10 to play his trumpet to announce that they were coming through the streets looking for refuge and junk and rubbish. Louis ate at their home every night. They sort of adopted him. They became surrogate parents, and Louis always wore a star of David and had Matza. So you can see right there, there was this cultural interchange between the two groups. And I suppose ultimately, we defined jazz as freedom of expression.
SD METRO: New Orleans is credited as jazz’s birthplace, but in the early 20th century, you see many jazz artists move to Chicago. Why is that and how did it influence their music?
Dick Golden: Louis was one of those people. He moved up there after Joe Oliver, who was his great mentor, moved to Chicago. He called Louis, who had never been out of New Orleans and said, “You’ve got to come up here.” And that’s when Lous first began to get attention, and there are all these little pockets breaking out all over the place. In New York, it was Harlem and it was that area, the Renaissance going on in that area. But I think what we find today is that in San Diego or in Cape Cod, there are these little pockets, little communities of jazz where it’s cultivated and nourished.
Another important part of it was the invention of radio. Certainly by 1925 or 1928, the whole country could hear this music. They could tune in and listen to Count Basie in Kansas City and Benny Goodman playing in Chicago or in New York. So that helped make it national music.
SD METRO: As the music goes across the country in the early decades of the 20th century, how does it change? What sort of influences does it see?
Dick Golden: There were different eras. It just had this sort of organic growth. We start off with Swing and Big Band, Dixieland and Ragtime. At the very beginning we think of Ragtime and how it evolved, and then the Big Band Swing Era, which was so important because these musicians were developing their chops and skills. Then it moves to the ’50s. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie changed the music. And then Miles Davis and the people in the ’50s and ’60s came along. It never became stagnant. New generations bring some new interpretations to it.
SD METRO: A number of Black jazz artists moved to Paris, especially after World War I. Why were they there?
Dick Golden: Well, it brought our music to Europe, of course, but a lot of it was to escape institutionalized racism, where these incredible gifted artists who were revered around the world could play at a club, a paid gig, but they couldn’t eat there or if they were playing at a hotel or something, they couldn’t stay at that hotel. It must’ve been just so disorienting.
SD METRO: What makes jazz unique compared to other forms of music?
Dick Golden: I think it’s the improvisational part of it, and it’s that combination of melody and the rhythms. When you hear the lyrics, you think a thought. When you hear one of these great songs, like “My Funny Valentine” or “Little Girl Blue,” you think of a feeling. There’s a visceral reaction and you listen to it. And I think that’s part of the foundation of jazz.
SD METRO: Music is one of those things that can sort of get you through a bad time, but then also make a celebration even better.
Dick Golden: I’ve always felt it was given to us by whatever creative forces put us here, and it imbued us with life. There was already a recognition that, A, you’re going to die, so you’re not going to live forever. But along the way between birth and death, you’re going to experience marvelous highlights. But there are going to be some difficult times. Music is in our quiver, and we can just take up when something goes wrong, you pull out a Louis Armstrong “West End Blues” and put it on, and it doesn’t make that wrong or the bad thing go away, but it helps you cope and deal in a healthier way.
SD METRO: When you think about the 10 musicians who put jazz on the map, who would they be?
Dick Golden: There are just so many. I could draw up a list that would say these names. Someone else would have their own list. At the very top is Louis Armstrong. And if you talk to every musician who played that instrument today, it would be Wynton Marsalis. Singers, like Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, said, “Louis is a singer.” It was the soulfulness that he brought to everything he did.
And again, that’s part of the definition of jazz. So I put Louis there. I put Duke Edward Kennedy, Duke Ellington, born in Washington DC on April 29th, 1899, who came into his full chops and his full popularity when he went to Harlem in the Cotton Club days in the early 1930s. Count Basie for rhythm. I always think Basie liked that rhythm section with Freddie Green on guitar and Joe Jones on drums and Count at the piano. Everyone was astounded by it. The singers, for me, are the ultimate realization of the art form because they’re collaborating with musicians. To have a great singer and a great musician doing the arrangement and conducting the orchestra and stuff, when you listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, for instance, to me that’s the epitome.
And it goes on. I think of Dave Brubeck in the ’50s. The great ambassadors I think were Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and that whole school came along and nourished and fed jazz. And then the Latin influences that Cal Tjader and all the Latin people came along. And so it’s hard to come up with a list of … Again, I love Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, and all the female singers.
SD METRO: I’m thinking about just Miles Davis. He seems like a rebel. As the story goes, he sees fewer people coming into jazz clubs, and it becomes the inspiration for his album “Bitches Brew”. How would you describe him?
Dick Golden: Like people who were in the music at the time, they were being pushed to the margins. The big bands could not subsidize traveling around the country with 18 to 20 guys. So they’re all breaking from the big bands and looking for gigs. Simultaneous with that is the Baby Boomer preferring rock music. Miles had to compete with all the other new stuff. And I can understand the bitterness that an artist like that who was just so incredibly gifted would have.
SD METRO: He seemed very, very frustrated not only with what was going on culturally in the United States, but then also with his own record company.
Dick Golden: We forget that it’s a business – a big business. Record companies want something that sits on a shelf for a very, very limited amount of time and is quickly replaced by a new product. These guys were artists. They wanted to do something that would be permanent, not temporary, not taste-of-the-day. Miles demanded freedom of expression. Here we are talking about him and what he achieved. We don’t remember who the producers were, or who was running Columbia Records. We remember the artists.
SD METRO: How does jazz reflect American culture?
Dick Golden: I keep coming back to freedom of expression. We’re a country for which the Statue of Liberty was built. People didn’t come only for job opportunities but because the culture seemed big. A lot of European countries were married to traditions that were centuries old. We were a new entity. It encouraged freedom of expression, new growth, new ways of approaching music. There’s a famous cartoon that was in the New Yorker back in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War after Louis and Dizzy and Benny Goodman had made these State Department-sponsored jazz ambassador trips around the world because even behind the Iron Curtain, where our American music was loved.
And the chair of the meeting says, “We have a very serious situation in Europe with the Russians. We have to make a decision to help quell the embers that are flaring that could provoke a war. We have to decide whether we should send Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or Louis Armstrong.” And that’s the impact that the music had. Our American jazz and American song classics have a universal audience.
SD METRO: Who are today’s musicians who are keeping this musical art form going?
Dick Golden: Oh, there are many. I mentioned him earlier, but he is a force that is to be reckoned with, and that’s Wynton Marsalis. I think Wynton not only for his virtuosity as a musician and a composer, but his sense of the … I just wish he was sitting here next to me and could jump in and answer some of your questions, because his sense of the history of this music and its place in our cultural history in the United States is so formidable.
SD METRO: Jazz Appreciation Month is coming up in April. How does this help keep jazz going, keep it in front and center in people’s minds?
Dick Golden: One of the essential elements of it is creating these incredible educational packages, which are distributed and available for high schools, public and private high schools all around the country. And they’re packets of historical books, documents, and music on these artists. When I lectured in the music department at George Washington University, I always asked myself, how do you approach a group of college students and talk about Ella Fitzgerald? This was only a couple of years ago. I believe that before you play a note, start with a story about this person born in 1917 who dropped out of high school, had a very abusive situation as a child in Harlem when growing up. Her stepfather was very abusive. She ran away from home. She was arrested for being a delinquent, but never got into any major trouble. She was a beautiful soul and loved dancing.
At the Apollo Club in Harlem, there was an amateur night. They would select eight candidates or something like that for their amateur night. Ella’s friends persuaded her to sign up. She signed up. She wanted to be a dancer. She was going to be a dancer. And at this point, in that classroom with 22-year-olds, I’ve said, “Now listen to what happened.” And I’ll play an audio clip of Andre Previn interviewing Ella in the ’70s.
Ella said, “I get out there on stage. I was the first amateur to appear and out on stage taking bow after bow after their credible performance with the two dancing sisters in Harlem.” They were very famous. And Ella looked and she said, “No way I’m going to go out and dance after them.” And she said, “But then they announced me and I had to come out on stage.” And Previn said, “Well, what did you do?” And she said, “Well, you know, my mother loved Connie Boswell. She played her records at home. And there was one particular song that she played and I loved Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Judy”. So I sang “Judy” and the audience went crazy.” And the MC said, ‘You have to do an encore.'”
When she was being applauded, she knew this was what she was going to do for the rest of her life. And then I’ll say to the class, now listen to what happened. See, she had a backup plan; always have a backup plan in life. Ella is nervous, kind of gangly, off the street, going out in front of this rowdy audience. But rather than collapse or fall apart, she reached into that quiver.
Close your eyes for a moment and think it’s 1915 and you’re in Hoboken, N.J., and there’s a doctor assisting a lady delivering this baby. He’s having a lot of problems because the mother is very small, and the baby turns out to be about 13 lbs. The doctor uses forceps to pull the baby out, but in doing so, he tears the baby’s ear, the skin, and it’s really a mass of tissue and blood. And there’s an Italian grandmother in the room watching all of this and crossing herself. While the doctor’s trying to revive the mother, the grandmother takes that mass of tissue and blood and sticks it under a faucet, and the baby starts crying. That was the first sound Frank Sinatra made.
And he kept those scars, his daughter Nancy wrote in her book, to remind him of what he heard when he was growing up, “Do something with your life. You came this close to not being here. There’s a reason for you being here.”
SD METRO: American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to the 1920s as The Jazz Age. Did that help cement jazz into the American consciousness?
Dick Golden: I think it did. And I think there was a whole constellation of events going on. By that time, World War I had been fought and won, but had scarred and left some incredible pain in the country. And this music was relief for a lot of that.
SD METRO: What’s the demographic that finds jazz the most appealing?
Dick Golden: I find it’s a lot of people in their ’40s and ’50s, and the Baby Boomers. They grew in that age where you could love Elvis Presley, but you’d also hear Erroll Garner on the radio.
SD METRO: Your show runs for four hours each week. How long does it take you to produce it, and how do you select the artists?
Dick Golden: It takes about five hours to produce a four-hour program.
SD METRO: How did the show “American Jazz” come about?
Dick Golden: In 1999, Tony Bennett called, saying, “Dick, I received the business card of Michael Friedman. He’s the general manager of CBS Radio News.” Parenthetically, Tony was such a great friend and mentor and was always saying, “Dick, I’ve got to find a bigger platform for you. You’re having all this wonderful success in the Cape, and you love doing it, but you should be doing it.” Just to have Tony’s enthusiasm was enough. He said, “What I’d like to do is meet Mike Friedman, and then get you into a conference with Michael, you and I, let’s sit down and see if there’s an opportunity at CBS radio to do your program.” It was instant karma with Michael when Tony and I met with him.
Michael went off and explored, but there was nothing. CBS wasn’t interested in a music format. But Michael still was. He left CBS and went to George Washington University in 2001 as vice president of external relations. He got in touch with me again, he said, “Dick, I have a concept. Why don’t we do this in Duke Ellington’s hometown? The University is located four blocks from the White House, but also four blocks from Duke Ellington’s workplace in the west end of Washington. We’ll do a program and call it ‘American Jazz.’” So Mike was just an extraordinarily creative guy. He wanted to create CDs of the program that could be distributed to people at the University.
He also commissioned Al Hirschfeld to do a caricature of Louis Armstrong. That’s how much care and attention went into it. So, after the first couple of weeks and the first label that went on the CD, he sent it to Tony. And Tony then called, saying, “I have an idea. There’s this new satellite radio service that just started in Washington. It’s called XM Radio, and I know a few people there. Let me call and see who the CEO is and see if I could make a meeting.” And he got a meeting with Hugh Panero. Mike and I came over from GW. Tony came in from New York, and now XM is only about a year old or something at this point. When we went into Mr. Panero’s office, he had a Tony Bennett CD playing in the background. He said, “Before you say anything, whatever it is, Tony, you want, you have it.”
So “American Jazz” began in 2002 on XM, and then in 2008, XM merged with Sirius. In 2020, Mark Ruffin, the program director, expanded it to four hours with an encore at midnight on Sunday.
SD METRO: Two things from listening to your show, and I’ve been listening to it for a number of years now. I always sense there’s this great passion that you bring and love that you bring to the music as well as the artist. Where does it come from and when did it start?
Dick Golden: I think it starts with my own life. I knew when I was probably nine or 10 when I first heard that music. There was a real visceral feeling of who these people were. And as I evolved, got into my teen years and that sort of thing, the fusion of the technology and the radio, which I thought was magic. I mean, there are all these signals traveling through the air, and we’re not aware of it until you turn on the radio. Then they come out. So there’s that, the magic of communications, but then communicating through this incredible music, which was also magical.
While growing up, I thought I’d love to have a radio program where I could play this music because I know what it does for me.
SD METRO: One of the things I’ve noticed is that you credit all the artists who are playing on the individual song. It’s not just the lead one, like the singer or the lead saxophone player or lead trumpeter. You credit everybody who is participating in making that song happen. It would seem that that would be a bit unique.
Dick Golden: I love spreading the credit around, and especially when it comes to composers and lyricists.
SD METRO: Tell us about your friendship with Tony Bennett, and if I’m correct, you two collaborated on a book.
Dick Golden: We did in 2017, Onstage and in the Studio. My friendship goes back to the first time I met Tony. I was in college in the early ’60s in Boston, and I had a chance to interview him. This was after “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which he recorded in January 1962, had been released.
When I went to interview him, I was so nervous, and I brought a lady friend, Linda Gordon, who loved him. We were going to interview Tony in his dressing room, and I had my little tape recorder, and I’m so nervous, and we’re sitting on the couch and Tony is like everything’s so easy. And we calmed down and he’s just so, “Nice to have you here. You enjoyed the show?”
So, I started the tape recorder and I said, “Tony, you can’t turn the radio on today without hearing “Who Can I Turn To.” “Oh, thank you,” he said, “thank you very much.” And I said, “But I have to admit something. My favorite track on the album is the song “I Walk a Little Faster.” And, suddenly, this big Tony Bennett smile came across his face and he looked over at Linda, points at me, and said, “Finally a deejay with ears.”
It started there. Then the story moves along till in the early 1980s when Beverly and Bill Carmen purchased the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis. They invited him, and for 30 years, he came to Cape Cod. Each year he came, our personal relationship just blossomed, and within two years or so, he was inviting me to New York to his family, Christmas parties, and to do this and do that.
And then we started talking on the phone for several years. It was almost a daily ritual after he finished painting. He’d call about 4 p.m. and we’d have these incredible phone conversations that ranged … I mean, we talked the business of life, and Tony’s had such a … I don’t think a conversation ended without him saying, “Dick, I am the luckiest guy in the world. I count my blessings every single day. I’m just so lucky.” He was a guy coming out of the Depression, losing his father to congestive heart disease when he was about 10 years old. Italian immigrant grandparents, going through the depression, going through World War II, marching Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma, all of that history. He was a guy who … He actually held a gun. He saw people killed in World War II. He was a total human being.
He was a humanist, he disdained false patriotism, he would call it. This is our planet that we live on. We all should be patriots of the planet. He was like that. He loved America and what America represented to the world, and that’s why his constituency in terms of demographics and race and gender and all of that were so different. People discerned that from him. People used to say to me, “Oh, you have a friendship with Tony Bennett. What’s he really like?” And I said, “Well, what’s your perception?” “Well, he just seems like such a nice guy. I mean, I saw him on the Carson Show, and he’s just so terrific. He’s always kind. Never says anything that’s crude or rude. Never puts anyone down. And he has a beautiful smile, but what’s he really like?”
And I said, well, multiply your impressions by 10. He just had the most incredible temperament and fixation on only wanting to give the public the best. Rarely did I go in before a show because I never wanted to be a distraction in the green room. But 15, 20 minutes, a half hour before Tony said, “Excuse me,” he said, “I have to go in and get my vocalizing done now.” Every night. I said, “Well, you sang last night. You’re going to sing tomorrow night.” And the door would shut. You’d hear him in there with an opera record and you’d say, “He cares that much.”
Duke Ellington wrote about him, in his autobiography “Music is My Mistress.” The first line on Tony Bennett is, “Tony Bennett is a Christian. And he lives like one.” And he wasn’t talking about religion, he was talking about the philosophy, the forgive thy neighbor, all of the stuff that goes under that umbrella. That’s what he embodied and practiced.
SD METRO: I read that you have a charcoal portrait of Duke Ellington. Who’s the artist?
Dick Golden: Tony Bennett. One night in 1999, when I was in New York, he, Susan and I had dinner and he had brought this package. It was all wrapped. He said, “I have something for you.” It’s this beautiful charcoal portrait of Duke Ellington that I treasure.
And Ellington, that’s another book. Tony said, “I always thanked Duke in the ’70s.” Duke said to Tony, “You’ve got to be more serious about your painting.” And Tony painted very well at that time. And Tony said, “Well, Duke, I make the time, not having enough time is the excuse.” Duke replied, “I write, I conduct, I play piano, and I paint. So, make time for your painting.” Hearing that from Duke inspired Tony to become serious about painting. And he became Tony Bennett, the painter, as I mentioned, and has three paintings at the Smithsonian.
Tony said, “By virtue of doing that and focusing on my painting, I never wander out of my creative zone. When singing becomes burdensome, I go and paint, and when I’m exhausted by that, I go out on stage and sing. But I’m always in that zone — creating.” And that was because of Duke who just loved him and loved Tony’s family. I mentioned Tony’s dad died when he was 10 in 1936. Duke was like a surrogate father to Tony. Tony espoused all those human qualities that Duke loved and found attractive in people.
SD METRO: You wrote that letter to Frank Sinatra when you were working at the radio station on Cape Cod, and lo and behold, something that no one would ever have probably expected, he replies. Tell us about that.
Dick Golden: I wrote him in August of ’83. I was lacing up my sneakers (to go for a run) and I saw a New York Times front page story that they had just announced the Kennedy Center honorees for 1983. And among the five was Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra’s in his sixties, and I was just so thrilled to see it was finally going to happen. So, I’m running and thought, “I’m going to write a letter, a congratulatory letter. Sinatra will never see it, but I am so moved by this experience that I’m going to go and write a letter.” When I came back, I wrote a two-page letter to Frank Sinatra.
I told him I’m a radio guy and that I so appreciated his artistry because I think for people in my generation, people grew up listening to his albums on Capitol Records, not the RCA Tommy Dorsey records or the later Columbia things he did, but people who grew up when he started in 1953 with Capitol, you helped open the minds of young people to this incredible accomplishment, these American songwriters, the way you did Cole Porter’s music, Gershwin’s music, and your own special artistry and your total involvement in this.
Then I went to the post office. I knew he lived in Rancho Mirage, Calif. I found the zip code and wrote Francis Albert Sinatra, Rancho Mirage, California, the zip, put a stamp on it, put it in the mailbox, and that, as they say, is that. Then in October, I received a letter. The return address was North Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles. I opened it and there’s Frank’s Sinatra stationary, and a beautifully typed letter. There were a couple of mistakes in the letter with an FS/1 on the bottom of it. So, he typed it himself. I think his first line was, “Your words moved me.”
I was just so excited about it. In the middle of, he said, “If there’s anything I can do for you and your station to show my appreciation, perhaps a holiday greeting, please let me know.” I’m thinking he must be thinking Christmas or Thanksgiving. So I didn’t want to hold him to a deadline. In my reply I said even if it was a generic greeting, you could do it any time at your leisure. I would be honored to have that.
In early December, I received a cassette tape in the mail with a cover letter from a producer. I put the cassette tape on and heard the most identifiable speaking voice. “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3. Howdy, Richard, you probably thought I forgot your letter or misplaced your letter, but I had this …” And he’s talking like you and I are speaking. “You probably think I lost your letter, but actually I had this, the doctors didn’t even have a name for it, some throat thing.
And I had to cancel a lot of one-nighters, and I’m back out on the road now. But I’d like to get these greetings, holiday greetings done for your audience. So why don’t we start here?” He did a Christmas greeting, he did a New Year’s greeting. He did a Mother’s Day greeting, a 4th of July greeting, and then he did about four just generic greetings. “Hi, everyone. You’re listening to Dick Golden on WQRC in Hyannis, Massachusetts. He plays the best Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and I hope the signal’s getting out to all the ships at sea and all the dinghies, too. This is Sinatra, Frank Sinatra.” Like that. I mean, it was the most phenomenal thing.
I didn’t fully appreciate Frank Sinatra until I read Pete Hamill’s book on him, Why Sinatra Matters, that opening line was that your words moved me because that’s what he was all about. The magic he brought to singing. Pete Hamill in his book, Why Sinatra Matters, comparing Bing Crosby and Sinatra, because Bing Crosby was Sinatra’s Idol. He loved Bing Crosby.
But Hamill said the difference between Sinatra and Crosby’s singing was that Sinatra revealed more than he concealed. Bing wasn’t emotive. You feel this guy’s heartbreak when he’s singing. He was all about revealing emotion and that sort of thing. So I was touched by that. And I also had the great pleasure of meeting his daughter, Nancy.
This was at the opening of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. We had a little sidebar conversation, and I said, “I know you have 999,999 stories of your father’s generosity and kindness, but I would like to give you the 1,000,000th story.” And I told her the story just as I told you, and she said, “I’d love to put that on the family blog. Could you put it into writing?” And I said, “I’d be honored to.”