[Dixielandjazz] Jazzman Alan Greenspan

[Steve Barbone]

Damn, a jazz clarinet player, a sideman no less, controlled US fiscal policy
for decades. And we thought all jazz clarinet players were dummies.<grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Economist¹s Life, Scored With Jazz Theme

NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW By DAVID LEONHARD - Published: September 18, 2007

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE - Adventures in a New World - By Alan Greenspan
Illustrated, 531 pages, Penguin Press

In 1944 a draft board in downtown Manhattan rejected Alan Greenspan, then a
recent high school graduate, for military service because he had a spot on
his lung that looked like it might be tuberculosis. So Mr. Greenspan,
suddenly without a plan for the future, auditioned to play clarinet for the
trumpeter Henry Jerome¹s traveling big band.

He got the job, but he was never a star. He was a sideman rather than a
soloist. Among his fellow musicians he became known as the band¹s resident
intellectual, the clarinetist who could also fill out his bandmates¹ income
tax forms for them. Between sets, when they disappeared into the green room
‹ ³which would quickly fill with the smell of tobacco and pot,² Mr.
Greenspan recalls ‹ he read books about business.

The pattern repeated itself, albeit in a more sober form, after the war
ended and he began studying economics at New York University. Many of his
classmates were swept up by grand questions relating to the new economic
order, but Mr. Greenspan was more interested in numbers and equations. ³I
still had the sideman psychology,² he writes in his memoir, ³The Age of
Turbulence.² ³I preferred to focus on technical challenges and did not have
a macro view.² 

remainder snipped for brevity.