Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pulses to the ambling rhythms of Dixieland. The place is Nick's, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the time is any night of the week (except Monday), and the trumpeter front and center, blowing bright and raucous phrases where they count most, is Phil Napoleon himself, back at the jazz business after two decades...
Brooklyn-born Napoleon, 51, thinks of his return as a kind of mission. Somewhere, he feels, jazzmen have gotten off the track, both the latter-day Dixielanders and the bopsters, who seldom let you hear the tune. "These kids, now, all on a 'progressive' kick, don't know what they're listening to because they don't know where it came from." Phil Napoleon is doing what he can to set things straight by taking the young crowd back to first principles: "This music we're playing...
Listen & Learn. When he was eleven, Napoleon ran away to New Orleans, began working out his own way of playing the trumpet ("I was playing before Louis Armstrong got out of the Waif's Home"). At 16 he formed his own Original Memphis Five, soon found himself proprietor of one of the most popular little outfits in the U.S. For a while, a youngster named Bix Beiderbecke, who was to die at 28 and become a jazz immortal, carried Phil's horn for him, listening and learning. Between 1917 and 1925 the Memphis Five made 3,011 records...
...French take pride in the artistic appearance of their paper money, but the only French currency that has their unswerving faith is a little gold coin about the size of a U.S. nickel. The napoleon (named for the ruler who first issued it) has a nominal value of 20 francs, or less than a cent. On France's free money market, it brings 4,000 francs ($11.40). But the visitor to France is not likely to pick up many napoleons. The thrifty, inflation-wise French keep their gold-an estimated $5 billion worth-hidden away in socks, sugar bowls...
...French Finance Ministers have despaired over the problem of getting at these private gold hoards. But last week Premier Antoine Pinay, a shrewd businessman, thought he had found the way. He announced a new government bond, the value of which would be tied to the price of the gold napoleon. As the free market price of the napoleon goes up, so will the price of Pinay's bond: unlike the napoleon, the bond will also pay 3½% interest. Since every Frenchman knows that the government can bring the market price of napoleons down by minting more of them...