Dennis the Menace’s ‘Dad’ a Real Swinger

Dennis the Menace and jazz? Can there possibly be a connection between the world’s cutest brat and the improvisational art?

Sort of. It turns out that artist Hank Ketcham, who has been producing “Dennis the Menace” strips for more than 1,000 newspapers (including The Times), in 14 languages and 68 countries for nearly 50 years, is an inveterate jazz fan.

And that affection has blossomed in his until-now lesser-known career as a fine artist. On Saturday, at the Every Picture Tells a Story gallery, an exhibition of his paintings opens with a large number of his insightful renderings of such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson.

At 79, Ketcham treasures fond memories of the music--memories that are encapsulated in the paintings.

“This is a nostalgia kick,” he says, “reviving memories of spending all the wee small hours down in [Greenwich] Village at Nick’s and Eddie Condon’s, along the joints on 52nd Street and in Los Angeles, watching the Palomar burn to the ground. . . . We sipped two-bit beer while watching the King Cole Trio perform on a tiny platform behind the bar, or catching a midnight performance on lower La Brea Avenue.”

Ketcham, who recently underwent chemotherapy for cancer, is focusing most of his energies on his paintings: “My bid to posterity,” he calls them. And his love of jazz--rivaled only by his love for golf--is present in each of the works, in his effort to transform the ambience of a jazz performance into a visual medium.

“I wanted to give the viewer the physical feeling of what’s happening,” he says. “All that’s missing is the booze and the cigarette smoke.”

* “The Paintings of Hank Ketcham,” Every Picture Tells a Story, 7525 Beverly Blvd., Saturday, 5 to 8 p.m. Through May 30.

Belated Honor: The Pulitzer Prizes announced earlier this week included a “Special Citation” award to Duke Ellington for his “indelible contribution to art and culture through the medium of art.” To say that the honor comes a bit late would be an understatement. Ellington died in 1974, so the Pulitzer committee has managed to wait a quarter-century before getting around to coming up with a posthumous tribute, presumably to compensate for their utter failure to recognize the significance of his work while he was still alive. It would be interesting in, say, another 25 years to check out the staying power of some of the music that was recognized during the years in which Ellington was ignored. And it’s a pretty safe bet that, at that time, Ellington’s music will continue to be as loved and honored by millions of fans around the world as it has been for decades, no matter what the Pulitzer folks have to say.

Free Jazz: It’s the biggest free jazz festival in Los Angeles and an attractive collection of music regardless of price. It’s LA JAZZ ‘99, the sixth annual installment of a four-day event--Monday through Thursday--sponsored by USC. Headliners are Latin jazz saxophonist David Sanchez’s quartet on Monday; the quartet of trumpeter Dave Douglas and Mark Turner on Tuesday; poet Kamau Daaood and his Army of Healers on Wednesday; and the McCoy Tyner Trio on Thursday. The main programs take place at 7 p.m. in the university’s Bovard Auditorium. But a wide variety of other programs is also scheduled from noon every day, in Alumni Park and at the Topping Student Center. Scheduled artists in those venues include the Phil Ranelin Band, 4-SIGHT, the Ernie Watts Quartet and a variety of USC student ensembles. Information: (213) 740-2167.

Passings: Red Norvo, who died last week at the age of 91, was a far too little-acknowledged jazz great. The first jazz artist to perform prominently on mallet instruments--first the xylophone, later the vibraphone--he also made extremely effective transitions through several jazz eras. His career stretched from the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where he met and married his first wife, singer Mildred Bailey, to a bop-oriented trio with bassist Charles Mingus and guitarist Tal Farlow. In between, he co-led his own bands (with Bailey) and worked with such influential artists as Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Woody Herman and Billie Holiday.

Norvo also toured and worked with Frank Sinatra for more than 20 years, before hearing problems and a serious stroke put home out of action a decade ago. His playing, fortunately, is preserved in a number of reissues. One of the most appealing is a recently released live performance with his own quintet, backing Sinatra in an Australian concert in 1959. The affectionate empathy between these two artists bursts through the sometimes uneven sound. And Sinatra’s richly jazz-tinged performances are testimony to the vibist’s capacity to create irresistible rhythmic settings. Norvo was, by any estimation, a jazz man’s jazz man.