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Larry Kart's jazz book


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I'm glad you don't leave the house much, Allen--I've been spending some more time with DEVILIN' TUNE V. 3 (1934-1945) and really enjoying it.

I did a brief write-up on Larry's book at Night Lights several weeks ago that doesn't really begin to do justice to it... but it did give me the opportunity to use the phrase "a la Kart" (and now that I think about it, JAZZ A LA KART as a possible title for a sequel of miscellaneous pieces? Well, maybe not...)

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I'm glad you don't leave the house much, Allen--I've been spending some more time with DEVILIN' TUNE V. 3 (1934-1945) and really enjoying it.

I did a brief write-up on Larry's book at Night Lights several weeks ago that doesn't really begin to do justice to it... but it did give me the opportunity to use the phrase "a la Kart" (and now that I think about it, JAZZ A LA KART as a possible title for a sequel of miscellaneous pieces? Well, maybe not...)

That was really nice, David -- and I mean nicely done as well as generous. "Jazz a la Kart," though -- eek! On the other hand, there is a 1941 Basie recording "Feather Merchant" (a very good one IIRC, comp. by Jimmy Mundy) that was meant to be a play on Leonard Feather's name (it also was a pre-existing slang term for someone who likes to sleep a lot).

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I'm glad you don't leave the house much, Allen--I've been spending some more time with DEVILIN' TUNE V. 3 (1934-1945) and really enjoying it.

I did a brief write-up on Larry's book at Night Lights several weeks ago that doesn't really begin to do justice to it... but it did give me the opportunity to use the phrase "a la Kart" (and now that I think about it, JAZZ A LA KART as a possible title for a sequel of miscellaneous pieces? Well, maybe not...)

That was really nice, David -- and I mean nicely done as well as generous. "Jazz a la Kart," though -- eek! On the other hand, there is a 1941 Basie recording "Feather Merchant" (a very good one IIRC, comp. by Jimmy Mundy) that was meant to be a play on Leonard Feather's name (it also was a pre-existing slang term for someone who likes to sleep a lot).

Please pardon my penchant for terrible puns (and that one was conscious, as opposed to the many that tumble out of my mouth without thinking), not to mention jests--any possible second volume of your superlative criticism would be worthy of a far better title. Re: "Feather Merchant" (which I've not heard), I'm a bit groggy now from combined cold/afternoon nap/insufficient caffeine, but I think there were a # of instrumentals from the 1940s/50s era that had punning titles along those lines...especially odes to DJs, a topic I once covered on a Night Lights show after Oscar Treadwell passed away.

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I'm glad you don't leave the house much, Allen--I've been spending some more time with DEVILIN' TUNE V. 3 (1934-1945) and really enjoying it.

I did a brief write-up on Larry's book at Night Lights several weeks ago that doesn't really begin to do justice to it... but it did give me the opportunity to use the phrase "a la Kart" (and now that I think about it, JAZZ A LA KART as a possible title for a sequel of miscellaneous pieces? Well, maybe not...)

That was really nice, David -- and I mean nicely done as well as generous. "Jazz a la Kart," though -- eek! On the other hand, there is a 1941 Basie recording "Feather Merchant" (a very good one IIRC, comp. by Jimmy Mundy) that was meant to be a play on Leonard Feather's name (it also was a pre-existing slang term for someone who likes to sleep a lot).

Please pardon my penchant for terrible puns (and that one was conscious, as opposed to the many that tumble out of my mouth without thinking), not to mention jests--any possible second volume of your superlative criticism would be worthy of a far better title. Re: "Feather Merchant" (which I've not heard), I'm a bit groggy now from combined cold/afternoon nap/insufficient caffeine, but I think there were a # of instrumentals from the 1940s/50s era that had punning titles along those lines...especially odes to DJs, a topic I once covered on a Night Lights show after Oscar Treadwell passed away.

Another one was Sir Charles Thompson's handsome "Robbins' Nest," for DJ Fred Robbins. That post-Lester 1941 edition of the Basie Band (with Don Byas on tenor) was so fine -- "Harvard Blues," "Fiesta in Blue," "Down Down Down," "Feather Merchant" et al. BTW, has there ever been much examination of Jimmy Mundy's work? "Feather Merchant" and "Fiesta in Blue" are both his. Born 1907, died 1983, Mundy wrote a lot of fine stuff for a lot of bands (Goodman, Hines, Basie, James, et al.), but I don't have a good sense of what it all amounts to, probably because he mostly wrote for other people (he briefly had his own band), and I think he did so for a rather long time. Among his compositions is "Travelin' Light." I see now that Schuller refers positively to Mundy in many places in "The Swing Era," but I'd still like to see a comprehensive estimate of his work and style.

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I'm glad you don't leave the house much, Allen--I've been spending some more time with DEVILIN' TUNE V. 3 (1934-1945) and really enjoying it.

I did a brief write-up on Larry's book at Night Lights several weeks ago that doesn't really begin to do justice to it... but it did give me the opportunity to use the phrase "a la Kart" (and now that I think about it, JAZZ A LA KART as a possible title for a sequel of miscellaneous pieces? Well, maybe not...)

That was really nice, David -- and I mean nicely done as well as generous. "Jazz a la Kart," though -- eek! On the other hand, there is a 1941 Basie recording "Feather Merchant" (a very good one IIRC, comp. by Jimmy Mundy) that was meant to be a play on Leonard Feather's name (it also was a pre-existing slang term for someone who likes to sleep a lot).

Please pardon my penchant for terrible puns (and that one was conscious, as opposed to the many that tumble out of my mouth without thinking), not to mention jests--any possible second volume of your superlative criticism would be worthy of a far better title. Re: "Feather Merchant" (which I've not heard), I'm a bit groggy now from combined cold/afternoon nap/insufficient caffeine, but I think there were a # of instrumentals from the 1940s/50s era that had punning titles along those lines...especially odes to DJs, a topic I once covered on a Night Lights show after Oscar Treadwell passed away.

Another one was Sir Charles Thompson's handsome "Robbins' Nest," for DJ Fred Robbins. That post-Lester 1941 edition of the Basie Band (with Don Byas on tenor) was so fine -- "Harvard Blues," "Fiesta in Blue," "Down Down Down," "Feather Merchant" et al. BTW, has there ever been much examination of Jimmy Mundy's work? "Feather Merchant" and "Fiesta in Blue" are both his. Born 1907, died 1983, Mundy wrote a lot of fine stuff for a lot of bands (Goodman, Hines, Basie, James, et al.), but I don't have a good sense of what it all amounts to, probably because he mostly wrote for other people (he briefly had his own band), and I think he did so for a rather long time. Among his compositions is "Travelin' Light." I see now that Schuller refers positively to Mundy in many places in "The Swing Era," but I'd still like to see a comprehensive estimate of his work and style.

Mundy wrote the arrangements for Illinois Jacquet's "Soul explosion" - his greatest album in my view - and "Sonny Stitt & the big brass".

MG

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well as I said in a thread some years ago about Leslie Gourse (RIP), I'll always put the Kart Before the Gourse -

:lol:

:tup for Larry's book. The Neo-Con game , the Tristano material, and so forth have given me some insight I don't imagine I would have ever gotten elsewhere.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest Bill Barton

The book arrived in the mail today. It's a mint condition hardcover copy from Amazon. The price was right too! I'm looking forward to "digging in," Larry.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest Bill Barton

I'm now about 3/4 of the way through the book, and have been "cherrypicking" a bit, bouncing back and forth from section to section. It's packed with superb writing and some very cogent insights. I thoroughly agree with montg on the neo-con and Tristano sections.

The piece on page 101 is one of my favorites so far. This is the 1980 review of Lee Konitz and Al Cohn at the Jazz Showcase. In only three paragraphs you make me feel like I was there, Larry, and I can almost hear the music in my head. That's a rare talent.

The Hank Mobley liner notes for Poppin' starting on page 119 is another piece that I really like. I love this sentence: "What will serve at the moment is the hallmark of his style; and thus, though he is always himself, he has in the normal sense hardly any style at all."

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Actually, my OK little house is on a lot that has a lot of nice old-growth trees, as does the entire block. You can tell the difference just one block west, where there were few trees when the houses there were built some 30 or so years ago. The ones that were planted then are a nice size now, but their location looks planned; "our" trees were there before the houses on our block were built, a whole different feel. The back 25 percent of my backyard is pretty close to a forest.

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I don't know, you guys keep buying those bootlegged and used copies, and Larry won't be able to afford that large dacha in the Illinois woods that he has his eye on -

(I'm assuming that there are woods somewhere in Illinois)

Just want it known that I bought mine as a brand new hardback right from the shelf of a real, physical bookstore, just like in the days of old. It was and is worth every penny.

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Okay, now I feel better about paying a bargain price for the book... ;)

I hope that you're getting royalties, Larry.

Not yet, probably not ever -- I'm still in the hole versus the publisher's modest advance, at least according to their figures. But I never expected to or cared about making any money from the book; I just wanted to assemble what's in there in the right way, add some good new stuff where it fitted, have the book look and feel nice, and have it fall into the hands of a fair number of the not very large group of people who would find it interesting. I think I'm ahead of the game on all counts.

Certainly on the last one, word of mouth on this board has made a big difference; even though every review the book got was positive, several were more than that, and one was to die for, few of those reviews ran in places where favorable reviews "sell." Also, and this does bug me, the publisher's catalog placed its announcement of the book way in the back (which signaled to their sales staff that it was an unimportant title in the publisher's eyes), and thus I'm sure that the sales staff then made little effort to place it in bookstores. I certainly never saw it in any of the three Borders stores near me. Also, several friends ordered it from the their local Barnes & Noble store and were told after a wait of a month or two that copies could not be found.

This I think has to do with an odd fact of the book business: brick-and-mortar stores don't get their books from publishers, they get them from intermediate, regional distribution firms, who actually maintain the warehouses in which books are stored and from which they flow to the stores as needed. If the publisher, expecting not to sell many copies of a particular book, sends or is asked to send not that many copies of the book to the regional distribution firms, when those copies have gone out to the stores, the distribution firms can get more copies only by ordering them from the publisher, which the distribution firms are loath to do because it's a small, specialized task, nor, I believe, is the publisher itself all that crazy about sending out to, say, Des Moines five or ten copies of a book that it never cared about in the first place.

As Clausewitz wrote, a key but often forgotten element in warfare is "friction." And this attitude and these effects run up and down the publishing/book store food chain and sideways too. For example, when a friend visited a well-known, well-regarded, non-chain bookstore in Manhattan, found that they didn't have a copy of the book and tried to order it, the bored young clerk refused to accept his order, explaining that this would be too much trouble. So I'm pretty sure that almost everybody who bought the book already know about me, already wanted to buy it, and then ordered it online.

Don't know how many books on this and similar subjects are sold because they caught someone's eye on a bookstore shelf, or better in a bookstore display, but I'd be surprised if more than five copies were sold that way. Again, that bugs me for at least two reasons: Why go to all the trouble of publishing a book if you're going to make so little effort to sell it, and how many people out there who might have enjoyed the book never found out that it existed?

About the first reason, I should add that the wonderful veteran editor (himself a former newspaper music critic [classical] and author of several excellent books) who asked me to write the book in the first place left the publishing firm in mid-stream, so it might have been an orphaned book in-house for that reason alone. The young woman who took his place on the project certainly made it clear that she thought that I and the book were s--t on her shoe. A Sarah Silverman type, now that I think of it, but with no sense of humor. :g On the other hand, the production people I dealt with were ideally caring and skillful. And I am, despite these complaints, still ahead of the game.

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