Larry Kart's jazz book

[Larry Kart]

Chuck -- you're right about the date of "Spirits." A senior moment.

Cornelius -- You're right about "Soul Station" being recorded (2/7/60) before Mobley joined Miles (early 1961).

About the "stylistic upheavals" thing, I didn't mean that Mobley didn't pay attention to Trane (or Rollins) but that their "upheaval"-like ways weren't his. Surely, for example, when one places "Giant Steps" alongside, say, "Chasin' the Trane," "Ascension," and Intersteller Space," a path of stylistic upheavals is what we hear in any number of areas, while we don't hear anything like that, either in Mobley's own playing or in the contexts he chose to work during that span of time. Likewise, I think (though to a lesser extent than with Trane) when the point of comparison is the Rollins of 1959, the Rollins of "The Bridge," and the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins band.

About Duke Jordan and Sonny Clark -- while Jordan certainly was active in the hardbop era and beyond, he was a fully formed musician by 1947, when he recorded with Charlie Parker, and remained more less that marvelous player, in stylistic terms, from then until now. Also, in 1947, hard bop (if that term means anything, and I gather we both think it does) was nowhere to be found. Sonny clark, to quote from the liner notes to "Soony's Crib," was "

[AllenLowe]

Cornelius - I'm not sure what the problem is, but by quoting Larry directly you inadvertently proved his point and defeated your own - it's a beautiful piece of writing that sums up the method and affect of Mobley's playing better than 10 paragraphs of so-called "technical" analysis could have - I, for one, had no trouble discerning Larry's point -

[Cornelius]

Thanks, Larry. I better see your point now about "stylistic upheavals." I had read it in a different sense.

Duke Jordan was a '40s bop player, but he was also a '50s hard bop player (the difference sometimes not being great), so I'm skeptical about the trope you used only because it doesn't ring well in my ear to say that "X is the Y of Z", when Y is his own "of Z."

Maybe Roll Call also was before Davis (I don't know.)

Allen,

"I'm not sure what the problem is [...]"

I went in to some detail about the problems I find, even posing non-rhetorical questions about them.

"I, for one, had no trouble discerning Larry's point -"

I must take your word for it that you didn't. However, I can usually get the gist of most writing, while passages such as the ones I quoted strike me as unnecessarily opaque. Moreover, they didn't ring a bell sympathetic with my own sense of Mobley's music, upon pretty extensive listening to him for many years.

"10 paragraphs of so-called "technical" analysis could have"

Why would it be [only] so-called and "technical" (in quotes) if it were indeed technical? Anyway, I don't think that all jazz writing has to be strictly technical, but a lot of jazz writing could use some technical stuff woven into the kind of impressionist accounts we usually get. If the writer mentions technical considerations, then I think some followthrough is helpful, otherwise it often reads to me as arm waving.

[Larry Kart]

SORRY, HIT THE WRONG KEY. TO REPEAT AND CONTINUE:

Chuck -- you're right about the date of "Spirits." A senior moment.

Cornelius -- You're right about "Soul Station" being recorded (2/7/60) before Mobley joined Miles (early 1961).

About the "stylistic upheavals" thing, I didn't mean that Mobley didn't pay attention to Trane (or Rollins) but that their "upheaval"-like ways of development and (at times) of music-making weren't his. Surely, for example, when one places "Giant Steps" alongside, say, "Chasin' the Trane," "Ascension," and Intersteller Space," a path of stylistic upheavals is what we hear in any number of areas, while we don't hear anything like that, either in Mobley's own playing or in the contexts he chose to work during that span of time. Likewise, I think that's the case (though to a lesser extent than with Trane) when the point of comparison is the Rollins of 1959, the Rollins of "The Bridge," and the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins band.

About Duke Jordan and Sonny Clark -- while Jordan certainly was active in the hardbop era and beyond, he was a fully formed musician by 1947, when he recorded with Charlie Parker, and remained more less that marvelous player, in stylistic terms, from then until now. Also, in 1947, hard bop (if that term means anything, and I gather we both think it does) was nowhere to be found. Sonny Clark, to quote from the liner notes to "Sonny's Crib," was "almost an unknown when, as a member of the Buddy DeFranco Quartet, he came East in Janurary 1954..." Note the year, seven years on from 1947 and well into the so-called hardbop era. Also, Clark becomes a shaper of that era's music stylistically -- hear the way the rhythm section works on the title track of "Cool Struttin'" in particular -- and Jordan (again, marvelous as he was and is) does not play that role in that era.

About Mobley's periods -- you got yours, I got mine.

About your "say what?" paragraph and the one that preceeds it,, while I suspect by now that you may just be dicking around with me here, I'll try to respond to a few of your points and questions as though you were not.

1) "Why must one experience every one of Mobley's notes to understand his music any more than you'd expect to have to listen to every note of any jazz musician?"

See the passage on p. 120 that begins "In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line..." as swell as the answer to your next question below.

2) "Do you mean that the music is so adventurous that there's doubt whether the musician's choices of notes will turn out to be good ones or what adventurous gambit they'll embody? But what is meant by 'ambiguities of choice'"?

I think the answer to this question, as well as the one you ask above, is right there, in the words "there are many points of development, each of which can inspire in Mobley an immediate response..." Of course, Mobley choses the path he does in each case, but I think we often hear how easily he might have chosen a tempting to him and close to hand alternative; his music seems to mull over multiple possibilities in the moment far more than, say, Rollins or Dexter Gordon do; this Mobley builds into his lines a sense of how open, or ambiguous, an act it might be to choose one possible path over another. Don't you hear something similar in middle- to late-Lester Young?

OK -- so my writing leaves you cold; so be it.

And you don't think that the Donald Byrd of, say, "Off To the Races" was brassier than the Byrd of "Senor Blues" or "Nica's Dream"? OK, again.

[Larry Kart]

In the next to last paragraph, that should be "thus Mobley builds" instead of "this Mobley builds."

Also, sorry if I got a little snarky there. I hadn't read Cornelius's response when I posted the one I sent after I'd inadvertently sent another while in mid-sentence and was under the impression that he had been getting a little snarky with me. But that's how it goes with us "open-ended, free-associative" types.

[Cornelius]

"I suspect by now that you may just be dicking around with me here [...]"

Oh please, it wouldn't even occur to me to waste my own time "dicking someone around," whatever that might entail. The purpose of my posts is to express my thoughts and to be elucidated by the responses. [i just saw your last post, but I'll leave this in anyway.]

"In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line..."

If you mean drama in the structure of the solo, then I don't agree. Though, extraordinarily great structure is not what I usually seek from Mobley anyway.

"[...] his music seems to mull over multiple possibilities in the moment far more than, say, Rollins or Dexter Gordon do [...]"

I don't think of it in those terms, but I would agree that Mobley usually doesn't have the kind of resoluteness that Gordon has.

"Mobley builds into his lines a sense of how open, or ambiguous, an act it might be to choose one possible path over another."

That doesn't capture my own sense of Mobley, but, again, I do hear a kind of tentativeness, maybe a shyness, sometimes. On the other hand, Mobley used a hell of a lot of pat material in his solos, and fairly long stretches of it sometimes. I guess you can hear this as an achievement of making himself sound shy even when he knew pretty much right where he was going. It's a tough and interesting question. However, that manner of his doesn't strike me as expressing adventurousness, though I do find adventurousness in other aspects of his playing.

"[...] my writing leaves you cold [...]"

I wrote that passages such as I quoted leave me cold. I didn't make a flat judgment of your writing.

"[...] you don't think that the Donald Byrd of, say, "Off To the Races" was brassier than the Byrd of "Senor Blues" or "Nica's Dream"?"

As I mentioned, I grant that one can hear Byrd going in and out of brassy. However, your overview suggested increased brassiness during the period his lines got leaner and blusier. That's not so much 'Off To The Races', which is some of his fastest (hence, many notes) playing, but rather starts decidedly with 'Fuego'. On that album he plays pocket trumpet, so that complicates things, but on succeeding albums there's a lot of playing that turns from brassy towards softer edges, rounder and mellower sound.

Edited January 21, 2005 by Cornelius

[Bill Nelson]

Congrats, Cornelius. I believe you've gotten yourself nicely elucidated -- and with no dicking around!

[Cornelius]

You wouldn't be dicking me around, would you?

[AllenLowe]

Sorry, Cornelius, to call Duke Jordan a "hard bop" player means you have not been listening to the music real well - name one recording of his that qualifies as such -

[Larry Kart]

"'In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line...'

"If you mean drama in the structure of the solo, then I don't agree."

I mean "drama" in this sense: A lot of great players (and tenor players in particular e.g. Ben Webster, Ike Quebec, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins) use means other than, or in addition to, the developing line (emphatic shifts in timbre, volume, semi-isolation and/or heightening of certain phrases by the use of pauses/rests, etc.) to in effect present us with a solo that might be compared to an act of effective public speaking or a speech by a character in a self-created stage play. One feels more or less that the soloist's goal is to establish and explore a certain mood and convince of its strength (and of his conviction) in dramatic terms. We are being addressed or are witnessing someone address another or others -- we're like Lincoln's audience at Gettysburg, like somone watching Romeo speak to Juliet or Brando telling Rod Steiger in "On the Waterfront" that "he coulda been a contender"). (A choice, if perhaps extreme, example is Quebec's virtually programmatic "Easy, Don't Hurt," but I hope the principle is clear.) Mobley, by contrast, does not seem to me to address us in this manner -- "In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line." While he is of course playing in public, his musical "speech" is not shaped like a public, dramatic discourse; it lack those foreshadowing, "this is going to about..." cues that mark the music of the mentioned above; one could even say that Mobley's primary audience is himself, plus the musicians with whom he's playing at the moment. (In this, he's akin to Lee Konitz.) Thus, again, the need to listen to every note with Mobley versus what I think is the case with the players mentioned above. While people like the people on this list usually listen as closely as we can because that's where the fun is, the external drama of an Gordon or Ammons solo -- the way it's filled with cues as to where it's going and when and how it's going to get there -- allows us to follow its general progress rather well without paying attention to every note. (I'm sure that many people do listen to Ammons, Gordon that way -- I've done so myself when there was other stuff going on around me that called for some attention and could follow what was going on in the music quite well.) But with Mobley at his best, my belief is that if you don't follow him note by note, you're not likely to get what he up very well -- because his solos (for good reasons) lack external drama and because (here it comes again), because many of his choices are ambiguous or equivocal, and because this meaningful (and I think quite deliberate on Mobley's part) ambiguity or equivocalness is most evident (at times maybe only evident) on the note-to-note level. Is this not one of the reasons why a lot of people who like the gneral style of music within which Mobley worked did not rank him as highly as many of us did and do, or even dismissed him outright? To put it another way, I think you've got to really work with, think along with, Hank to get him; a Rollins, an Ammons, a Gordon, does a lot of that work for you. Not that makes Hank a better player than they are, just a somewhat different one in that respect.

[Dan Gould]

I want to thank Cornelius for his extensive quoting of Larry's work, and Larry for attempting to clarify his opinions.

As I read the lengthy excerpt, I was left thinking:

What the hell does this mean?

and

Is there anything here that illuminates a single thing about Mobley's playing that I don't already get from the music itself?

The answers I am left unequivicolly with is:

Not much

and

Absolutely nothing.

I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for me, I am missing nothing by not running out to buy Larry's book.

Your mileage may vary, and hey, if you get great insight from his work, more power to you. But for me, Larry's ramblings epitomizes the old cliche about "writing about music is like dance about architecture."

[AllenLowe]

what's your probelm? Did Larry give you a bad review somewhere? If you get nothing out of Larry's book than chances are you get nothing out of the music. This is the problem with jazz, audiences and musicians alike - a lack of intellectual background or perspective, a decided anti-intellectualism and a failure to understand that jazz is like all art forms and deserves the kind of sophisticated analyses that other forms receive. The failure to perceive this is why there is so much bad writing about jazz. Shame on you two for being so willfully dense -

Edited January 21, 2005 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

DAVE! I was referrring to the prior posts by Gould and Cornelius - sorry -

Edited January 21, 2005 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

Just to clarify my clarification - there's nothing wrong, of course, with disagreeing with Larry, as I do in more than one instance - it's the tone of Cornelius and Goulds's posts that bothers me - instead of engaging one of the country's finest jazz critics (and I am not exaggerating in that assessment) they seemed determined to prove that his whole approach is symptomatic of some kind of hyper-intellectuality - which is a lot of crap -

[Dan Gould]

what's your probelm? Did Larry give you a bad review somewhere? If you get nothing out of Larry's book than chances are you get nothing out of the music. This is the problem with jazz, audiences and musicians alike - a lack of intellectual background or perspective, a decided anti-intellectualism and a failure to understand that jazz is like all art forms and deserves the kind of sophisticated analyses that other forms receive. The failure to perceive this is why there is so much bad writing about jazz. Shame on you two for being so willfully dense -

IMO, Jazz hardly needs the convoluted meanderings of one man's guesses about what an artist does or what motivates him or how he goes about his work.

Its one man's opinion and just because you think its spot-on doesn't mean it isn't utterly vacuous.

If the fruits of his great intellectual efforts give you some great insight into the music, great. I get mine from within the grooves.

Look, nothing I've seen Larry write here made me think I would get anything out of his book, and Cornelius' lengthy quote confirmed it. That's why I asked for the Morgenstern book for Christmas. So shoot me.

[JSngry]

I'm reading both.

[Clunky]

book just ordered so I can decide for myself

[Dan Gould]

I'm reading both.

Which is fine! Good for you ... but, to borrow a phrase from John Belushi, "EXXXCUUUUUSE MEEEE" if I don't "get" anything from Larry, for it has nothing to do with "anti-intellectualism" and has everything to do with a belief that there's "no there there" just a lot of one man's guesses, suppositions, and impressions. Born of years of listening? Yeah, but so what?? That makes his opinion more valuable than someone elses?

Lowe, you act as though Larry's opinions are precious, and his approach impeccable. They may be to you but that doesn't make it so.

[AllenLowe]

well, they are precious because jazz has so few critics of his stature -

Edited January 21, 2005 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

to borrow a phrase from John Belushi, "EXXXCUUUUUSE MEEEE" if I don't "get" anything from Larry, for it has nothing to do with "anti-intellectualism" and has everything to do with a belief that there's "no there there" just a lot of one man's guesses, suppositions, and impressions. Born of years of listening? Yeah, but so what?? That makes his opinion more valuable than someone elses?

Dan, all I can say is that a lot of Larry's opinions are similar to mine, and that more than once over the years his writing has helped me to get a better grip on what I was already feeling about certain music but had not yet been able to pinpoint and/or express (as to why I've not been content to just feel w/o having a concurrent need to express, hell, I dunno. Guess I'm just wired that way. To each as they are, right?). And that although he offers no "technical" analyses, he quite often "gets inside" the actual processes of playing a lot more accurately than many who do. This I can state with total certainty.

As they say, your mileage may vary (and obviously it does), and that's totally cool. But if anybody asks, put me down as a huge fan of Larry Kart's writing, even the stuff that I don't agree with.

[AllenLowe]

I will add that, as a musician, I can attest that Larry, in his way, gets much closer to the process than nearly anyone else. And it's not the fact of the disagreement with Larry that bothers me, honestly, but the nasty and contemptuous tone of some of these posts -

[Dan Gould]

I will add that, as a musician, I can attest that Larry, in his way, gets much closer to the process than nearly anyone else. And it's not the fact of the disagreement with Larry that bothers me, honestly, but the nasty and contemptuous tone of some of these posts -

So, apparently with things you don't care for, things you just don't "get", you manage to write without a hint of personal rejection?

You're a better man than I, Gunga Din.

And I'd really like to see that sympathetic portrait of Kenny G.

*******************

Look, Jim, another HUGE fan of Larry's, gets it that mileage may vary. Why is it that you can't?

[AllenLowe]

there was a lot more than a "hint of personal rejection" in the tone of your posts, and it got personal in a way that was completely out of line.

[Dan Gould]

there was a lot more than a "hint of personal rejection" in the tone of your posts, and it got personal in a way that was completely out of line.

Please, PLEASE identify that which is "personal" and "out of line".

"convoluted meanderings of one man's guesses"?

That I got "not much" and "absolutely nothing" out of his explication of what Mobley is doing?

[Dan Gould]

In fact, if anyone got personal, it was you in your rant about "anti-intellectualism" in which you explicitly put both me and Cornelius down as not "getting" the music if you can't "get" what Larry is saying.

What a crock.