AllenLowe

"Wynton is a symptom, not the disease." well, so is George Bush, but I still hate him - and Wynton, like Bush, is a willing carrier.

what's Australia? Are you sure you don't mean Austria? or Astoria?

I remember Herb Geller recalling a late Chet Baker concert; Herb: "He could only play one octave but nobody else could play that octave like Chet." I've always thought that too little distinction has been made between Baker's pre-middle 1960s playing and afterward. When healthy he had a new fire in his playing that really made some of this period his best. There's the Italian sessions (1960s I think); I heard him at Strykers around 1975-1976, I think, and he was aggressive and brilliant. There are some French concert recordings with Bob Mover that show this side, and a bunch of stuff in various pklaces, particularly from the 1970s, that affirm his new musical personality, IMHO -

it is true that in the late 1970s in NYC things were in flux, but there was activity, the loft scene, a lot of new independent clubs. But I do remember Barry Harris, at the time, talking about the difficulties of what he called the "in between" generation - musicians who were born between Bird and the 1930s and 1940s jazz generation, beboppers like Barry, Jimmy Knepper, Al Haig, basically a lot of mainstreamer types who suffered from the middle 1960s and on, in the wake of rock and roll, and who were not progressives in the sense of people like Julius Hemphil or Arthur Blythe, etc etc. (not that those guys were making a million bucks either but they did seem to have some niche, small as it was). This was the time when Barry opened his own club, and I would say that guys of his style were probably ultimately pleased by the rise of Wynton and the so-called young lions, much as they might have been annoyed, particularly at first, by the out-of-proportion attention the youngsters were getting. It did, however, open up some ears to their playing. As to the ultimate economic impact, I would guess that it was positive, but that is based purely on outside observation, not real empirical analysys (ie looking at the tax returns of every bebopper).

hey, take it up with Stanley Dance - well, I guess my original post was God's way of telling me I need a more exciting day job -

I want to refer back to Larry's economic issue, about how the expense of the Lincoln Center band has managed to eat away the jazz budgets of local presenters everywhere - Marty Khan, who has been presenting and managing avant garde jazz acts for many years, actually mentioned this issue to me back in the 1990s, so it has been going on for some time. Marty told me that Marsalis et all had basically destroyed the economic middle of jazz presentation - everything was either super expensive or super cheap. Now you have to hold the presenters responsible for this as well, as, frankly, they are generally idiots who don't know better, and I tell you this from personal experience, having sat on too many rubber-stamping jazz panels (before I figured out what was really going on). And we have to be honest and admit the same thing goes on at the other end - presenters who put on more progressive music often get stuck in presenting and re-presenting the same people over and over again. I'm way out of the loop know, but was a time that all we saw on the "left" were David Murray, Geri Allen, Don Byron, over and over and over again. Something like Spahn and Sain and two days of rain, than Spahn and Sain again. the more things change...

actually, Betty Roche was a travelling saleswoman for that company, which she founded - that's how Duke met her, when he was suffering one of his frequent bouts of insomnia - see Chapter 6, Stanley Dance, the World of Duke Ellington -

you need one of those Hezbollah missles with the ball bearings - just be careful not to hit a daycare center -

"Ka Ka Poo Poo Wee Wee Pee Pee" Ko Ko (Bird version) Ko Ko (Duke version) Wahoo (Perdidio changes) actually, alta cocker is a transliteration of a Yiddish phrase (Means old fart) -

you gotta do the math - after all, how many times does 77 go into 43?

lenny Bruce Bruce Wayne John Wayne Wayne Newton Francis Newton Arlene Francis Francis Davis Dave Davies Davey Crockett Betty Crocker Alta Cocker (will have to change the name of this game)

well, this could also end up in the artist section here - if it was Squirrel Ashcraft -

Randy Sandke - can play anything, writes beautifully - can evoke Box without mimicry - a great thinking musician, with lots of feeling -

Bock was in the film industry prior to this, I think - he wasn't, by any chance, a film editor, was he?

I like Schuller but, interestingly enough, he himself has tended to be critical of Ellington's longer works, using "classical" criteria - which I've always felt were not entirely appropriate to this kind of music -

flat, 10-46 - Dadarrio, they stay in tune and they are easy to play - no sense working harder than I have to -

I would disagree on some specifics here - I think Ellington WAS as great (no, a greater) composer than Copeland, whose Americana I find a bit precious and distant (as in vernacular music by someone who never really listened to vernacular music) - Duke wasn't the kind of composer, in a formal sense, that Copeland or Beethoven were but he made his own rules and he was much closer to the Harry Partch ideal of the domestic composer whose work relates to American speech, and contains a deeper and more indigenous kind of expression than, say, Bach or Beethoven - here's a relevant Harry Partch quote: (from 1941): "The ancient Greek and Chinese conception...as old as history - that music is poetry, has deteriorated...even when words are used they are merely a vehicle for tones. The voice is just another violin or another cello...with this metamorphosis...the ancient conception...was obscured, left to folk peoples...sailors, soldiers, gypsies...troubadours, Meistersingers, the Japanese Noh and kabuki, the folk music of England and our own southern mountains, the pure Negro spiritual (not 'symphonized') - hearers are transported not by mass but subtlety...the true music of the individual." I find Ellington to be within this continuum - also, to take this a bit further, find Larry Kart's essay on Ornette Coleman and "pre-tonal" music; it's in Larry's book and I would argue that it explains a good deal of the appeal of American country/blues performance -

I bought that LP for 99 cents in 1970 at Mays department store in Massapequa -

the only reason I worry about the Miles credit for Donna Lee is that he was not above putting his name on other people's tunes - I seem to recall he may have taken credit at one point for When Lights Are Low -

I got Bird's axe -

musical suppositories - you heard it here first -

I like all of Priestly's work, and the Bird book is short but smart and accurate - this is interesting, Larry, as I tend to identify Bird's compositions by the ingenious harmonic extensions - usually shown in broken chords that land on odd but perfect places and which resolve quite miraculously. But Priestly may very well be right - though I do hear Bird's melodicism on Ornithology - on the other hand it, like Donna Lee, lacks the chromatic complexity of some the tunes we know to be his - thinking, also, rhythmically, of Billie's Bounce and Relaxin at Camarillo (playing that last with inexperienced rhythm sections always caused problems, somewhat like Dameron's Sid's Delight, which has the most difficult rhythmic twist I ever encountered in a bebop tune) -

correct on Jack Black and Hayden's daughter -

well, I have a private Bud Powell recording of early piano lessons from 1922 -

Larry's probably right about my previous mention of Schaap and this - ("you know you're gettting old when...) ok here's a new trivia one, maybe it's gotten around already, I don't know - "what famous actor is marrying what famous bass player's daughter soon (if not already)?"