AllenLowe

well, problem is that the stereotype of Asian food as not being filling is about Chinese food and not Japanese food.

actually, my new policy is that everything is in Db. However, since you asked - Dick Hyman's book puts it in Ab.

very smart comments on Genet; compare to Albert Murray's comments on same; Murray was truly an intellectual lightweight.

he's no Herbie Hancock.

Lennie was worse.

personally I think ultimately Lenny' musical opinions were cancelled out by his basic meanness and king-sized ego. Not to mention all that Chinese food....

let's not forget to mention that Knocky was one of the original western swing pianists.

I would suggest Harold Rosenberg, whose insights on action painting can apply to this kind of music - basically saying what Beckett saying, "he has nothing to say, only a way of saying it," and Rosenberg adds that the art is in the action presented in the painting itself, not in any externalized story-telling. As Rosenberg says: "To work from sketches arouses the suspicion that the artist still regards the canvas as a place where the mind records its contents—rather than itself the "mind" through which the painter thinks by changing a surface with paint." "Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which—or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act." "The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist's existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life." "The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, from—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger." "The work, the act, translates the psychologically given into the intentional, into a "world"—and thus transcends it. With traditional esthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not psychological data but the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation. The interest lies in the kind of act"

Moms got it right; Parsons was really a mediocrity; and Emmy Lou Harris....oi, white bread city.

to me the dynamics of the standard are harmonic - the motion of the chords and the way in which this motion effects melody; I do think it's a lost art in jazz, and few jazz composers today truly understand how it's done (I deal with a fair amount of these questions in Mulatto Radio; see the notes and the song Love is a Memory; also, Other Bodys, Other Souls). Jazz post-1945 was overwhelming affected by the '20s Broadway song. Duke of course was looking at this prior to that date, and Bud, Monk and Mingus built their compositional sytems on the standard. Dick Katz told me how the post-swing era change was largely an adjustment of repertoire; Bill Crow has said that the pianist that he remembers as codifiying the reharmonization of these old tunes was Al Haig, though by the time I heard this it was too late to talk with Haig about it. But it makes sense.

I have to talk to Lewis Porter this weekend; will ask and report back if he knows of anything.

in my experience most of the standards were from Broadway shows of the 1920s and 1930s; after that the heyday was pretty muchg over; I think this is born out if you analyze the work of Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, etc.

loudest and most annoying pianist in my existence: Harold Mabern. Walter Davis was great, but I heard him put a piano out of tune at a Carnegie recital hall concert.

I have some problems with this - or possibly not; but there are no sources cited, no footnotes to this. So I would hesitate before believing it entirely.

enough Fiber 1 to choke a cat.

I play older Conn altos (30s and 40s) because they are loud, a little shrill, but in a nice way. They have a soul that Yamahas don't - as a matter of fact, what makes the older horns appealing (I also have a Super 20, a Buescher, and a 10m stencil) is that, sonically, they breathe - there's a major and noticeable difference (as a matter of fact I recorded last year with a famous player who now endorses a newer horn and his sound is radically different and, to me, less appealing; please don't ask me who). not sure if this is relevant, but I do think volume perception is effected by tonal perception.

my mother (she was a pianist).

Ken Peplowski, particularly on the tenor, plays very quietly.

I never miss anything Herbie does.

you did better than me, I must say; stayed at the Minetta for one hour and then went back to Brooklyn. Too much of a corporate zoo for me.

I don't know if he did any work on classical music; I do know that his academic specialty was Medieval studies.

thanks Jeff, and thanks for saying all that Mark, you summed up Larry way better than I did; I am somewhat in denial and resisting posting about him but he really was a great man; less known in the critical field than many others. I became friends with Gushee after I sent him American Pop years ago - I think he liked the book because the fact that he would talk to me - when he avoided so many other would-be historians whose work frustrated him - was an extremely good sign, in Larry's terms. I once finally asked him what he thought of Devilin Tune and he said, after some hesitation "you didn't do anything wrong," which was high praise from him. Another time he told me "you know everything" without a hint of sarcasm or irony and rather than go to my head it just gave me the confidence to continue my work because it came from a guy who really did seem to know everything. Like Larry I work in an area of writing history where standards are not just notoriously low but almost non-existant, so Larry's approval was really all I needed.

skateboard.

yeah, wonderful man - just happened to run into Dan Morgenstern tonight and we talked about what an interesting man he was - knew about a lot of jazz from the early days forward (used to call me and suggest Eric Dolphy recordings). A bit of a curmudgeon at times, was very protective of his research, though he sent me a few interesting things (I do worry about what will become of his files which have some information on Bolden, et al, at least from what he told me). Talked to him only a few weeks ago, though he was not too cognizant at that time. Even in most of these last years he was sharp and full of brilliant/cynical statements on jazz history, revivalists, and clarinet players, Very sad about this, he was really one of my best and most entertaining friends. He taught me, among other things, that you just cannot trust the conventional wisdom when it comes to jazz history - and that one should never believe anything Phil Schaap says about Duke Ellington (he was very funny on the subject of sitting at conferences and going crazy listening to what were apparently historical inventions by Phil).

unless they get bit while they are in the shower.