sgcim

That confrontation between Nick and Phil Woods must have been a doozy! Do you have any more details?

He became a chiropractor, and completely dropped out of the scene. I remember putting him down to Larry K. here, but I heard him again recently on ATTYA, and enjoyed his playing a lot more than I had when I initially heard him years ago.

Tal could not sight read music at that period. Cinderella was a big studio musician in NY at that time, and could sight read very well, which was important for Melle's music. Mecca could also read better than Tal. Mecca hasn't recorded much, but I've heard recordings where he sounded fine, and other recordings where he sounded not so fine.

Actually, one of the composition teachers I had was humiliated in front of the whole world by his own daughter, who wrote a well-known book about how her father used to come in to her room in the middle of the night and sleep with her... You don't hear any of his pieces performed anywhere, anymore.

You know what's demoralizing, and quite possibly terrifying? The idea that Schoenberg/Webern/Berg all sound the same to some people. They don't, and never have, at least to not me. But I have seen what happens when malevolent idiots go about de-facing individuals for the purpose of pursuing the desire to eliminate/exterminate "their type". My cue to get out of the academic music scene was when the composition teacher who made that comment about listening to 12-tone music while eating cereal for breakfast, said that he thought Webern sounded like a bunch of little farts. The other guy I studied with thought that Schoenberg was disgusting to him, and he loved Webern. Meanwhile, while they liked my tonal work (one said it sounded like Shostakovich), they both insisted that I had to write 12-tone music, because that's what everyone else was doing. I said screw 'em, and went back to jazz.

I'm not trolling, I'm merely responding to the attitude my composition teacher had some 40 years ago, when he was predicting that people would be listening to twelve-tone music in the morning while they ate their cereal. Gunther Schuller wrote in that essay back in 1962 that it has been over 50 years, and people are not responding to twelve-tone music the way they responded to similar changes in the style of classical music in a similar amount of time. Now it's been almost 100 years, and still no response from the vast majority of classical music lovers. As Larry noted a while back, the programs of all the major orchestras has gotten more conservative if anything, with the dominant programming being from the 19th Century. When i posted the two humorous takes on twelve-tone music I posted here on musician websites, they all just found it very funny, and moved on. Why get so upset about this?

Thanks! There's gotta be a book out there with some more Blossom Dearyisms...

Yea, that was pretty much how she treated that jazz DJ. I thought I was hearing things when I heard her telling him that he was asking her stupid questions. No wonder Bobby Jaspar got addicted to heroin...Thanks for the confirmation!

Yeah, but no interesting stories about her. After hearing an interview Blossom did with Rick Petrone on that Connecticut jazz station back in the 80s, I'm sure there was a lot going on in that incredibly talented brain of hers. It had to be the most adversarial interview I've ever heard in my life, and we were cracking up at the way she mistreated Rick on the air. I did a gig with Rick a few years ago, and forgot to ask him about that. Doh!

I just finished this 2017 autobiography of the jazz pianist/songwriter/vocalist Dave Frishberg, and found it a welcome rest from the angst-ridden, self-involved autobio of Fred Hersch, who seemed obsessed with telling us the state of his interior mind during every second of his life. Frishberg whirls through his 85 years on the planet in under 200 pages, and fills the pages with lyrics to his many songs, and interesting anecdotes involving the many jazz musicians and celebs he came into contact with through his long career. Some things I found interesting were his time in NYC, from about 1957 to 1971, where he comes into contact with such shadowy figures as the pianist Billy Rubinstein (rumored by a few people to be Bill Evans before Bill Evans hit the scene), who set DF with his first big gig, pianist with the Kai Winding four-trombone band. The drummer in the band was Stu Martin, who Frishberg described as a "Caucasian, fair-skinned with red hair, who chose to live as a black man, and who left for Europe after the Winding band, becoming something of a free-jazz icon playing mostly with black artists". He then got a strange two-piece gig (pno. and drums) at a cabaret on Seventh Ave. a block south of the VV, which was called The Page Three. Almost every singer there was trans (including Tiny Tim), with the exception of Sheila Jordan. When he left that gig for a while, he got Herbie Nichols to replace him, who being a well-rounded musician, was able to a great job in this and many other situations. One night, DF visited the club to see Herbie, and he found the place in a complete uproar. It seems that Herbie got another pianist to sub for him that night, and the singers refused to go on stage with him. Sheila Jordan greeted DF with a big smile, and said, "You know who that is on piano, don't you? You don't? That's Cecil Taylor; Herbie sent him to sub. He's been here all night, played for everyone. You've never heard a show like this in your life!" DF asked Sheila if Tiny Tim had gone on, and Sheila answered, "No, damn it. Wouldn't that have been priceless?" He talked about his times jamming at the Sixth Avenue Loft with people like Sam Brown, and the "legendary tenor sax player Fred Greenwell from Seattle. Freddy was a freakishly talented jazz player who played entirely by ear, and couldn't discuss music in terms of notes and chords, sharps or flats. He loved to play, and would play all night and into the next morning, going without sleep for for days until the Dexedrine was gone. Then you wouldn't see him for a week or so, but he'd be back at the loft after that." In 1961, he got a gig with Bud Freeman, and they needed a bass player. DF suggested the 18 year-old Steve Swallow who he had met at a loft session. Freeman refused to play with an 18 year-old until he found out DF had played with him in a dixieland band at Yale. Freeman's face lit up. "A Yale man! Will you call him for me , Dave?" They went on the road together, and one afternoon Swallow invited them to his hotel room to listen to tapes of Coltrane and Ornette. Bud listened patiently to 'Trane's "Naima" and made polite comments. When he heard Ornette he burst out laughing. ""That's not new!" He said, "We used to play that waywhen we were kids, just to be funny! He's serious, isn't he? Or is he making fun of music like we used to do in Chicago? Sometimes we'd play like that and the people weren't laughing, and they would applaud and think we were brilliant!" Swallow was a little downcast, while Bud guffawed over the new music. He then tells a story about how Bud rehearsed him, Bob Haggart and drummer Don Lamond for three afternoons for an album Bud was going to record. They went over little riffs and interludes Bud wanted to add to each tune, and DF learned them all. At the recording session, Freeman didn't play any of the songs they had spent three days rehearsing! He's got a lot of other great stories about singers he accompanied such as Judy Garland and Anita O'Day (whom he despised), and goes on to talk about his career as a studio musician in LA, and as a songwriter for Schoolhouse Rock with Bob Dorough.

If you read the essay in Schuller's book, it had everything to do with Schoenberg and his technique. It was taken from a speech he gave to a group of student composers and their teachers at some college about the abject failure of the strict twelve-tone technique to maintain an audience for contemporary classical music. In it, Schuller went over the many aspects of the technique that drove audiences out of the concert halls, and how they could change them to retain an audience of music lovers. He himself followed many of the suggestions that he made, and many people thought Schuller's music took on a new resonance in his music after that period (1962). Schuller was considered the leading composer of serial composition in the US, but don't let that bother you...

In the end, I guess I should go back to what they taught us to say in graduate school, "Schoenberg's music doesn't speak to me in a very special way".

Oh yeah, you're right. I just remembered it was a piece for orchestra and piano. Ghastly! With Roger Sessions, whom she studied with, it was a similar path; he'd take row and like Fine follow his ear, rather than using Schoenberg's list of things to avoid.

You need to go back to the Lutheran Church. Tomorrow's Sunday, and you need to get back to that Lutheran Church!!!

Swingin' hip commercial! You have a fine pedigree.

Well personally, I'm just opposed to the rigidity of the twelve tone system. Even though that satirical song is about atonality, the singer makes no distinction between atonality and the twelve tone method of Schoenberg. He's a Nashville Money Manager, not a musician, so he probably doesn't even know the difference between the two. To her credit, Fine resisted the twelve tone technique her entire career, and that's probably why Botstein decided to perform her work. If I know his taste in music, he's probably performing a piece from her tonal period. I think pretty much everyone agrees that the triadic tonality that ended with Wagner was pretty much exhausted. Schoenberg had to happen at some point, just as an experiment in a different direction, but Imho, and Fine's apparently, it was a failed experiment. Even Stravinsky's Piano Concerto resulted in an almost laughably distorted version of his music, as he struggled to maintain a part of his identity within the strictures of the twelve tone system. That period left him regretting his decision, and wishing he could go back to the tradition of being a "Town Musician", who just composed music for events occurring in his 'town'. Even Gunther Schuller in that essay I quoted the last time we spoke about this said "We've emptied out the concert halls", there has to be a compromise between the twelve-tone system and tonality. As Fine describes her later period as mutating tonality, tempered atonality, and NOT composing by avoidance, she found the necessary 'compromise' Schuller spoke of.

The only new music that the NY Philharmonic is playing that I saw listed in the Times was a piece by Julia Wolfe (whose music I like), who is anything but a twelve-tone composer. Leon Botstein's orchestra (God bless his soul) was also listed, continuing to play music by 20th Century tonal composers who were unjustly neglected, due to the twelve-tone purge of the 50s. They were performing the works of Vivian Fine this week. I always get a kick out of the fact that all the twelve-tone composition students I was going to school with are now working at jobs they're more suited for; Accountants, Computer Programming, etc...

Yeah, that's the correct spelling, but I had another album on which it was spelled Majorca. He played with Benny Goodman and the Sal Salvador Big Band in the 50s and 60s.

That's okay, it must've been him, because I did an exhaustive search, and found I spelled the freakin' last name wrong, that's why it was exhaustive. Anyway, he indeed played lead trumpet with the S-F Band on three of their albums in the 1954 period. Sadly, he died suddenly of a cerebral hem. at a very young age-shocked the NY brass community...

This quote thing is getting confusing, but I guess you just erase your last post and write a new one. TTK-In the message I sent you, I thought the Rolf Liebermann piece was a Trumpet Concerto, but it's a concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra. Anyway, I wanted to know if the trumpet soloist was a trumpet player named Al Majorca. You can see the details in my last post, sandwiched in the group of quotes above.

That's a beautiful piece! Thanks for posting that. You'd probably have to go to the stuff he wrote for Getz to find anything on that level...

Besides the remake of Diabolique, can you or anyone name at least five rip-offs of Diabolique's plot?