Hot Ptah

I have not known anyone who had Asperger's and could function well enough to get to the level that Lester Young and Monk were on. The Asperger's people I know talk a great deal, with no filter or brake on it, no social sense of when to stop. They are very insistent about everyone doing what they want, but not toward any positive goal. However, I know that there is a wide variation in degrees of impairment in the "autism/Asperger's spectrum".

As I watched Colbert, I thought that it would be nice if Wynton had more of a light touch, was more likeable and engaging on TV. Since he seems to get most of the very rare opportunities for a jazz artist to appear on TV in the U.S., if his personality was more like, say, Barack Obama's, ijust to pick out a random example, it might actually be positive for jazz.

Allen, that fascinates me, as our son is autistic, and I have known several people who are higher functioning and have Aspergers. What leads you and Dr. Muir to think that certain musicians have some form of autism/Aspergers?

I bought a mint copy of that LP, still in its shrinkwrap, for 20 cents last week, at the Music Exchange liquidation sale in Kansas City. It was in a box with showtunes and Christmas records--such is the nature of this liquidation sale. I'll give you a quarter for it. This is just one sad thing among many at the Music Exchange's liquidation sale in Kansas City. Once one of the nation's best music stores, with a truly staggering inventory and many rare jazz gems, now the Music Exchange is reduced to a bunch of totally disorganized cardboard boxes full of records in a dingy old warehouse, with nutty people clawing through them in the faint hope of finding a good album or two. The price is now down to $5 a box, which translates into about 8 cents an album. Last weekend it took me three hours to fill two boxes. I must have looked through 100,000 albums to find 150 which were even marginally desirable, to keep or give away to friends. Still, even last weekend there were gems. I increased my Benny Goodman and Woody Herman collections considerably. And then there are the oddities, such as coming upon 15 copies together of David Liebman's "Drum Ode", sealed in the original shrinkwrap. It's a jazz record nerd/nut's dream. One of the clerks at the Music Exchange, when it was still open, had a name for the kind of people who keep going back to this sale--"the pawers". He said that there are just some people with a deep need to paw through stacks of records. Sorry, Chris, I did not mean to sidetrack your fascinating thread. And seeing your reviews from Stereo Review brought back memories of when I used to read them with great enjoyment when I was in middle school and high school.

More like two. So much for my idea of fighting my way out of debt by writing a book.

My wife and I met Wynton backstage before an April, 1982 concert in Madison, Wisconsin, when I interviewed him for the Daily Cardinal (University of Wisconsin student newspaper). Her comment when she saw this Colbert show: "Boy, is he full of himself. And he's really become heavy. Now his head looks like a pumpkin."

That's really true. I find Sarah Carter's voice very compelling. It is certainly not a "great" voice in a high art sense, but it has a poignant quality that I really like.

I would imagine that recordings of pop groups like the Beatles, Rolling Stones etc. recreating their hits in a studio in 1967 would be of widespread interest, and would be a big seller if commercially released.