Larry Kart

Some excerpts from Marc Myers' interview with Collins: Some passages from Collins' Jazz Wax interview: JW: Who did you room with (with Herman)? DC: Trumpeter John Howell. I learned a lot from him about playing trumpet in a section. Certain things you learn by sitting next to a guy in a band. Not talking but by listening and locking into what the lead player is doing. I was the jazz trumpet. The first chair in Woody’s band was John or Al Porcino. JW: What’s special about the lead trumpet? DC: When you have four trumpets playing, they all have to move around on a sheet of music like one instrument. In the trumpet section of a good band, you learn how to play intuitively. You learn how to make the same mistake the lead trumpeter makes. That’s how close the horns have to be and how hard they have to be listening to the lead player. JW: Was trumpeter Burt Collins a relation? DC: Not at all. We just happened to have the same last name. Woody used to drive him nuts. Woody would fool around by announcing, “That was Burt Collins, Dick Collins’ Jewish brother.” That was Woody. It really burned Burt to be compared to anyone. JW: You were featured on Nat Pierce and the Herdsmen for Fantasy in 1954. DC: Actually, that was my session but Nat took over the whole thing. It was my date. He just arranged it. But somewhere along the way he became the leader instead of just the piano player. He just made himself the leader, New York style [laughs]. I just let it happen. Nat never said anything and neither did I. W: You knew Al Cohn, who was on both [RCA] albums. DC: Al and I got along real well. One night he came up to my hotel room. I had no booze or pot. Al didn’t ask for anything. He just sat down and wrote a chart on the bed. We talked and he wrote while we talked. JW: Which song was it? DC: The Long Night—on Horn of Plenty. He had nothing to drink, not even a Coca-Cola. He just wrote and talked. It was amazing to watch him work. JW: Who introduced you to Cohn? DC: Trumpeter Al Porcino. I remember the three of us were standing together. Al Cohn turned to me and said, “That’s Cohn, without an ‘e’ ” [laughs]. That’s pure Al. I mean, who would even bother to say that? Al, that’s who. Al would just sit down and blow. He was amazing. JW: Why did you cut back and stop recording in 1962? DC: The business was slowing down. I said to myself, “Someday you’re not going to be 30 anymore. You’re going to be 65 and then 70, and everything will have changed. What will you be doing?” The answer, invariably, was, “Nothing.” I had no real skills other than playing the horn. I only had an undergraduate degree. JW: What did you do? DC: I decided to get a masters degree in library science. I went back to school and became a librarian in the pubic library system in Los Angeles. I worked there for 15 years and today I’m living on that pension. I don’t have to worry about a Saturday night, as some older musicians do. JW: Did the people who worked with you at the library know who you were? DC: No. I kept those worlds separate. I was still playing locally at night. I’d work during the day at the library and play at Disneyland at night in Anaheim for a week or a month. I joined the local union in Orange County so I could do that. JW: Did you enjoy being a librarian? DC: I loved it. Too many people look down on the job but it’s as honorable an occupation as any other. Eventually I was hired by Cal Tech to help the university create a special library for earthquake engineering. I had to read all the books to determine which ones we should have on the shelves. I jumped right in and had a ball. JW: Do you have any regrets? DC: Just one. I wish I didn’t drink so much early on. JW: How did you manage to play so beautifully? DC: Thank you. Maybe because I liked to memorize song lyrics before blowing on the melody. My dad raised me that way. A new piece of sheet music would come in and we’d start learning the lyrics and melody at the exact same time. P.S. Collins' early trumpet teacher was Red Nichols’ father. From part I of the Collins interview: Starting at age 6, I took lessons from Red Nichols’ father, who lived in San Jose. When I first went over to his place, he tied a trumpet from the chandelier. When I reached out to grab the horn, he said not to touch it, that I had to learn to play the trumpet while it hung there without putting my hands on it. The point was to teach me the right way to blow. So I had to approach the instrument delicately. JW: How did you do it? DC: I had to learn to blow without pressing my mouth into the mouthpiece. The whole idea was hands off, easy treatment and no force. Nichols was a great guy. He'd take three or four kids out to the park, and we'd sit around a tree. He’d have a half a crate of apples out there, and we'd eat them while we talked. I ran into Red Nichols [pictured] years later and told him I had studied trumpet with his father. Red said, “Yeah, so what?” JW: Didn’t he get along with his dad? DC: Apparently not. I think Red’s father gave him hell. Like Conrad Gozzo’s father, who told him, “If you make one mistake that’s one. Second mistake, that’s two." After the third mistake, his father would whack him with rolled up paper.

Just played this 1954 RCA album for the first time in many years and found it quite interesting. Personnel is the Herman band of the time with NYC additions/subs: Collins, Al Porcino, Charlie Walp, or John Howell, trumpets; Sonny Russo, Billy Byers, trbs.; Dick Meldonian, Al Cohn, Bill Perkins, Richie Kamuca, Jack Nimitz, saxes, Jimmy Raney, guitar; Nat Pierce, piano, Red Kelly, bass, Chuck Flores, drms., arrangements Cohn and Pierce. Understandably more tight-knit than the typical NYC studio band of the time — the saxes are particularly together, but then the trumpets and the trombones are too, and I’ve always liked Flores’ Don-Lamond-inspired (or so I assume) drumming. This was a good period for Cohn’s writing I think — all his charts here sound fresh, and while there are a good many soloists, no piece sounds like a string of solos; Al’s writing is always there. Collins’ mellow, more or less neo-Hackett and/or Don Fagerquist-like horn is attractive, and all the other soloists are in fine form — the Pierce original “Donna Mia” inclues a long chase sequence with Perkins and Cohn that is very intense, a real joust of styles and ideas. My old LP has a complete list of soloists, but oddly it doesn’t mention that (obvious to the ear) on two tracks Collins and another trumpeter do the chase thing. Probably it was Walp; Howell was a lead player I think. Only drawback, for my taste, is that Kamuca only gets one solo; this was good time for him too. There was a previous Collins RCA album, “Horn of Plenty,” which I used to have, but it’s disappeared. I was hoping that Fresh Sound had combined the two on one CD, but no such luck, though they have issued them separately. Mark Myers did a nice interview with Collins (then 85) a few years ago on Jazz Wax. Collins left the business in 1962 because he had a grim sense of where he’d probably be in later years, got a degree in library science and became a librarian (natch) — a profession that he liked.

IIRC, the engineer on the Chambers Jazz West date made a special effort to record Paul as accurately as possible. I'll have to listen again to see if he succeeded, but I think he took a good shot at it. P.S. Damn, I know I used to have that album, but I can't find it on my shelves under "Chambers" or "Coltrane,"

Your choice of "unfurled" is interesting and to the point, I think. The Rollins I love was not a matter that much of unfurling but (to stick with the metaphor) of explosive unfoldings, of revelations of accumulating and revealed forces. In his own rather different way, Von Freeman was a genius at this art of statement/ variation, and powerful and scarcely to be believed summings up. Again, we like/respond to what we like/respond to.

OK, Jim -- I'll raise you one, Here's one of my favorite but lesser-known vintage Rollins performances that epitomizes one of his key traits/gifts/you name it of that era that I didn't hear much from him later on -- his ability/even drive to sum up/compress in more or less sonata-form like climaxes what has been going on in a particular solo to that time (there are several of them here). This is, of course, a hallmark of such recordings as the Prestige "St. Thomas," "Wagon Wheels," and many others of that era, and IMO of this recording too. In any case, the latter-day absence of those immense-in-musical-and-emotional-effect summing up passages and the substitution (if you want to put it that way) of what amounted to a kind of associative discursiveness is what I began to find disappointing: Also, something eventually happened to Rollins' sound, if "happened" is the way to put it, which may have been in large part a result of him using a clip-on mic. Compare his sound on "What's My Name" with his sound on the two tracks you linked to. There is a definite difference, I think, and while preferences here are personal/individual (nor do I deny that Rollins himself might have been quite freely exercising his own preferences in this regard), all I can say is that Rollins' sound c. 1955-60 was an essential aspect of his expressive package, and that the change that I hear in his sound in his later playing was a change in more than his sound per se. BTW, speaking of changes in Rollins' sound, the first big change came with "The Bridge" and his other RCA recordings, where his sound became a fair amount more intensely focused than it had been before, almost diamond hard. This I more or less "understood" at the time; it flowed into and out of the whole withdrawal from the scene experience and (I'm fairly sure) his response to Coltrane, and it was in both senses urgent, an apparent emotional and aesthetic necessity. And there are some recordings from the tail end of the '60s -- e.g. a sublime Scandinavian trio date with Henry Grimes and Pete LaRoca -- that sound like an extension of the Rollins of the late '50s on rocket fuel, but... Sorry, that Scandinavian Rollins performance was from 1959 (see below):

Yes I am here -- our out there if you prefer. Basically, I agree with you. I didn't hear Sonny live that much in later years, nor did I buy that many Rollins albums after a certain point, but nothing that I did hear in person or on record was up to all that I'd heard from him earlier on. At one point, in fact, I felt that Sonny was the most important living artist, maybe the most important man on the planet. So much strength, wisdom, insight, and humor, and his wisdom was his alone. I know -- that's too much of a burden to place on anyone. But I don't think I was the only one who felt that way. The painter Alex Katz, FWIW, once said that the turning point in his career -- what inspired him in the late 1950s to paint in the way that became his calling card -- was listening over and over to "Way Out West."

Should you ever run across "Lover," an amply filled, 20-track seemingly now o.o.p. Garner CD on the Giants of Jazz label, do not hesitate. It's electrifying vintage material from 1950-2, with John Simmons and Shadow Wilson. Garner himself is well-captured sonically, a treble boost gives one a bit more of Wilson, though one would like more. Nonetheless the drive that he and Simmons help to impart is evident.

And now for something completely different -- Kenneth Gilbert's recording of the earlier, autograph copy of The Art of the Fugue (see explanation below), which is many respects different from the commonly performed manuscript version we all know, which Bach added to and modified after he wrote the autograph copy and that probably was tweaked some after his death by his son C.P.E. Bach, who oversaw the publication of the manuscript version. In any case, there are some fugues here that are hair-raisingly far out, harmonically and otherwise. At times you want to say, "Herr Bach, this is getting too damn weird; you're never going to make it back home from there," and sometimes he pretty much doesn't. But what a trip; in particualr, Fugue 11 in the autograph version is almost psychedelic. I have another recording of the autograph TAF by Robert Hill but haven't yet compared it with Gilbert's, which I picked up today. But I don't recall that when listening to Hill's recording that I felt that the music was being hung from sky hooks at times, as I did with Gilbert. I'll be curious to compare. Perhaps Hill's performance normalized some things, while Gilbert just let it all hang out. The Art of Fugue has been the subject of controversy for years: Was it actually Bach's final composition? Was it intended for performance? In what order are the pieces to be played? For what instrument or instruments was the cycle composed? Fortunately, the lack of definitive answers to many of these questions, especially the one about instrumentation, has resulted in many diffeent wonderful versions being recorded over the years. As to the question of when it was written, Christoph Wolf argues persuasively in the notes to Gilbert's delightful album, that Bach began writing the Art of Fugue in the early 1740s (and perhaps even earlier) and edited and augmented it toward the end of his life. Wolf's conclusions are based on comparisons of the autograph and manuscript copies that survive. Kenneth Gilbert's recording is a special one because it is derived solely from the earlier autograph score. Gilbert's playing is, as always, full and rich, aided by a well-recorded harpsichord built in 1671 in Antwerp and enlarged in Paris in 1758 and 1759. Here it is. Fugue ll begins at the 36.25 mark.

I'd like to hear this one again. Bought it when it came out way back when, and my memory is that it was something of a riot in the best sense -- very loose and swinging. More Images Woody Herman And The Las Vegas Herd ‎– Jackpot! Label: Capitol Records ‎– 5C 038-85404 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono, Reissue Country: Netherlands Released: 1979 Genre: Jazz Style: Big Band, Swing Tracklist A1 920 Special 6:14 A2 Bags' Other Groove 3:35 A3 Broadway 2:40 A4 Jumpin' At The Woodside 5:02 B1 The Boot 5:27 B2 Wailing Wall 4:07 B3 Base Face 2:39 B4 Junior 3:36 Companies, etc. Manufactured By – EMI Records Holland B.V. Distributed By – EMI Records Holland B.V. Credits Bass – Monte Budwig* Clarinet – Woody Herman Drums – Chuck Flores Liner Notes – Ralph Gleason* Photography By [Budwig Photo] – Sol Weiss Piano – Norman Pockrandt Saxophone [Tenor] – Richie Kamuca Trumpet – Cy Touff, Dick Collins, Johnny Coppola* "Ruby and Woody" is a good one, very relaxed.

In the right mood -- hers and mine -- she could really intoxicate.

Speaking of movies that bear some relationship to the blacklist and the role of/issues stirred by communism in the Hollywood community, I urge you to seek out if possible the fairly demented 1947 film noir “Desert Fury.” Here’s a squib I once wrote about it: 'Another interesting (and I think little known) noir is "Desert Fury” (1947), with John Hodiak, Wendell Corey, Lizbeth Scott, Lauren Bacall, and Burt Lancaster -- directed by Lewis Allen, script by Robert Rossen (the likely autuer and eventually one of the Hollywood Ten). To me, it's the quintessential pre-Hollywood Ten movie because its chief theme, transformed into a gangster setting in a more or less allegorical manner, is loyalty on the part of actual or would-be intellectuals (or, in this case, frontmen) to the Communist Party no matter what (or rather to some degree because) the loyalty the CP required was of the "no matter what” sort. 'This comes through in one key element of the plot -- the belief (held by many committed CPUSA members) that the ultimate test of virtue was one's "hardness" (not only as in toughness but also in one's willingness to do almost any deed in the name of submission to party discipline -- especially if the Party's dictates ran counter to the promptings of one's personal [i.e. bourgeois] conscience, convenience, or morality.) Thus Hodiak's character is a handsome, narcissistic frontman (a star gambler) who throws his glamorous rather menacing weight around but who shies away from doing the rough dirty stuff, while Corey, his sidekick who does do he rough dirty stuff when that's necessary (actually, he deeply enjoys doing it), is at once literally in love with Hodiak's character and his "star" aura (this homo-erotic aspect of the film is quite startlingly evident for its time) and enraged by the gap between what Hodiak's character thinks he himself is unwilling/ too good to do and what Corey's character both has to and, in some sense, chooses to do instead. Corey, playing a deeply twisted man, gives a terrific twisted performance. 'BTW, I can't swear that this is true, but a great American writer who shall be nameless (because, again, I can't swear that this story is true, though I trust my source for it) and who was a committed CPUSA member of the type outlined above (that committed CPUSA member part is fact) was among those who decamped to Mexico when things got hot in the immediate post-war Red Scare era and was among those who bought into the ultimate test of one's virtue as a committed Party member was one's "hardness" -- this despite (or maybe in some sense because) he was an essentially kind, gentle man. In any case, according to the story I was told, in Mexico his "hardness" was put to the test and on Party orders he engineered the death of a fellow leftist American emigre who was suspected of being a traitor to the cause and an FBI snitch.' BTW, Rossen, was probably best know for writing and directing "The Hustler." P.S. Lewis Allen is not to be confused with "Lewis Allan," the pseudonym of Abe Meeropol, the New York schoolteacher who wrote the lyric to "Strange Fruit" and eventually adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/lewis-allen-desert-fury/ http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2012/04/desert-fury-1947.html

Again, aside from the authors' so far general good sense/savvy, the key virtue of this well-written book is that it begins at what was pretty much the beginning -- the advent, with the coming of sound in film, of screenwriting and screenwriters as a key factor in the Hollywood production mill as never before. Then, with the nature and details of the screenwriters' relationship to movie-making in general and the producers/studio bosses in particular set firmly in place, a great deal of what then happened politically in and around Hollywood begins to seem virtually inevitable/make a dire sort of sense.

Just read all three of these in a row -- three of the best biographies I've ever read. And what a fascinating subject. Am now reading a previous book that Steven Englund co-wrote: Very enlightening so far, in part because it doesn't begin with the blacklist era but starts in 1930. That background matters a great deal.

A while ago, after many years spent with various recordings -- from the Vegh to the Hungarian, the Alban Berg, the Yale, the Suske, the Tokyo, the Juilliard Quartets and more than a few more -- I finally settled enthusiastically (and somewhat to my surprise) on the RCA Guarneri Beethoven Quartets, which are available in three boxed sets (Early, Middle, and Late) on Amazon for between $8 and $11 a set. I also see on Amazon a Complete Guarneri Beethoven on Brilliant Classics for $30, but those aren't the RCA recordings repackaged but a later set repackaged that they did for Phillips -- that set I haven't heard, though it's received very good reviews. But the RCA set I can definitely vouch for.

Have no particular expectations, though I do wonder if his girlfriends (several are said to be interviewed) looked like Petula Clark. BTW, I wonder if Gould also was a fan of Karen Carpenter.

Tnaks to this thread and a library sale, I'm now a proud owner of the DVD "Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould." Will report when I watch it if there's anything of interest.

They come from his chapter "Bach and Handel" in the 1972 Pelican paperback "Keyboard Music" (ed. Denis Matthews, other chapters are by other writers). Reissued in this form: https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Music-Denis-Matthews/dp/0800844564/ref=sr_1_18?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1533864237&sr=1-18&keywords=denis+matthews

I don't doubt the weight and significance of Bach's "science" whatsoever. But I'm reluctant to regard Gould's supposed "scientific objectivity" in the same light, preferring to regard his approach as, to quote Mr. Hawkins, "personal, idiosyncratic" (terms that don't jibe that well with "scientific objectivity, no?) Yes, it still always sounds like Bach, but the approaches of other performers to Bach please me much more, make more sense to me, and also (to claim what cannot be proved) sound more like Bach.

Very revealing perhaps. By contrast, this from Rosen: "This inability [of keyboard instruments] to make in practice the clear-cut distinctions [among contrapuntal lines] that were made in theory embodied the tendency toward toward a completely unified texture and the powerful vertical harmonic force that characterized so much of the early eighteenth century...." I'll add that Gould's quote, in conjunction with that passage from Rosen, perhaps give me a clue to the nature and origin of Gould's approach as an interpreter. Given his aforementioned digital and mental gift for realizing contrapuntal lines, and given, as Rosen claims, the gap in Bach's time between theoretical contrapuntal distinctions and the ability of keyboard instruments to make those distinctions (which Rosen says led to unified textures and the advent of powerful vertical harmonic forces), Gould (because of the horizontal texture of the sort of musical discourse that he temperamentally favored and that he could strikingly realize) proceeded to interpret (to some degree reshape?) Bach's music in that image. Another thought: There is, I think, a moralistic, even dictatorial, strain in Gould's "every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane." (My emphasis). Remembering that Gould was something of a Schoenberg devotee and himself wrote Schoenbergian music, one thinks of such dicta from the early days of so-called Serialism as no octave doubling, no recurrence of any pitch in a piece until every other pitch in the series had been sounded, etc. IIRC Schoenberg circle composers who failed to obey those rules were more or less banished from the temple, though of course S. in later years failed to comply with those rules himself. In any case, Gould's privileging (horrible term -- sorry) of the "past and ... future on the horizontal plane" standard for proper musical discourse does induce a certain shiver, at least in me.

To the degree that Gould's way of playing Bach is a-historical, I have no big problem with that, although as I said before I think that Gould's approach is itself historical -- a personal offshoot of the anti-romantic, "objective" (viz. Jim's invocation in a previous post of Gould's "scientific objectivity") approach to playing Bach that began to emerge after World War I, as part and parcel of the general anti-romantic approach of much artistic modernism of all sorts. As for the personal side of Gould's music-making, one aspect of it may have been that he had (I believe from the get-go) a remarkable ability -- digital and mental -- to differentiate contrapuntal lines. Thus, the music of a quintessentially contrapuntal composer like Bach was something that he would tend to see and interpret through the lens of his own primary and abiding gift. Further, and this is particularly true of his first Columbia recording of the Goldberg Variations, the recording that made him a star, there was the motoric "peppiness" (if you will) with which he frequently amped up the tempos of passages that many previous performers had taken at a more measured pace. Compare, for example, Gould's playing of the Allemande from the French Suite No. 5 to the other two performances of the Allemande I posted alongside Gould's above. React however you're inclined, but it's hard not to feel that Gould's reading of the Allemande is almost a different piece of music -- not only because, as I've said before, he more or less pecks at it in terms of accentuation/articulation but also because the whole "breath rhythm" (so to speak) of the piece has been Gould-ized into a series of brief motoric gasps and leaps. Indeed, I came to feel over time that this particular kind of short-breathed rapidity was so typical of Gould's musical inclinations that many of the more rapid passages in his Bach recordings began to sound alike. That probably accounts for my eventual weariness with Gould's Bach, after having had my socks knocked off by his Goldbergs back in 1955 -- his Bach is a good deal more of a piece, more uniform, than (as I've learned from many other performances) Bach is. Interesting that you should mention Tristano. I vaguely recall that Gould had something to say about Lennie at one point -- positive or negative I don't recall (I'll see if I can find it). Here it is: "… in my teens I went through a period when it was very 'in’ to see profundities in Lennie Tristano, and I tried, so help me, I tried, but I never succeeded."

Yes. "Apart from the trio sonata, which is written for flute, violin and basso continuo, the pieces have few indications of which instruments are meant to play them, although there is now significant support for the idea that they are for solo keyboard, like most of Bach's other published works."

We're talking about the same thing, and whether one does or doesn't respond positively to this approach is a matter of personal preference. I do think, though, that the phrase "its own" in "give each note its own, fullest space without any transient(?) overflow into the next" assumes or grants too much. Each note has a will, wants to be cut off just so, apart from its role in the overall musical context? Again, for what Rosen's point of view is worth, he writes that "it is remarkable ... how much in ingenuity [Bach] has expended in avoiding articulation, in keeping all aspects of the flowing movement constant." (My emphasis) I also bridle some at "scientific objectivity." What science are we talking about, and why are notes that flow more into other notes than the notes in Gould's Bach do the results of subjective choices?

Sorry for my semi-error. In my previous post, I was thinking more of The Musical Offering than the TAF when I said that settings for that work/such works for instrumental ensembles were not of Bach's time but were later developments. Nonetheless, the evidence more than suggests that we're basically talking about music that was, in origin and practice, keyboard music. OTOH, there are no limits to the larger implications of such works.

As for even The Art of the Fugue not being keyboard music, Rosen has this to say: "...[T]he old controversy of which instrument [these works] were written for is largely meaningless; it is not a question that could have been asked in the early eighteenth century. [Many of these pieces] are essentially practice pieces, etudes, in short; they would have been studied on whatever instrument with a pair of keyboards and a set of pedals was handy -- at home, it would most likely have been a clavichord. This does not rule out their performance on the organ when the occasion afforded one.... But practicing on an organ was not as simple a matter in the eighteenth century, when manpower as well as an organist was needed to produce a sound; furthermore, occasions for the public performance of secular, non-operatic music were rare at that time.... The basic interchangeability of instrument for most keyboard music of the time must be accepted before we can begin to understand the relatively limited number of works intended for a specific instrument." Yes, there have been numerous realizations/arrangements of The Art of the Fugue for various ensembles of instruments over the years but no evidence I'm aware of that any of these date from Bach's time. TAF was written for private study/contemplation, not for public performance. Indeed, as Rosen says, there were then "no recitals in any recognizable sense of the word." If TAF were realized in sound, as it surely was by some of those who were studying it; it would have been realized by them on a keyboard instrument that was near to hand.

I think heart failure was a euphemism for overdose.