Larry Kart

"Which is why all the retro-Second Quintet musics, including Herbie's, are really kind of sucky. they're no longer writing the book, they're reading from the book that already got wrote." Exactly.

Damn. How strong was the wind that did that?

From Janis' first album: Accompanying Images include some from Janis' later days in the Nashville area. I suspect that he's no longer with us; his website has been inactive for some time. P.S. Yes, he passed in 2017 at age 89. http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/tennessean/obituary.aspx?n=johnny-janis&pid=185016926&fhid=17194

Yes, Frank was something else. He came along a little too late in the game, as did another excellent and somewhat more obscure Chicago-based singer-guitarist Johnny Janis. He, like D'Rone, was a Hefner favorite, and Hefner in the mid-1960s bankrolled a gorgeous album, with Don Costa charts, of Janis singing ballads, "Once in a Blue Moon." A few years earlier Janis recorded a date, unissued at the time, with Ira Sullivan, Dodo Marmarosa, drummer Guy Viveros, and bassist Jerry Friedman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DhjpCrSjrE

I see your point, but I just took the album for the more or less organic 1959 entity it was/seemed to be. Further, I think the committed nature of the solos to some degree may have stimulated the drummers who accompanied them. I can certainly hear (or think I can) how the way Rich stokes his guys and Roach stokes his then stokes their own solo work. Further, I like the fact that the potentially cheesy "duel of drummers" setup and the relative brevity of the horn solos doesn't lead those soloists to slack off. Finally, given the relative sparsity of Willie Dennis (1926-85) on record, I'm pleased to hear a fair bit more from him, especially from when he was in his prime.

I think all the horn solos are quite committed and at least one of Tommy Turrentine's to be top-notch -- IIRC it's on the alternate take of "Limehouse Blues."

In part because of a recent spirited exchange of views on Rich on another board, in part because I just ran across it, I picked up the CD reissue (with alternate takes added) of this 1959 album, expecting Heaven knows what all -- maybe some sort of bloodbath -- and to my surprise find it quite fascinating, at once playful and serious. Rich's band of the time (Phil Woods, Willie Dennis, John Bunch, Phil Leshin) is in one channel, Roach's (Tommy and Stanley Turrentine, Julian Priester, Bob Boswell) in the other, charts are by Gigi Gryce (efficient or more than that), horn soloists are all on their games, as are the co-leaders. In their numerous exchanges, Roach gains points, if that's the way to put it, through meaningful obliqueness and typical tymp-like timbral variations, while Buddy, though he's certainly his own self by and large, fairly often tries and succeeds in working variations on what Max has just played -- the tone of Rich's responses being (so it seems to me) a blend of challenge and curiosity/respect. Also, there's one 4:30 track, "Figure Eights," that is entirely no b.s. exchanges (mostly "eights") between the two. Fascinating again, and also kind of moving in that everyone involved seems to me to have put aside the potential showbiz nature of the project and just played their asses off. Jack Tracy was the A&R man.

I tried to do that some but decided/realized that, at least right now, I couldn't make any headway with that. That review -- yeesh. Though I can't judge precision here other than on a subjective basis, "intense precision and deft phrasing" is just what I heard on "Ride the Wind" -- this, if nothing else, by contrast with the IMO somewhat looser/less effective Wide Hive recording of similar material by Mitchell and an ensemble drawn from Mills College.

Sometimes when listening to Morton Feldman. And I like Feldman, when I'm in the right mood and haven't eaten a heavy meal.

I use a dowsing rod.

Wonderful Chicago cabaret-jazz singer and pianist: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-ent-audrey-morris-dead-0402-story.html

Sorry for the repeated "David Ayers said" above. It carried over, and I didn't see how to get rid of it.

Yes, I obsess about Gopnik quite a bit, in part because, as I went into in an early post on this thread, in my own journalistic career, and well before I knew Gopnik existed, in the late-'70s/early '80s at the Chicago Tribune I definitely felt the temptation of trying to turn myself into a kind of resident culture vulture, though the opportunities there were less abundant and probably less consequential in terms of self-advancement than they were at, say, the New Yorker or the New York Times. For various reasons -- some of them moral (or so I like to think), some of them matters of personal temperament (I didn't want to be treated or regarded as a "pet" and/or as an agent of specific higher-ups who would expect me to do their bidding in those realms and thus further their own power operations) -- once I began to understand what the lay of the land was, all I ever wanted and in effect used was my own byline and the freedom to say in print whatever I saw fit about what seemed to me to be right in front of me. Doing so got me into trouble at times, but I could sleep at night. If I had taken the other route, I'm pretty sure that at times I wouldn't have been able to.

That was it. The batteries must have died, and I somehow put the new ones in backwards. Many thanks. Now it's back to my regular job at Missile Command for NORAD.

Tell me where I mis-transcribed Gopnik, and I'll go back and correct that. His point about that particular fault line in popular music history is a hoary cliche. Further, though it doesn't have much bearing on ALW, the real fault line in popular music history (if one wants to call it a fault line) came with the advent of rock 'n' roll -- the crucial date probably being 1956 when Elvis' "Don't Be Cruel"/"Hound Dog" single climbed to the top of the pop, country, and rhythm and blues charts.

After maybe ten years, the RC003SA remote for my Marantz SA-15S2 CD Player suddenly stopped working. First thought was the batteries needed to be replaced, but no. Any thoughts on a next move?

I dunno. Yes, I brought it up, but I'm kind of sick of this whole subject now, especially after a friend of mine going back to high school days told me yesterday that my negative view of Gopnik was "utterly ridiculous." Didn't change my mind when he said that, but it sure was disturbing/depressing.

As far as I can tell, it has no function other than to serve as a kind of electronic billboard. If it's not an April 1 joke, it should be.

Ran across this advice a few days ago, don't recall where. Get ahold of some decent spray contact cleaner (I used CRC 2000) and clean all the connections on your playback equipment (don't neglect cable-to-speaker contacts), using Q-tips, pipe cleaners, etc. In some cases, judging by the eye, things were clean already; in others the Q-tips, pipe cleaners, etc. definitely picked up some dirty residue -- in which case repeat to make sure that there's none of that left. I did this late on Tuesday night and didn't turn on the unit until the next morning so as not to wake up those who were sleeping. Wednesday a.m. when I did turn things -- wow! Top and bottom ends extended, volume increased, more space around sounds, better imaging. If you don't get similar results, at least there's no harm -- other than the cost of the can of contact cleaner and the modest effort involved. I suppose what I did could be overdone though -- so don't do that; more contact cleaner probably doesn't mean better. Let the presence or absence of dirty residue on your Q-tips or pipe cleaners be your guide. But on a unit that's been sitting in a basement for almost a decade, some crud may well be present.

It was Gopnik himself, dipping into his "I have deep thoughts" bag.

Early 1970s.

I once saw Patterson simulate cunnilingus on the organ (i.e. play the Hammond B-3 organ with his tongue as though the keyboard were ... you got it -- this replete with appropriate gestures and perhaps sounds too -- that I don't recall). Was this, I wonder, a normal part of his routine, or did I catch him when he was inspired? BTW, it was at a private party. P.S. Rest of the band was Von Freeman, guitarist Sam Thomas, and Wilbur Campbell. It was a party for a middle-aged couple who were celebrating a wedding anniversary.

Thinking of Gopnik again (sorry about that), to me much of this comes back to or down to the basic character of the writer -- as I said earlier, "Who are you?", "Where are you?." "What are you up to?" If the answers to those three questions are good ones/what they should be, ninety percent of the rest probably will take care of itself because such people would be fully motivated to do whatever needs to be done to get things right. If the answers of others to those questions are squishy or worse, then they'll cut corners, go off on self-serving tangents, puff up their partial knowledge into displays of faux omniscience, etc. The ten percent that writers of good character might miss? The ten percent. or whatever percentage, that is seemingly lost or more or less hidden in the recesses of time or in odd corners and calls for an indefatigable historical-minded scholar-detective with very good judgment like the late Larry Gushee (see his book on the Creole Jazz Band) to uncover and sort out. Very few people like that.

Vallee d' Obermann -- amazing

Just to be clear, though this is peripheral to the concerns of most of us here, my lasting irritation with Gopnik is because IMO he's a particular kind of journalistic creep who has only Potemkin Village ideas and fairly often retails mis-information in an attempt to, as in the case I cited, add to his all-important air of casual omniscience. Given all that, Gopnik also matters if you think the New Yorker still matters, because he's become as crucial to that magazine's identity as any writer on its staff.