Larry Kart

Happy Birthday

Wonderful player, lovely man.

Very promising so far, powerful cast. The libretto, along with extensive scholarly information about the opera, can be found on-line. I took a chance on this after being impressed by Taneyev's chamber music.

A favorite of mine.

Very good. Lots of still vigorous (in 1990) older guys here: Wess, Sweets, Joe Newman, Snooky Young, Al Grey, Bennie Powell. Marshal Royal, Curtis Peagler, Billy Mitchell, Ronnell Bright, Ted Dunbar, Eddie Jones et al. Above all, the band sounds like a BAND.

Maybe my favorite Zoot recording, Excellent rhythm section -- John Williams, Knobby Totah, Gus Johnson.

Yes, that's what Troy Vincent said -- that is was the hit, not the suspension. But I'm thinking that the real reasons for this and some other suspensions are whatever the heck the NFL feels about the incident, not what it says about it.

But he's not supposed to then stand over the guy and taunt him. Even Mike Tomlin said that was way wrong for him to do.

But those 10" Riverside dates are all reissues or by trad artists, with the exception of these "modern" albums (the Sarah Vaughan was picked up from another label, I would guess): RLP 2508 - Cole Porter in a Modern Mood - Randy Weston [1954] RLP 2515 - Randy Weston Trio - [1955] RLP 2517 - Counterpoint for Six Valves - Don Elliott With Rusty Dedrick [1954] RLP 2518 - A Woman In Love - Barbara Lea [1954] RLP 8001 - I Love New York - Pat Northrop with Tony Burrello [1954 RLP 8002 - Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Tony Burello] Lea, and I assume Burello, were more or less cabaret acts, which leaves us with only Weston and Don Elliott as "modern" pre-Monk artists on Riverside. Of course, Don Elliott and Rusty Dedrick were notorious junkies ... not.

What early Riversides are you thinking of? Wasn't Riverside's earliest modern jazz album "Monk Plays Ellington"? So how could there have been any junkie-free Riverside albums that pre-date Monk (given that trad musicians were more likely to be boozers than junkies)? Or do I not understand what you're saying here?

Yeah — like Matthew Gee, Ernie Henry, Kenny Drew, Kenny Dorham, Wilbur Ware, Johnny Griffin. Can't swear that all those guys were junkies at precisely that time, but.... Also, Riverside's house drummer was Philly Joe.

I'm sorry, but I thought the "Jazz Loft" book was pretty much a mess for several inter-related reasons: 1) What Smith left behind was a mass of material that was an almost literal mess -- one that, as you say, it took Stephenson a long time to sort out; 2) I think that Stephenson perhaps understandably made a decision that to sort out things beyond a certain point would not be true to the nature of Smith's loft and the kinds of lives that were being lived there, so he left things on the "shaggy" side; and 3) Smith's own life during that period was itself fairly well, albeit colorfully at times, messed up. The resulting book then was again IMO "shaggy" (if that's right word) to a fault. E.g. because Smith obsessively taped certain radio broadcasts, we are treated IIRC to page after page of those transcripts, which I can't imagine being of much interest other than as a record of what Smith's habits and quirks were. Also, and this is just my opinion, notable though Smith was as a photographer at one time, I don't find much of the work of his that's reproduced in the book to be of high quality. Do you? So for me it's a book that falls between several stools -- the quirky, ramshackle latter-day life of Smith (which I don't find to be a subject of much interest), and the jazz lives that were lived in and the actual music that was made in Smith's loft. Those things do interest me, but reading the book I felt that those things got the short end of the stick, and this I found frustrating. P.S. It was Stephenson who rather high-handedly introduced the disparaging term "posing hipsters" -- "The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries."

I mentioned the Five Spot not because it was typical but because its habitues and the habitues of the Jazz Loft might have overlapped to some degree. And Max Gordon's Village Vanguard, and Frank Holzfeind's Blue Note and George Marianthal's London House and the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago, George Wein's Storyville in Boston, the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood, and the Blackhawk, Keystone Korner, and the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, and the Half Note, Bradley's, et. al. in New York were all "hellholes"?

OK -- but the phrase "I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier...." is what threw me; "I was working" clearly referring in 1999, when he went into that coffee shop and heard Clark's music for the first time, while it is "for the past decade"since then he has been working on the Jazz Loft book, and it was at some point during those years he came across the tape Smith had made of Clark's near-death from an overdose. P.S. I apologize for my misreading/misinterpretation of what in fact was the case, but rereading that piece: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/01/13/sonny-clark/ I don't think that my confusion re: chronology was entirely of my own making.

More on Gavin's Chet Baker biography, taken from something I posted elsewhere at the time: Gavin did lots of interviews with lots of interesting people (e.g. Russ Freeman, Jack Sheldon, Carson Smith, Bob Zieff etc.) with interesting points of view who were around at the time and know where the bodies are buried. The problem is that Gavin, while far from the worst of the "pathographer" breed, doesn't have the grounding to sort through all the good stuff he has without creating an air of semi-pervasive dubiousness and introducing lots of inadvertent "wised up" howlers -- e.g. a reference to the Miles Davis of the Birth of the Cool band supposedly perfecting "the ethereal sound of cool" while "in the throes of addiction." No, Miles was not an addict at the time.) The book is full of such stuff, most of it arising because, again, Gavin seems not to be a jazz person but someone who was drawn to Baker on a "cultural historian" basis--and that may be putting it kindly. Here's one odd little example among many: on p. 112, Gavin writes of pianist Dick Twardzik: "Soon he was a junkie, and joined with [drummer Peter] Littman, the rising young saxophonist Serge Chaloff, and other buddies in a fraternal ritual of getting high, then playing jazz." No date is given, but in 1951, when Twardzik first worked with Chaloff in Boston, the pianist was a talented 20-year-old novice while Chaloff was a 28-year-old poll-winning "star" who had returned to Boston, his hometown, in part to recover from ill-health (mostly the vicissitudes of drug addiction). Also, Chaloff was no longer "rising" but pretty much descending toward his eventual demise. Characterizing Chaloff as a "rising young saxophonist" and saying that he and Twardzik were "buddies" strikes me as more than a little tone-deaf; no one who knew who Serge Chaloff was before he started to work on this book could have said what Gavin did there. It's as though Gavin had written in his previous book about the New York cabaret scene: "Liza Minnelli admired the rising young singer Mabel Mercer." Minnelli might have admired Mercer, but Mercer had "arrived" long before Minnelli was old enough to be fond of anyone other than her dolly. (Also--and this just may be me--the phrase "a fraternal ritual of getting high, then playing jazz" inadvertently brings to mind a bad movie of the '50s: "Hey, fellas, I know what -- let's get high, then play jazz!") If you bring enough context to "Deep in a Dream," you may be able to sort things out yourself, but don't trust Gavin to do it for you or to do it accurately. To return to that Serge Chaloff example, if I were writing a serious work on Figure Y or subject X and something or someone came up in relation to my main topic that was unfamiliar to me (as Chaloff seemingly was to Gavin), I hope I would try to acquire however much context I needed to say something sensible at that point rather than something that's not only "off" or just plain wrong but also probably stems from, a need to display some would-be "wised up" attitude. But then that's the sort of book that Gavin's publisher clearly wanted from him, not that he was unwilling to supply it.

OK, here is the stopped-me-in-my-tracks anomaly in Stephenson's Paris Review piece about Sonny Clark: "Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever at home. I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier.... "My wife, Laurie Cochenour, grew up in Elizabeth Township, about seven miles from Herminie No. 2. [Clark's home town.] For the past decade, I’ve done a bit of research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me." Help me out here. Stephenson has done "research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her [his wife's] family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me" -- and this chance episode in that Raleigh coffee shop is "the first time" (my emphasis] Stephenson has "noticed" Clark's actual piano playing? Again, this doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe, but to me it is freaking strange that a) one would have been working on a book "about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians" and b) have been doing some "research" on one of those jazz musicians "for the past decade," not have taken the trouble to listen to some of that musician's music, which in 1999 was not at all hard to come by. What am I not getting about this?

Maybe he’s changed his spots, or I’m just dead wrong about the guy, but based on his New Yorker and Paris Review pieces from several years back about Sonny Clark and also on his IMO messed-up “Jazz Loft Project,” I have my doubts about Sam Stephenson. Here are some comments I’ve made about his work here. 1) Rather creepy, almost vampire-like-in-tone article [the New Yorker piece or the Paris Review piece on Sonny Clark, I don’t recall which]. I would hope that Stephenson passes on the material on Clark that he has gathered to someone with a different, less neo-hipster-rides-again sensibility. Also IMO, "The Jazz Loft Project" book fell between two stools. One was the desire to capture the jittery, relatively random texture of the life photographer W. Eugene Smith was leading at the time; and this the book did accomplish -- by more or less imitating that texture. But if one were interested in the actual musicians who played at Smith's loft and the actual music they played there -- lots of luck. IIRC, little or no knowledgeable sorting out of the material from that perspective was done.' 2) The creepy tone I refer to stems from several things. First, the focus [in those pieces] on whether the body that was buried as Sonny Clark's actually was his. Either it was or it wasn't, and if it wasn't it may well be a sign of social-racial indifference or worse on the part of the relevant authorities, but this is a primary piece of info about Sonny Clark? Second, the fact that Stephenson says he may write a biography of Clark. I know -- not creepy in itself, but given the junky-life associations he understandably leans on, I sense, as I said in my previous post, a neo-hipster orientation in Stephenson, which IIRC was also present in "The Jazz Loft Project," and I almost always find that creepy, though YMMV. I'm thinking he'll give us, if he gets around to it, something along the lines of James Gavin's Chet Baker bio, "Deep In A Dream." Finally, there's something about Stephenson's account here that doesn't quite track; and if so, that gives me a queasy feeling. He says that he heard Clark's music for the first time by chance in a Raleigh, N.C., coffee shop in 1999, but he also says that at this time he had been working on what seems to be what eventually would become "The Jazz Loft Project." Then, some unspecified but apparently short time later, Stephenson discovers that the Sonny Clark whose music he had heard and been moved by in that North Carolina coffee shop not only was a habitue of Smith's jazz loft but also was at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes that Smith captured on tape -- almost dying from an overdose in the company of Lin Halliday. 3) OK -- If and when Stephenson comes out with a Sonnny Clark biography, we shall see, according to our own tastes, of course. But until shown otherwise, I'll stick by intuition that Stephenson is a somewhat exploitive neo-hipster type. For one thing, can you imagine a not particularly jazz-oriented freelance writer setting out to write, with any hope of getting it published by a major firm like his current publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, a book on Sonny Clark unless it were focused on Clark as an exemplary hardbop junkie? It's the "romance" that's thought to sell, especially the dark, tragic romance (as in the Clark-Halliday episode that W. Eugene Smith captured on tape). That someone also was a brilliant musician is just icing on the cake. 4) Maybe I'm pushing this too hard, but that seems to leave us with two options: 1) Stephenson not only had never heard Clark's music until he just happened to encounter it in that N.C. coffee shop in 1999, but he also at that point had never heard of him at all; or 2) he was already aware of Clark's name from his work on the Smith material but hadn't yet bothered to check out his music. Option 1) is not impossible -- it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe -- but unless I've misunderstood what Stephenson says, it seems like a whopping big coincidence to me that he would be entranced by Sonny Clark's music out of the blue and then discover that Clark not only was a habitue of the place he'd been researching but also was at the center of one of the more sadly dramatic events that took place there and that W. Eugene Smith would capture on tape. Option 2) seems a tad more likely and also seems to me to fit the rather loose way the music and the musicians are treated in "The Jazz Loft Project" IMO, but I don't like that sort of looseness; it feels exploitive to me. And if option 2) is the case, what does that do to the N.C. coffee bar story? 5) OK -- I've read through "The Jazz Loft Project" again, and one of the first things I noticed was this (p. 5): "From [W. Eugene Smith's] photos and tapes and from interviews with participants, we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college." This struck me as an extremely odd assertion, but how to check it myself, as author Sam Stephenson surely must have done, otherwise why would he say such a thing? I wasn't going to write down every name in the book as I went along -- that way lies madness (though some might think I'm halfway there already) -- but then at the back of the book I saw there was a list of those 589 people, many of whom I had heard of. So with the aid of Google and the like, I began to check and discovered that (conservatively) -- because many of these people I didn't know of, and there was a limit to my patience -- at least 61 one of those 589 people had gone to college. I'll print their names below, but first, why would someone take the trouble to say "only a dozen or so" when they either hadn't checked or had checked in such a half-assed way that their answer was so wide of the mark? Makes me wonder. Those sometime habitues of the Smith's jazz loft who did go to college: Toshiko Akiyoshi Mose Allison David Amram David Baker Warren Bernhardt Donald Byrd Teddy Charles Harold Danko Dennis Russell Davies Miles Davis Richard Davis Bob Dorough Don Ellis Bill Evans Don Friedman Lee Friedlander Dave Frishberg Jimmy Giuffre John Glasel Eddie Gomez Gigi Gryce Jim Hall Don Heckman Nat Hentoff Joe Hunt Chuck Israels David Izenson Lincoln Kirstein Nathan Kline Joel Krosnick Yusef Lateef Barbara Lea Mark Levine Mark Longo John Lewis Alex Leiberman Teo Macero Norman Mailer Ron McClure Mike Nock Bob Northern Hank O'Neal Hall Overton Ray Parker Paul Plummer Steve Reich Perry Robinson Robert Rossen Roswell Rudd George Russell Lalo Schifrin Gunther Schuller Peter Serkin Dick Sudhalter Steve Swallow Billy Taylor Francis Thorne Mal Waldron Martin Williams Phil Woods Denny Zeitlin P.S. Not every name on the list is a jazz musician, obviously. Some are just people who went by the place. 6) More odd, dubious moments from Sam Stephenson's "The Jazz Loft Project": p. xii: "Among the tunes played is 'I Got Rhythm,' composed in 1930 by George Gershwin." How helpful. p, xvi: "Among the tunes played is is the 1926 composition by Ray Henderson 'Bye, Bye Blackbird'"... See above (such instances are present throughout; won't mention them again). p. 3: "Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idosyncratic Steinway B piano...." "beat-up," yes, but how so "idiosyncratic"? P. 167-8: "Late September 1961 "Suddenly someone on the sidewalk ... whistles a distinctive, piercing call from his lips. "Smith: 'Frank [Amoss], there's a chuck-will's-widow out there. "There is the whistle call again. It's a near perfect mimic of the chuck-will's-widow, a nocturnal bird ... that inhabits the swamps of the South in the summer. [Reasonable speculation follows that Smith knew this call from his youth in Wichita, Ks.].... "Frank Amoss: 'That was Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt trying to get in here [i.e. one of them was the whistler]. "Davis and Hewitt were both African-American pianists....Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, and Hewitt in New York. Davis probably whistled the bird call, given his Southern childhood, but Hewitt could have visited Southern relatives as kid, too. [OK, SO FAR — BUT NOW GET THIS, WHICH FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE ABOVE.] Ironically, on September 29 Robert Shelton published in the New York Times the first-ever notice of a young new artist named Bob Dylan, who performed at Gerde's Folk City that same week. Shelton wrote: 'He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.' Surely, Minnesota native Dylan wouldn't have known firsthand the call of a chuck-will's-widow." "Ironically...?" "Surely…”? Another little gem from "The Jazz Loft Project," p. 231: "But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." "...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed. OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

Been dipping into Puente's Concord latin jazz albums lately. Not a dud so far. I like the charts, the soloists (e.g Hilton Ruiz), the variety, and especially the choice of tempos. E.g. on this one "Flight to Jordan" is just a bit "up" from where it usually lies, and very effectively so.

May have mentioned them here before (I'll try to check), but I had two fairly interesting conversations with Getz, one on the phone, one in person, both of them kind of crazy in a very a la Stan manner. BTW, Chuck, did your Getz encounter take place while he was at the London House with the "Captain Marvel" band? I saw them there with Terry and Ann Martin, band in great form.

In that photo, Moody is standing in front of the London House, at the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The London House, of course, is no more.

Very good 1950-51 recordings.

That was Bobby Kennedy.

i'm waiting for Chris Matthews to get his. Actually, Matthews is probably safe. His only conceivable erotic object is himself.