Larry Kart

Have just begun to listen. Love it. First impression -- the way it's mic'ed/mixed is both somewhat new to me (though my experience may be limited in this bag) and a delight. Though distinct strands are distinct enough, organ, guitar, and drums are essentially knit together spatially and otherwise as one vibrating/pulsating unit; likewise the arrangements are not so much a matter of solo turns, though they're definitely present and striking/impressive, but of one detailed, rolling ball of musical information that has, as John and Paul said, "Come Together." In that, unless there are precedents that I'm not enough of a organ trio maven to be aware of, this is not only an excellent album but an innovative one as well.

Yusef should be so lucky. And I do remember Madison.

Another OP goodie, but fairly obscure, is "Tenderly" (Just a Memory), with the Ellis, Brown trio from a 1958 Vancouver concert. Issued in 2002, with liner notes by Peterson discple Oliver Jones, it seems to be legit and is in excellent sound. Right up there with Stratford and the Concertgebouw. Not quite like Cziffra I think, who had a fabulous swashbuckling technique but also was known for taking notable liberties with the text.

But OP is in good form as an accompanist on those albums.

Yes, it varied. But when OP's comping was bad IMO, it was inexplicably so along the lines I mentioned -- clottled, insensitive. Wish I could recall what musician said this, but I remember one worthwhile musician complaining as well that OP played the "wrong" changes, meaning (or so I understood this remark) that at times OP delved into his chunk-a-chunk bluesiness when the piece at hand was not a blues or even that blues-tinged.

The '50s Basie tribute album with Buddy Rich is nice -- has a very "in there" feel. Stratford and Concertgebouw of course for that trio. I will dissent for the most part on OP as an accompanist for the likes of Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and other major figures of that vintage. His comping for them IMO tends to be quite airless and clotted -- compare, for example, his comping on Harry Edison's "Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You" with that of Jimmy Rowles on "Sweets," with essentially the same band. An odd example is the "Getz and J.J. Johnson at the Opera House" recordings from 1957 -- half in mono from one concert (supposedly from L.A.), half in stereo from another (supposedly from Chicago -- in fact, I think the locations of the two concerts may be the other way around, not that it matters). In any case, OP and the rest of the rhythm section ( H. Ellis, R. Brown, and Connie Kay) are terrific on the mono tracks, as are Getz and J.J., while OP is quite discombobulated/insensitive on the stereo tracks, which has a negative effect on Getz especially -- this divergence on performances separated by just a week. My guess is that on the stereo tracks the members of the group were placed too far apart on the stage for them to hear each other or the horn soloists adequately, but the difference between OP's comping on these two concerts still seems weird to me.

If the play on the field is all that matters to you, I assume it also matters to you whether the team you favor plays well, wins a lot more than it loses. Well, all this WAR stuff, right or wrong, is merely an attempt on the part of those who fill the rosters to assemble a team that has a better chance of winning, one that makes more good plays on the field than would have been made otherwise.

Frank Martin -- Der Strum

VAGN HOLMBOE, SYM. NO. 8 A hard composer for me to get a grip on, nor can I quite get a grip on why he's a hard composer for me to get a grip on. In this work, in particular, there's an insistent, even hectoring quality in his taste for fierce, urgent massed brass and percussion that isn't that often (for me) backed up by a sense that fierce urgent things are being said. OTOH, his penchant for what he calls "metamorphic" structuring calls for a certain sort or level of close listening, typically amid much busyness, that often repays the effort, though finally one can wonder where all these steely shifting strands/all this "journeying" finally take you. By contrast, I have no such doubts about the music of Holmboe's less known fellow Dane, a contemporary and colleague, Herman Koppel, whose works I've recently discovered.

from a friend (names suppressed in the name of privacy): My onetime roommate, a fine reed player/arranger with numerous major-league credentials, decided 30 years ago to become a lawyer. So he went to law school, passed the bar exam, and worked for a law firm for years. All the while keeping his hand in as a musician. Last year, his firm closed its doors, and he elected to return to full-time playing and arranging. With no little irony, I observed to him that it was a good thing that he had music to fall back on.

The Lunceford was a revelation to me.

Anneliese Rothenberger/Andre Previn, Strauss, Four Last Songs Best I've ever heard, and I've heard many. Rothenberger is just "there" -- so much so, and without unneeded spin, that one hardly needs to look at the translations to grasp what the poems say. By comparison the supposedly classic Schwarzkopf-Szell sounds coy and mewling, a whole lot of spin. And Betty fudges a good many top notes while Rothenberger just soars. Sound is a bit edgy, though.

A move as good or better: http://www.espn.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/7432801/chicago-cubs-acquire-1b-anthony-rizzo-san-diego-padres-andrew-cashner

Yup -- this is the Epstein move I was thinking of: http://www.espn.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/11177585/chicago-cubs-trade-jeff-samardzija-jason-hammel-oakland-athletics I can tell you that the majority of Cubs fans at the time were up in arms about this trade, believing that Samardzija, then age 29 and coming off a seemingly good season, was the arm on which to hang the team's future. Again, I can't swear that advanced metrics played a key role in Epstein's decision, though Samardzija's likely future as a .500 pitcher at best now seems carved in stone. But even if Jeff S. had been the real deal, Addison Russell! As good a young SS a there is in baseball, and a kid who is almost certainly going to continue to grow as a hitter? One would fall on one's knees to acquire a young player like that, and Epstein got him for players that he almost certainly felt (I would assume for "advanced metrics" reasons) weren't going to play significant roles on a championship team no matter what. Again, though, at the time, most Cubs fans were appalled by this deal. Sorry -- I was just responding to Scott's question.

Scott: If you were a Chicagoan and had been paying attention over the last five years to Theo Epstein's WAR-based revamping of the Cubs into a world championship team (and with many hardcore Cubs fans opposing many of the moves he made along the way -- I know; I was there), I don't think one would be clamoring for "a refresher on the correlation/causation dichotomy." Further, while one is at liberty to plunge into the waters of WAR as deeply as one might wish, I don't, as I said before, really care if WAR-based talk would fly in a conversation with fellow fans, though I certainly would use the argument I made above (though with no desire to actually argue) in such a conversation, just as I've used it with you. What I care about is being a fan of a team that consistently makes decisions that make it a better team, one that (one hopes) not only wins a World Series but also will go on to contend for a long time. I should add, perhaps, that as a fan of the Chicago White Sox since 1951, I saw them win it all in 2005 and then virtually destroy the team from then until this off-season (fingers crossed) by making a series of plug-the-holes/buy someone's on-the-downswing "star" in-the-hope-of-winning-this-coming-year moves until both the major league roster and the farm system were virtually depleted. Would the same moves have been made under a WAR-oriented regime? Maybe. But with the example of Epstein and the Cubs in front of my eyes, I don't think so. Now you might say that the only difference there is that Epstein knew that the Cubs needed to be almost completely rebuilt, while Sox management was operating under delusions about the strengths of the major league roster and the health of their farm system, and that Epstein also had an owner who bought into his reading of things. Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, by contrast, a season or two ago, was told well along into the season by his WAR-oriented asst. GM Rich Hahn that the odds of the current Sox team making the playoffs was 11 per cent and that therefore this would be a good time to unload some vets while they still had trade value; Reinsdorf, backed by longtime GM Ken Williams, said, "We're going for it," and IIRC further aging vets were even acquired in exchange for prospects -- all to no avail. Returning to the contrast between that mode and Epstein and the Cubs, I understand that I'm conflating two or more different things -- Epstein getting the green light to rebuild and my assumption that all or most of the revamping-the-roster choices that Epstein went on to make were both good or better-than-good and were to some significant degree based on "advanced metrics" factors. As to the last, I can't say for sure; I'm not privy to what Epstein and his staff say amongst themselves, though one has heard that their thinking is as sophisticated (or if you prefer "sophisticated") in terms of metrics as that of any regime in baseball. As to the success of their revamping-the-roster moves, I can't think of a single move they've made that hasn't paid off (other than the acquisition of Jason Heyward, and the rest of Heyward's story perhaps remains to be written), while some (e.g. the acquisition of Jake Arietta for chump change, the choice of Jon Lester as their key free-agent pitching acquisition among all the others of his vintage who were available last off-season, the belief in the evolution of Kyle Hendricks) have paid off spectacularly. Yes, plain-old scouting (and in the case of Hendricks, good coaching) no doubt has played a role here, but if "advanced" metrics has as well, why is anyone complaining just because the average fan is left scratching his head? Another post to come about Epstein's "advanced metrics"-based moves and the fan pushback against them at the time, after I do a bit of research.

Sorry, Scott, I myself am one of those who as yet has not dipped his toe into those WAR waters. All I know, as I said in my post, is that some very successful baseball execs, like Theo Epstein, make use of WAR stuff in making decisions. At this point, if I'm a fan of a team that such an exec heads, that's good enough for me. In other words, as a fan I don't need a new stat or a complicated weighted compilation of stats to enhance my appreciation of the game. All I need is that our new, say, third baseman, traded for on the basis of WAR stats, turns out to have a real good season.

If front offices are using WAR and related stats, they probably are useful. Given his track record, I'm pretty sure that the Cubs' Theo Epstein, for one, is no dummy. If WAR stuff is useless for the average or even above-average fan, too bad for them, though I imagine that many fans who hold such views haven't tried to even dip their toes into those waters. In any case when the Cubs didn't try to resign Dexter Fowler (with whom many I know Cubs fans were madly in love) and instead signed that fairly obscure (to most of us) outfielder whose last name is Jay -- don't even recall his first name), wouldn't you be curious if you were a Cubs fan about what Epstein's thinking was, assuming, as I'm sure was the case, that it wasn't just about money but also was WAR-related?

Restricting myself to actual LPs, not LPs that compile 78 performances, I'd say (off the top of my head): All-American, Afro Bossa, and the Far East Suite. Also, there's Bal Masque, with Hodges' "Alice Blue Gown."

I've got the excellent Shore-Norvo album on a Capitol two-fer, coupled with Shore's "Down Home." Do you know who the trumpeter on the Norvo date is? He's not listed in the personnel. Sounds like it might be Don Fagerquist.

Schtick definitely. A regular feature when Red was on the band. My guess is that he came up with it in his vaudeville days, long before he began to do it with Benny. It fits Red's impish nature; Benny, by contrast and by reputation was not a barrel of laughs, though that only made the bit work better.

A decade or more ago I caught Herve Niquet and his band playing Charpentier in the Church de Invalides in Paris. Unforgettable the way the sounds rose up to the church's very high domed ceiling and intertwined along the way. It occurred to me at the time that Charpentier was the greatest master of literal musical space before Morton Feldman.

She was terrific in Albert Brooks' "Mother." BTW, Albert's original choice for the role was Nancy Reagan, but she reluctantly turned him down.

About the long-stemmed, turned-on-a-lathe Mitzi, in a review I once wrote that she reminded me of a vintage Packard hood ornament. Her genial husband Jack Bean (they both were genial) sent me a Xmas card that year that mentioned what I'd said and asked if that were a compliment. I said, you bet.

I reviewed her stage show at a suburban Chicago theater in the early '80s. Wouldn't say she had as much talent as the otherwise similar Mitzi Gaynor (who often played that venue and whose act always was a gem of its kind), but Debbie brought with her what sounded like the original MGM Rogers Edens charts from her film musicals, and played by an orchestra of the area's top freelancers she and they sounded terrific.