Larry Kart

Hines was very much in fashion, not out of fashion, at the time, thanks to the stunning Hines concerts -- with Hines in a trio setting and also in the company of Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins -- that Don Schlitten and David Himmelstein mounted and recorded at the Village Vanguard: https://www.discogs.com/Earl-Hines-Trio-Grand-Reunion/release/2812272 From this a veritable avalanche of typically superb Hines solo and small group recordings ensued, the solo recordings being especially choice. I've got a whole bunch of them.

Don't know that one. I'll look for it.

I've got several of Mike's previous albums. They're excellent.

Just found this today, and what a pleasant surprise. On MPS from 1978 and handsomely recorded by H.G. Brunner-Schwer, this might be the best Supersax album of them all. In part that's because the band itself just sounds much looser and more free than before, but I think it's mostly because three of the pieces -- "The Fruit," Tempus Fugit" and "Parisian Thoroughfare" -- and the transcribed solos that the band plays, are by Bud Powell, not Bird. This has (or seems to have) two results: 1) the constraints, and I think there were some, and the potential artificiality of reproducing Bird solos note for note is gone; and 2) to be utterly heretical, the note-to-note relationships in a topflight Powell solo arguably are as much or even more complex than in the typical topflight Bird solo. (See the link to Supersax's "Tempus Fugit" below.) Further, all of the band's soloists -- Frank Rosolino, Conte Candoli, and Lou Levy -- are absolutely inspired. I would even say that Rosolino's solo on "The Fruit" is the finest I've ever heard from him.

Just carpe'd that one from Amazon.

Got that on your recommendation and love it.

Thursday night at Elastic I heard two of best young players I’ve heard in a long time — Norwegian drummer Tollef Ostvang and Portuguese trumpeter (now resident in Stockholm) Susana Santos Silva. In a duo with alto and soprano saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, Ostvang (age 31) sounded something like a “free” Kenny Clarke who could read minds, remarkable fluidity of technique and a terrific sense of compositional rightness/wholeness. Not a stunningly different kind of drummer at first hearing, but I may change my mind on that — everything he played made such lovely sense. Santos Silva (age 37) has superb chops, in terms of range and rapidity of note production/placement of same, and a fantastic ear for fairly busy collective playing — paired with alto and baritone saxophonist Dave Rempis, bassist Toby Cederburg and Tim Daisy, that’s mostly what she was up to. Her ideas were crystal clear (as was her sound) and rhythmically intense, and one felt sure she could shine in many contexts. Striking too — for all the speed, range, and power of her playing — was her utterly relaxed physical relationship to her instrument, even in what seemingly was (or would have been for most other players) top gear. She reminded me some of Herb Robertson, especially in her occasional use of mutes for essentially rhythmic rather than coloristic purposes. Some Ostvang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUuOxMYMfHY&list=PL5qgKuOqliQH_xr1ht1s4_xxXn6gJbF_H Some Santos Silva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA93zC-ckQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ml4K8GNNj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmh1-5KmTX8 Though none of the above, nor the albums of theirs I bought, good as they are so far, quite matches what I heard from them Thursday night.

Almost finished with this excellent account of the life and trials, literal and figurative, of Radclyffe Hall, author of the pioneering lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness." Quite apart (or almost quite apart) from her sexual orientation, Radclyffe Hall is among the most seriously batshit people I've ever read about -- victim of some of most vicious parenting imaginable (mostly on the part of an utterly narcissistic self-indulgent mother who loathed her daughter's father (a philandering bounder, as they used to say, who left his wife's company ASAP), while she regarded all of her daughter's nascent traits of character and physicality as stemming directly from her husband, whom again she loathed. Throw into the mix the fact that Hall's father died when she was in late adolescence, leaving his large-ish estate almost entirely to her, which gave RH the chance to turns the tables financially and emotionally on her needy/extravagant mom, for whom she was now virtually the sole source of support. And that's only a wee bit of the setup. The author, Diana Souhami, has a nice dry wit, which is much needed at times to fend of the atmosphere of RH's proliferating professional victimhood -- not that she and her book (which was of minor literary merit but an immediate best-seller) weren't on the receiving of treatment by the British government that might stir the gene of victimhood in almost anyone (it was banned in the mid-1920s in a "sentence first--verdict afterwards" court proceeding that it would be an insult to call arbitrary).

The other day at a library sale I bought two Hackett with strings LPs on Enoch Light’s Project 3 label — “A Time for Love” and “The Midnight Touch.". The string writing by one Lew Davies is about what one would expect, but Hackett is handsomely recorded (Project 3 was a supposedly super hi-fi outfit), and he gets some nice support from Dave McKenna and Tony Mottola. Among the tunes Hackett plays on “The Midnight Touch" is one that I have long found uniquely nagging, Johnny Mandel’s “Emily,” perhaps even more nagging than “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Hackett plays it fairly straight, yet somehow — simply (or not so simply), through subtle rhythmic emphases, timbral nudges, and a few meditative, non-flourish-like flourishes — he transforms “Emily” into something quite lovely. I wouldn’t have believed until I heard it.Here’s the whole album; “Emily” begins at the 9:25 mark:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj3xQ2nZoKA

I reviewed it for the Chicago Tribune when it came out because I knew who Francis was from his stellar work on Don Ellis' "New Ideas." Loved this record and got in touch with Francis by phone afterwards. Wish I knew what became of him. There used to be some "live" things with him on YouTube. The entire album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG80H21CGs0

Just heard him take a kind of semi-plunger solo on the Boss Brass album "Brassy and Sassy" on a piece titled "Hey." An excellent player and quite distinctive too.

Sorry -- I posted what I did while the album itself was downstairs and should have gone back to check. Also, I think that guitartst Dave Barbour, Lee's husband at the time, had a co-credit on the song.

Don't know if it's been mentioned here before, but I'm betting that she's also an under-wraps addict -- drugs or alcohol -- and any money she has goes down that rabbit hole first and foremost. Good luck, Dan, and don't give in an inch. Also, take care to the degree that you can that in the final stages of this she doesn't pillage or trash your place.

Recorded in London in 1965 (natch), this solo album is a gem. The almost nine-minute title track -- a blues, with Hines supplying a walking left-hand bass line almost throughout -- is really something, very inventive, and in its feel and contrapuntal textures not that far from some of Tristano's solo forays of the same time. Also, on two tracks -- "If I Could be With You" and "I Didn't Know About You" -- Hines sings in a charmingly insinuating and, as one might expect, rhythmically quite supple manner. His singing is quite intimate in effect -- the quality of the voice not unlike that of a less insistent Cab Calloway but without any of Calloway's jive. https://www.amazon.com/Piano-London-Definitive-Black-Sessions/dp/B001CDJM3A/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1464797154&sr=1-1&keywords=hines+65

If you don't respond to Appalachian Spring, then Copland probably is not for you. Other Copland works I like a lot are the Emily Dickinson Songs and the Eight American Songs (as sung by William Warfield). In a "tougher" vein, the Piano Variations and the Piano Fantasy. Quiet City is tasty too.

If this is the Nelson quote on Africa and slavery that you have in mind, I don't think it quite says: "Thank God for slavery." I thought that in going to Africa we would find some black faces and we would be able to exchange things musically. But in the major portion of my tour there, in the capital cities, we didn’t find one person who could play any jazz. And then I started to think about it: was American slavery the catalyst that was needed in order to make this music? Why did it only happen her and nowhere else? It didn’t happen in the Virgin Islands. It didn’t happen with the Africans who went to South America. Why did jazz only happen here? Maybe slavery was the answer. He's saying that maybe the experience of American slavery (and/or slavery in the setting of America) was in some respects the answer to his question: "Why did jazz happen here?"

Got this coming: http://www.amazon.com/8-Classic-Albums-Oliver-Nelson/dp/B00AG8GU6E?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00 There'll be some overlap with what I already have, but who cares?

Worthwhile piece about him from the Journal of Jazz Studies: http://jjs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jjs/article/view/99/76

IIRC, A.B. Spellman gave "Afro-American Sketches" a great review in Kulchur magazine when it came out.

I've been told authoritatively that the other arrangements are all by George Williams, a fairly conventional writer (as Paul Secor said) who made an album or more for RCA in the mid-'50s.

Got the info from a scholar who runs a private jazz list. Several knowledgable people weighed in when the topic came up there some years ago. Don't know of any links. You probably know Russell's "Similau" from 1949 for Artie Shaw:

Just found out it's a George Russell chart.

Found this on an old Ventura RCA LP "It's All Bop To Me": Who wrote this fairly crazy chart (it probably dates from 1949), and who is the wordless soprano vocalist? Johnny Mandel, Al Cohn, and Manny Albam are in the band, but doesn't sound like anything I've heard from the first two. Maybe Albam in a playful and/or eccentric mood? BTW, the tracks on album by Ventura's very popular regular group of the time -- Conte Candoli, Boots Mussulli, Benny Green, Roy Kral, Jackie Cain, Kenny O'Brien, and Ed Shaugnessy are quite good in Ventura's "Bop for the People" mode. The Chu Berry-inspired Ventura had great time, though one wishes the other soloists had more room (Green is in fine form), O'Brien was an attractively springy bass player, and Shaugnessy was his bubbly swinging self.

Jim -- I actually had such an experience while listening to "Peace" (I think it was) from "The Shape of Jazz To Come" right after the album came out. Up to that point much that Ornette played sounded intriguing but also fairly weird to me, but as I listened to his solo on "Peace" in my bedroom while I was close to drifting off, I had a waking dream in which I was listening to some of the most beautiful and perfectly lucid music I'd ever heard. Then I came fully awake and realized that what I'd been hearing in my waking dream was Ornette's actual and still ongoing solo. That broke the "weird" barrier for me once and for all.

Saw "The Nice Guys" on Saturday, with Russell Crowe (his belly as big as a house) as a down on his luck professional enforcer and Ryan Gosling as a somewhat addled and also down on his luck PI in 1977 LA. Very funny at best, though perhaps without the follow through one hoped for; probably they were setting up a sequel. Best line almost had me on the floor. Won't say what the line is in order not to spoil it for others.