Larry Kart

Picked up today this 1974 Bellson Big Band CD (orginally recorded for a probably Bellson-owned label, Percussion Power, later on picked up by Concord), and while one pretty much knows how one feels about Bellson’s big band albums, I was surprised by how good this one is. First, it’s fairly early in the band’s lifespan, so the section work is very together and key players are still present: Bobby Shew, Conte Candoli, Sweets, Frank Szabo, Blue Mitchell, Don Menza, Pete Christlieb, Frank Rosolino, Gene Cherico, Ross Tompkins or Nat Pierce, etc. Second, given who the players are, the solo work is consistently inspired: best Shew I’ve ever heard, very intense Sweets and Conte, maniacally virtuosic Rosolino, and a tenor battle between Menza and Christlieb on one track that is seemingly for real and inspires the best/most cohesive Christlieb playing I’ve ever heard, by far. Didn’t know he had it in him. The cherry on top is Bellson’s relatively brief concluding solo on the tenor battle track “Time Check” — admiring his playing as I do, I also tend to find it a bit too rounded off or curved at times, if you know what I mean, but this passage is just raggedy-ass explosive.

I remember hearing Perowsky and Donny McCaslin in a classroom ensemble at Berklee when they were first-year students there and thought right off they were going to be really good -- heck, they already were. I told Gary Burton about them, he was then Berklee's dean of students, and the next time Burton came to Chicago, Donny was his tenorman. Ben made a nice record with his tenorman father, Frank. http://www.amazon.com/Bop-Pop-Frank-Perowsky-Trio/dp/B00006RZ4Y/ref=sr_1_5?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1463951875&sr=1-5&keywords=perowsky

Which date was that, "Trane Whistle"?

Just by chance, I've recently been in touch with Steig's onetime musical partner on Steig's "Flute Flight," Denny Zeitlin, whom I heard and knew when we were both high school students in the northern Chicago suburbs in the late 1950s. (Denny is four years older than I am.) Tossing names from the past back and forth with Denny and then looking them up myself on the Internet when I didn't have current direct knowledge of their fates or whereabouts, I discovered that a good many of them are now deceased.

Speaking of Mel Torme -- as I/we were at one point above -- I just ran across "Spotlight on Mel Torme," a compilation of his early Capitol singles, and was struck by how when Mel was just on the other side of literal adolescence (ages 24-25) his arguably never to be left behind emotional adolescence pretty much comes across as a virtue, as it mates with his remarkable vocal resources and ear. Yes, at some points he sounds a bit too fond of himself, but that's how a lot of talented young people are; here it sounds and feels genuine. http://www.amazon.com/Spotlight-Mel-Torme/dp/B00000DR7W/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1463849464&sr=1-1&keywords=spotlight+on+mel+torme

About Nelson's macro thinking, I've often wondered whether some, or some parts, of his solos were pretty much worked out beforehand. If so, not a problem for me but just the way he thought/went about things.

Delicious skirt steak with mashed potatoes and crinkly fried onions at a local restaurant that's been around since 1947 -- a place with veteran waitresses (though not the original ones), red leather booths, and a central bar area where I assume some elders start drinking at 5 p.m. and are poured out at closing time. They brought me a hot slice of apple pie a la mode gratis with two candles ( a "7" and a "4") on top for dessert. My stepson had an anchovy pizza, my wife had scallops with pasta.

Thanks. A good birthday it was.

I found Rickles' act in person to be pretty ugly. Believe me, not all of the people in the audience whom he ridiculed found it amusing.

Afro-American Sketches!!!! Do not miss this one.

Looking forward to the arrival of the Marshall albums I ordered. My friend Bill Kirchner mentioned that Marshall is showcased nicely on an abum that composer-arranger Mike Abene did with the WDR Band.

Does anyone know his work? Formerly with Buddy Rich and the Vanguard Orchestra, he’s been in Germany with the WDR Band for a decade or so. Picked up a 1996 CD by by him, “Keep On Keepin’ On” (Mons), and was impressed -- very lyrical, swinging player -- ordered several of his European label small group recordings. A good deal of those can be heard on Spotify. If you're interested further, they can be found on Amazon, but only if you plug in Marshall's name and the full titles of the albums -- "John Marshall" alone won't do it. http://www.marshallbop.com/#music

Good one. In addition to everything else, I really like Shecky's vibe and soul.

My favorite Sinatra story is the old Shecky Greene joke, which I've been told is based on fact: "Frank Sinatra, wonderful man, saved my life. One night I was in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel, three guys were beating the crap put of me, and Frank said, 'That's enough.'" Perhaps unnecessary background is that Shecky had been wisecracking in his act about Sinatra's mob connections, and Frank decided that he should be taught a lesson. Obviously the lesson was not learned, but that was Shecky.

Whew -- looking again at what I wrote I thought it might come across as too self-indulgent.

I saw him several times after that '82 Chicago Fest concert, and he was in good form, though not at the level of a remarkable late '70s concert at the Chicago Stadium. Pretty sure that I figured out what happened to him that night at Chicago Fest, though I do so well after the fact. Over the years, as Frank's voice naturally deepened/descended in range, he needed to sing more and more from his butt, so to speak, support lower tones especially from his gluteus maximus region, maybe even clenching those butt muscles some, in order to make things work. Well a short ways into the Chicago Fest concert -- if I recall correctly it was a rather cool August night -- his voice thinned out quite suddenly and notably in the middle of a number, as though the lower tones were no longer being supported. I would guess that he'd tweaked a muscle in his lower back, and the resulting discomfort pretty much screwed up his ability to sing adequately and left him eager to leave the stage ASAP, which he pretty much did, both because his back hurt and because, as a result, he was not singing well at all. One aspect of the aftermath is that Mike Royko, who was at the concert as a front-row guest of Mayor Jane Byrne, whom he had recently helped to elect, wrote a column for the Sun-Times the day after my review appeared saying that I was dead wrong, that Sinatra had been in great form, and that I was just some kid whose hearing had been ruined by too much rock music. I found this amusing, but then the new editor of my paper, the Tribune, Jim Squires, called a meeting the next day with the entire features staff to discuss "fairness and objectivity in criticism" and pretty much tried to tear me a new asshole. (I found out later on that he had wanted to fire me, but features editor Koky Dishon, a fan of my stuff, more or less interposed her body between me and Squires -- metaphorically, that is -- and I lived to fight another day.) I no longer recall much of what the steaming mad Squires said to the assembled features staff, other than what he said clearly was aimed right at me and that he said that he had called up Royko and offered him my job, which he actually had (it was a joke of sorts of course, but Squires was trying to lure Royko over from the Sun-Times, which had just been bought by Rupert Murdoch, and soon he would succeed in doing that). But I was so pissed at the phone call to Royko business that I got steaming mad at Squires in turn, telling him that I had gone out there as the representative of the/his paper, and I didn't appreciate getting stabbed in the back by having him tell a writer from another paper (Royko) who had attacked me in print that he was right and I was wrong. I also asked Squires if he had heard any of the concert; there were cutaways to the concert during the 10 p.m. local news, during which, I learned the next day, the anchormen of two different stations registered dismay at what they were hearing from Frank.) At this, which for some reason really infuriated Squires, he more or less screamed (this I do recall), "What does it MATTER how well Sinatra sang?" To which, kind of stunned but also understanding Squires' train of thought, I said, "Well, why did you send ME [a so-called critic] there then? Why not just send a reporter?" No way I ever could have spoken up like that in any normal joust with authority I can imagine, but the whole thing was so crazy, like a scene in a farce, that I felt utterly free. Perhaps interesting side notes: The only person on the features staff (there must have at least 30 of us there) who said a word in my defense was film critic Gene Siskel -- this perhaps because Gene and I were on fairly friendly terms and because he was or could be a mensch, but also perhaps because he already sensed or knew (this I know nothing of then) that Squires had plans for some reason (perhaps just one dick-swinging ego confronting another) to take the very popular Siskel down a peg or more. Second side note: Some years later, an acquaintance of mine, Chicago Magazine writer Marcia Froelke Coburn, was doing a big profile on Royko. Marcia was very good at getting subjects to unzip their souls, and at one point she asked Royko if there was anything in particular about writing his column that he regretted. He said, yes, that it was writing things that turned out to injure more or less innocent people, and he named me as one such -- saying that his column mocking my Sinatra review had cost me my job. Marcia explained that this was not true, that I was still employed by the Tribune and that he must have confused me with someone else. Later on we figured out what his confusion almost certainly was. Not too long before the Sinatra review, Al Rudis, a then young rock critic on the Sun-Times had written an ecstatic review of a Rolling Stones concert, and Royko had written a column mocking what Rudis had said, I think even mentioning Sinatra as the only sort of popular music figure who deserved such praise. A short while later Rudis left the Sun-Times for one of the Los Angeles papers -- not because he was fired but because, like any sane rock critic of the time, he thought of LA as more fertile territory for music journalism than Chicago. But Royko thought Rudis left the Sun-Times because he had been fired and thought further that he had been fired because Royko had mocked him in print. Then came my Sinatra review and Royko's column about that, and now in his memory it was my head that had been chopped off because Roko had mocked me in print, when in fact no head had left anyone's shoulders. Further oddity -- before all this, at some point in the mid-'70s I think, Royko had written a column mocking Sinatra for having Chicago policemen assigned to stand guard outside his room in the Chicago hotel where he was staying. Sinatra wrote a Royko an irate letter about the column, which Royko then printed, draped in further mockery of Frank's engorged ego; then after a while they semi-mysteriously arrived at some sort of reconciliation. (I'm pretty sure the Royko-Frank dustup figures in Kaplan's biography.) A Million Stories in the Naked City. And I haven't even told the tale of Frank's possible three-cushion-billiard-shot revenge. Sinatra's 1976 letter to Royko: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/youre-nothing-but-pimp.html Can't find the Royko column about Sinatra's police bodyguards that set Frank off. IIRC it was Royko at his best. But here is the column in which Royko responds to Sinatra’s letter: https://books.google.com/books?id=WUMjZaxfpwEC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=royko+on+sinatra's+flunkies&source=bl&ots=_E2miDO2sa&sig=b_i7adT3EuIuvsgXq70Co0D0XIU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKhpv4m-LMAhUo8IMKHXOWDOI4ChDoAQgbMAA#v=onepage&q=royko%20on%20sinatra's%20flunkies&f=false

Yes, Buddy, Tommy, & Benny were bosses -- that was my point. Who is Bautista the boss of? His prissiness has infected his whole team, like the Zika virus? OK, that's not good. But prissiness and being whiny-assed is not bullying; it's being a jerk. Bluto could hurt you; Mel Torme could only hurt himself or maybe, after her death, Judy Garland; but even then he wasn't being a bully, just (so some would argue) a jerk. Actually, creepily self-serving as some of it is (but that was Mel), his book about working with Garland on her TV show was very interesting and also (according to my spider sense) pretty darn accurate. If I can judge by my own brief but somewhat hair-raising encounter with Liza Minnelli and her entourage -- which probably reproduced much of her mother's working environment in tone, detail, and in some cases actual personnel -- Mel's iron-clad narcissism, plus his not inconsiderable intelligence, may have been just what was required to survive in and then report accurately on a world in which everyone but the sick queen bee herself was dedicated to doing whatever it took to get the queen bee in shape to give the next performance.

But how does an "attitude bully" affect how opposing baseball players play? A funky, annoying attitude sure -- I accept your Mel Torme example, often felt that way myself toward him when I saw Mel perform -- but a real attitude bully would have be someone like Buddy Rich or, reputedly in certain moods, Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey, no? That is, someone who not only has a bad attitude but can also make other people's lives truly miserable from a practical point of view/cost people their jobs, etc. This is Bautista? How so? Speaking of Rich, do you know the Andy Fusco-Rich story? It's a pretty good one.

Again, I'm no expert on the behavior of Mr. Bautista, but just how does someone" bully" someone in the course of playing a game of baseball? Trying to show someone up or to antagonize them, being flamboyant to the point where one violates the b.s. unwritten rules of the game and all that, or just being a flaming jerk, sure -- but how is that "bullying"? Bullying, it seems to me, would have to involve some sort of aggressive threatening behavior that would deflect or prevent opposing players from doing their jobs. Bautista does that to opposing players on a regular basis or even at all? Enlighten me. And if he does do stuff that's outside the actual (not the unwritten) rules of the game, isn't that why we have umpires or, if comes to that, a commissioner?

Another county heard from. Joe Morgan: "If you were willing to show the other team up, then you've got to be willing to take what goes with it." Right -- "what goes with it" as can be found in "The Red-Ass Rules of the Game." To that I would say, again: "If you serve up a HR ball, you've got to be willing to take what goes with it." Get the man out and there's no problem. Bautista may be a flaming jerk, I'm no expert on his behavior, but a Bautista who's not trotting around the bases is just jerkdom poured on top of an empty salad bowl.

Sorry, Jim, I meant to say, as Ghost of Miles caught, that given a punch of that force, Bautista's career, like Rudy T's, could have been over. That he and Odor were facing off is neither here nor there IMO; blows like that are not part of any sport except boxing and ultimate fighting. FWIW broadcaster and former player Kevin Millar on the Dan Patrick Show last night said that Bautista's slide, while certainly intentional, was far from career-threatening in execution. Millar added that on the play, anticipating what Bautista would do, Odor tried but failed to throw the relay into Bautista's face. Also Millar said that despite the tightness of the game, the pitch in his view was intentional and also (within basball's red-ass framework of retaliation) kind of candy-assed because Texas waited to hit Bautista until his last AB of the series and of the season between the two teams. My general and main point, though, is that all this "you show me up, I get to plunk you, etc." baseball-police stuff is dangerous garbage. You don't want a guy to hit a HR and then behave like a jerk, show you up, etc., then don't throw him a HR pitch. If he hits a HR, flips a bat, makes faces, etc., then the next time just get him out/win the game.

And per the punch thrown at Rudy Tomjonavich, Bautista's career or worse could be over. Are you a member of the bat-flip police? Having just been through a series between the White Sox and the Rangers, I can tell you that talented though Texas' Odor is, he also is an overtly flamboyant player. IMO the only sane answer to bat-flipping and the like is to throw pitches that don't get hit out of the park, not to get all red-ass afterwards. We just had one like that with with John Lackey of the Cubs, after some guy on the Pirates hit one out and stood at the plate for a while goggling at how far the ball went -- about 450 feet, as far any HR at Wrigley Field in many years. After the game Lackey said to the press, "How many home runs has he hit?" (very few as it happens, but how many does he need to have it to make what he did less of a crime to Lackey the Baseball Cop?). And then he added ominously, "I have a long memory."

James Kaplan, author of a recent two-volume (so far) bio of Frank: http://www.amazon.com/Sinatra-Chairman-James-Kaplan/dp/0385535392 Haven't read it, though I think I did look at the index of the second volume to see if I was mentioned. Wasn't but I could have been, re: the rather mockingly negative review I gave to Sinatra's near non-performance at Chicago Fest in 1982 I think it was, which almost cost me my job at the Chicago Tribune. Here's the review. As you can see, it rested rather oddly alongside the accompanying new story: http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1982/08/11/page/64/article/lead-tones-tarnish-solid-gold-sinatra May have told this story before, but I think that Ol' Blue Eyes very cleverly, even quite elaborately, took or tried to take revenge on me a few years later, though I can't prove it.

Just ran across a copy of this delicious 1989 Muse album, with Virgil Jones, Charles Davis (on tenor), Houston Person (on one track), Arthur Harper, and Mickey Roker. Utterly relaxed and in there. This may be old stuff to Jim A. and others, but I was particularly pleased by Scott's subtly varied registration throughout; she often shifts colors amidst a solo in a very natural speech-like manner. This is not the Scott I remember from the "Cookbook" days, but maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention back then. Nice to hear Davis on tenor, Jones too. Harper, Roker, and Scott are joined at the hip(s). http://www.amazon.com/Oasis-Shirley-Scott/dp/B000008ROK/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1463348539&sr=1-1&keywords=shirley+scott+oasis

Problem is, if you were there, you probably don't remember it.