Larry Kart

Picked up the other day a copy of this album, which preserves a bit more than 50 minutes of a 1998 Town Hall Concert, and quickly returned it after taking a bath in Lysol. What an ugly concept -- the pieces the band plays are "Canteloupe Island," Sugar," "500 Miles High," "Red Clay," "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise," and "All Blues" -- and for the most part what ugly disconnected performances, though I suppose none of these players should be blamed too much for that; this surely wasn't their idea. Only one who seems to be trying to make some music is Randy Brecker.

Tibor Serly completed (or "completed") Bartok's unfinished at his death Viola Concerto.

I find Spotify very useful when I'm deciding whether or not to buy something that isn't an automatic purchase. Usually the disc I have in mind is there, more often than on, say, Amazon or the like. Also, on Spotify I can listen to as much as I want to of any track that's there.

Skvorecky was a heck of a good novelist and a jazz fan.

Try Aksel Schiotz: Talk about exaltation!

Sorry -- please ignore my previous negative post about David Holzman's Wolpe recordings. I see now that I got my wires crossed -- was thinking about what someone I know had said another pianist altogether.

John Sturdy (photographer, friend of my son) Joan Tower The Towering Inferno

Another version of the Passacaglia (also on Bridge): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ztKkGLjvZs And some of the best Wolpe performances ever: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/music-stefan-wolpe BTW, I've been told by someone who should know that Holzman's Wolpe is close to dog shit.

The liner notes to the latter-day (late '50s) album "Gene Krupa Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements" (Clef) state: "Mulligan's only retrospective comment is, 'It came before Four Brothers.'"

Eileen Wilson (dubbing for Ava Gardner) and Dick Haymes sing it in the film version. A bit creepy to see the inherently creepy Robert Walker ("Strangers on a Train") opposite Gardner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluAL7GMPWw

Yeah -- I can see the "impossible person" part, but "Art never had that much talent"?

Listened to side 2 last night, no less enjoyable; the big-band charts were not casually assembled by Rogers but have a near-storytelling coherence. Personnel listing on the jacket and online is somewhat random: Giuffre isn't mentioned but is there soloing on clarinet (one track) and baritone (several), though most of the bari solos are Pepper Adams', quite a contrast. Maynard isn't mentioned either but is there. Rosolino takes most of the trombone solos, but I'm pretty sure that Milt Bernhart gets a few. To say, as I did, that Holman is Rollins-esque here may be an exaggeration, but he's headed in that direction. Didn't detect any Jack Montrose solos (he's in the section); that might have been interesting. As someone who doesn't care at all for latter-day five-string Red Mitchell, I have to say that his section and solo work here is excellent. I'm not a Herb Geller completist and resented his snotty putdown of Art Pepper's playing of the time, but he seems to me to be at his best here. BTW, if you run across an LP copy, as I did, you'll probably have to crank up the volume level a good bit.

West Coast, in the realm of music we're talking about, doesn't necessarily refer to where one was born or reared but to where and how one's music took shape. Further, as far as Rogers and a good many other key West Coast figures were concerned (Rogers being inspired by Sweets goes without saying), what might be called a polite reduction of the '30s Basie band was a frequent hallmark of the style, especially in terms of rhythm, as was (though much less common) a screaming expansion of the '30s Basie mode on albums like Rogers' "Shorty Courts the Count." What typically was left out of the musical picture in what is commonly regarded as West Coast jazz (the style again, not literal geography) was bop. I say this BTW as someone who enjoys a lot of West Coast jazz.

Actually, I noticed on this one a certain East Coast-related stiffening of the laid back West Coast spine -- thanks to Pepper Adams' razor's edge articulation and tone (does he sound good here), Holman's rather Rollins-esque muscularity, and Geller's relative heat. Rosolino, of course, always was as boppish as heck. And in the rhythm section Jolly certainly was not unaware of Horace Silver, while Levy never lost his 52nd St. affinities. There is, however, at least one Jimmy Giuffre sub-tone clarinet solo, a good one, too.

Picked up a used LP of this one from 1957 today and am tickled so far. Nice rhythm section (Pete Jolly, Red Mitchell, Stan Levy) backing a medium-sized big band on some tracks and six horns on the rest. In addition to the leader, Herb Geller (in exceptional form), Bill Holman (Rollins-esque; sounds like he was still playing a good deal at the time), and Pepper Adams (one senses the other players are digging him) are frequent soloists, as is Frank Rosolino, Jolly is lively, Mitchell gets several solo spots and is not yet into his latter-day swoony bag. Despite the seemingly gimmicky Rogers/Rogers premise, Shorty's charts are not cute but committed/intense, with Maynard Ferguson notably present in the section on the big band tracks, which are a bit different in style from the Rogers big-band work of a few years earlier -- less Kentonian, no massed trumpets for their own sake. Overall the feeling is of guys just enjoying themselves.

Hampton's electric-bass hookup was IIRC because that was what Monk Montgomery already played.

1) 2005 2) 2009 3) 2015

Craft's three latter-day Webern CDs on Naxos are excellent and can often be found used on Amazon for smallish sums.

Maybe "over the top" isn't the right term, but I do think the rhyme between "awful" and "trough full" is rather precious. Yes, indeed, to "Something To Live For."

It's a little over the top in spots, but Strayhorn's lyric for "Lush Life" is quite something IMO. Cole Porter could be so perfectly direct and speech-like, e.g. "What Is This Thing Called Love?" I love the way that lyric is bonded to the music; you can't say the words without summoning up just how they're set. "In the Still of the Night" is pretty special, too. Ann Ronnell's lyric for her own "Willow Weep for Me" is perfect, especially as interpreted by Sinatra.

Allen is right -- that annotator's distinction between Stride and ragtime is batshit. As a partial antidote, from the liner notes to a Donald Lambert LP, here is Dick Wellstood on stride: Stride piano, according to Dick Wellstood I would like to say, first, that I don't like the term "stride" any more than I like the term "jazz". When I was a kid the old-timers used to call stride piano "shout piano", an agreeably expressive description, and when once I mentioned stride to Eubie Blake, he replied, "My God, what won't they call ragtime next?" Terms, terms. Terms make music into a bundle of objects - a box of stride, a pound of Baroque -. [Donald] Lambert played music, not "stride", just as Bach wrote music, not "Baroque". Musicians make music, which critics later label, as if to fit it into so many jelly jars. Bastards. Having demurred thus, may I say that stride is indeed a sort of ragtime, looser than Joplin's "classic rag", but sharing with it the marchlike structures and oom-pah bass. Conventional wisdom has it that striding is largely a matter of playing a heavy oom-pah in the left hand, but conventional wisdom is mistaken, as usual. Franz Liszt, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner and Pauline Alpert all monger a good many oom-pahs, and, whatever their other many virtues, none of them play stride. To begin with, stride playing requires a certain characteristic rhythmic articulation, for the nature of which I can only refer you to recordings by such as Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Donald Lambert. The feel of stride is a kind of soft-shoe 12/8 rather than the 8/8 of ragtime, and though the left hand plays oom-pahs, the total feeling is frequently an accented four-beat rather than the two-beat you might expect. For instance, the drummer Jo Jones once told me that when Basie played stride he would play a soft four on his bass drum, accenting, however, the first and third beats. This would be perfect. A straight four is too confining; a simple two makes you seasick. At any rate, the characteristic rhythms of stride are provided by the right hand, not the left. It is possible to play an otherwise impeccable stride bass and ruin it by playing inappropiate right hand patterns. By pulling and tugging at the rhythms of the left, the right hand provides the swing. Now, if the right hand is to be able to do this, the left hand must be, not only quasi-metronomic, but also totally in charge. The propulsion, what musicians nowadays call the "time", must always be in the left hand. This is what Eubie Blake means when he says, "The left hand is very important in ragtime". To a non-performer, the lefthand dominance probably seems either unimportant or self-evident, but it is the crux of a successful stride performance. If, in the heat of the battle, the time switches to the right hand (because perhaps of a series of heavily accented figures), leaving the left hand merely to wag, then the momentum goes out of the window. The left hand must always be the boss and leave the right hand free to use whatever vocalized inflections the player desieres. Stride bass is not just any old oom-pah, either. The bass note, the "oom", should be in the register of the string bass, a full two octaves or more below middle C -- an octave or so lower than was used by Joplin or Morton. And the "pah" chord is usually voiced around middle C -- one or two inversions higher than Joplin or Morton (here, as elsewhere, I'm referring strictly to [Donald] Lambert-style fast stride and am also generalizing wildly, of course). Moreover, the bass note is ideally a single note, not an octave, except in certain emphatic passages. The use of an octave would shorten the stretch between bass note and chord, and it is this wide stretch that gives stride its full sound. The wide stretch means that the player can activate the overtones of the piano by pedalling technicques unusable by Joplin or Morton, the denser texture of whose playing would have been unbearably muddied by the sophisticated pedalling of, say, Waller. Stride bass lines move in scalar patterns, too. Ragtime stuck largely to roots and fifths, with most of the scalar motion in the tenor parts, but stride pianists, having more room in the bass, can walk up and down scales in a way that is very difficult in the shorter span of the earlier pianists. One can also use in the left hand what pianists called in my youth "back beats", where one disrupts the rhythm temporarily by playing oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-oom-pah, and so on. With luck it comes out even, without sounding like one of Leonard Bernstein's early works. To stride is to have patience, not to be in a hurry to get things over with. Lambert could play pieces in which the melody would allow a harmonic change perhaps only every four bars, requiring his left hand to pump patiently away for what seems like hours. And the late Ben Webster was an ardent stride pianist, whose pet piece was a version of "East Side, West Side" in long meter with lots of left hand, to with: (East!)-oom-pah, oom-pah, (Side!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, (West!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, (Side!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, and so on, ad infinitum, ad wolgast. Fantastic patience! If all this sounds rather difficult and complicated, you may be sure that it is. In a world full of pianists who can rattle off fast oom-pahs or Chick Corea solo transcriptions or the Elliot Carter Sonata, there are perhaps only a dozen who can play stride convincingly at any length and with the proper energy (...)" P.S. About that mysterious "ad wolgast"in the next to last paragraph. Wellstood is horsing around; Ad Wolgast is not another Latin phrase but the name of a topnotch lightweight boxer of the early 20th Century.

Just ran across this 1995 Novus album. If you can find a copy, don't hesitate. What a "comprehensive" pianist Miller was by this time, so much personal harmonic variety and flexibility (doesn't sound like Herbie, or McCoy, or Bill Evans or anyone else really, though I do hear some distant and welcome echoes of Earl Hines) coupled to quite individual melodic impulses, plus lots of rhythmic intensity that also leaves one with a nice "I've got enough time and chops to think of and execute anything" feeling. Not that this is news, but Miller was one DEEP subtle player.

Just checked and, geez, they played together on the soundtrack of "Bird."

Glad you like it, but I think of Mover as a pretty individual player.