Larry Kart

Don't know if this has been posted before: http://adammelville.blogspot.ca/2014/09/ornette-coleman-blindfold-test-and.html

Thanks -- I'll try to find a copy.

When I sent my friend Bill Kirchner a version of my post above about the Jones Trio dates, he mentioned a '47 Jones solo date (is that the same as the Savoy, Allen?***) that "is astounding in a Tatum-like way, but with Jones' own harmonic vocabulary. Should be required listening for any pianist -- or anyone interested in harmony." *** Nope, it's a Granz date for Clef, a 10 inch. Hank Jones SoloHank Jones (piano) probably NYC, September-October, 1947601 | 236 | 1965-1The Night We Called It A DayMercury 1131; Clef 112; Mercury MG 25022; Clef MGC 707602 | 237 | 1964-1YesterdaysMercury 1130; Clef 113; Mercury MG 25022; Clef MGC 707603 | 238 | 1966-1You're BlaseMercury 1131; Clef 113; Mercury MG 25022; Clef MGC 707604 | 239 | 1963-1Tea For TwoMercury 1130; Clef 112; Mercury MG 25022; Clef MGC 707605 | 240 | 1967-1Blues For Lady DayMercury 1132; Clef 114; Mercury MG 25022; Clef MGC 707606 | 241 | 1968-1Blue Room-

Picked up one of those European bootlegs (shame on me), this one ( on Phoenix) of mostly ‘50s Hank Jones trio recordings, the core of the album being the 1955 Savoy album he did with Wendell Marshall and Kenny Clarke, preceeded by a 1953 track with Mingus and Max Roach and a four-tune Granz date with Johnny Smith and Ray Brown and followed by two tracks from Elvin Jones' “Elvin!” and one from a Charlie Smith Dawn album. I’m surprised by how different Jones sounded back then than he did for the most part later on — very two-handed and almost lushly chordal, with a lot of shifty, shimmering, near far-out harmonic inventiveness (that’s what makes the lushness “almost”), seldom boppish rhythmically or otherwise, more like a cross between Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole but more dense, with Tatum lurking in the background, though Jones' touch is not at all Tatum-like. The thinking involved in a good deal of Jones' work here is quite something — so many moving parts!

Don't think that list was kept up to date -- a fair number of holdovers from prior years, including yours truly.

Me, too, probably -- but are we going to get them or just lots from the JALC orchestra? Negotiating rights might be a bear when it comes to non-JALC artists.

Yes, but if I read the story correctly, most of the recordings will be of the JALC orchestra, and we know how well those albums have sold over the years. 'The recording project is the baby of Mr. Marsalis, who has conceived and developed each year’s programming over the last 28 years. “I picked almost every song we played at every concert,” he said. 'Comprising mostly performances by Mr. Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the organization’s R. Theodore Ammon Archives and Music Library has grown to include thousands of songs from hundreds of concerts.'

Straight to the used bins, I'm thinking.

BTW, I think those hipsters are not people but statues permanently installed at Club Coca Cola.

all that and more, sure ... but why did he not get a better piano? And where did they cast the hipsters behind RvG? Could be wrong on this, but I don't think that the quality of RVG's piano was the problem -- if problem there was -- but rather his taste for miking the piano very closely in order to control or shape its sound -- if control or shape are the right terms here. OTOH, I pretty much grew up with RVG's piano sound and generally like it; OTOH there are a number of non-stupid people, including some pianists who were miked by RVG, who felt otherwise. Bill Evans IIRC was one of them. Yes, RVG could be an interventionist at times -- as in the way Hank Jones sounds toward the end of "Autumn Leaves" on "Something Else," almost like a celeste -- but I love the way Jones sound there.

A bit off topic, but the best Henderson I know (represented only on half a Milestone album, I believe) is when he had the working band that included Curtis Fuller, altoist Pete Yellin, George Cables, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White. Heard them live in Chicago at the North Park Hotel in the early '70s, and they were on fire.

Yes, fine poet: The Ocean bones of dead fish at my shoes day settles in the calm of a Coltrane ballad you don’t know what love is an ache away from the desperate all or nothing at all

Just found out that board member David Gitin has passed.

Does anyone know this delicious, utterly relaxed album, with Woody on vocals with Garner's trio? http://www.amazon.com/HERMAN-ERROLL-GARNER-LOVERS-record/dp/B00Q5KNI44/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1435371212&sr=1-2&keywords=woody+herman+erroll+garner I found a playable used copy about ten years ago. If Martha Glaser's liner notes are to be believed, the date was an act of mutual affection after Garner and the Herman band had shared an engagement in 1954. Sure sounds that way.

Auld is just a guess, but I'm pretty sure that it's a player of his general vintage and style. As for Auld and Jug -- yes, Auld had some of what Jug had (big warm tone more or less out of Hawkins and Ben Webster, plus incipient Pres-like phrasing and gut-level swing) before Jug was on the scene, though I wouldn't think there was any Auld to Jug influence. If it's not Auld on the London album, I thought for a sec that it might be Plas Johnson, but Plas' musical fingerprints are usually pretty evident. This late-in-the day Auld performance is rather Jug-like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjORxGVzMDA early Auld balladering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tanFCDqtFUs Auld c. 1944 with his own big band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN6T8J3a47g Auld from 1958, with Don Fagerquist, Larry Bunker, Howard Roberts, and Lou Levy:

“Julie,” a 1958 Julie London album on Liberty with exceptional big-band charts by Jimmy Rowles -- Ellingtonian in some ways but also quite personal and quirky (almost surreal at times), a la Rowles’ comping. Recognizable soloists include Harry Edison, Benny Carter, and (I’m pretty sure) Don Fagerquist; acoustic guitar solos by (I think) Al Viola, a frequent London musical partner, and on one track there’s even some nice jazz violin! Tenor saxophonist I think is Georgie Auld. The flute and baritone saxophone soloists I don’t know, though a friend suggests that the latter is Ronny Lang. It’s available on a Capitol London compilation: http://www.amazon.com/Julie-Love-Rocks-London/dp/B000DNVJSQ It also can be found on Spotify. London more than hold up her end of things. If Rowles could write like this, what else did he do in this vein, if anything?

In the course of the piece, author Adam Shatz takes an IMO ridiculous swipe at George Russell, saying that Andre Hodier's compositions were "even more ersatz and mannered" than those of 'American 'Third Stream' of [sic] composers, such as Gunther Schuller and George Russell." Methinks Mr. Shatz needs an ear transplant.

The other day I ran across at my local Half-Price Books a nearly complete set of the Time-Life Giants of Jazz series, at $1 a box. I already had a lot of them and bought all the ones I didn't have -- as much for the often excellent booklets as for the music, most of which I have elsewhere. Particularly happy to get the Red Norvo box with superb notes by the late DonDeMichael. The late Dick Sudhalter's notes for the Bunny Berigan set look to be top notch, too, and Berigan hasn't been written about much in such detail. Tatum set, interestingly, has notes by A.B. Spellman. Also got the Waller, Bessie Smith, Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Bechet, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, and Pee Wee Russell.

Got the Korstick concerto set. Still making my way through, but those early works are CRAZY.

Don't recall ever being disappointed by any Garner recording, as long as the man himself was left unemcumbered. For example, I recall rather hesitantly picking up an early ‘60s MGM Garner album of movie themes "A Night at the Movies” and being knocked out by Garner’s exceptional by his own standards zest and inventiveness.

Buy the Mosaic box. In addition to everything else, a fine set of liner notes from Loren Schoenberg, especially insightful on Dave Tough.

You can get a STD just from watching this.

to see if ricardi's description of it is correct? the only thing that Teachout disputes about the description is that Teachout says that he did insert this line into the play: “It ain’t about the money, got me plenty of that,” . but i suspect that this line was spoken by the actor during the intermission, when the audience was getting coffee. Again, I feel that we are getting lost in historic fact, when the reality it is a play that has to be built on drama to hold the audience’s attention. Ricardi states that the performance is convincing. If it gets a few more people turned-on to Armstrong's music and interested in jazz, then it has served it's purpose. The relationship between Armstrong and Glaser was complex and multi-faceted, Teachout with his playwright hat-on, has to focus on drama. As Spike Milligan once said, “I've just jazzed mine up a little.” Yes, what Teachout focused on (choosing to believe George Wein's account of Armstrong's state of mind re: Glaser) was dramatic, but as I said above, what the actual complexities of the Armstrong-Glaser relationship were (as Riccardi convincingly IMO details them) seem to me to be no less open to effective dramatization. But then one wouldn't have the play's seemingly pat "noble victim finally angrily realizing that he's long been been victimized by a semi-villiain"resolution, which is why I'm suspicious that that resolution was chosen not only for dramatic reasons. We do recall Edward Albee's "The Death of Bessie Smith," in which the myth that Smith's death was the result of her not being admitted to a nearby whites-only Mississippi hospital after a car wreck was put to use by Albee to in part dramatize the ugliness of racism in the South. For the facts about Smith's death, see Chris Albertson's "Bessie." Main detail is that Smith was not refused admission at a whites-only hospital and then bled to death before she could be treated elsewhere, as John Hammond wrote at the time, which account Albee based his play on. Smith was taken directly and ASAP to a blacks-only hospital, but her injuries were too traumatic for her to survive. Of course, the fact of there being whites-only and blacks-only hospitals in the South was ugly to say the least, but that is not why Smith died.

canard and absolutely believes that his (Wein's) version is correct. What is really striking to me is the contrast between Wein's "He said it like I said, and it has to be true because no black man with a white manager could possibly have felt otherwise" vs the categorical dismissal of Louis' "white son". As a white manager-promoter himself, Wein would know.

I agree that Teachout's Pops was magnificent, scholarly and well researched. But the Ellington biography, now there is the rub! Actually, I find Teachout's rebuttal convincing, it is drama and you have to take artistic license with the facts to get to the essence. It is a play, not a lecture on history. But what essence in this case?