Larry Kart

It is/was an amazing show, possibly my favorite ever, for many reasons. My favorite show probably is "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." I'm not kidding.

Thanks to the waywardness of this thread, I've ordered an Anita Ellis album.

So glad I stopped watching "Mad Men" part ways through episode two of season one -- first because, as Chuck said at the time, having lived through the '50s I don't need to see them regurgitated; second, because I could tell right off that they were getting or going to get just about everything wrong. The ludicrously demonstrative smoking was a good clue.

Anita Ellis (Larry Kert’s older sister) — The way she handles sustained notes is something else. Ellis (a la Marni Nixon later on) did a good deal of dubbing for movie stars whose voices were felt to be not up to snuff. Most notably, in Rita Hayworth's "Put the Blame on Mame" number in "Gilda," that's Ellis' voice. In some ways such "ghost" roles may have suited Ellis; she suffered from paralyzing stage fright.

Nothing more heard from or about that psycho or pseudo-psycho, thanks be. Right! I remember him. Fine writer, nice guy. Thanks for the good detective work.

Looks like it's gonna be a happy story...any idea who/what/etc? No idea who she is, and surely if we had met I would have remembered her.

I know of him best from his work with Red Norvo. Nice player, akin to Bud Shank. Circa 1944-5, Drasnin was a member of the Hollywood Canteen Kids band with Warne Marsh.

Thanks all. It's been a good day so far, and my wife is going to make one of her fabulous chocolate cakes. Kert's was a rather sad story. 'According to Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for West Side Story, Kert was "a California extrovert, laughing, bubbling, deadly funny, and openly gay." Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins frequently clashed with Kert, publicly chastising him for being a "faggot," despite the fact that Robbins himself ... and most of the creative team was gay.' He and his older sister Anita Ellis, a talented pop-jazz singer, were natives of Montreal. Their parents were Orthodox Jews. A million stories in the naked city.

I like a lot of Ireland. Gifted American pianist-composer Robert Helps was a big Ireland fan.

I should add that things I ordered, plus regular mail, arrive to me (and from me to others) just fine via the USPS all the time. Also the people at the nearest local post office are very nice and competent.

I ordered a set of the complete Beethoven String Quartets that ended up in Sparks, Nev. I live in Illinois. A replacement set arrived soon after I complained. The guy in Sparks, Nev needed it more than you do. Hope he's a fan of the Suske Quartet.

I ordered a set of the complete Beethoven String Quartets that ended up in Sparks, Nev. I live in Illinois. A replacement set arrived soon after I complained.

Yes.

Nice night, very nice. Was most struck by how Russ Johnson sounded with Ulery's Loom -- big buttery sound, great range, gorgeous lyrical playing, all melody; he's in the top flight of trumpet players IMO. Bradfield (mostly on bass clarinet, where he gets a lovely woodsy sound and moves around with remarkable agility -- in my experience a woodsy sound on the instrument precludes top-level facility) ) and Clearfield played their asses off too, as did the whole band. Ulery's pieces are a bit modal folksy at times for my taste but in fact they turn out to enough grit, and they're darn nice to play on. Nick was in good form, but I'd heard him a few weeks before in better form and can't think of anything to add to what I said then.

Did she sing when you knew her? Not in public, though she had a nice airy voice, kind of in the Chris Connor mold, and she certainly was a jazz fan.

Here's her obituary from the Seattle Times: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/seattletimes/obituary.aspx?pid=174160417 The younger of the two images is the how she looked when I knew her. Her given name was Patricia (Pat); she changed it to Tichiang after she moved to Seattle to assert her Asian identity. Her father was Filipino, her mother was Polish.

Poulenc plays his own piano music; he plays Satie on the other side. Haven't heard his Satie yet, but he plays his own work with all the flair one might hope. I have that Feldman/Brown too, along with some of the other Time albums in that series. College for me too. BTW, just found out from the alumni magazine that my college girlfriend, maybe the most beautiful woman I ever met and a good friend long after the romance faded, died in late January in Seattle at the age of 73. Whew. I remember so many things about her.

Just picked up a New World CD of three of Schuller's late compositions -- "Of Reminiscences and Reflections" (1993 -- won the Pulitzer), "The Past Is in the Present" (1994) and Concerto for Organ and Orchestra (1994). Have listened to the first two, both memorial pieces -- the first for his wife, the second for his memories of Cincinnati, where he got his start in that city's symphony -- both very impressive. A commentator on Amazon says "Of Reminiscences and Reflections" is Schuller's film-noir masterpiece," and I can see why; the mood is certainly noir and it's often masterly, though maybe it's not a masterpiece because, at least for me, it's a bit "gestural" at times -- i.e. there are some passages where "thrusting" figures thrust forward while the formerly integrated harmonic, melodic, and timbral aspects of the music kind of trail in the wake language-wise for a while and/or seem a bit decorative, like scenery in a play. But that's a minor and mostly descriptive cavil; these are strong works.

Basically, yes. Nor can they understand human speech in any way, whereas most artists can do both of those things and chew gum at the same time. Then there’s that old favorite “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” which apparently was originated not by one of the usual suspects (Frank Zappa, et al.) but by comedian and sometime painter Martin Mull, who in his version had “Writing about painting” instead of “Writing about music.” Better yet, this seems to go back to a 1918 remark from an article in the New Republic: “Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics. All the other arts can be talked about in the terms of ordinary life and experience. A poem, a statue, a painting or a play is a representation of somebody or something, and can be measurably described (the purely aesthetic values aside) by describing what it represents.” Interesting that the New Republic guy (the article apparently was unsigned) says that painting is one of the arts that can be written about but that music cannot be. This is because painting, in the view of this writer, “is a representation of somebody or something, and can be measurably described … by describing what it represents.” The existence of abstract art seems to have passed this fellow by. Whatever, the answer to my mind is that all these “Writing about X is like [blanking] about Y” formulations are bullshit. Difficult though it is, writing well about X (whatever X might stand for) is always possible. I’m reminded of Severn Darden’s solution to Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: '…I have discovered possibly the meaning for this paradox. I was reading recently a book called "Greek Pots In Polish Museums" by John Davidson Beasley. 8 vo., $9.75 and worth every penny of it. Big wide margins--er, I'm getting off my point. 'Anyhow, in there is a picture of a pot that has on it a picture of an archaic tortoise of the kind that Zeno would have known about. Now, it isn't a little, flat American tortoise. IT'S A LITTLE BULLET-SHAPED TORTOISE WITH LONG, SINEWY LEGS, ABOUT 4 FEET LONG, AND IT COULD RUN LIKE CRAZY!'

There ya go.

I haven't heard him on C melody, but was very impressed with his alto playing at a recent gig in Atlanta and on the CDs I've heard - beautiful sound and lots of imagination. Nice guy, too. Very nice guy. But then a whole lot of guys on the Chicago scene are. In fact, can't think of one who isn't.

THE ANAGRAM SERIES PRESENTS MERIDIAN TRIO AND MATT ULERY'S LOOM MONDAY, MAY 11 9 PM • $10 AT ELASTIC ARTS FOUNDATION 3429 W DIVERSEY AVENUE, 2ND FLOOR SET 1: MERIDIAN TRIO Nick Mazzarella – alto and C melody saxophones Matt Ulery – bass Jeremy Cunningham – drums SET 2: MATT ULERY'S LOOM Geof Bradfield – tenor saxophone and bass clarinet Russ Johnson – trumpet Rob Clearfield – piano Matt Ulery – bass and compositions Jon Deitemyer – drums Pre-gig expectations: Nick on C melody is a trip -- he's just taken it up after Tim Daisy gave him a battered horn from the '20s that Nick then refurbished (he works in a reed instruments shop) -- and on alto he just keeps getting better/stronger. Looking forward to hearing Russ Johnson again. It's been a while. Ulery's Loom should be a good setting for him and vice versa.

I agree that some of the final or near-final recordings are very good: I like "The Last Waltz" in particular. OTOH, other live recordings from about the same period seem grimly formulaic to me. One assumes that the ingestion and effects of drugs played a fluctuating role in determining what shape BE was in when it came time to play. I can't stand most of the vaunted "Turn Out the Stars" set from the Village Vanguard in 1980, all those obsessive spinning wheels going pretty much nowhere versions of "Nardis" especially.

To partially repeat myself, this is what I wrote in my book: Plausible words, perhaps, but the value that Evans seemingly places on restraint in itself leads one to ask, What is being restrained and why? Evans’s “challenge of [working within] a certain craft or form” is not merely an account of his own necessary practice; it lends to that practice an aura of moral virtue (“I think a lot of guys …want to circumvent that kind of labor….”). In other words, for Evans certain sorts of musical labor are not only valid but they also validate. And should an aesthetically valid outcome be reached in a seemingly non-laborious manner, that can be disturbing. Thus in 1964 , after acknowledging that the brilliant, lucid, and “completely unpremeditated” two-piano improvisation that he and Paul Bley played on George Russell’s 1960 album Jazz In The Space Age “was fun to do,” Evans says: “[but to] do something that hadn’t been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that kind of freedom.” Drawing a comparison between Bach and César Franck in his Man and His Music: Romanticism and the Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Mellers refers to the “tension [in Bach’s music] between linear independence and the dramatic logic of harmony.” In early Evans, as in Bach, that tension was alive, rich and fruitful; in much later Evans, as in much Franck, logical and increasingly elaborate harmonic labor seemingly exists to curtail, if not defeat, linear melodic independence. (Pettinger says of Evans’s 1966 composition “Unless It’s You”--and the same could be said of many latter-day Evans improvisations--“…[T] he interest was mostly harmonic …, the significance of almost every note [of the top line] dependent on its attached harmony.” ) One thinks again of Evans’s recording of “Tenderly,” with its dramatized joust between restraint and the desire to break way from it, of Evans’s actute sensitivities, and of his apparent attempt to damp them down after the death of his uncannily empathetic musical partner Scott LaFaro. In 1983 I began by referring to Bill Evans as a minor artist. What I would say now is that Evans was an artist whose conflicts threatened to overwhelm his gifts, and that it was his fate to spend much of the latter part of his career making a music in which those conflicts were in effect disguised, even denied. Me again, in the present: Further, as I said in my previous post or two, there are several pretty real conflicts at work here in I think in Evans' mind and musical practice -- between his tricky/difficult rational-labor modifications of romantic popular songs and the organic musical nature of those songs and between the romantic as BE conceived it and between musical romanticism, as it is commonly understood and as I think BE understood it too. If BE's music had tried to and managed to express these conflicts, fine; Instead, especially in his later years, I think he tried to disguise them or even to deny that they existed. In particular, the conflict and/or potential confusion arises because BE is trying to tame or modify or whatever the arguably anti-rational, instinctual tides of romanticism through hyper-rational means. About Frost's famous quip, I think BE's " romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty" was not a quip at all, in tone or content.

OK -- but what's the musical/expressive point of radically displacing the harmonic rhythm of "All of You" or any such Broadway piece of material? First, there is an obvious organic connection between the song's harmonic rhythm as Cole Porter conceived it. Alter that if you will, and if you can, but why? Only, one would think, as Martin Williams once said of the way jazz musicians typically alter the melodies of standard tunes, "because they can come up with better melodies (e.g. Charlie Parker on 'Embraceable You.'") But are the displaced harmonic rhythms on standards that BE would come up with musically/expressively "better" in any sense or are they just trickier, more difficult to grasp and execute? Further, is the resulting musical/expressive relationship between those displaced harmonic rhythms and what remains of the original tune all that coherent? I think of the early BE piece that was (I believe) built around such displacements, "Five," where the piece itself and BE's solo work were close to one thing. Looking back on the passage from that 1964 interview with BE, I finally came to think that for him the attraction to romantic material per se and 19th Century musical Romanticism (two different things, the former implying "imaginative, visionary, idealistic," the latter referring to a movement in the arts whose hallmarks were the anti-rational, a belief in the values of intuition, instinct, and private expression and a search for transformation and transcendence that would go beyond the limits of human society) were one thing and close to omnipresent. Thus he introduces rational disciplined "labor" (e.g. tricky displacements of harmonic rhythm, left-hand figures based on the "Erwartung" chord, etc.) to undercut/transform the potentially "schmaltzy" nature of the romantic material to which he is drawn and come up with "... the most beautiful kind of beauty ... romanticism handled with discipline.'" For me, both the musical results and the thinking that seemingly underlies it are kind of f---ed up. Maybe BE is jazz's Franz Schrecker?