Larry Kart

This from Dan Morgenstern's 1964 Down Beat interview with BE is at once the most direct and for me a quite puzzling series of remarks from him on some of this : 'The only way I can work is to have some kind of restraint involved, the challenge of a certain craft or form and then to find the freedom in that…. I think a lot of guys…want to circumvent that kind of labor…. I believe that all music is romantic, but if it gets schmaltzy, romanticism is disturbing. On the other hand, romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty.' Also: '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."'

Another odd glitch in Schuller's autobiography. On page 389 he writes of the time the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in which Schuller was first horn, spent several weeks accompanying the Sadler Wells Ballet: ”I was really looking forward to playing with [conductor-composer Constant] Lambert... And I didn’t like it when some of our musicians, realizing that [Lambert] was a homosexual, kept calling Lambert ‘Constance’ — under their breath, giggling like little children.” While I don’t doubt that the Met musicians did what Schuller says they did, Lambert most certainly was NOT a homosexual, viz: 'Lambert's first marriage was to Florence Kaye; their son was Kit Lambert, one of the managers of The Who. After divorcing Kaye, in 1947 Lambert married the artist Isabel Delmer; after his death, she married Alan Rawsthorne. Lambert earlier had an on-and-off affair with the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn. According to friends of Fonteyn, Lambert was the great love of her life and she despaired when she finally realized he would never marry her.” Further, if you don’t trust Wikipedia, I’ve read a great deal about Lambert’s colorful life over the years because one of my favorite fictional characters, Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s “A Dance To the Music of Time,” is modeled on him, and I’ve never encountered any suggestion that Lambert was homosexual. Lambert died in 1951. It would have been nice if Schuller, in the intervening years, had managed to get the facts about Lambert's personal life straight, so to speak.

Something else I just learned from Schuller's biography: the gifted Julius Watkins was a longtime drug addict who died at a fairly young age (55) largely because of his necessarily scuffling lifestyle. Damn.

What a gem this 1997 Milestone album is. A fine, very well-rehearsed band -- John Swana, Ron Blake, Mike LeDonne, Peter Washington, and Joe Farnsworth -- a nice program of mostly new Golson originals with one old favorite "Five Spot After Dark," and two tunes that people used to blow on but now don't that much -- "Dear Old Stockholm" and "Lullaby of Birdland." The other horns acquit themselves handsomely -- Blake plays an especially lucid solo on "Birdland," Swana reminds me at times of Don Fagerquist (a high compliment in my book), LaDonne is relaxed-intense and attractively boppish, and Golson himself is terrific throughout. Didn't even know this one existed until I saw and bought it.

I’m now in the midst of Schuller's vast and at times oddly toxic autobiography. Without doubt the man has lived a rich, varied, and valuable life, and the book is full of all sorts of information and some good stories, but Schuller can be such a damn know-it-all, and when he doesn’t actually know it all, that can really grate. For instance, “I didn’t hear Parker live most of that year [1947] because he was … in California, seriously … involved with drugs, which affected his playing quite negatively, as can be heard on the recordings of that year, especially 'Relaxin’ at Camarillo.'” Schuller has to be thinking of Parker’s "Lover Man," where he had the infamous physical/emotional breakdown that led to his being hospitalized for six months at the state mental hospital in Camarillo -- a recording that Parker never forgave Ross Russell for issuing. Made upon his return from Camarillo, at its title makes clear, "Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” is one of Parker’s best recordings. I’m also put off by Schuller's seemingly out of left field references to his erotic life — e.g. about how his beloved wife Margie became at his urging more sexually uninhibited over time and how when he was in the south riding around with a group of people in a crowded automobile and an attractive woman ended up sitting on his lap, he twice became “tumescent.” OK, maybe, if these things had something to do with anything else, but they don’t. Also, I’m sure that Gunther’s two sons are delighted to read about their late mother’s behavior in the bedroom, though perhaps that was a frequent topic of conversation in the Schuller household. BTW, on the Erwartung Triad, and GS' 'influence on Evans' use of it in his left hand voicings'; that's interesting because one of the things about much later Evans that I find off-putting is the disconnect IMO, both harmonically and emotionally, between those "advanced" left-hand voicings and the often relatively sugary songs Evans chose to play and the way he more or less preserved, even cherished, their arguably simplistic melodic sweetness. Erwartung meets "People" or "Make Someone Happy"? -- I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

You are going to have to search long and hard for a note before this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBhB9gRnIHE Sounds something like Hamza El Din. Remember him?

I just thought that Amazon post was interesting. Also, as we know, the very first jazz musician was Wingy Marsalis. Mike: I ordered the 1999 La Venexiana Quinto Libro recording. If it's as good as I think it might be, I'm in for "Concerto della Dame." Already have the keyboard music CD, which is what started me down the Luzzaschi road. Amazing how at my age and given all that I've listened to over the years, I keep running across terrific new (in this case "old") music. Also, Mike, as for virtuosity in performance, of course (and I'm speaking here only of Western music) there was music of daunting complexity in prior eras but not AFAIK music that required performers to come up with the sort of individual vocal acrobatics/registral extensions that Luzzachi's music apparently did (I say "apparently" because at this point I've only heard samples on Spotify). There's also the private performance for invited guests aspect of things, which suggests that something about this music was regarded as rare in nature, with little or no precedent, by those who elicted it and those who came to hear it.

But a good critic, by definition (i.e. my definition -- and I don't know any aestheticians), captures the spirit of things. Otherwise, why would one bother? Now whether any of them actually does that -- there we can argue. But not to even try? Or to more or less repress such speech? Again, for me -- and I'm sure I'm not alone in this -- to talk in some loving detail about about that which you love has always been a natural thing to do. Don't we do that all the time here? I agree with you completely there, Larry. I just find that too many critics in all fields end up sucking the lifeblood out of what they write about. I should say that I've been trying to play the part of devil's advocate here (how well, I don't know) and that I wasn't in any way referring to you or John B. Both of you do "talk in some loving detail about that which you love" - a very well turned phase. My favorite critic is/was Guy Davenport who did exactly what you said. Hey -- I commissioned a few book reviews from Davenport when I was the editor of the Chicago Tribune Books section. The one I remember was of a very good biography of Ben Jonson. I was looking at that book just the other day.

But a good critic, by definition (i.e. my definition -- and I don't know any aestheticians), captures the spirit of things. Otherwise, why would one bother? Now whether any of them actually does that -- there we can argue. But not to even try? Or to more or less repress such speech? Again, for me -- and I'm sure I'm not alone in this -- to talk in some loving detail about about that which you love has always been a natural thing to do. Don't we do that all the time here?

That's not what I meant. Sometimes the NYT is engaged in 'the advocacy of "so-called" progressive causes.' More often than not, though, in recent years especially, it is engaged in protecting and advancing what it perceives to be its own image and interests, and the resulting behavior may not be "progressive" in any sense. Thus, for example, allowing/encouraging Judith Miller and Michael Gordon (and columnist Tom Friedman) to sell their readers on the existence of WMD in Iraq and the need to invade that country was, as Karl Rove himself has explained (he having doped out how to manipulate the Times and other similar media outlets beforehand), basically an attempt by the Times to avoid being painted as a fundamentally liberal "outlier" paper amid the burgeoning neo-con New Reality of the Bush administration.

From the following piece by one Donald Brook, Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts in the Flinders University, South Australia: “Almost everyone takes Barnett Newman’s remark that ‘Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds’ to be insightfully true. ‘In spite of this the sense in which it is true is seldom clearly spelled out, and the sense in which it is not true is almost universally ignored despite the obvious ease with which it can be spelled out.’ http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2014/07/as-ornithology-is-for-birds-by-donald.html To paraphrase Brook’s wryly literal-minded conclusion: Ornithology might be influential on the behaviors of birds only if birds had the capacity to understand what ornithologists are saying about them. But birds can’t do that. Artists, however [quoting Brook directly now] “are generally supposed to be accessible to persuasive modification” by the words and ideas of other human beings — including aestheticians, critics, their spouses, their children, their friends, other artists, gallery owners, garbage men, landlords, waiters and waitresses, etc. Aesthetics may, but does not necessarily, shape the behaviors and activities and beliefs of artists. Ornithology does not and cannot possibly shape the behaviors, the activities and the beliefs of birds.

I find that there's another side to this, especially to your comment: "There exists among and around jazz musicians by and large (but not always), and for perfectly understandable reasons, a sort of locker room culture that says, among other things, 'Only we (and not all of us, for that matter) can understand, comment on, and judge the human and social circumstances and the artistic results of what we do.'" There's a quote attributed to Barnett Newman which speaks to this: "Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds." (Within the context of these forums, there's another, ironic, side to that quote.) Newman wasn't speaking about critics but, in general, I think that musicians, writers, artists (of all kinds) tend to regard critics and criticism as a necessary evil. Perhaps I'm wrong about that. (I know there are writers who write criticism and reviews but, at least in certain cases, I think that's because they have to eat.) I'm thinking of a quote attributed to the composer and teacher Andre Gedalge: "Critics make pipi on music and think they help it grow.” Just my thoughts - or mainly the thoughts of Newman and Gedalge. Artists do what they do and critics do what they do. I'm much more interested what artists do. Some critics, yes, the good ones, no. What artists do and what good critics do are not mutually exclusive things. Again, I prefer to "analysis" or any term like that just "talk about." You think plenty of artists don't talk about what they're doing and what other artists are doing? They do; I can show you plenty of terrific examples, and often it's real good "talk about" too -- although there are some who don't, but that's mostly a matter of personal temperament. But the idea that there's some proud moral divide here between those who talk and those who remain silent and do nothing but "do" -- I'll make pipi on that for sure.

Comment from Amazon on this CD: http://www.amazon.com/Luzzaschi-Concerto-delle-Dame-Ferrara/dp/B0000007MZ/ref=sr_1_5?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1431094807&sr=1-5&keywords=Luzzaschi from a guy I know of who is widely versed in music in general and early music in particular (a scholar in the field, he also plays the bassoon and related instruments). The key passage I’ve emphasized. BTW, the music he's speaking of is amazing — really good and also it sounds unique, like a cross between Frescobaldi and/or Bellini but a Bellini who has listened to Frescobaldi. BTW Luzzaschi was Frescobaldi's teacher, which is saying something. 'The twelve madrigals on this CD were composed by Luzzasco Luzzaschi sometime around 1579, during the first years of the marriage of Margherita Gonzaga to Alfonso d"Este, Duke of Ferrara. They were intended to be sung by three court ladies, attendants of the Duchess, who were fabulously skilled in music. Court ladies naturally couldn't sing just anywhere; they performed only in the private chamber of the Duchess, to which a very select number of high-ranking guest might be invited. The fame of the Three ladies became such that ambassadors, nuncios, and even sovereigns clamored to be included, and thus a new tool of diplomacy was invented. Soon every fashionable court in Italy was eager to have its own ensemble of madrigalists. High times, in short, for composers such as Luzzaschi. 'But the impression made upon music was more than a fashion for women's voices. Unlike the madrigals and motets of previous generations, which were enjoyed chiefly by the singers themselves in the act of singing, these madrigals were intended to be admired by an audience, and in fact an audience that could NOT possibly sing them also, lacking the three ladies' virtuosity. Thus the whole relationship of music to audience began the seismic shift that would eventually lead to the construction of concert halls with paid public admission.' The price of this CD was a bit rich for my blood at the moment, but I've ordered another more reasonably priced Luzzaschi CD that should also be good and probably will get this one if and when my ship comes in.

Steve, the critic J.B. Figi described the Breuker band's rhythm section as sounding like "Dutch wooden shoes." I tend to agree and I think Bennink and Glerum slipped into the same thing last week - fatigue perhaps, though some other times I've heard Bennink so preoccupied with his showmanship that he didn't remember to swing. Yes, ICP offered the best improvisers - Mary played the best I've heard her play this time. Guus Janssen is now on the band, yay. Missed out on Saturday night's concert, but when I heard the ICP in spontaneous small group settings on Sunday night, Han was on fire. Also, of course -- or OTOH -- some of his swing is very straight up and down; "flow" is not the way he chooses to go by and large or maybe ever, in part I think because he wants every stroke to be heard as a stroke, as though he were saying "This wall is built of individual BRICKS, and don't you forget it." But how far removed, aside from the element of conscious choice (but not, for me, self-consciousness) is this from, say, Cozy Cole or Jimmy Crawford? I have more doubts about Glerum at times, not so much in terms of his time feel, which also is straight up and down, but lack of weight/volume/power. (Han certainly has no problems in that sphere.) OTOH, Glerum is a longtime part of the package, and I don't know what other kind of bassist would be more effective there, if any other kind would be.

At once complicating and potentially enriching things is that analysis of jazz (I'd prefer a phrase like "ways of talking about") often doesn't match up that well with previously familiar ways of talking about other music, even other kinds of art -- the upside being that if we can come up with ways to talk about jazz on its terms ( I know, what the heck does that mean? but I think we know we're doing it when we manage to do it) without turning our backs on previously familiar ways of talking about other music when those ways are useful, we may come up with ways of grasping how all music, even all art, works or can work that are as novel and useful as Ellington, Morton, and Monk are in relation to, say, Hemingway or Richard Strauss.

Just got Schuller's book from the library. Gunther's not responsible for it, but the first sentence from the Introduction by Joan Shelley Rubin: https://www.rochester.edu/news/experts/index.php?id=169 is almost astonishingly stupid: "Near the beginning of his landmark study 'Early Jazz' (1968) Gunther Schuller describes a chord pattern called 'fours' that jazz musicians sometimes introduce into the conventional thirty-two bar song form. After noting that the pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses, he remarks, 'The 'bridge' produces especially interesting combinations." "[A] a chord pattern called 'fours'.... [T]he pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses..." etc. Would you run that by me again, Joan?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_Evans

Yes, come to me for deep intellectual understanding, only 5 cents per insight. OTOH, I think I know what Allen means, up to a point. There exists among and around jazz musicians by and large (but not always), and for perfectly understandable reasons, a sort of locker room culture that says, among other things, "Only we (and not all of us, for that matter) can understand, comment on, and judge the human and social circumstances and the artistic results of what we do.” And a lot of non-players, again for understandable reasons, buy into this jazz version of locker room culture, in part because the circumstances of their own lives make such attitudes and behavior seem necessary and attractive. A perhaps relevant passage from my book: ‘The men and women who make jazz are just like everyone else in any number of ways--they have to put food on the table and roofs over their heads; function as children, parents, and spouses; orient themselves toward the world as best they can along political, social, and spiritual lines, etc. But they also, however varied their individual humanity, form a group apart. 'What kind of group, and “apart” in what ways and for what reasons, are questions that were brilliantly explored by sociologist-jazz pianist Howard Becker in his 1951 paper “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience” (by “dance musician” Becker meant jazz musician), which later became the basis of two chapters in his 1963 book “Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.” Becker’s basic insight, which stemmed from his own experience as a participant/observer in the field, is that while jazz musicians by and large, and with good reason, tend to think of themselves as artists, they belong functionally to a “service occupation”--that is, one in which “the worker comes into more or less direct contact with...the client for whom he performs the service…[and one in which the client] is able to direct or attempt to direct the worker at his task and to apply sanctions of various kinds, ranging from informal pressure to the withdrawal of his patronage …. It seems characteristic of such occupations,” he continues, “that their members consider the client unable to judge the proper worth of the service and resent…any attempt on his part to exercise control over the work.” And Becker drily adds, “a good deal of conflict and hostility arises as a result ….” 'Perhaps the situation that Becker describes didn’t--or doesn’t, or needn’t--always prevail, and certainly the nature of the lives that jazz musicians lead depends on a good many other things as well. But the social side of the music is directly shaped by the artist-for-hire and at the mercy of those who hire syndrome--and all the defenses, evasions, stresses, and accommodations that arise as a result.' Me again, in the present: Becker’s original paper “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience,” if you can get access to it, is just mind-blowing. Failing that, check out the more compact version in his “Outsiders.”

I find it hard to believe that at this late date in GS' life, and given how much experience he must have had with jazz musicians over the years, it could have been news to GS that the BE who showed up at his door was a junkie on the mooch. Further, how could GS in 1963 not at least have heard through the grapevine that BE was an addict. He had been since at least 1959.

Guus Janssen -- First name pronounced something like "Hchuss" I believe, as though one were clearing phlegm from the throat.

It was one heckuva concert.

At the moment, I can only think first of specific examples, positive and negative, and then try to draw some conclusions. I agree about the peculiar, alternate-world deadness of W. Marsalis' composing and, after a certain early point, his playing as well, but OTOH I don't think his music represents much of anything in terms of whatever post-mdernism in jazz or in general is or might be. Rather, I think of the whole neo-con Marsalis-linked JALC phenomenon as more or less an act of social engineering, aided and abetted by many people who should have (and in some cases do) know better. I'll bet that when the last literal vestiges of the Marsalis Era/Style/What Have You are gone, in terms of actual human beings playing such music, (and sadly I won't be around to see this), there won't be any other vestiges of it around -- no music of any interest or value that could be said to stem from it. The only real effect of the WM Era is and will be one that's almost impossible to calculate -- the blotting out the sun aspect of it, the way it occupied so much of the public space and soaked up so much of the money that otherwise might have gone to other jazz artists of all sorts of styles who were already making, or would have gone to make, worthwhile genuine music that did not fit into the WM-JALC tent or just wasn't connected to that empire. Otherwise, restricting myself to direct experience, several very positive examples: 1) Roscoe Mitchell and the rest of the first and second wave of the AACM. There were some strains there that might look seem Post-Modern like at times -- the level of irony, playing with fragmented older styles of jazz, in some of Mitchell's early music and in the Art Ensemble of Chicago in general (in particular the sheer amount of trumpet history that Lester Bowie incorporated and played with); the Joplin versions that Air came up with early on, etc. By and large, though, Mitchell and most of the major AACM-associated artists seem to me to be Modernists in the classic sense -- i.e. language re-shapers like Joyce and Picasso who refer to the past (as the former did with so many writers, as the later did with Degas and others) not on an attempt to comment on the past or to draw on its energies but as a natural aspect of their drive to make it new. 2) The no-longer so new Chicago New Wave that began to emerge in the late 1990s and continues to flourish. Lots of variety here, and some Post-Modern touches -- e.g. the way cornetist Josh Berman springs more or less from both Ruby Braff and Don Cherry and has built some of his most effective pieces on Austin High Gang material. But in the event I would say that in Berman's case, and in most others from this group of musicians, such aspects of the past as may be there are not essentially referential but a part who those musicians are. I know for a fact that Josh never thought of Braff as some old guy but rather as a player whose whose musical-emotional solutions (so to speak) spoke directly to him. That he was open to hear that -- and that he, like many others in this group, probaby listened to a lot of recordings from all eras -- is another thing, but not a hard core Post-Modern trait, I think. 3) The Dutch, the ICP Orchestra crowd in particular. Post Modern for sure, on the face of it -- as many recordings and much that figures like Misha Mengelberg have said over the years will attest -- but the difference here, I think, is that Post Modernism in the arts, at least in my experience, has a smell of solemnity and political aggrandizement to it; it's typically a power operation, a way of edging other ways of making and experiencing art off to one side, if not trying to mock or even obliterate them. None of this feeling do I get from the ICP people and their music; rather (and I just heard them in concert a few nights ago) there's a consistent sense of wit, play (sometimes impish), and joy, and when actual pieces from the jazz past are present, they're typically inhabitee with great zest and insight. 4) The "Kind of Blue" reproduction by Other People Do the Killing. Now that's might be my idea of a deliberately Post Modernist gesture in jazz, except that it was at once so self-conscious, and also so musically inept by any standard that I could bring to bear, that I think it was in effect a Post-Post Modernist act, a la the references to the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of 'Don Quixote'" with which they sought to bolster what they had done. But that great Borges story, like its companion piece "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was not only immensely clever as a piece of storytelling in its own right but also very funny. In effect, Borges created something; these guys hung up a broken shaving mirror. My guess then -- though it's just a guess -- is that Post Modern strategies and gestures don't and perhaps never will have much of a place in jazz, if only because both the notion and fact of personal instrumental expression is so tightly woven into the fabric of the music. Yes, there have been brilliant multi-voiced ironists in the music -- e.g. Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter in certain phases of their careers -- but sustaining such an approach was something that neither man chose to do, for whatever reasons. Otherwise?

Helluva record! Along with Medina & Spiral, the best of the Land/Hutcherson collaborations, imho. But they're ALL great. Hey -- I reviewed that album for Down Beat back in '68 or '69, gave it ***1/2. IIRC drummer Donald Bailey plays harmonica on at least one track.

I do the same. I hope you may have stumbled upon either or both of the Avaialble Jelly Live in Nassau discs. Michael Moore has many nice recordings floating around but for me, these two are desert island material. I picked up a nice Toby Delius trio disc called Booklet last time I saw the band. I'll be looking for a few Ab Baars discs this Thursday!!! Don't know those two Available Jelly discs; they weren't on sale. Bought Moore's "Easter Sunday" and another by the same quartet, plus several by Delius, Baars, a Heberer, a Guus Janssen ("Matrix") that it turns out I already have, Etc. BTW, Heberer was in superb form Sunday night. In addition to everything else, what a fine player per se of the cornet he is.

ICP Orchestra members in spontaneous small group settings at Elastic in Chicago. Superb work from everyone. Han Bennik sure hasn't slowed down. Guus Janssen, taking Misha's place at the piano, was excellent. Each of the two sets ended with a group performance, the second set's was "Black and Tan Fantasy." Bought a lot of CDs of the various band members and one of ICP itself because when will I ever see those discs again?