Larry Kart

The Feather album: http://www.discogs.com/Leonard-Feathers-West-Coast-Stars-East-Coast-Stars-West-Coast-Vs-East-Coast-A-Battle-Of-Jazz/release/3568094\ I'd have to listen to be sure, but on the face of it, I don't think it would be as likely as the RCA album to show clear-cut "Coastal" stylistic differences. For one thing, who are the arrangers? Rugolo and Dick Hyman? Rugolo was Rugolo, no, in all his quirkiness? And Hyman was kind of faceless? For another, Fagerquist, while located in the L.A. area, was not to me a WCJ figure stylistically. A very personal player who came out of the late Swing Era, he was in his mellow and sometime heated lyricism somewhat analogous to Fats Navarro; or, if you prefer, he was an advanced and much superior Ray Linn.

P.S. A passage from Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle that, in its perhaps alarming succinctness, still seems to me to cut the Gordian knot: "A more literally detached emotionality arrived with the West Coast jazz inspired both by Tristano and Miles Davis's 1949 Birth of the Cool nonet, a muted, scaled-down big band. The relaxed, subdued atmosphere of West Coast jazz had a healthy acceptance of stylistic diversity and innovation, but it also accepted the emotional world of pop music at face value; even original themes are treated like more hip, more grown-up kinds of pop music. In bop's freest flights it could not escape reality, but these Californians were not aware of the conflict of value that was the source of bop."

Why not take in the "West Coast vs East Coast" LP on MGM E3390 too, then? Yes I know the fact that this session (much like various preceding "Battle" 10-inchers) was masterminded by Leonard Feather will be grating enough to many to dismiss this outright and consider it unworthy of close listening, but hey (hey, there I said "hey" too! ), the Westcoasters have Enevoldsen and Fagerquist (a.o.) in their lineup! Seriously, I doubt Jim at any time meant to say those East Coasters were carbon copies/duplicates of WCJ in their sound, arrangements, etc. but is Al Cohn (and his surroundings) such a far-fetched example of Eastern jazzmen who did their own (Eastern?) thing apart from Hard Bop that was different but not a million miles away from those WCJ segments that were NOT all "classically influenced" etc.? Why all this insistence on narrowing down the many facets of WCJ to such a narrow excerpt that seems to qualify as the primary "typical" WCJ today? Sorry again for taking this up but this IS puzzling to me, and all credentials aside, may I sum up what baffles me in the following remark just from one forumist to another? Is this really a matter of "Larry Kart's West Coast Jazz is what Larry Kart's West Coast Jazz is and just will not be all of what West Coast Jazz was and, by all recorded evidence, still is?" My sincere apologies if this sounds disrespectful - it really, really is not meant to be, it just baffles me no end coming from your corner of the jazz world. Somehow what Peter Friedman said above both about the necessity of having categories (not to pigeonhole in the narrowest possible way but to establish overall, general references of what an artist works within or how a jazz style functions) but of reappraising the music at the same time within those terms sounds much more down-to-earth to me. So you did not like the WCJ history by Ted Gioia? What is it that you did not like or what do you fault him for? Realy curious to find out ... It's funny - among the many jazz books I have read and hang on to, this is one of not very many (Ira Gitler's " Swing to Bop" is another one) that I find myself pulling out time and again to start reading it again from any chapter that suits my mood and each time I feel like immediately being fully immersed in the subject and find it as fresh as the first time I read it. IMHO he strikes a very nice balance between the background, the overall setting/framework, the life and music of the artists to present the full picture and the whole scope. Gordon's book which focuses more on the recordings and has more of a "record review" slant complements it quite well and brings out the wide range of WCJ nuances too. Not to forget the JWC book by Alain Tercinet published in 1986 or so that also has that "record review" angle but covers an incredibly wide range of artists and ties a lot of loose ends together, IMO (and it does dwell on East Coast-West Coast comparisons/evaluations, including from the "arranged" and "classically influenced" angle too, BTW). Enough coverage of the subject available, then, that adds insights that became apparent "after the fact". And regardless of the fact that Tercinet's book was published in French, it does have its merits and adds to Gioia and Gordon and if it is off the radar of those who do not speak or read French then this does not invalidate the book or make it irrelevant but rather is the loss of those who don't read French. Don't know the Feather album? What was the lineup? As for "Seriously, I doubt Jim at any time meant to say those East Coasters were carbon copies/duplicates of WCJ in their sound, arrangements, etc. but is Al Cohn (and his surroundings) such a far-fetched example of Eastern jazzmen who did their own (Eastern?) thing apart from Hard Bop that was different but not a million miles away from those WCJ segments that were NOT all "classically influenced" etc.?" all I meant was that even though admittedly the players in these two groups on that album were not "a million miles away from each other" (even-surface neo-Basie rhythmic habits in particular were pervasive, little or no boppish breaking up of the time) it was still fairly easy, then and now, to tell them apart stylistically on a "Which Coast?" basis. BTW, Jim did use the word "identical" to characterize those two scenes. I was just saying that the results sure didn't sound identical. As for the Gioia book, I think I have it on the shelves and certainly would need to take a good look at it to answer your question in detail and in a way that's fair to the book. What I recall, though (risking unfairness and inaccuracy now), is that Gioia was so determined to do what Jim admires the book for doing -- give the, if you will, non-WCJ style aspects of the larger WCJ scene their due and thus redress the by then longstanding "imbalance" that I felt that the WCJ style (as I and many others saw it and felt it to be at the time) was being handled by Gioia with a certain suspicion and distaste (musical and moral). Obviously, from some of things I've said on this thread, I myself am far from a blanket enthusiast for the WCJ style (as I and others on this thread .e.g. John Litweiler, think of it), but it always has seemed to me to be a particular and relatively tight-knit musical-social phenomenon (and with the passage of time, a historical one), and in general I don't like to see accounts of actual detailed facets of the lived past (particularly the lived artistic past) that retrospectively reshape that lived past because one feels/sees that it was arguably inseparable from calculated or semi-incidental (but no less damaging) acts of injustice. I think we're better off if we try to live (or "live") with all of it and work from there and not turn would-be historical accounts into attempts to re-live the past in which, so to speak, the good guys, to use Jim's image, now go to the front of the line. BTW, perhaps I need to say again that back in the heyday of the WCJ style, I was as aware of, and as much an admirer of, Carl Perkins, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Criss et al. as it was possible for a teen-aged non-resident of California to be, given of course the relative availability of their recorded work, that I certainly noticed the differences between their musical-emotional sensibilities and those of, say, Bob Cooper and Lennie Niehaus and pondered as best I could what those differences might mean about the world or worlds in which we all were living. Isn't that what people do, try to do, ought to try to do when they encounter art and its connections to the social context? But not, in my book, try to do by retrospectively engaging in something of a reparations project.

No, I don't recall liking that Gioia book or any Gioia book. Nor any book by his brother "new formalist" poet Dana Gioia -- George Bush's choice to run the National Endowment for the Arts -- either.

One swallow doesn't make a summer, as they say, but as it happens there is an album that nicely demonstrates that the '"scene" on the East Coast [that you feel was] identical to that of the "West Coast Jazz" -- players who worked the studio, played jazz as/when available, writers who wrote beyond the conventional conveniences, etc. etc," was not in fact so. The album is "East Coast -West Coast Scene" (RCA), from 1954, and it features Al Cohn and his 'Charlie's Tavern' Ensemble and Shorty Rogers and his Augmented Giants -- three longish tracks for each group. Cohn's group includes Joe Newman, Billy Byers, Eddie Bert, Hal McKusick, Gene Quill, Sol Schlinger, Sanford Gold, Billy Bauer, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson; Rogers group includes Milt Bernhart, Bob Enevoldsen, Lennie Niehaus, Bud Shank, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Guiffre, Pete Jolly, Barney Kessel, Curtis Counce, and Shelly Manne. I'm telling you that both back in the day and now, no one with much listening experience would have thought that just about any of the soloists (with the exception of Sims, who just happened to be L.A.-based at the time, and the rather faceless Gold) or any of the writing came from a coast other than the one from which they/it actually came. Maybe, that's because I was around at the time and (as a young but assiduous fan) was more or less immersed in the various musical/stylistic "cues" that were involved, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Note BTW that none of those East Coast players was part of the then just taking shape "Hard Bop" musical scene. If any of them had been, that of course would have made stylistic differentiation between players from the two "coasts" a good deal easier.

But in that article do you see some disconnect between these two passages? 1) The first and most obvious thing to note is that you can see exactly why Seattle wanted to pass the ball. Even though they had three wide receivers on the field, the Patriots were almost completely selling out to stop the run. [Notice that "almost."] 2) [The Patriots] ran this play in practice specifically to prepare their defensive backs for it. Nothing in football gives you an edge like knowing exactly what is coming. People have called this play a great read by Butler, but if you take a look at his reactions, he is playing nothing else. He knew this play was coming and that’s all he was planning to defend. [Notice the phrase " knowing exactly what is coming,"] So the two Patriots who are not selling out to stop the run [browner and Butler] just happen to be the two guys who are defending against the play the Seahawks actually ran. The Seahawks got out thunk, I think.

Further thoughts, info, obfuscation: http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2014/story/_/id/12266535/super-bowl-xlix-darrell-bevell-seattle-seahawks-play-call-made-kill-clock I've also heard that Seattle OC Bevell said that Lockette didn't "contest" that ball aggressively enough. If your choice, Mr. Bevell, let the whole game come down to a jump-ball contest, then you f----d up.

So the "real-time consensuality of mutally shared real-timers" has or ought to have "no real meaning" any more? Yes, Dixieland was not a real place, but it was a real musical style, for better or for worse -- though it was, again, far from the only style of jazz that had some connection with New Orleans. Why must a musical style and the physical place connected with it in some way be an identity? May I have the next Viennese waltz?

German trumpeter Thomas Heberer’s “What A Wonderful World,” with bassist Dieter Manderscheid (an Armstrong tribute) Heberer and Manderscheid’s “Chicago Breakdown” (a Jelly Roll Morton tribute) plus several other Heberer albums with bass and drums

What criteria met in what way? The name on the sign, interpreted in terms of geography, or the particular musical style that virtually everyone at the time knew that that name stood for? And what line that formed where? Of course, several different styles of jazz happened/were happening on the West Coast, but only one of them -- and who said it was the only one? -- had the particular stylistic traits of so-called West Coast Jazz. Who has ever had that much of a problem sorting out this non-conundrum? West Coast Jazz is NOT the only jazz that emerged from the West Coast. And -- stop the presses -- not all of the jazz that emerged from New Orleans is, or ought to be called, Dixieland.

Jim, I'm having a tough time following you here. Carl Perkins deserves to get paid because there's the label "West Coast Jazz" and he's a terrific player and he lives on the West Coast and they're giving money to those other West Coast guys just because they live there and they're music fits the WCJ label stylistically, but Perkins doesn't get paid because his style of music doesn't fit the music that's been labeled WCJ? To that I say, on two somewhat different fronts, Hampton Hawes and Horace Silver. The former, stylistically similar to Perkins, did get paid fairly well I think for a good while -- probably about as much over a comparable period of time as, say, Pete Jolly -- but of course Hawes screwed up almost as definitively and for much the same reasons as Perkins did. Silver, to me, raises the question whether a player like Perkins -- highly individual, soulful, you name it, but quirky, probably not that flexible, not cut out to be a leader given all the "personal issues" static, etc., would have "gotten paid" if he were based on the East Coast of his time, let alone anywhere else in the U.S. To return to Silver, he got paid not only because he too was a terrific highly individual player, but also because he was ideally suited to be a leader, wrote lots of great music, and lived his life in a take care of business manner. Also, Silver had the backing of Alfred Lion and Blue Note; Hawes had Lester Koenig and Contemporary in his corner for a good stretch of time; while Perkins had, if anyone, Dootsie Williams and Dootone. As for labeling per se, which is what seems to be getting your goat. Sure, labels can be reductive or even just plain erroneous, but the label WCJ -- per Litweiler's descriptive post #96 above -- happened to fit most of the music so labeled at the time quite well IMO. Or maybe it's just that I don't quite get what you're saying.

Of course, black people. But West Coast Jazz the musical style and the jazz that the black musicians of California were making at the time didn't cross paths that much, this side of Buddy Collette, Curtis Counce the sideman (not the bandleader), Hampton Hawes the sideman (and the copping of Hawes' cum Carl Perkins' style by Andre Previn), etc. You want to talk about social justice or social injustice, fine -- I thought we were talking about the actual stylistically rather coherent music that, for better or for worse, was labeled West Coast Jazz at that time. I can see (I think) why you're saying that West Coast Jazz was a label of convenience designed to con and exploit consumers "every bit as much as the victims." But having lived through that era as a burgeoning and reasonably socially aware jazz fan, I can tell you that a whole lot of people (I being one of them) found WCJ (when applied to the music to which it was commonly applied at the time) to be as accurate a label as could be, in the sense that the music so labeled had a good deal of stylistic coherence. Some of us liked that music/found it charming, some of us (I was one) began to feel that it was a bit isolated/desicated or even kind of creepy in relation to the contemporary music of, say, Silver, Rollins, Blakey, et al., not to mention that of "mainstream" masters like Eldridge, Hawkins, Benny Carter, etc. And some of us (I'm one of them) eventually came to regret my/our virtual blanket dismissal of the WCJ I/we had once liked and found that music (I hope on a sound basis) interesting all over again. Do I then need to pay penance at the altar of Teddy Edwards or Walter Benton? Perhaps. But when I heard Edwards, Benton, Hawes, Carl Perkins, L. Marable, James Clay, et al. back in the day, I thought they were fine players.

Looking at West Coast Jazz in terms of geography alone makes little sense. Certain aspects of the laid-back California life style and climate -- that makes a little more sense. The prevalence of studio work and the nice fit of that work with the skills of disbanded former Kentonians, Hermanites, and other young veterans of the rapidly ebbing/vanishing big-band era -- now we're getting somewhere. The tendency of some of the musicians just mentioned (e.g. Lennie Niehaus, Jack Montrose, Duane Tatro, Marty Paich, Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, et al.) to embark upon advanced (or if you prefer "advanced") musical/compositional studies at local colleges, with private teachers (including some of the L.A. area's notable European emigre composers), and at places like Westlake -- that was important, not only for the writers and players directly involved but also because they then created/shaped settings that shaped the work of other players who worked within them. Also, backtracking a bit, the norms of studio work -- where neatness probably counts for a good deal more than it does on the average bandstand -- couldn't help but foster similar habits elsewhere. Further, there was the social atmosphere of studio work, with its office work-like bureaucratic tensions and regularities/regimentation, its sometime need to kiss the contractor's ass, the enforced passivity of sitting by the phone waiting for the next studio call (Bill Perkins in a Cadence interview speaks eloquently of how emotionally debilitating that could be), the good living studio work could provide, coupled with the awareness that a black mark or two could torpedo your comfortable lifestyle (I believe some such pattern contributed to Frank Rosolino's downward spiral), and you've got a recipe for a certain ... "tightness" might be the word.

It's Jack Montrose, not to be confused with contemporary tenorman JR Monterose. "JR" BTW stands for "Junior" -- full name is Frank Anthony Monterose Jr. -- thus JR should not be written J.R. I like Peter's list of West Coast jazz traits and would add, perhaps as a subset of "highly arranged," touches of classically tinged counterpoint.

You bet. Also almost anything arranged by Jack Montrose -- all those fugal textures and other twiddly bits, which normally drive me up the wall, although Montrose's Atlantic album with his frequent partner Bob Gordon is a gem. Twiddly Montrose, relieved by Clifford Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1YwQJJPdpM&spfreload=10 Montrose and Gordon:

Trumpeter Dave Ballou's "Insistence" with Michael Formanek and Randy Peterson and "Volition" with Cameron Brown and Jeff Williams. Good stuff if you like Ballou.

That's why I love "Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders," his statement of the melodies of songs like "In The Chapel in the Moonlight" and "You" (best known to many as the theme song of the "Art Linkletter Show").

Aeschylus, The Oresteia. I'm balancing three translations: Robert Fagles (Bantam Classics), Peter Meineck (Hackett), Hugh Lloyd-Jones (U. of California Press). Primal stuff. Fagles has a gnarled power at best but can get too "poetic" and obscure to the point of near incomprehensibility, excellent notes and a intriguing long introduction (these the work mostly of editor W.B. Stanford); Meineck is admirably clear (it's a version designed to be staged) and powerful, lighter on notes than I would wish; Lloyd-Jones has few literary pretensions, fine notes, much scholarly learning stands behind it all, shines light on virtually every puzzling/obscure passage. Best of luck! Read it in college for an 18th Cent. English Lit. class. Could have read an abridged version but volunteered to read the whole thing just for the hell of it. Resulting paper was not as good as it should have/could have been, but I got a good grade for persistence, I think. A great work, as you're finding out. I'd like to hear Robin Holloway's opera "Clarissa." There is an excerpt on YouTube.

The music on "Short Stops" strikes me as a blend of Kenton, Second Herd Herman, and (on some tracks) updated '30s Basie -- which is to say two bands in which Rogers actually played and wrote for and one that contained his chief model as a soloist, Harry Edison. Yes, all three of those elements were present in the WCJ cook book, but the sheer fierceness of much of the music on "Short Stops" (that trumpet section! -- Rogers, Maynard Ferguson, Conrad Gozzo, Pete Candoli, John Howell) is not what I think of when I think of WCJ.

I didn't say that all WCJ was effete, and I don't think that the music on "Collaboration" is a "terrible example," just a fairly extreme one that I, again, have found attractive and fascinating for more than 50 years.. As for the 8-bar solos, at that time on both coasts to a fair degree,the template of the 3-minute or so 78 or 45 rpm single was still common, and many 12-inch LPs consisted of 12 roughly 3-minute tracks (as "Collaboration" did), which meant that solos often would be fairly brief, though Rogers and Previn get a full chorus on most tracks IIRC. Yes, in clubs it would be different, e.g. the pieces that were recorded at the Lighthouse (I think) by Rogers, Art Pepper, and Hampton Hawes and eventually released by Don Schlitten on Onyx (I think).

Not wanting to criticize the STYLE of a renowned and respected critic unduly but one (recurrent!) thing keeps bugging me nonetheless: What's all this "precious" business and the derogatory use of THAT term? "Precious" is "valuable". And that's that. Yes I know that "Webster's" give another (subordinate IMO) meaning to "precious" which is what is apparently evoked - but: Do you realize how affected the USE of this term sounds by all accounts ? Isn't there any more straightforward way of describing this and what the gripes one has when one feels like resorting to such a term? Honestly, I really find the use of that word in this context so very affected and mannered that it really clouds the subject as such. Whatever debatable aspects there may be, there invariably must be more straightforward way of expressing one's personal negative opinion about it. One man's meat is another man's poison anyway, but what is "precious" or (derogatorily) "clever" to one might be "elegant" or "intelligent" to another one, and in the same vein the playing of Brötzmann and others of that ilk might be described by some as "vulgar blaring" (a term you no doubt would strongly object to ) etc. etc. Lists of such qualifiers could be extended endlessly yet would only amount to exchanges of personal tastes and opinions of no overriding objective judgment. BTW, IMO there are lots of Shorty Rogers LPs around that are more Westcoastish than "Collaboration" (which I don't pull out that often either). Seems like it all depends on what you would like to see as particularly Westcoastish in the recorded body of WCJ. @Art Salt: Correct about Lighthouse at Laguna, but wanting to see WCJ as a kind of "we can bop hard too and can be (sorta) Eastcoastish too" is a bit short of what WCJ is all about. Just like I don't believe in that "effete" denominator to lump in WCJ per se either - not nearly as often as it is evoked anyway. If you want to approach the subject negatively from the start instead of taking the music for what it is and in the context of its times and area (important IMO!), then, yes, there ARE WCJ records that sound a bit bloodless but for almost each pale and gutless 50s WCJ recording there is a formulaic and immature thrown-together East Coast blowing session of bunches of guys milking the "angry young men" tag to death. "Precious" does not only mean "valuable." The secondary or tertiary meaning of "precious" is "affectedly refined." To me, that phrase and/or concept fits the music on "Collaboration" quite well, and I see no reason, linguistic or otherwise, to apologize for using it. Further, as I said or implied above, for me that quality is inseparable from the music's attractiveness and the fascination it has had for me for more than 50 years. BTW, as someone who is quite familiar with Rogers' music, I'm curious -- what other Shorty Rogers LPs are there "around that are more Westcoastish than 'Collaboration'"? The only Rogers recording I can think that might qualify of is the title track of "Martians Go Home," when Manne spins that coin on his tom-tom. Finally, I find the music on "Collaboration" to be at once elegant and affectedly refined. How so? Well, the elegance, which for me is undeniable, is also somewhat willed, as though "elegance" were a pre-existing category -- this more so perhaps in Previn's writing than in Rogers' here -- and that willed reaching toward, if you will, an image of elegance is what gives the music its precious aura. In the classical realm, the music of Reynaldo Hahn might be analogous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTP_HapyUrM&spfreload=10

Perhaps the most West Coast of all West Coast jazz albums -- almost incredibly clever/precious (can imagine many people wanting to throw it across the room), but the playing is expert (in fact, I can't imagine any players today being able to re-create its needle-point precision -- it's a matter of sensibility as much as instrumental skill). The whole thing is very entertaining and arguably entirely nuts. Too bad this reissue doesn't have the original Flora cover, one of his best: http://www.amazon.co...n shorty rogers http://www.google.co...7&bih=948&dpr=1 On one side, Rogers arranges three Cole Porter songs, and Previn writes three originals based on those songs, with the Rogers arrangements and Previn originals alternating. On the other side, the roles are reversed -- three Previn arrangements, three Rogers originals. Lots of Rogers trumpet/flugelhorn and Previn piano (poised between his neo-Tatum mode and his later Hampton Hawes-inspired period). Rest of the band: Bud Shank (alto and flute), Bob Cooper (tenor and oboe), Milt Bernhart, Al Hendrickson, Curtis Counce, and Shelly Manne. On some tracks IIRC there's a different guitarist and bassist.

Just got and listened to Martin Boykan's Violin Concerto, a terrific piece: http://www.amazon.com/Martin-Boykan-Orchestral-Works/dp/B009CYGMVQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1422464498&sr=1-1&keywords=boykan It can be heard in full on Spotify, but from what I just heard at home on a good sound system, reproduction that way is more than useful.