Larry Kart

Yes, that was a lucky semi-accident. That Rosen essay "Bach and Handel" is in an old Penguin collection of essays by various writers, "Keyboard Music," and I'd always been intrigued by the passage I quoted because Rosen makes a point there that undermines so many "modern" keyboard Bach performances of the time (e.g. Glenn Gould's) in which the entrance of each fugal voice typically is picked out and thrust at the listener. "It is remarkable {Rosen writes] how often Bach tries to hide [the successive entrances of a fugal theme] by tying the opening to the last note of the previous phrase, how much ingenuity he has expended ...in keeping all aspects of the flowing movement constant." (My emphases). Rosen goes on to sat that because Bach's keyboard works (organ music aside) were not conceived for public performance but were intended for the educational/pleasurable use of the player himself, there was no need to emphasize those fugal entrances because the player in effect was the audience and could scarcely not know when each new voice entered because it was his fingers that were, so to speak, doing the walking. In any case, remembering what Rosen had said (I quoted a lot more, maybe too much), it seemed like it might apply to the Tristano of "Line Up" and "C Minor Complex," so I threw that whole long passage in there.

FWIW, two comments from Amazon on a problem with the set, the second one from English pianist Raymond Clarke: 1) There is much to recommend this collection, but yet again Sony have made a mess of the re-mastering of Stravinsky's Movements for Piano and Orchestra. When this appeared on LP it was complete, i.e. it included the repeat in the first movement as indicated in the score. Somehow, when it was issued on CD the repeat got excised. I had hoped that by now someone at Sony might have learned to read music and notice that they had left a good chunk of the recording on the cutting room floor. Not good enough, Sony. This is an insult both to the memory of Charles Rosen and of Igor Stravinsky. 2) The problem was not just that the repeat was excised: it was that the first AND second time bars were included. The first 26 bars are played, but after performing the "first-time" bars the performance then proceeds (without observing the repeat sign!) to the "second-time" bars. If it was planned to omit the repeat in the CD reissue (and there is no justification for this anyway) then the "first-time" bars should have been excised.

And his daughter Anita Brown is an excellent composer-bandleader. http://www.amazon.com/East-Anita-Jazz-Orchestra-Brown/dp/B000G8P7JU/ref=sr_1_13?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1417473746&sr=1-13&keywords=anita+brown https://www.youtube.com/user/anitabrownjazz?spfreload=10 http://www.composersandschools.com/composer-profile-anita-brown/

Thanks, I needed that.

Yes, you did (introduce me to Pettersson, that is). I've still got that Dorati Symphony No. 7 LP.

Having a life you can live in terms of "the same everyday responsibilities and pressures that most all of us have, food, clothing, shelter, family, self, etc." and having a life as an artist may not always be the same thing. As for "professional," you mean one thing by the term and I mean another, as I've tried to say in post #37. Now when you say "personal" in 'McLean made a lot of personal decisions along the way, and the whole "professional" thing was one of them,' it looks like were at another semantic crossroads. By "personal" I was referring specifically to the emotional springs of his music-making; you're referring to personal (as in private?) decisions he made about how he wanted to live his life. Yes, those decisions I'm sure had an effect on his music, but the ways in which McLean's music once was, it seems to me, so personal were not I think the result of the kinds of decision-making he engaged in later on. BTW, we may have reached the point where we're going around in circles here. If you agree, let's stop.

"Ferris Benda" was Jackie's pseudonym on this RCA Jazz Messengers album: http://www.allmusic.com/album/a-night-in-tunisia-1957-mw0001986964 no doubt because he was under contract to Prestige.

OK, I think I see the problem -- my use of "professional." I wasn't thinking of "professional" versus "unprofessional" (as in sloppy) but professional in relation to personal. Perhaps some examples -- one of mine, one of yours -- may add some light. Any complaints I might have about Oscar Peterson's music don't have to do with his apparent near uniform professionalism per se but with the seemingly rote appearance of IMO too many familiar figures and patterns, and figures and patterns that for me just aren't that interesting anyhow. Also, I'm far from the first person to feel that in the midst of a good many OP performances, it's not easy to tell what piece he's playing -- those patented OP figures and patterns crop up time and again and kind of mow down whatever in one piece he's playing might distinguish it from the next one. And yet there are times, not many of them but times, when OP works for me. I guess I should go back and try to figure out what the difference there is, for me. Then, as I mentioned in passing in a previous post, there's Johnny Hodges, at once I would say utterly personal and utterly professional. Utterly personal in that his musical-emotional vocabulary -- with an early assist from Bechet and also shaped of course by Ellington and then Strayhorn -- is virtually unique. Utterly professional in that his music emerges with great consistency, with room for many peaks of "inspiration." I went on to say that the nature and location of the "life force" of Hodges's music seems to me to be somewhat different than the the nature and location of the "life force" of McLean's music. I'll try to go a bit further. The fact or (if you wish) the illusion of personal involvement and immediacy is in both cases at once intense and more than sufficient. That Hodges can do that within the bounds of, by and large, quite similar pieces and patterns has to do with his musical background and history, the settings he had, and his temperament as well. In all those areas, it would seem, McLean was dealing with different sets of circumstances -- musical, social,and personal -- and while his emotional-musical vocabulary was as individual as Hodges, the fact or or (if you wish) the illusion of personal involvement and immediacy on McLean's part was unlike Hodges' in that IMO it seemed to rely to great deal on the immediacy being about as immediate as could be for McLean himself, on a note-to-note, in-the-act basis. (Not that this also wasn't ultimately true for Hodges in some sense, but I'd have to write a book there.) But If that is roughly how things worked for McLean at one time (or times), a shift from a quest-discovery mode to something arguably different (I've tried to describe in a previous post how I think it worked and how it hit me) led to different results. Yes, a life is a life and one lives it as best one can, but what I had in mind when I said "professional McLean" was his musical vocabulary of (direct or illusionistic) immediate emotion being ironed out and kind of normalized. At least that's what I heard and felt.

Without doubt, so-called personal problems had something to do with early McLean, but unless I misread you, you seem to be pretty sure that BN Jackie also was "in a state of perpetual panic/uncertainty." Obviously I don't know about that directly, one way or another -- do you? All I can go by is my memory of what McLean himself said from time to time (e.g in A.B. Spellman's "Four Lives in the Be-bop Business") and also by the recorded evidence of the Prestige era and the BN era -- and the latter doesn't sound to me like that of a man who was "in a state of perpetual panic/uncertainty," not at all. Rather BN era McLean sounds to me like, if you want to put words to it, a man grappling with and quite often mastering the circumstances of life. Yes, those life circumstances weren't mine in detail, but that's one of the things that art can do -- express and communicate beyond the bounds of individual distress and states of being, for the artist and all other parties involved. Also, do you really believe that my love for all the McLean I love amounts to my "getting off on [his] personal struggle being translated into music"? I'm baffled and kind of disappointed that you could think that, if in fact you do. Yes, I see that "a man grappling with and quite often mastering the circumstances of life" could be taken as another way of saying "getting off on [his] personal struggle being translated into music." But, trust me, I don't take Beethoven, or Chopin, or Mahler et al. in that "getting off on [their] personal struggles" way, and I don't take McLean that way either, beyond a certain not unreasonable point -- where one isn't blind to the artist's life circumstances to the degree that one is aware of them but accepts and responds (submits?) to the act of translation and expression. The audience for "Oedipus the King" is not limited to people who have killed their fathers and married their mothers.

Maybe he needed it. OK

But what I think of as questing in McLean is IMO so essential to the life of his music. By contrast -- but maybe not by contrast -- I think of Johnny Hodges, who so often is telling us much the same stories he has told us before, and using the same vocabulary he has used before. And yet very seldom do I feel that this compromises the life of a Hodges solo. I could try to expound on this difference, but for the moment let's just say that the nature and location of the life force of McLean's music is other than the nature and location of Hodges'.

That track from "Dynasty" pretty much epitomizes what began to turn me off in latter-day McLean. The whole JMc vocabulary is there, but it is -- so to speak and IMO -- now all vocabulary, a series of assembled gestures and tropes. Yes, they're his gestures and tropes and hard won over time, but the feeling I get is that now they've become too familiar, too known to him; the formerly near-omnipresent and often quite astonishing immediacy of his playing is not there or not there as much as it once was. It's kind of like "professional" Jackie McLean, and professional Jackie McLean I don't need. One specific sign of what I'm talking about -- if I'm not blowing this out of my ass -- is that this solo from "Dynasty" is more or less seamless, one externally emotive figure pretty much neatly flowing into the next (yes, I know that "externally" presumes a great deal, but that how it hits me by contrast with all the McLean I love)). By contrast, I just listened on YouTube to "Melody for Melonae" from "Let Freedom Ring," which might be an unfair test. Even so, leaving aside everything else, what I couldn't help but notice was how much air, how many meaningful hesitations, how much "groping" and reaching there is in that solo -- which is (I would say of necessity) often un-seamless from moment to moment (e.g. those freak-register screams) but an ultimately coherent quest. OK, that's the word I've been groping for -- "quest." McLean marshaling his own hard-won personal vocabulary of quest but no longer embarked on a quest.... The same reason so much McLean means so much to me is the reason a lot of latter-day McLean doesn't.

My perhaps erroneous impression, though it was the one I had at the time, was that post 1975 much of the emotional air, or the push, was somewhat mysteriously gone from McLean's music, even though all the familiar stylistic gestures were still in place. It's as though he had begun to sound like a disciple of himself. In any case, rightly or wrongly, I lost interest, pretty much stopped listening.

Best survey of the 20th Century that I know is Paul Griffiths' "Modern Music and After": http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Music-After-Paul-Griffiths/dp/019974050X/ref=asap_B000APG0QI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417358427&sr=1-1 Some will say that Griffiths has a modernist bias, but he has a mind and a spine, and if you want to make course corrections, they are easily made.

More accurate (got some dates wrong, lopped off year indications by mistake in copying) and more complete (includes sideman dates): 1960 Freddie Redd - The Music From "The Connection" (Blue Note BLP 4027) Jimmy Smith - Plain Talk (Blue Note BST 84296) Jimmy Smith - Open House (Blue Note BST 84269) Jackie McLean - Capuchin Swing (Blue Note BLP 4038) Lee Morgan - Lee-Way (Blue Note BLP 4034) Donald Byrd - Byrd In Flight (Blue Note BLP 4048) Freddie Redd - Shades Of Redd (Blue Note BLP 4045) The Complete Blue Note Recordings Of Freddie Redd (Mosaic MR3-124) Jackie McLean/Tina Brooks - Street Singer (Blue Note (J) GXF-3067) 1961 Jackie McLean - Bluesnik (Blue Note BLP 4067) Jackie McLean - Bluesnik (Blue Note CDP 7 84067 2) Jackie McLean - A Fickle Sonance (Blue Note BLP 4089) Kenny Dorham And Jackie McLean - Inta Somethin' (Pacific Jazz PJ-41) 1962 (age 30) Jackie McLean - Let Freedom Ring (Blue Note BLP 4106) Kenny Dorham - Matador (United Artists UAJ 14007) Jackie McLean - Hipnosis (Blue Note BN-LA483-H2) Jackie McLean - Tippin' The Scales (Blue Note (J) GXF-3062) Jackie McLean - Tippin' The Scales (Blue Note CDP 7 84427 2) 1963 Jackie McLean - One Step Beyond (Blue Note BLP 4137) Jackie McLean - One Step Beyond (Blue Note CDP 7 46821 2) Jackie McLean - Destination... Out! (Blue Note BLP 4165) Grachan Moncur III - Evolution (Blue Note BLP 4153) 1964 Jackie McLean - It's Time! (Blue Note BLP 4179) Lee Morgan - Tom Cat (Blue Note LT-1058) Jackie McLean - Action (Blue Note BLP 4218) 1965 Jackie McLean - Right Now! (Blue Note BLP 4215) Jackie McLean - Right Now! (Blue Note CDP 7 84215 2) Lee Morgan - Cornbread (Blue Note BLP 4222) Jackie McLean - Jacknife (Blue Note BN-LA457-H2) Lee Morgan - Infinity (Blue Note LT-1091) Jackie McLean - Consequence (Blue Note LT-994) 1966 Lee Morgan - Charisma (Blue Note BST 84312)

Moms -- Your taste for sappy agitprop surprises me, albeit "The House I Live In" has better changes than "The Sinking of the Reuben James."

There are MANY photographs in circulation that make you think so. OTOH, if a young Earle Warren and, above all, Lena Horne, are found to be African American when looking at their pictures, then there is no reason why Jackie McLean isn't. Yes, but I'm talking about the one photograph of Jackie that made me think so, before I found out otherwise.

an important question & evidence, if more was needed, how generally deleterious Evans' career was that the best-- the correct-- answer hasn't already been offered. Re: Evans, the George Russell sides are best, a few others OK, the rest one, two and three are much better listening to Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, numerous non-Russians, NEVER fucking Jarrett, tho' admittedly Hampton Hawes did rip Keith off on that gospel album for Contemporary I'm forgetting the title of. An adjunct to the RCA Russell dates is BE on Hal McKusick's "Cross-Section Saxes," with writing by Russell, George Handy, Giufffre, and Ernie Wilkins. http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/05/hal-mckusick-cross-sectionsaxes.html

A mention of BE's rushing from the BE web page: http://www.billevanswebpages.com/gettingsent_revue.html Don't know this album, but I recall this sort of thing from "California Here I Come."

My favorite Prestige McLean, in part because I encountered it at the time it came out. The beginning of Jackie's solo on "Help"! And his solo on "Beau Jack." Never heard that kind of naked emotion before, with the possible exception of Pee Wee Russell. Also, FWIW this was the album whose cover photo stirred in some young minds (e.g. mine) the odd thought that Jackie might not be African-American. The disparity between his sound and that erroneous thought was momentarily quite provocative/confusing. Think I heard "Lights Out" before "& Co.," and while that one is strong too, the MOOD of this one is special. The Waldron pieces, the sound of Draper, and Bill Hardman (early, maybe first, encounter with him for me).

If any drug can make you or encourage you to rush, cocaine would be it, and I believe that was BE's drug of choice in those later years when rushing was what he fairly often did. Why "crackpot theory" then?

What is Schapp's crackpot theory on "BE's tempo variation issues," if you can or care to say? Also, was he referring to BE's tendency to rush in later years or to something else?

No recordings from this period that I'm aware of. BTW, I say something about that gig allowing Frank to polish his guitar chops. I don't think that was the case; his guitar chops were always there. Also, contrary to what the review says, Frank was as much a swinger as he was a balladeer. The critic's disease -- trying to sound like you really "know" something when you probably don't.

Never cared for "'Bout Soul." Bassist Scotty Holt was pretty annoying. Heard Jackie 'bout that time in Chicago with Holt on the band. Familiar to me from prior performances (Holt was IIRC a young Chicago vet), he took a typically flashy and IMO empty solo, after which I hear Jackie say sotto voce "ridiculous sh--." I'm aware that that often is a term of praise, but in this case I felt it was simply descriptive.