Larry Kart

Watched "To Have and Have Not" the night before last. A perfect movie. Slim and Steve.

I think the "art form 90% of the people in this country already consider long gone" part is crucial. It's about semi-idle resentment that anything "we" don't care about anymore even exists and that we've also been told that it's inherently noble and good for us. About the Marsalis-Crouch and "Jazz Is America's Classical Music" shticks, I take your point, but that sort of stuff might well echo somewhere in the backs of the minds of people who never paid much if any conscious attention to it. Again, it is (or it might be) the "nanny-ness." Jazz as spinach.

From today's paper: "[Williams] said his earliest comic influences were his mother ... and Jonathan Winters, an absurdist improvisational comic of film and TV." "[X] said his earliest literary influence was Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist of the 20 Century." BTW, Winters -- arguably no less troubled than Williams, though who can really say -- made it to age 87. I spent some time as an interviewer with both of them.

I agree with that to the extent you mean it. But how did Jazz end up being such a go to hot button issue?! My partial guess about how (from post #10 above): "Is it an oblique latter-day offshoot of the whole solemn Marsalis-Crouch The Great God Jazz is Freedom Embodied theme, with an order of "Jazz is America's Classical Music" on the side?' Oversell the idea that a particular cultural entity is surpassingly good for you and also exemplifies the highest human values, and a fair number of people are going to decide that this entirety instead exemplifies their desire to spit out/spit on what "nanny" has put on the table. Also, did any of us come to like jazz because some figures of would-be authority told us we should?

It is kind of scary my recommendations carried this much weight with you, tho I am pleased. If you're at the track and some tout keeps giving you winners... BTW, I've since found a Leister Mozart Clarinet Concerto with Kubelik on DGG that I like more than the one with Karajan. I'd also like to add some of Inghelbrecht's Debussy, especially his EMI "Jeux," and Arthur Weisberg's recording on Nonesuch of Stefan Wolpe's "Chamber Piece No. 1."

"A work of parody"? Parody of what? Django Gold's piece? In order to parody that, or anything for that matter, you'd have to imitate the nature of what you're parodying. Moyer didn't even try. As for "Ask anyone who knows me," I have asked several people who know Moyer what they think about him, but I can't say in a public forum what they said.

Ah, I see! How does this fit into things, then? Not sure. Maybe they cut him into pieces and buried them all over the place.

I played golf with Nordine once. Very nice guy, terrible golfer. anton webern grave

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS

Guilty as charged, literally, but I did so in an attempt to end it, as in "Remove one's limbs from the water, and it stops."

I don't want to unduly extend this theme, or whatever it might be, but I think it has to do with some semi-silly, semi-ugly free-form desire to mock looking for and finding the permission it needs. That was the source, I'm pretty sure, of the original D. Gold "satire" -- select something that looks like a sacred cow (Rollins, I know, is a "someone," but here he's a stand in for a "something") and characterize it as a self-important s--- machine. The author of this Washington Post piece (and/or the editors who may have elicited it) simply goes Gold one better (or worse) by playing it straight (and stupid). I could take a guess about where some of this stems from -- is it an oblique latter-day offshoot of the whole solemn Marsalis-Crouch The Great God Jazz is Freedom Embodied theme, with an order of "Jazz is America's Classical Music" on the side? If so, I see this, oddly enough, not as an injury but an opportunity. Know-nothing arbiters of cheesy hipness say we're not hip? Fine -- let's give up on whatever remains of that miles-overripe stance toward the rest of society while we continue to pay whatever kind of good supportive attention to the music we admire that we are willing and able to. Above all -- and maybe this just me, but it feels right strategically -- I would advise lightening up on angry letters to the editor and so forth. To me this is a classic circling piranhas scene. Show them blood, and it's feeding time until boredom sets in or there's nothing left to eat. Remove one's limbs from the water, and it stops.

If I understand you correctly...

In the Washington Post no less ... and as the writer says, it's not satire: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/08/08/all-that-jazz-isnt-all-that-great/

Yes, it's on what might be called the "aristocratic" side, but I listened again today and take back what I said above about Francescatti being "rather detached" here. It's a marvelous performance, and the playing of Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra is damn good too.

Just realized that I bought the Reprise LP from these sessions way back when. In fact, I have almost all the Ellington Reprise LPs, which is why I hesitated over the Mosaic set until it was too late.

Friday and Saturday: Ellington — Recollections of the Big Band Era Teri Thornton — I’ll Be Easy To Find Charleston Chasers — (not the original group but an utterly awful ricky-tick English revival band; my mistake) Art Lande — Shift in the Wind (a flier because I recall Ethan Iverson saying on his blog that Lande was a very interesting, unjustly neglected figure; haven’t listened to it yet) Earl Wild/Liszt — Piano Extravaganzas on Operatic Themes (an RCA Record Club “exclusive” from 1962) Schola Antiqua — Plainchant & Polyphony from Medieval Germany (Nonesuch). New music to me, darn interesting, 1974 performances don't sound dated to me in a realm where styles of interpretation probably have changed over the years, but I’m no expert. Gene Krupa Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements — very early Mulligan charts are interesting, performances (especially the solo work) by 1958 NYC studio band are rather generic. Brahms Violin Concerto — Francescatti/Ormandy (had high hopes for this because I’ve been getting into Francescatti and have enjoyed everything I’ve heard from him so far, but he seems rather detached here) All of the above from two nearby Half-Price Books stores, most on LP, none more that $1, some at 25 cents.

Anyone else know this album of material rec. 1962-3 and not released until many years later? http://www.amazon.com/Recollections-Big-Band-Duke-Ellington/dp/B0072KWNS8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1407118481&sr=1-4&keywords=ellington+big+band+era Picked up a used vinyl copy the other day, just listened to side one, and I'm delighted. The band and soloists (Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Cootie Williams, Paul Gonsalves, et al.) are in great relaxed form, as is the Ernie Shepherd-Sam Woodyard rhythm team. I would guess that the setup of recording songs associated with other bands (Charlie Barnet, Ben Bernie [!], Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, Don Redman, Guy Lombardo) and composers (Quincy Jones' "The Midnight Sun Will Never Set," Sy Oliver's "For Dancers Only") freshened up/loosened up everyone. Stanley Dance's "I was there in the studio" notes suggest as much.

Thanks for that informative post, Jeff.

Over one harmless but awful attempt at humor??!! When did you become so hysterical? But at least Handey was usually pretty funny. I always enjoyed his "Deep Thoughts" segment on SNL. Yes, he usually was. But if this guy is the would-be Handy I think he might be, humor of that sort apparently doesn't travel. Which somehow reminds me -- I'm old enough to have reviewed the first two shows that Robert Smigel's comedy troupe "All You Can Eat and The Temple of Doom" put on in Chicago. They were very funny.

Don’t know if it’s worth speculating why someone at the New Yorker thought this was funny. Maybe the writer is an inept Jack Handy disciple. The cadences are vaguely similar: E.g. "I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur.” "To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other."

But what I meant/asked originally was different -- how common was it in pre-tape era for two or more takes of a classical work to be stitched together to make up a 78 master? Also, per a later comment about the Terry Teachout item that inspired my question, how uncommon was it in the pre-tape era for a work that took up one side of a 78 to be satisfactorily recorded in one take? Teachout, writing of Benno Moiseiwitsch’s 1939 recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s transcription of the scherzo from Mendelsson’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, said "This performance was made in a single take,” as though that were remarkable. Yes, it's a difficult piece, but Moiseiwitsch would have been expected to play the piece very well if he were performing it at a concert, where one doesn't get second chances, so why should a good enough to release first-take performance in a recording studio be remarkable? And if that's not what Teachout meant, we're back to my first question about how common it was in the 78 era for a released 78 to made up of two or more stitched together takes.

I remember that Taruskin piece quite well. He has a point there up to a point — in particular "Because there is no structural connection [in Martino’s music] between the expressive gestures and the 12-tone harmonic language, the gestures are not supported by the musical content (the way they are in Schumann, for example, music Mr. Martino professes to admire and emulate).” But when Taruskin goes on to say "Insofar as he seeks to be expressive, the composer [of such music] is forced to do without language altogether,” the indictment IMO begins to fall apart. Altogether? In the same paragraph Taruskin says, "Mr. Martino can be expressive only in essentially inarticulate ways, the way one might communicate one's grossest needs and moods through grunts and body language. Huge contrasts in loudness and register, being the only means available, are constant.” I know Martino’s music, and while he is not my favorite modern composer, Taruskin’s claim that Martino "can be expressive only in essentially inarticulate ways, the way one might communicate one's grossest needs and moods through grunts and body language” is not my experience of that music at all, though it sure does make for a nasty-sounding indictment. The problem here, I would say, is twofold — first, in Taruskin's piece there is the lingering sense (see some of what has been said by and about George Rochberg above) that expressivity is something that is more or less separable from (tacked onto?) the work's "musical content." Second, Taruskin's air of irritation and bad faith, in particular an unwillingness to entertain the possibility that there might be kinds of expressivity that one is not already familiar with or are neither false nor broken but of a sort that is not to one’s own taste. (For me, that last option would be the case with much of Donald Martino's music.) Paraphrasing W.H. Auden, Taruskin often comes on like a man who faced with arguably imperfect works of art would prefer that they and their creators not exist at all and that decisions about which works and creators should survive be left exclusively in his hands. Given his ostensibly quite different political views, it's interesting that Taruskin has always seemed to me to have the mindset of a Soviet political commissar.

Just listened to the Oboe Concerto all the way through. Sounded something like the soundtrack to a circa 1948 film about an unhappy adolescent unjustly confined to a mental ward -- "sensitive" wistful oboe cantilenas, lightly accompanied or in the form of cadenzas, alternate with eruptive, often IMO rather clotted orchestral passages (as in thickish figures for what seems to be the full complement of orchestral strings are mirrored by a four or so French horns). It's as though the sensitive wistful oboe were struggling with and being subdued by the agitated (one might even say) resentful orchestra, which (again, one could say) doesn't "understand" the feelings being expressed by the poor oboe. At about the 10-minute mark a somewhat acidic Prokofiev-like march emerges and is elaborated for about two minutes more; the rhythmic profile of that was, for me, a welcome break from the previous cantilena/eruptive orchestra back and forth, but soon we're in cantilena/eruptive orchestra territory once more, until a final deliquescence closes the door.

I think you've zeroed in on something here. For sure, it's expressivity (or expressivity that's readily translatable into certain desired feeling states like "heroic," "tragic," "lyrical," "noble", etc.) that is the goal for Rochberg; and that is what one gets from his actual post-conversion music by and large -- a good deal of IMO poster-like geschrei. OTOH, though, at least for Rochberg when he writes about these matters, it's also about "clear ideas, vitality and power expressed without impediments, grace and beauty of line ... transcendent feeling...." In other words, intensity and reliability and "concreteness" of more or less verifiable-in-advance emotions versus (although Rochberg wouldn't say "versus" but something like "plus") the stability and orderliness with which the structural material that yields such emotions is deployed. Thus, even though it may be true that no one "is proposing a return to classical tonality," a yearning for its supposedly lost or semi-sabotaged or pissed-away world of stability and orderliness is one of the more powerful emotions at work in all this. Where I get confused, or see a potential paradox (and this may just be me), is whether stability and orderliness are supposed to be values in themselves here or signs that the expressive results will be, in nature and intensity, what one wishes to summon up. Like what modern music could be more orderly than much of late Hindemith, but there's not much "expressivity" there in the experience of most listeners. And I'm sure that once could come up with lots of highly expressive, or would-be highly expressive, modern works that not only lack structural clarity but whose expressiveness (or "expressiveness") is bound up with the sense that one is encountering parts that don't seem to fit into other parts but that those parts are nonetheless being jammed together. BTW, I've been trying to work my way through Rochberg's Oboe Concerto, figuring that actual (and I hope open-minded, honest) listening might be the best, if not the only, test. Two days in a row now I've fallen asleep somewhere between the 12- and 17-minute mark of a work that runs 18:35. Maybe today I'll try again, but in the morning rather than after lunch and maybe on earphones.

I would have thought that it meant Beethoven/Mozart/Haydn. Schumann is often quite disruptive that way, lots of fragmentation/instability that doesn't come to rest. Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" has a lot to say about that side of Schumann.