Larry Kart

Wish I could be there. Say Hi to the guys for me. Sorry, I'd left the house before you posted the above. Very nice set, almost all new pieces by Josh -- quirky lyrical-elliptical and quite individual, maybe like some blend of Herbie Nichols and the Giuffre of both the first Hall-Pena and the later Bley-Swallow editions of the Jimmy Giuffre Three (if Giuffre were Jewish). Performances were uncommonly brief for this day and age, maybe 12 pieces in the the first 45 or 50 minutes. Best of all, Josh's solos were so much of and on the pieces that it has hard to tell where the pieces left off and the solos began. I think this material will be an album eventually.

So much to be said about Silver, but I recall in particular the impact at the time that "The Stylings of Silver" had on me and my friends. It was so hip, the track "No Smokin'" especially and "Metamorphosis," too, with its nutty Latin interlude.

Probably was this tour: http://www.amazon.com/Norman-Granz-Presents-Philharmonic-September/dp/B0042A3SA8 I have the single LP, issued in the '80s under Bob Porter's aegis, from this tour called "The Trumpet Battle." It was a high-quality JATP ensemble, with Roy, Shavers, Benny Carter, a quite alert Lester Young, Flip Phillips, and the usual OP-led rhythm section with Buddy Rich. Roy and Shavers are on fire.

Josh Berman Trio (Jason Roebke, Frank Rosaly) at Constellation.

Yes, I wondered about that. But if there are just three pitches involved, the manipulation of those pitches would have to be pretty darn ingenious to be regarded as ingenious.

From John Cage's "Indeterminacy": On another occasion, Schoenberg asked a girl in his class to go to the piano and play the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, which was afterwards to be analyzed. She said, “It is too difficult. I can’t play it.” Schoenberg said, “You’re a pianist, aren’t you?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Then go to the piano.” She did. She had no sooner begun playing than he stopped her to say that she was not playing at the proper tempo. She said that if she played at the proper tempo, she would make mistakes.He said, “Play at the proper tempo and do not make mistakes.” She began again, and he stopped her immediately to say that she was making mistakes. She then burst into tears and between sobs explained that she had gone to the dentist earlier that day and that she’d had a tooth pulled out. He said, “Do you have to have a tooth pulled out in order to make mistakes?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTKMw_ZtMew

Yes, I'm a jerk about such things. Better I should worry about Sunnis and Shiites.

OK, it's ugly. But did you watch, say, "Straw Dogs"? Or "Clockwork Orange"? Hey, I found "Pinnochio" damn disturbing, albeit I was seven at the time.

I know I'm a jerk about such things, but writing in the 6/23 issue of the New Yorker about the New York Philharmonic Biennial festival, Ross says: "Peter Eotvos won a large ovation for 'DoReMi,' a rich-hued concerto dedicated to the violinist Midori and constructed ingeniously from the letters of her name (mi,do, ri/e, or E, C,D)." INGENIOUSLY??!! Does Ross not know that maybe thousands of composers, dating back to Bach and beyond, have written works whose thematic material is based on the equivalent pitches to someone's name?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiplash_(2014_film)

Well, at least in today's world (most of it) his ass probably would have been fired the next day. P.S. I particularly like, given the total dramatic context, J.K. Simmons' early, or maybe it's his initial, line: "Not quite my tempo...it's all good..."

Ya think?

Oh, yeah. The Clef quartet album "Little Jazz" with OP, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich has a fantastically passionate "Stormy Weather," an excellent "Sweethearts on Parade," and a way up "Sweet Georgia Brown" on whose back Roy pounces on like panther. One of the first records I bought; great close-up cover photo of Roy, too, probably taken by Herman Leonard. He was the first musician who made me feel that I knew what every note he played meant.

I feel I approached her with an open mind and seriously disliked the two books I read. I'll probably still give Middlemarch a shot. Middlemarch" is superb, and I expect that "Daniel Deronda" is in the same class. Other George Eliot novels I've tried (e.g. "Romola") were absorbing up to a point but eventually off-putting in their stern and IMO somewhat external, finger-wagging moralism. My favorite 19th Century English novelist is Trollope, though I came to him fairly late in life and almost certainly would have had no taste for him before that.

BTW, I didn't mean to -- as clearly appeared to be the case -- jump down Paul's throat that way. A week or so ago I was part of a long and sometimes hostile back-and-forth about Denk's Ives piece on the Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings site (a Google group that I believe can be accessed by anyone, though you have to sign on to Google post there), and when I saw the Denk Ives "monster" rearing its head here, I kind of lost my own head and posted one of the things I had posted about the piece on RCMR. That no doubt came across as rude and thoughtless, and in fact it was. I apologize.

A post I made on another site (rec.music.classical.recordings) about Denk's IMO awful Ives piece. You can go to that site for a lot of back and forth on the topic. Some examples (with comments) of what I found callow and stupid in Denk's piece: "Charles Ives, the crazy and brilliant patriarch of American music, loved a good cacophony." Vulgar and cheesy, IMO. "Ives had many enemies, including himself, but his real impulse was affection: a desperate affection for the past, and for the joys and possibilities of music-making." That was his real impulse? And why "desperate"? "Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874, and grew up in a world of music that has now become not just historical but quaint--marches, hymns, sentimental ballads, ragtime. This unlikely and motley collection of genres and styles became his source material; he was destined to be its modernist archivist." He was its "modernist archivist"? I don't think so. That material went on to suffuse all sorts of later American music-making. Now if you want to say that Ives' attitude toward those musics and the way he handled them was unique -- musicality and dramatically/emotionally -- OK. But Denk doesn't say that. "By day he crafted sales pitches for an army of insurance men; by night he scrawled unsalable musical visions." Vulgar and wrong-headed. Ives wasn't crafting "sales pitches for an army of insurance men." He was among the chief conceptual architects of the modern insurance industry. "...there aren't that many insurance tycoons doubling as undiscovered modernist geniuses..." Right-- there are none, you smart ass. And don't tell me Wallace Stevens. An insurance executive, yes, but Stevens was no tycoon and he wasn't an "undiscovered" modernist; he was a recognized one. "Ives turned doubt to artistic insight, but the doubt turned back against him. He was an unusually insecure pioneer. When he published the "Concord" Sonata, an act of supreme confidence, he also released a companion book (Essays Before a Sonata) as a preemptive defense. It's hard to imagine Beethoven supplying a program note to his late quartets." Plenty of other major composers -- Berlioz? Wagner? Busoni? -- published reams of self-explanatory, self-justifying prose. "Another of the essential Ives problems, an important manifestation of his doubt, is his simultaneous affection for music of unashamed consonance--like hymns or Stephen Foster ballads, which are almost too easy to understand--and music of bewildering dissonance. (His dirty secret was that he loved to write beautiful things.)" "His dirty secret..." Come on. "Humor has a complicated place in the value system of classical music, and for many Ives's broad wit is a failing. But his slapstick pastiches and his most affecting testaments share a common urge: to recreate the messiness of human experience." What slop. Let's assume that with "affecting testaments" Denk has in mind something like the third movement of Ives' Orchestral Set No. 2, which creates (quoting John Kirkpatrick) "an impression of an event at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania, in which a crowd of office workers waiting at a New York City elevated station in the early evening heard a hurdy gurdy playing "In the Sweet By and By," then heard the El workers beginning to whistle or hum the tune, "and before long the entire crowd was singing the chorus wholeheartedly and with dignity, as an outlet for their feelings..... Ives' music evokes this scene, with a sense of many people, living, working, and experiencing things together." This is Ives "recreating the messiness of human existence"? No -- complexity is not messiness, though one can see where Denk might think so. Denk on the slow movement of the First Violin Sonata: "We float through increasingly complex, dreamlike sonorities, aware at once that we are in "The Old Oaken Bucket" and not. Admirable in purely musical terms, this passage is also rich in meaning: you feel the familiar tune drifting away from you, even nostalgia becoming memory." What the heck does "even nostalgia becoming memory" mean? Even? And that final paragraph: "If Ives’s music often falls flat in performance, does that make the music less great? For most people the answer is unequivocally yes. But it’s worth contemplating the example of three piano sonatas, all written within fifteen years of the premiere of Ives’s “Concord,” by three of the most important American composers: Carter, Barber, Copland. Each of these pieces attempts an epic statement, fusing popular music with the complexities of modernism. Each is more expertly composed than the “Concord”—better crafted, more transparent, more pianistic—and eminently practical in concert. But Ives’s sonata towers over them all, despite or because of its doubts, sweeping past the fine points of constructing a musical work to address the nature and purpose of music itself. And that is the injustice of art; sometimes all the craft in the world is trumped by someone with something more important to say." What's with that "trumped"? Were Ives, Carter, Barber, and Copland all participants in some damn musical zero-sum game? Did Wagner trump Brahms, or vice versa? Grow up, Jeremy. Also, if Denk feels that "Ives’s music often falls flat in performance" (only when it's not well-performed, I would say), then how the heck does it "say" all those "more important" things? Surely Denk doesn't mean that it's music best left to be contemplated in libraries?

Just finished Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts,” his 525-page poetic drama/diorama about the Napoleonic Wars. Very strange in many ways — there are numerous choruses of spirits who comment on what is going on — but I found it immensely gripping. For instance, check out this IMO gorgeous explosion of verse about something I’d never even heard of before, a disastrous British expedition in 1809 to the isle of Scheldt in the Netherlands, where many of the troops succumbed to wasting disease: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walcheren_Campaign Paradoxical, perhaps -- or perhaps not, given Hardy’s predilections in such poems as his “The Breaking of the Twain” about the sinking of the Titanic -- that the content here should be so grim and the verse so elegant: CHORUS OF PITIES “We who withstood the blasting blaze of war When marshalled by the gallant Moore awhile, Beheld the grazing death-bolt with a smile, Closed combat edge to edge and bore to bore, Now rot upon this Isle! The ever wan morass, the dune, the blear Sandweed, and tepid pool, and putrid smell, Emaciate purpose to a fractious fear, Beckon the body to its last low cell — A chink no chart will tell. “O ancient Delta, Where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humor clings about our hearts and hands And solves us with its softness, till we sit As we were part of it. “Such force as fever leaves is maddened now. With tidings trickling in from day to day Of others’ differing fortunes, wording how They yield their lives to baulk a tyrant’s sway — Yield them not vainly, they! “In campaigns green and purple, far and near, In town and thorpe where quiet spire-cocks turn, Through vales, by rocks, beside the brooding burn Echoes the aggressor’s arrogant career: And we pent pitiless here! “Here where each creeping day the creeping file Draws past with shouldered comrades score on score, Bearing them to their lightless last asile, Where every wary wave-wails from the clammy shore Will reach their ears no more. "We might have fought, and had we died, died well, Even if in dynasts’ discords not our open; Our death-spot some sad haunter might have shown, Some tongue have asked our sires and sons to tell The late of how we fell; “But such be chanced not. Like the mist we fade, No lustrous lines engrave in story we, Our country’s chiefs, for their own fame afraid, Will leave our names and fates by this pale sea To perish silently!" John Moore was a British general who died in the Peninsular War and commanded these troops there. A “thorpe” is a hamlet; “alise” is French for sanctuary or refuge. I’m particularly struck by: Thy humor clings about our hearts and hands And solves us with its softness, till we sit As we were part of it.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_9_12?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=shirley+horn+the+main+ingredient&sprefix=shirley+horn%2Cpopular%2C196 Fine work from Joe Henderson and Buck Hill on several tracks; they appear together, both playing with much intensity, on “All or Nothing at All," with Elvin Jones stoking things. Nice to hear Horn comping behind the horns; her ear and timing were something else. And the purely vocal tracks are magic.

I have a pretty good story IMO about Dexter, Maxine Gregg, and myself (no, not a threesome) -- this when Dexter was on tour promoting the movie "'Round Midnight" -- but I'm saving it for my next book, should there ever be one. It was during that encounter that I mentioned Mobley to Dexter, and he began his response with "Ah, yes -- the Hankenstein. He was SO hip."

Thinking of JL Hoots' mention above of "The Philadelphians" (an album I've always loved) I wonder what "Bag's Opus" would have been like with Philly Joe on drums. Or Blakey.

On a related note, anyone who somehow read that Britney Spears was being held up as a prime example of pop complexity is also showing the shallowness of their intellect. Or at least horrendous reading comprehension. Though, if someone did, I'd be overjoyed if you could quote it, or direct to the particular post. It was Hot Ptah, mentioning some people he knows but doesn't agree with: "I know some very intelligent people who know theater, literature and visual arts at a sophisticated level far above mine, who totally disagree with this. I have had discussions with them about this subject. They believe that the artistry required to produce compelling vocal pop hits far exceeds the ability to improvise instrumentally, at any level of improvisational skill. To them, improvised instrumental music is "half-music", an easy out in which the musical artist does not try particularly hard, and stops before completing their musical work of art. To them, a Spears hit, or a Beatles hit, or a Motown hit from 1965, or a Frank Sinatra hit from 1955, is a far greater artistic achievement than any jazz instrumental ever. They speak articulately and intelligently about this. "I don't agree with them, but it is another point of view, which jazz lovers typically do not even consider." Not sure that's correct, as nothing was mentioned there about complexity. But, I could be wrong. There's a first for everything. No, the word 'complexity' did not appear there, but 'artistry' did, and ''improvised instrumental music' (e.g. jazz) was referred to as '"half-music", an easy out in which the musical artist does not try particularly hard, and stops before completing their musical work of art.'

On a related note, anyone who somehow read that Britney Spears was being held up as a prime example of pop complexity is also showing the shallowness of their intellect. Or at least horrendous reading comprehension. Though, if someone did, I'd be overjoyed if you could quote it, or direct to the particular post. It was Hot Ptah, mentioning some people he knows but doesn't agree with: "I know some very intelligent people who know theater, literature and visual arts at a sophisticated level far above mine, who totally disagree with this. I have had discussions with them about this subject. They believe that the artistry required to produce compelling vocal pop hits far exceeds the ability to improvise instrumentally, at any level of improvisational skill. To them, improvised instrumental music is "half-music", an easy out in which the musical artist does not try particularly hard, and stops before completing their musical work of art. To them, a Spears hit, or a Beatles hit, or a Motown hit from 1965, or a Frank Sinatra hit from 1955, is a far greater artistic achievement than any jazz instrumental ever. They speak articulately and intelligently about this. "I don't agree with them, but it is another point of view, which jazz lovers typically do not even consider."

Yes, music, like any art, expresses the culture it's a part of, but it also (like any art) at times seeks to and does transcend the immediate social context. I would say that among the things that are most relevant to just about any society are the drives on the part of some of its members to create things that reach beyond the immediate social context. Further, a good many societies then respond to some degree to those creations with pleasure, wonderment, you name it -- just because that drive toward extra-social "relevance" is recognized as having potentially transcendent value.