Larry Kart

I agree about both Schildkraut and Eager on "Handyland," though Eager has some moments there. Lord, when I heard him at the Jazz Showcase in '80s with Al Cohn, he could barely play at all. Al not only seemed disgusted by this but also responded with some of the most fiercely intense playing I'd ever heard from him, as though he were trying to punish Allen, shake him by the neck like a misbehaving puppy. I mentioned this to someone a short while later -- I think it was Ira Gitler, who would have been in a position to know -- and he said that Allen had been a very arrogant S.O.B. on the scene circa 1947, especially toward up-and-coming players like Cohn, and that Al had never forgotten that. You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?) Bix, somewhere between perhaps and probably; Tesch IIRC was living in a fairly hell-for-leather, both-ends-of-the-candle manner, though he wasn't driving that car, Jimmy McPartland was. OTOH, as I said, "to get way too romantic no doubt." Wasn't it Wild BIll Davidson who was driving the car? Oops -- you're right.

You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?) Bix, somewhere between perhaps and probably; Tesch IIRC was living in a fairly hell-for-leather, both-ends-of-the-candle manner, though he wasn't driving that car, Jimmy McPartland was. OTOH, as I said, "to get way too romantic no doubt."

Concerning Allen, where do you get this from, Larry? I'm talking late 40's early 50's. Maybe your musical ears hear subtleties mine don't ... but are you sure Lester's "gray boys" reference didn't influence your thesis? Perhaps initially you meant to write "gray boyish" - then it's easy to see where you are coming from... Q At this distance in time (31 years) from when I wrote that piece, I'm not entirely sure why, aside from the presence of that W.C.W. Williams poem, I used the term "boyish" for Eager, Brew Moore, Beiderbecke and Teschemacher, although of course all four of them were "grey boys." The phrase that I used in explanation/apposition to "boyish" was "a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside," the implication being that those terms/feelings would not have been true (or true in the same ways) of the other figures mentioned: Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Thelonious Monk. Moore and Eager, by contrast to those figures, and for all their artistry and individuality, were at heart (i.e. in their own hearts, in particular) disciples of Lester Young. In fact, Moore is famous for saying something like "If you don't play like Pres, you're wrong." As for Eager, his boyishness also took the form of behaving in what could be called an overtly boyish manner socially, as in playing at life -- e.g. hanging out as a hanger on with the foreign jet set, driving race cars, messing around with LSD with Timothy Leary, etc. (Eager said that he was the one who told Leary to stop experimenting carefully with the stuff like a damn scientist and instead just take whopping amounts of it, get stoned, and then see how you feel). As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

Henry (Tucker) Green was a damn good drummer -- reminds me of Gus Johnson.

On the face of it, alternates of these performances wouldn't make my pulse beat faster, unless I were obsessive about Budd Johnson or Herb Geller. The charts are the charts, and the solos would be in similar grooves to those on the issued takes. As for the price, I bought my copy of the Fresh Sound used but clean for about $14.

Sorry; I screwed up. This one:

I think Laubrock is impressive here. She solos at the 3:09 mark, but the whole track should be heard. She was in great form with this band at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2011. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Ingrid%20Laubrock%20mike%20reed&sm=12

Two Maiden charts out of twenty-four tracks, "Cervezita" and "Tell Me Funky." Others, all originals, by Al Cohn, Bill Holman, Giuffre, Manny Albam, Ernie Wilkins, Brookmeyer, Marty Paich, and Johnny Mandel. Maiden not on the band. Quite alarming that the trumpet section includes Maynard and a pool drawn from Ernie Royal, Al Derisi, Joe Ferrante, Al Stewart, Nick Travis, Stan Fishelson, and Jimmy Nottingham. Ouch.

Recently picked up this single CD reissue of the two VIK LPs: http://www.amazon.com/Birdland-Dream-Band-Maynard-Ferguson/dp/B000XCXGJW/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1393879419&sr=1-1&keywords=birdland+dream+band and discovered something that I'd forgotten in the 57 years or so since this stuff first came out -- a number of tracks here feature absolutely hellacious solos from Budd Johnson.

Based on the Wooley I've heard, this may be not a joke exactly but something a good bit to the left of a straight ahead "tribute."

Yes indeed. In so many different groupings, too. Wouldn't it be great to hear him again with Mobley, Ammons, Dexter, Stitt, Art Pepper, Konitz-Marsh, Jimmy Raney, etc.? Too bad we're too young to have heard that quartet of Monk-Griffin-Ware-Campbell. Let's see, there are records of Wilbur Campbell with Ira, Von Freeman, E. Parker McDougal, Muhal - who else? He's also on some tracks of Ware's "The Chicago Sound." Wilbur also had a special affinity for Al Cohn and Cohn-like tenormen like Sandy Mosse. He could get right inside their time and boot them along with great empathy. One of my favorite Wilbur experiences came when he was at the Jazz Showcase at the Blackstone backing Konitz, with Jodie Christian and Steve Rodby. Lee wanted them to play as freely as possible, and by the end of the week, boy did they!

My take on Kerouac and jazz, from my book (BTW, counter to what I say below at one point, I now like a good deal of his poetry). In any case, the "square" clunkiness of Crouch's prose in the Chinese food riff is IMO far removed from both Kerouac's virtues and his flaws: JAZZ AND JACK KEROUAC [1983] What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight. A good place to begin is at a level that might not seem very important at first--the quasi-journalistic, jazz-tinged vignettes that Kerouac sometimes used as scenic backdrops. Here, in The Subterraneans, is Roger Beloit (a character based on tenor saxophonist Allen Eager) “... listening [on the radio] to Stan Kenton talk about the music of tomorrow and we hear a new young tenor man come on, Ricci Comucca, Roger Beloit says, moving back thin expressive purple lips, ‘This is the music of tomorrow?’” The actual name of the musician involved is Richie Kamuca, not Ricci Comucca, but leave that be. What matters is the way Kerouac has captured a small yet essential twitch of the jazz sensibility. Beloit-Eager, “that great poet I’d revered in my youth,” as Leo Percepied says to us and to himself a few pages later on, was a first-generation white disciple of Lester Young and, of all those players, the one best able to modify Young’s style to fit the more rhythmically and harmonically angular world of bebop; while Kamuca, coming along a half-generation or so behind Eager, was also inspired by Lester Young (and perhaps by Eager as well). Eager was at his peak in the mid- to late 1940s, but “now it is no longer 1948 but 1953 with cool generations and I [i.e., Percepied-Kerouac] five years older.” So the joke, if that’s the way to put it, is that Beloit-Eager’s “This is the music of tomorrow?” remark is steeped in mordant irony, as though he were saying, though he’s too “hip” to be this explicit, ‘Hey, I was ahead of this guy five years ago.” Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fictional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time. In Kerouac’s fiction there are a number of other moments like the Beloit-Eager passage--brief, seemingly casual glimpses that take the reader and the narrator into the heart of what Kerouac chose to call, at various times, “Jazz America” (On the Road) or the “Jazz Century” (Book of Dreams). But these glimpses are only glimpses. The narrator happens to be there, and what he sees or overhears doesn’t bring him into direct contact with what he has perceived. A good example, no less shrewd than the Beloit-Eager vignette, is the narrator’s reminiscence, in Desolation Angels, of Stan Getz sitting in a toilet stall in Birdland, “blowing his horn quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything--(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said),” Marsh being Tristano’s tenor saxophonist of the time. Again, this has meaning within Kerouac’s self-referential fictional world; it’s a thought that ought to occur to Jack Duluoz at the time. But “Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh!” is also, one suspects, exactly what Getz was saying to himself as he sat there in that actual toilet stall. It would be nice to linger over these precise, attractive insights, but now it’s time to look at the painful stuff, the yearning Kerouac’s heroes have to be part of something they can’t really belong to. At times there is (at least one hopes there is) a deliberate edge of farce to the program, for how can one do anything but gag at stuff like “I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero!” (Visions of Cody), “good oldfashioned jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls” (Visions of Cody), and “wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (On the Road). As Jack Duluoz says in Visions of Cody, referring, perhaps, to Sherwood Anderson’s novel: “Dark laughter has come again!” Of course this is fiction, and it’s fair, especially in the “true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” case, to put some distance between Kerouac and his narrator, who at that point in On the Road ought to be half a fool. But common sense finally says that this not only fiction but is also, more often than not, exactly what it seems to be--a moonstruck desire to turn jazz into some imaginary black earth-mother and, in the process, shed all sorts of inhibitions, just like those “unashamed…good oldfashioned jitterbugs.” And Kerouac pushes it even further at times. “You and I,” writes Jack Duluoz to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, “could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians”--a vision that again raises the question of how much distance there is between the narrator and his words, for if “You and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians” is to be taken at anything close to face value (and I can see little reason not to take it that way), it is the self-delusion of a naïve tourist. Jazz has, and always will have, its romantic component, but surely this is a music of overriding emotional realism. So if anyone thinks that there is some intrinsic bond between the music of Charlie Parker or Lester Young and a “weekend climaxed by bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano...and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group…(this from Visions of Cody)--well, James Dean played the bongos, too. But what of the “jazz” texture of Kerouac’s prose and verse, for which some grandiose claims have been made (Kerouac himself saying of Mexico City Blues: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday”)? The “spontaneous prose” business isn’t worth bothering about in any literal sense, because the “no pause to think of proper word”... “if possible write ‘without consciousness” aspects of the program apparently were not adhered to very often. How “the object is set before the mind” is the point; and in any case it’s the results that matter--that is, do the words, labored over or not, manage to capture the feel of spontaneity? To a remarkable degree they do, less so in the raggle-taggle verse (the Book of Dreams being much superior to the otherwise comparable Mexico City Blues) than in the best of the prose, where Kerouac does at least two things: he captures the sound of all kinds of jazz-related talk, from the hip, ingrown-toenail language of his Subterraneans to Cody Pomeroy’s manic, carnival-barker monologues. And having a wonderful ear for the speech of others, Kerouac also could hear himself, which is where his wish “to be considered a jazz poet” really rests. What kind of a jazz poet? That brings us back to Roger Beloit-Allen Eager and the other Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonists Kerouac seemed most fond of, the late Brew Moore (or, as Kerouac always spelled the name, “Brue” Moore). Moore figures most prominently in Chapter 97 of Desolation Angels, which has its moments of fan-like, romantic presumption (“Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time--besides he wants to play a new tune--I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he’s right”). But this dream of participating in the magical “IT” of jazz, “the big moment of rapport all around” (words given to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody) seems small alongside Kerouac’s ability to sustain the rhythm of a paragraph or a chapter on a series of long, swinging, almost literal breaths. Here Kerouac achieved his dream of a prose that shadows the chorus structure of an improvising jazz soloist. And it is the sound of men like Moore and Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture. “I wish Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct,” Kerouac writes in Book of Dreams, “but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of quietness.” Listening to Eager or Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation--as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy “Ah, me,” which would border on passivity if it weren’t for the need to move on, to keep the line going. Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman’s long line and Thomas Wolfe’s garrulous flow. And I wouldn’t insist that Kerouac’s prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn’t the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching--his “holy flowers floating…in the dawn of Jazz America” and “great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns” stuff--Kerouac’s desire to be part of “the jazz century” led to a prose that was, at its best, jazz-like from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground (as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen (as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac’s vision. “These are men!” wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore--and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter--a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story, too.

How was that? Dream line up Friday night was mostly a damp squib for me. Leo played very well, but I could hear little or no effective group interaction. In fact, I almost fell asleep at times. Some (maybe most) of this response or lack of response may have had to do with me, but that's how it felt.

Can we get a moderator to change the thread title? Done

ba·thos ˈbāTHäs/ noun 1. (esp. in a work of literature) an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. If Kerouac had written that paragraph, he would have shot himself.

Whatever else, leave us not forget the Bering Strait to Tierra Del Fuego to Chow Mein riff: “These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Strait, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

Sorry I didn't get to meet you, Larry. We could've debated a few points face to face. :-) Would have been fun. BTW, our entire visit to the Boston area was a joy.

Stopped by in August, but Jack wasn't there that day. Picked up two Jerry Bergonzi CDs and a precious Epic LP set of the Juilliard's Mozart "Haydn" Quartets, several other things, too, but right now I've forgotten what they were. Wish I'd had more time to browse that day and more room in my luggage.

Carter mavens I trust say that the best versions of 1 and 2 are by the Composers Quartet. Not sure if they feel the same about 3 and 4 by a later version of that ensemble. I have the Arditti and have recently ordered the Composers' 1 and 2 and the Pacifica set. A/B comparison on Spotify between the Composers and Pacifica in No. 1 inclines me toward the Composers, but the Pacifica sure isn't chopped liver, just a bit less ... incisive, I suppose. The Composers play the piece as if they had -- that's right -- composed it. BTW, the Composers' second violinist is the wife of George Avakian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anahid_Ajemian

Not so much if this is the latter-day Juilliard, as I think it is. Robert Mann's hand had begun to lose its cunning, and Joel Krosnick is no Claus Adam. Elliott Carter's String Quartets: discography (thanks to David Gable) This discography includes all of the studio recordings and several recordings of live broadcasts that have been posted at various sites online. I. Complete Studio Recordings The Juilliard and Arditti String Quartets recorded complete cycles before Carter composed the fifth quartet. The Pacifica made an integral recording of all five quartets. (It would seem that the Juilliard since has recorded the Fifth Quartet.) String Quartets 1 & 4 String Quartets 2 & 3 Arditti Quartet Irvine Arditti & David Alberman, violins; Levine Andrade, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello Recorded June 1988 String Quartets 1 & 4, Et Cetera KTC 1065 String Quartets 2 & 3, Et Cetera KTC 1066 String Quartets 1-4 Juilliard Quartet Robert Mann & Joel Smirnoff, violins; Samuel Rhodes, viola; Joel Krosnick, cello Recorded May 28-June 15, 1991 Sony S2K 47229 String Quartet no. 1 (1951) String Quartet no. 5 (1995) Pacifica Quartet Simin Ganatra & Sibbi Bernhardsson, violins; Masumi Per Rostad, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello Recorded March 16-18, 2007 (no. 1); June 3-4, 2007 Naxos 8.559362, (P) 2008 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) String Quartet no. 3 (1971) String Quartet no. 4 (1985-86) Pacifica Quartet Simin Ganatra & Sibbi Bernhardsson, violins; Masumi Per Rostad, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello Recorded July 5-6, 2008 (no. 2); September 11-13, 2008 (no. 3); September 24-25, 2008 (no. 4) Naxos 8.559363, (P) 2009 II. Recordings of String Quartet no. 1 String Quartet no. 1 (1951) Walden Quartet Homer Schmitt & Bernard Goodman, violins; John Garvey, viola; Robert Swenson, cello Recorded February 2, 1955 Columbia ML 5104 (LP), (P) 1956 String Quartet no. 1 (1951) [coupled with String Quartet no. 2] Composers Quartet Matthew Raimondi & Anahid Ajemian, violins; Jean Dupouy, viola; Michael Rudiakov, cello Recorded 21-23 April, 1970 Nonesuch H 71249 (LP), (P) 1970 CD reissues: Nonesuch 9 71249-2; Nonesuch 510893-2 III. Recordings of String Quartet no. 2 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) Juilliard Quartet Robert Mann & Isidore Cohen, violins; Raphael Hillyer, viola; Claus Adam, cello Recorded October 27 & 31, 1960 RCA LM 2481 (monaural LP) & LSC 2481 (stereo LP) CD reissue: Testament SBT 1374 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) [coupled with String Quartet no. 3] The Juilliard String Quartet Robert Mann & Earl Carlyss, violins; Raphael Hillyer, viola; Claus Adam, cello Recorded February 19, 1969 Columbia M 32738 (LP), (P) 1974 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) [coupled with String Quartet no. 1] Composers Quartet Matthew Raimondi & Anahid Ajemian, violins; Jean Dupouy, viola; Michael Rudiakov, cello Recorded 21-23 April, 1970 Nonesuch H 71249 (LP), (P) 1970 CD reissues: Nonesuch 9 71249-2; Nonesuch 510893-2 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) Quatuor Debussy Christophe Collette & Dominique Lonca, violins Vincent Deprecq, viola Yannick Callier, 'cello Live performance, Paris, February, 1994 String Quartet no. 2 (1959) The Juilliard String Quartet Joel Smirnoff & Ronald Copes, violins Samuel Rhodes, viola Joel Krosnick, 'cello Live performance, Paris, Cité de la Musique, January 22, 2008 Troisième Biennale de Quatuors à cordes IV. Recordings of String Quartet no. 3 String Quartet no. 3 (1971) [coupled with String Quartet no. 2] The Juilliard String Quartet Duo I: Earl Carlyss, violin; Claus Adam, cello Duo II : Robert Mann, violin; Samuel Rhodes, viola Recorded November 19-21, 1973 Columbia M 32738 (LP), (P) 1974 String Quartet no. 3 (1971) Arditti Quartet Irvine Arditti & Levine Andrade, violins; Lennnox MacKenzie, viola Rohan de Saram, cello Recorded February 1982 [british] RCA Red Seal RS 9006 (LP) String Quartet no. 3 (1971) Composers Quartet Matthew Raimondi & Anahid Ajemian, violins; Jean Dane, viola; Mark Shuman, cello Musical Heritage Society MHS 4876 (LP), (P) 1983 String Quartet no. 3 (1971) Arditti Quartet Irvine Arditti & David Alberman, violins; Garth Knox, viola Rohan de Saram, cello Live performance, Wien Modern, 4 November 1990 Schubert-Saal, Wiener Konzerthaus String Quartet no. 3 (1971) Arditti String Quartet Irvine Arditti & Ashot Sarkissjan, violins Ralf Ehlers, viola Lukas Fels, cello Live performance, Paris, Cité de la Musique, January 25, 2008 Troisième Biennale de Quatuors à cordes V. Recordings of String Quartet no. 4 Elliott Carter: String Quartet no. 4 (1985-1986) Composers Quartet Matthew Raimondi & Anahid Ajemian, violinists Jean Dane, violist Mark Shuman, 'cellist New York première, December 12, 1986 Merkin Concert Hall String Quartet no. 4 (1985-86) Composers Quartet Matthew Raimondi & Anahid Ajemian, violins; Maureen Gallagher, viola; Mark Shuman, cello Recorded 1988 Music & Arts CD-606, (P) 1990 String Quartet no. 4 (1985-86) Arditti String Quartet Irvine Arditti et Ashot Sarkissjan, violons Ralf Ehlers, alto Lukas Fels, violoncelle Live performance, Paris, Cité de la Musique, January 26, 2008 Troisième Biennale de Quatuors à cordes String Quartet no. 4 (1985-86) Quatuor Arditti Concert donné le 26 janvier 2008, Cité de la Musique à Paris dans le cadre de la Troisième Biennale de Quatuors à cordes VI. Recordings of String Quartet no. 5 String Quartet no. 5 (1995) Arditti Quartet Irvine Arditti & Graeme Jennings, violins; Garth Knox, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello Recorded 15-19 July 1996 Disques Montaigne CD String Quartet no. 5 (1995) Arditti String Quartet Irvine Arditti & Graeme Jennings, violins Garth Knox, viola Rohan de Saram, cello Live performance, Amsterdam, June 9, 1996 String Quartet no. 5 (1995) Quatuor Amati Sebastian Hamann et Katarzyna Nawrotek, violons Nicolas Corti, alto Claudius Hermann, violoncelle Live performance, Paris, Cité de la Musique, January 27, 2008 Troisième Biennale de Quatuors à cordes

Leo Smith, Douglas Ewart, Mike Reed at Constellation in Chicago

If you mean "theme" albums with supposedly pretty women on the cover, I agree. I don't ever want a "theme" anything; my idea of a women i want to see on the cover of a classical album is Lotte Lehmann.

A post on rec.music.classical.recordings "I heard that MHS has ceased to exist as of today. The sale of the assets to Passionato by the Nissim family is now complete. "MHS was started as a small, NYC-based operation by a Dr Naida, who had good musical sense but no business sense. He quickly sold the business to Al Nissim, who was involved in the direct marketing of wigs, among other things, and who felt it would be neat to own a music company. Most of us who became members of MHS did so during the time the Nissims owned the business. MHS saw it's first real success when they marketed the Palliard recording of the Pachelbel Canon, basically putting that piece on the map in America. The family's fortunes were made on the strength of offering that LP as a loss leader to gain new members, who then received LP after LP of unordered "negative option" LPs that kept showing up in the mail. Enough were kept and enough invoices were paid to make for a tidy business. "They stayed in business for many years, operating as a family owned record club that had the classical ground to themselves until BMG decided to really go after the classical market in the early 90s. That caused them real angst as BMG's aggressive pricing structure wreaked havoc on the high CD prices MHS was charging its members. MHS had to follow suit, and the business got a lot more complicated. Eventually, MHS started offering more finished goods and a greater variety of product, looking to sell multiple CDs to a smaller customer base, rather than a single CD to millions. "Between the pressure brought by BMG, the evolution of the internet and the fatiguing of the club model with the public, MHS's fate was sealed. After Al Nissim passed away, the sons looked to sell off the business while it was still worth something, and they did sell to James Glicker and his Passionato group. MHS continued to do fulfillment out of their warehouse for about a year, and the MHS name was kept active to transition former MHS members into Passionato's online business. "While Passionato still offers a "Record of the month," members must actively order it, rather than it being shipped to them through negative option, which was the hallmark of the record clubs (MHS, RCA and Columbia House)." Bring us your fond memories and complaints (if any).

Jackie on "Help" and "Beau Jack" from "Jackie McLean and Co." -- it's like he's opened up a vein, if that image isn't too creepy. Those performances just floored me back in the day, and they still do -- didn't think or know that musical/emotional expression of that sort was possible, though there was the example of Pee Wee Russell "Stuyvesant Blues" with Max Kaminsky (Jazztone).

Just picked up the Jazz Icons DVD. Looks promising.