Larry Kart

I don't think that Adam Gopnik is a critic. Rather, like David Brooks (and Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell for that matter), Gopnik is more or less an agglomerator, notorious for bouncing off of books and "studies" by other people in fields where he himself has no particular knowledge and then attempting to put his own stamp on the resulting pile of faux contrarian b.s.

Johnny Richards' "Something Else": http://www.amazon.com/Softly-Something-Johnny-Richards-Orchestra/dp/B000B6TRNO The hair-raising trumpet section includes Maynard Ferguson, Pete Candoli, and Buddy Childers; Stu Williamson and Shorty Rogers are along for the ride. Some of Richards' most extreme, goofily exuberant work; the man had a surreal sense of humor -- e.g. the writing for piccolo!

An e-mail from a friend: 'I haven't even read the first sentence, but I feel a rant coming on: the latest issue of The New Yorker arrived in our mailbox a few minutes ago and the table of contents lists "Duke Ellington and the Beatles," by Adam Gopnik, subtitled "Duke Ellington, The Beatles, and the Mysteries of Modern Creativity." IMO, and obviously in that of my friend, Gopnik is a twit in the very top class. Wouldn't be surprised if he's riding on the back of the Terry Teachout Ellington biography here and borrowing many of its dubious conclusions.

Happy Birthday

I'm trying to remember a comparable goof of which I had personal knowledge. One doesn't come to mind right now, but I'm sure there were some. None that I was responsible for though, I don't think.

One of my favorites, too. Hall and Raney were an intense pairing, especially on "Move It" (think that's the title and think it's a Hall piece). The young Steve Swallow adds a lot to this date, as he does to the Art Farmer Quartet with Hall, and Walter Perkins or Pete LaRoca.

This one is a gem for both Hall and Brookmeyer: http://bobbrookmeyer.com/albuminfo.aspx?ID=201 Also, the Art Farmer Jazz Icons DVD: http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Icons-Art-Farmer-Live/dp/B002N5KE0Q

I've got that LP. Will have to listen again to the Powell work.

Does anyone know Frank Herbert's pre-"Dune" novel "The Heaven Makers," originally published in 1967 in Amazing Stories (probably as a serial)? In it a race of alien immortals, the Chem, ward off the ultimate blight of boredom by observing the various "stories" of human behavior. But in order to do so with maximum effectiveness one key presenter of these stories, Fraffin, begins to manipulate our behavior rather than to merely observe and present it to his fellow Chem. I remember finding it to be an insidiously compelling semi-paranoid tale, and several weeks ago I bought a used paperback copy of it. (Couldn't find it in any local library.) Hope it holds up. It begins: "Full of forebodings and the greatest tensions that an adult Chem had ever experienced, Kelexel the Investigator came down into the storyship where it hid beneath the ocean. He pressed his slender craft through the barrier that stood like lines of insect legs in the green murk and debarked on the long gray landing platform. "All around him flickering yellow discs and globes of working craft arrived and departed. It was early daylight topside and from this ship Fraffin the Director was composing a story. "To be here, Kelexel thought. Actually to be on Fraffin's world."

Damn. He gave us a great deal. And such a unique player, too.

Speaking of Ira, I remember as a relative youngster being fascinated by his chart of influences on then-contemporary tenormen on the back of "Sonny Rollins Plus Four." I took it all as gospel, and it probably led me to check out some players that I didn't yet know that well. IIRC, Wardell Gray was one of them.

Hey, another Andrew Imbrie fan.

Not being facetious, but did they really swang their pelvises while marching? F Could be wrong, but I don't think he means that the music of the black marching bands was being made by players who were themselves swinging their pelvises. Rather it was a music that led those listening to swing their pelvises, just as, when "pulled together," the various strains of early jazz fused into a "music that purported ... to soak the bloomers of listening girls." BTW, aside from everything else, isn't there something a bit off there language-wise? The music couldn't have soaked, or purported to have soaked, those bloomers; only the girls could have done that. What Crouch meant to say, I think -- and let's get rid off "purported" -- was something like "a music ... that would make listening girls soak their bloomers" etc. Freelance editing available for no fee on request.

Link (I hope it works) to David Hajdu's very favorable review of the Crouch Parker bio in the NYTBR: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/books/review/kansas-city-lightning-and-bird.html?_r=0 Interesting (at least to me) that Hajdu toward the end of his review singles out for praise -- "[Crouch] effectively presents the whole history of jazz in one dizzying sentence" -- a passage that I quoted in post #154 on this thread as an example of Crouch's overwriting at or near its worst: “First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulled them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust.” I agree -- dizzying. Then, after quoting that passage, Hadju concludes: "If writing like that takes three decades to do, I'm willing to wait another 30 years for Crouch to finish his work on Charlie Parker." BTW, Freelancer -- believe it or not, it's not Crouch's racial views, such as they are, that bother me. Rather, what I don't like about Crouch is his IMO bad writing, his arguably retrograde musical views, and the role he has played over the years in puffing Wynton Marsalis.

It didn't for me. IIRC dental insurance is in a separate bag from (if you're of that age) Medicare and whatever supplemental medical insurance you may have. That is, you have to purchase dental insurance separately from medical insurance. As to whether dental insurance is worth it, I'll bet that the fees for it are such that it's close to a toss up; that's the way the insurance industry works. OTOH, if you have good reason to think that you're going to have significant dental problems, I'd look into it.

Yes, indeed. Interesting aside there about Ray Brown.

Have had one implant, after an old tooth that had had a root canal job some years before developed new nastiness down below, which could not be ignored. Had the old tooth extracted, got the nastiness cleaned out, went the implant route. No problems, and it's been about three years now IIRC. Also, IIRC the whole process involved almost no discomfort. Once they insert into your jaw the metal post that will anchor the implant, you do have to wait some time (several months?) before the implant can be put in place, but you do have something temporary sitting there that's satisfactory enough.

Both of those Como tracks are a nutty delights. Without doubt, the man himself had a a very dry, wry sense of humor; you can hear it right there in his voice, especially on "Linda." And who the heck takes that tenor solo! There's a place or two where I think it might be Seldon Powell. The likely arranger was Joe Lippman (Jack Andrews also worked on "Como Swings"). Best know as the arranger for "Charlie Parker With Strings," Lippman was a pianist with Artie Shaw in the '30s and wrote a subtle set of arrangements of Beiderbecke pieces for Bunny Berigan (see below). I did a telephone interview with Como back in the day. What a nice guy. I wouldn't be surprised if his patented laid back manner wasn't helped along by applications of Mezz Mezzrow's favorite herb. If so, that might also account in part for the attitude that allowed/encouraged "Donkey Serenade" and "Linda" to happen.

Ok, so it's just another form of "essential" then, a concept both useful and useless concept, not any kind of "official designation" or anything. Thanks for clarifying that for me. I really wasn't sure what it was supposed to mean. Furtwängler and especially Mengelberg are an acquired taste for many and I'm not sure they are the best to start with if, like the original poster, you don't know anything about Beethoven's symphonies. What's so odd about Furtwangler? Great time, he has, not stiff at all. Who said that Furtwangler's time was stiff? The complaint (for those who complain -- certainly not me) would be pretty much the opposite, that his phrasing was too free and plastic.

A "reference recording" is a recording that conveys as fully as possible -- in the opinion of one person at the least, in the opinions of a good many supposedly knowledgable people at best -- how a particular work should go, i.e. a recording that other recordings of that work can and should be measured against. The term, I think, was popularized (perhaps even originated) by writers at the British classical music magazine The Gramophone, which was founded in 1923. Of course, what turns out to be your reference recording for any work (should you wish to entertain the arguably rather stuffy-prissy concept) is up to you, but I think it's safe to say that you shouldn't throw the term around unless and until you've heard a fair number of recordings of that work. In the Beethoven 7th sweepstakes, Carlos Kleiber's recording (Hans' choice) is regarded as a strong candidate by many. I also like Eugen Jochum's DGG recording from the 1950s, not (or not so much) his later ones on Philips and EMI.

On some of those solos from the Reinhardt-Wells and Reinhardt-Stewart-Bigard dates, there are moments when I feel that Django is almost able to make time come to stop -- in the sense that he and we seem to have the time to walk around the phrases he's playing and look at them from all sides.

Billy Drewes, Steve Slagle

I remember those Hentoff "Jazz In Print" columns and agree that Nat indulged in a good deal of sniping. Circling back to Dan Morgenstern, I recall that Dan wrote a letter to the Jazz Review complaining about how cavalierly several pre-modern musicians had been treated recently in its pages -- IIRC, he was especially ticked off by a review of a Stuff Smith album by no less than bassist Chuck Israels in which the humorless Mr. Israels referred to Smith's "out-of-tune schmaltz." For his temerity, again IIRC, Dan was taken to task in high-and-mighty, "We have critical standards to uphold here" responses from both Messrs. Hentoff and Williams. That letter may have been the first piece of Dan's I saw.

Good memory! And that is a double album. BTW, does Max hate Martin and Gunther Schuller. See his contributions to "The Essential Jazz Records: Vol, 2, Modernism to Postmodernism," which he edited and that also includes contributions from Eric Thacker and Stuart Nicholson. The footnotes to Max's pieces there are littered with sneering digs at Martin and Gunther; as far as Max is concerned, it would seem, there is room for only one genuinely musically literate "jazz intellectual," and that is Max. OTOH, Max at his best is a genuinely musically literate jazz intellectual, and neither Martin nor Gunther are without flaws. But Max's sneering is not only fairly ugly in tone, but it also leads him to say disparaging things about Martin and Gunther's work that he almost certainly knows are not true. For instance, dealing with Eddie Sauter's writing for strings on Stan Getz's "Focus," Max quotes Martin's statement that Sauter's work there is "derivative of Bartok." In fact, says Max, Sauter's work on "Focus" "bears no resemblance to Bartok at all," archly adding in footnote that "Bartok's influence here can be heard by those who do not know the composer's work yet not by those who do." But the first piece on "Focus," "I'm Late, I'm Late," is clearly based -- affectionately and effectively, I would say -- on the second movement of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, a fact that the first chair violist on the date, Jacob Glick of the Beaux Arts String Quartet, confirms (if confirmation is needed) in the liner notes to the CD reissue of "Focus." Weird, perhaps inexplicable stuff, but again Max at his best is brilliant. Another favorite Maxism from that book, though it has nothing to do with Martin and Gunther but does exemplify how his need to sneer can lead him into cuckoo land. At one point he refers to the album "Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley" and inserts a jeering "sic" after "Shubert." But "Shubert," of course, is the correct spelling for the theater-owning family for whom that portion of the Manhattan theater district is named. OK, so not everyone knows that; an Englishman in particular might think that it's a typo or worse for "Schubert Alley." But if I'm going to get all snotty about something, I'm damn well going to check first that I'm right.

"Live at the Beehive" -- notes by Pete Hamill