Larry Kart

Seems about the right age for someone who heard Ornette and others of that vintage and before with sufficient freshness and was able to build that into his own powerful, personal music. You must understand I am surprised by my age too. Me by mine too, but I'm being forced by reality to get over that.

Seems about the right age for someone who heard Ornette and others of that vintage and before with sufficient freshness and was able to build that into his own powerful, personal music.

Comparing Priestley to Russell is grossly unfair on Priestley, and ignorant about the extent of Russell's fabrications (he's the main responsible for the Massey Hall legend, as I explained in my blog). What Brian did is to compile all solid biographical information available on Bird with some tidbits of his own, and added a very clear explanation of the music. IMHO it's a very good introduction to Bird. With two new biographies coming out shortly, Priestley's book can be found for very little cash. F "Comparing Priestley to Russell is grossly unfair on Priestley..." That's what I meant when I referred to Russell's "outright fabulations."

http://www.amazon.com/Cry-Lasha/dp/B00005OR8T/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1379428317&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=prince+lahsa

"Folk Songs for Far Out Folk" arrived today and so far is just as impressive as the tracks from it that I checked out on YouTube. Whatever "Third Stream Music" was in theory, in practice Katz nailed it in an intense and quite individual manner -- not a blending of this and that but something genuine and new. One question, though. "Folk Songs" is strikingly well-recorded, but the very full booklet of notes doesn't say who the original recording engineer was, though it credits the guy who remastered the material, Gary Hobish. Anyone know who the original engineer was?

The ability to "play a note themselves" didn't necessarily have much to do with it. Plenty of guys of that vintage who could play had similarly blinkered opinions, and plenty of writers who can't play have broad tastes and acute things to say about the music. One choice example of blinkered musicians on musicians are the blindfold test comments over the years on Pee Wee Russell. The undeniably talented reedman Dick Johnson, for one, chosen by Artie Shaw to lead his band of the mid-1980s, excoriated Russell as a ludicrous incompetent.

Mahones is in particularly fine form on Booker Ervin's (previously mentioned) "The Blues Book" and "Groovin' High." He has his own "tippin' light" thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfRQI2NTN8Y

It all comes down to taste, but I'm confident I would not have preferred Alabama Concerto with Coleman/Cherry. Not sure I would have either, given the success of the recording we have, but am curious about what Coleman and Cherry's response to that material would have been. All academic, though, because Ornette almost certainly wouldn't have been able to read/play those scores as written (i.e. working from Brooks' annotation), and there wouldn't have been time for Brooks to convey all those details to Ornette by ear, as Mingus famously did with members of his ensembles on occasion. Not that Ornettte was incapable of responding to/handling complex material (e.g that Gunther Schuller chamber work, "Abstraction" I think it was, that he recorded for Atlantic), but the length and level of detail in "Alabama Concerto" is a different thing.

Check will be in the mail today or tomorrow. You have no idea, or maybe you do, how important in a very broad sense this/your forum is to the well-being of many of us.

Ordered Katz's "Folk Songs etc." Brooks' "Folk Jazz U.S.A." has some fine solo work from the horns (Zoot Sims on alto, Al Cohn on baritone, Nick Travis trumpet), but I too prefer "Alabama Concerto," which is a pretty amazing job of writing/assemblage by Brooks and uses (for want of a better term) "hipper" material. The work of Cannonball, Art Farmer, Barry Galbraith, and Milt Hinton, is close to all one could wish for, though one wonders what the album would have been like if Ornette could have handled Brooks' score and had taken the place of Cannonball (and with Cherry in for Farmer).

Listening to Mate'ka" from "Folk Songs for Far Out Folk" on Spotify and am very impressed. Helluva of a committed performance by the top-level LA studio players Katz assembled. Must get this one.

Larry Did you read the Carl Woideck book on Parker? Yes. I recall feeling that it was solid but not quite as much so as the Priestley book. In particular, and I'm relying on imperfect memory here, Woideck, who certainly knows what's afoot musically, has the problem of a good many such writers (on jazz or any music) of essentially pointing to/explaining -- in musical notation and in words that more or less paraphrase what's notated -- things that one can already hear, and then he pretty much stops at the point, as though the job were done. Priestley by contrast, at his best, succeeds at/makes a good attempt at detecting underlying principles that are at work and their possible implications as well. I guess what I'm saying is that Woideck is more or less a musicologist, and Priestley is a musically well-versed critic. Not my favorite critic -- among those would be Jack Cooke, Terry Martin, John Litweiler, the late Michael James, and the professionally irascible Max Harrison on one of his good days, but Priestley has some of the virtues (e.g. the understanding that one is running alongside a living art that, in Val Wilmer's phrase, is "as important as your life") of the old Jazz Monthly crowd -- to which he and the others I've mentioned (except for Litweiler) all belonged at one time or another.

Not an exhibition, but I've been looking at a book about the Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley, Interesting, among other reasons, because some of Sisley's later works, which are commonly felt to show signs of failing inspiration, strike me as more intense and inventive than much of what he painted in his supposed prime (the mid-1870s). On the other hand, because Sisley's typical manner was rather withdrawn, even bland, to being with, I may just be responding to the advent of some welcome (because it suits my tastes) latter-day relative gnarliness.

As I may have said here before, I've had two semi-direct encounters with Crouch, both perhaps revealing. The second one: I'm at the Chicago Tribune in the mid or late 1980s, writing about jazz. The phone rings, and it's Stanley; he's at the Ragdale Foundation in north suburban Lake Forest, an artist's colony a la Yadoo, working on a book. He starts to chat about jazz (we've never talked before), and he obviously knows something about my background because almost out of nowhere he launches into a steamroller attack on Lester Bowie, making a point that I think he already had made or would make in print -- that he heard Bowie play "Well You Needn't" and Bowie used the much less-complex bridge that Miles came up with for the tune way back when rather than the bridge that Monk actually wrote, and that this was proof that Bowie was incompetent, a fraud, etc. I immediately sensed (or so I thought) was Crouch was up to -- it was not so much that he wanted agreement from me on this but that if he could spew out this attack on Bowie with me on the line and I didn't stop him, he could think, maybe even say, that I had agreed with him. So I interrupted to say that I thought that Lester Bowie was a remarkable musician etc., that Miles had come up with that simplified bridge, just as he had simplified the bridge to Benny Carter's "When Lights Are Low" because in both cases those simplifications were better suited to what Miles wanted to play when improvising on those pieces, etc. Hearing that, Stanley, without a further word, hung up the phone.

Of the books about Parker that I know, this sober one seems quite sound to me (and often insightful, especially about the music itself) as far it goes: http://www.amazon.com/Chasin-The-Bird-Legacy-Charlie/dp/0195304640/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top Some fellow on Amazon put it down in comparison to Ross Russell's "Bird Lives!," which is certainly colorful but full of outright fabulations.

Yes, I see that now. Still bloody obtuse in its apparent equation of vitality and topical reference -- a hallmark of calypso lyrics IIRC.

OK -- if you guys like that sentence, please paraphrase it for me. I mean, what does it mean? I took a whack at that above in post #67; is that close to what you get from it or do you get something else? If so, what? BTW, what I don't like about "razors for spurs," among other things, is that spurs are or can be damn sharp -- that's the point of them, so to speak, to spur along the horse by inflicting pain and threatening further pain. So Crouch is IMO just pumping up the volume here in a "writerly" manner, pouring hot sauce on top of hot sauce. I'm reminded of that young sportscaster's immortal phrase "'Boom!' goes the dynamite."

I love the way early on in the solo he almost seems to be carving the notes out from some semi-resistant medium.

Not what the original poster asked for, but this magnificent Armstrong recording ought to be heard: The final chorus often brings tears to my eyes.

I wouldn't say "harsh" as much as really dense or drastically/smugly circumscribed. Interesting that the calypso remark is Paul Oliver's, not Larkin's. As a more or less principled British leftist, what Oliver (at times and despite his many virtues as a writer on the blues) wanted the blues to be was a protest music. This led him down some primrose paths.

Then, in a somewhat similar vein, there's Adam Rogers:

He can be a little sweet/pretty at times, but I have a soft spot for Jonathan Kreisberg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b5B0boJ3XY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcGTkYCmoWE

Meow... OTOH, I'm a big Joe Puma fan. His duo album with Chuck Wayne, "Interactions," may be his best recorded work IMO. http://www.amazon.com/Interactions-Chuck-Wayne/dp/B006I01KFA/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1378337187&sr=1-1&keywords=chuck+wayne+joe+puma Excellent Puma solo on "Body and Soul" there. This Puma album is also a gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDltZrlo9CM More from that one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVV3OO4afvE

Get in the way of 'what'? ...'who'?... - You? Read Crouch's liner notes for all those Wynton Marsalis albums and you'll know what his agendas get in the way of, though I might have put it differently, feeling that there's not much more there than the agendas themselves, and thus little or nothing for them to get in the way of. As for Crouch's prose, here's an excerpt from the new book: "Parker was basically a melancholy and suspicious man, a genius in search of a solution to a blues that wore razors for spurs.” I kind of see what he's getting at there, but "a solution to a blues that wore razors for spurs” is the kind of b.s. "poetry" that leaves me grasping for my secret decoder ring. Well, you may see what he's getting at here, but it's a mystery to me. gregmo What he's getting at, I think -- and I'll have to get a bit flowery myself here -- is that Parker sought a solution in music to a broader "blues" condition/state of life that was at once intensely galling and that, in its pain, stimulated in him a correspondingly intense musical expression of that state. Whatever, if I were Crouch's editor I sure would have suggested that he swap "a blues that wore razors for spurs" for "a blues that wore razor-sharp spurs." Also, unless surrounding context does this, I would have suggested that he not use "blues" in such a way that the term's literal musical meaning and its broader metaphorical meanings (as in the title of LeRoi Jones' "Blues People") could be confused. Something tells me that it would read better if you rewrote it, Larry!! gregmo Borrowing a line that a friend of mine uses in a near all-purpose manner, "Maybe so."

http://www.amazon.com/Jim-I-Live-At-Quasimodo/dp/B0092ICUHW/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1378327228&sr=1-2&keywords=zoller+raney There's also this great Zoller/Raney duet on YouTube: