Larry Kart

Grant Stewart, for one

Probably not a strict precursor (though she may have been planning/meditating on this and similar later pieces for some time) but how about Mary Lou Williams' "St. Martin de Porres/Black Christ of the Andes" (rec. 1963)? And "The Devil":

Sorry, but this moderator knows nada about the new quote system, except that he too doesn't know how to use it properly, if indeed there is a proper way to use it. Have you tried contacting Jim A. directly?

BTW, Jim Self was the Voice of the Mothership in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." More or less a "mainstream modern" player, as one might expect from a West Coast studio guy, but what a fine player of the instrument (he also plays the fluba, a tuba-flugelhorn cross of his own invention that is held like a trumpet but placed on a stand). He's no slouch as an improviser either.

Jim Self: http://www.bassethoundmusic.com/ I have and like the album "Inner Play."

By and large, I would say that Wynton in particular didn't "re-explore the past" but instead came up with an alternate world version of it and tried to make that into a new starting place, a la those science fiction novels like Philip K. Dick's "The Man in The High Castle," where the Axis powers won World War II, or Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee," where the Confederacy prevailed in the Civil War, and thus everything in "our" world is subtly or grossly transformed. Yes, it was a shame they had to phase out the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band in favor of the LCJO. The CHJB was doing programs like "The music of Manny Albam" and the like, bringing back great music that will always be relevant, regardless of what the hipsters and reverse racists say. When I first heard Wynton, I couldn't believe it. He was trying to play some modern shit, and it just sounded terrible. The nightmare that results in an unholy marriage of business and the arts, as described in a novel such as "JR" by William Gaddis, was being turned into reality by the ghouls in the recording industry, and then taken up by the power structure of NYC and Lincoln Center. Wynton once spoke at a conference I was forced to attend, and what he was saying was so full of shit, I started muttering curses aloud in disbelief. As the author Anthony Heilbut once said to me, when I was describing the situation in NYC and jazz, "What can you expect from a consumer society?"The people of NYC have traded the arts and education system for "stop and frisk", and a tourist economy, resulting in things like a kind of Bizarro World Minstrel Show, starring WM. Something got messed up here. The only part in the above screed that I wrote is the paragraph that begins "By and large, I would say that Wynton..." The rest are the thoughts of someone else, maybe sgcim, not me.

By and large, I would say that Wynton in particular didn't "re-explore the past" but instead came up with an alternate world version of it and tried to make that into a new starting place, a la those science fiction novels like Philip K. Dick's "The Man in The High Castle," where the Axis powers won World War II, or Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee," where the Confederacy prevailed in the Civil War, and thus everything in "our" world is subtly or grossly transformed.

Got a couple of Concord LPs with Tompkins, one as a leader with Al Cohn, the other as a sideman with Red Norvo. Nice player. And, yes, I'd bet he was a pretty hip guy, too.

It's Ross Tompkins, and hey, I just thought the McLaughlin segment was unexpected fun when it popped up on my TV screen back in 1985. It's not like I thought he was the Second Coming!

Well, it was fun to run across it on network TV. Or so I thought at the time.

Why is the "You crack me up" face not available these days?

I recall a 1985 McLaughlin performance with the Tonight Show orchestra (i.e. Doc Severinsen's TS Orch., with Carson the host, though I don't see Doc there) that left the members of the band fairly well dazzled:

Must have gotten my tracks confused, maybe it's the next one, but there's no way the exchanges I heard are with Gary Thomas, unless he's playing through some device that makes his tenor sound pretty much like a guitar. OTOH, if he is playing through such a device, kudos to him and to the device! It's most likely the keyboard player. There's a tune on the live album with that type of soloing. I think it's called The Divide. Yes, that's the one. And it's the live album I have. Many thanks. In any case, some very adept playing IMO and pretty "hot" too, in the good sense.

Must have gotten my tracks confused, maybe it's the next one, but there's no way the exchanges I heard are with Gary Thomas, unless he's playing through some device that makes his tenor sound pretty much like a guitar. OTOH, if he is playing through such a device, kudos to him and to the device!

Dubious move on the part of Proper. If you're putting together a box of Hayes from that period, surely you know that his fans want that album and they want ALL of it.I for one was going to order the box but now will not.

Never saw that cover before. Different from the old LP I used to have or the CD I have now. Evidently changed to cash in on his Columbia popularity. Just picked this up in mint condition at a thrift for $1.50. From what I read it's a 70's reissue. Nice sounding vinyl. I'm already familiar with the material. Great stuff. Originally on New Jazz, IIRC. Quite individual vibes work from Al Francis, who in the mid-1980s made a fine trio record "Jazz Bohemia Revisited "on an obscure label Lost Cosmic Unity with bassist John Neves and drummer Joe Hunt. And here it is, mirable dictu: http://www.myspace.com/jazzbohemia

Track list here: http://www.propermusic.com/product-details/Tubby-Hayes-Little-Giant-Steps-4CD-148786 Looks like Soho Soul, The Simple Waltz, and You're My Everything are missing.

So nobody here knows the answer to my question? I would have thought there'd be some McLaughlin-ites on the board.

I found some YouTube hits, though nothing extensive enough to tell me much about him. In several of them he's playing outdoors at a cafe with bassist Dewayne Oakley and drummer Donald (Duck) Bailey; there's also a longish video interview with Bailey where Clarke crops up briefly toward the end. He looks to me to be in his early 30s, and I assume he's based in the SF area, because that's where Bailey is. Upon further review, this video has more of him, and it's not too promising IMO, though it is outdoors and on a windy day:

'Mr. Hindemith’s composition ends strongly on a theme based on a Pittsburgh folk song [not an actual folk song; it was co-composed by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger] “Pittsburgh is a Grand Old Town.” … There is a beautiful passage for muted strings played against a tympani beat in the second movement, and this is followed by a stirring march. Mr. Hindemith employs a Pennsylvania Dutch ditty, “Hab Lumbedruwwel mit me lumbeschatz,” which can be translated very roughly into the vernacular as “My girl friend is giving me a rough time.”'

...as with the Metheny/Scofield album too? Are you beginning to explore the, for lack of a better term, "post-fusion" musics being made? Not specifically, though it looks that way. It's just that recently and semi-randomly I've picked up a fair amount of stuff of all sorts (jazz, classical, what have you) from Half-Price Books that's outside "my normal areas of interest and experience," in part because one can return stuff there (or if it's from a library de-acessioning sale, because it cost maybe $1 or $2), and just now am I sitting down and listening to it in a more than cursory, "OK, think I'll keep this" manner. What I'm hoping to find is some basic sense of physical/musical/emotional intensity, plus some sense that things are being done differently than I'm used to, and on this album and the Scofield/Metheny that's what I've found. Feels good. P.S. Something else I found and listened to yesterday was Werner Albert's CPO recording of Hindemith's "Pittsburgh" Symphony, his final orchestral work, which is much better than what I'd thought it would be for the most part but that ends with an absolutely lunatic setting of some popular in that city pro-Pittsburgh song, like a football fight song or the equivalent in tone of "Chicago, That Toddlin' Town."

I'm in agreement with Monk. I've never heard a piano successfully bowed.

Going beyond my normal areas of interest and experience, I was listening yesterday to this 1998 disc (with Gary Thomas, bass guitarist Matthew Garrison, keyboardist Otmaro Ruiz, percussionist Victor Williams, and Dennis Chambers) and enjoying it a good deal when I got to one track "Fallen Angels" that included a series of rapid-fire exchanges between two soloists -- one of them obviously the leader, and the other...? It sounds, in fact, almost like McLaughlin is playing exchanges with himself -- so similar is the thinking and the sound of the two (if there are indeed two) instruments -- but it seemed like it would be both unlikely to imitate the feel of two players exchanging ideas if that wasn't the case and also rather pointless. So if it is two players, does anyone know who the second one might be? All I could think of was Ruiz, with his keyboard adjusted so that it sounded very close to the sound of JM's guitar, but if so kudos to Ruiz for coming up with some quite virtuosic quick-witted stuff.

To be serious, I can't begin to calculate all the pleasure, stimulation, enlightenment, friendships, etc. that Jim and this place have given me over the years.