Larry Kart

Don't know about Esperanza's education efforts, but if Wynton's teaching is along the lines of his numerous pronouncements/strictures over the years about how jazz has to be played and how it should not be played, more's the pity. BTW, Wynton has been out there encouraging and inspiring the youth for some time now, no? How many notable youngish players can one name who owe a significant debt to his example/tutelage? I may be blanking on this, but I can't think of a single one outside of the guys who have played in his small groups or the LCJO. And I don't think of any of them as particularly notable figures artistically, certainly not compared to other players of their general age group who came up elsewhere and otherwise.

Don't care for Haydn too much, but Kasman is an excellent pianist, love his Prokofiev. Funny -- Liking Kasman's Haydn I tried his Prokofiev 8th, a work I love, and found that he hustled it virtually to death, especially the final movement, which IMO needs both motoric energy and a certain pathos/yearning. Kasman there is utterly brusque; compare him to Richter, for one. I also like Tedd Joselson's way with the 8th (on an old RCA LP).

Non-English speaking vocalists singing in English (especially Brazilians). Sing in your own language. I like the mystery of being clueless about what you are saying. Even if they're making fun of all the stiff upper lips in the audience? Can't understand them so they can be singing about what they like. Actually, it tends to be worse when the translate lyrics from the native language into English! I'm sure Stacey Kent singing in French sounds awful to the French. I love the late Ann Burton's accented English.

Listened to Kasman.

Tunes dedicated to people other than, say, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Florence Mills, or Willie "The Lion" Smith, especially those dedicated to "high class" avant-garde literary artists. I do have a soft spot, though, for Manny Albam's "Poor Dr. Millmoss."

At the Confucius Restaurant? I didn't work on that book, only was one of the people interviewed for it.

Soprano saxophones (with rare exceptions)

Some of the likely players: Barney Kessel Ted Nash Alvin Stoller Stu Williamson Conrad Gozzo (there's your lead trumpeter) Al Hendrickson Manny Klein Nick Fatool WIlbur Schwartz Chuck Gentry Uan Rasey Tommy Pederson Bob Hardaway Joe Howard Skeets Herfurt Heine Beau Joe Triscari Ray Sims An older group of guys by and large than, say, the Terry Gibbs band crowd.

It was LA and the band was led by Van Alexander, who was a Capitol Records guy, so it probably was the same basic body of players who cropped up on Billy May's Capitol albums.

About "Well sure it did. America did, and these guys were getting paid to Sound Like America, or at least some peoples' versions of it," I think you're painting with a rather broad brush here in the implicit externality of your "getting paid to Sound Like America" formulation. (I'm reminded of the Paul Desmond line, "Where do I go to sell out?") I think that a lot of this stuff was generated by the players and arrangers themselves. Shifting coasts, I'm reminded of Shorty Rogers Basie-material album of circa 1956-7, where the pieces of the '30s Decca-Okeh Basie band were recast for a band that included IIRC five trumpets, with Maynard Ferguson often playing an octave above everyone else. Exciting to some degree, as you might imagine, but the lilt and charm of the likes of "Topsy" et al. went into the trash bin. Was Roger taking orders here? Not likely. Was he expressing his own vulgarity/lack of understanding of what what he supposedly was honoring/interpreting was really like? Yes, I suppose, but that's too harsh and not quite accurate IMO. Rather, it's that Shorty (and his East Coast equivalents) were handling material they genuinely admired from their youth and adolescence, but feeling that they wanted to do something with/"update" it, they thought not in terms of how to extend that music's deeper language elements (e.g. the no-hands glide of the rhythm section, the fourth-dimension songfulness of Lester Young, the plasticity and wit of Dickie Wells, the biting tartness of Sweets Edison, etc.) but rather of how to project its external aspects with greater physical force, Basie a la Kenton perhaps.

About Oliver Nelson, while Thad may have maintained a higher overall standard, and Nelson had his cheesy moments, I'll take Nelson's superb "Afro-American Sketches" over anything that Thad did. About "New York-studio muscular" and " that whole scene [producing] an unimaginably large portion of Music America Heard for the better part of at least two decades," that "whole scene" was not one scene musically, and the nature of "New York-studio muscular" got a fair bit more sweaty-muscular between, say, 1954 and 1964 (or 1975). Early on in that evolution, I recall the 1957 album "Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements," in which a band of the better NY studio players of that time was assembled to play the charts that Mulligan had written for Lawrence's working band some ten years before that. Mulligan was indignant about the way they were performed at the recording session, feeling that much of the nuance of his charts (probably not unlike that of his "Birth of the Cool" pieces) had been turned into something generically neo-Basie. Though I myself pretty much like "Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements," I can certainly hear what Mulligan meant there. Those NY studio guys had and/or developed a "default mode," and it seems to have gotten more sweaty-muscular as time went on.

The "big lie"of WM is not so much anything that he himself has said but the promotion and widespread public acceptance of him (the latter on the part of many prominent people in th world of jazz whom I know know better -- see the anecdote I mentioned in my previous post) as a remarkable jazz trumpeter and composer who will lead jazz out of the darkness in which it supposedly was languishing until WM came along. Yes, he is or can be a remarkable trumpeter technically, but otherwise.... As for his compositions, oy vey. An important footnote to this "big lie" was WM's Stanley Crouch/Albert Murray fueled-stance that the jazz avant garde was more or less a fraud and that its very existence is what had brought jazz down to the sorry state that required the princely WM to ride in and rescue it. Two passages about aspects of this from my book "Jazz In Search of Itself" (Yale University Press, 2004): 1) Transforming tradition into an immediate aesthetic virtue has been the goal of Wynton Marsalis and others of his ilk; and the pieces gathered here under the heading “The Neo-Con Game” argue that, except in the realm of publicity, this attempt has failed. Not because the jazz past is or should be a closed book; the possibility always exists that living musicians will be driven to make contact with what has come before them and make something vital and new out of it. But when tradition is being brandished in the name of order, stability, or status, direct language-level contact with the music tends drastically to diminish--or so the course of Marsalis’s career suggests. 2) Almost twenty years have passed [since WM's advent -- at the time I wrote this piece], and it now seems clear that despite the prominence that the engines of cultural politics and publicity have given to Wynton Marsalis, his music (especially his latter-day orchestral work) is a non-issue aesthetically and has been for some time. Such Marsalis pastiches as the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite In This House, On This Morning (1993) and the ballets Citi Movement (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come from a strange alternate universe --one in which some of the surface gestures of Duke Ellington have been filtered through the toylike sensibility of Raymond Scott. Marsalis remains a skilled instrumentalist, but he has never been a strikingly individual soloist. As for his orchestral works, their relative poverty of invention becomes clear when they are placed alongside the likes of George Russell’s Chromatic Universe and Living Time, Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches, Bill Holman’s Further Adventures, Muhal Richard Abrams’s The Hearinga Suite, Bob Brookmeyer’s Celebration, John Carter’s Roots and Folklore, and, of course, the more successful orchestral works of Ellington himself. A brief comparison between one of the major vocal episodes in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and the opening vocal movement of Ellington’s otherwise instrumental Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler), might be revealing. The works are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned by the West African republic of Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847--and both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which lasts nine minutes) and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative semi-laments in which hope, pain, frustration, and doubt are meant to joust with each other. The melody of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace (climbing in pitch toward a point of harmonic release it cannot reach, it expressively stalls out on the words “raised up high, far out of sight”), while the key turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” (my emphasis) is commented upon and deepened by a tapestry of orchestral and solo voices (particularly those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast, the three verses of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere in twice the span of time. The melody itself, despite Wilson’s attempts to shape it, is hardly a melody at all but a lumpy recitative that sounds as though it had been assembled bar by bar, while the ensemble’s instrumental interventions and the solos of pianist Eric Reed merely distend things further. It could be argued that within the overall dramatic scheme of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant to be an episode of near-paralysis, and that the music ought to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself how often you have heard nine minutes of music pass this uneventfully. Why, then, the Marsalis phenomenon, such as it has been and perhaps still is? One struggles to think of another figure in the history of jazz who was a significant cultural presence but not a significant musical one. Dave Brubeck? Perhaps, but there is no counterpart in Marsalis’s music to the lyrical grace of Paul Desmond or to those moments when Brubeck himself was genuinely inspired. Paul Whiteman? Yes, in terms of the ability to marshal media attention, but if we credit Whiteman with all the music that was produced under his aegis, the comparison probably would be in his favor. Think again of Whiteman and Marsalis, though, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled. In both the 1920s and the 1980s (when Marsalis arose) the popularity and respectability of jazz were felt to be key issues--the difference being that in the twenties some part of the culture found it necessary and/or titillating to link a popular but not yet “respectable” music to the conventions of the concert hall, while in the eighties jazz had come to be regarded as a music of fading popular appeal that needed the imprimatur of respectability in order to survive--and to be subsidized, like the opera, the symphony orchestra, and the ballet. Thus the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini; thus Marsalis the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop. But while the byplay between notions of what is lively and what is respectable may be an unavoidable part of the cultural landscape, a music that springs from such premises, as Marsalis’s so often seems to do, eventually stands revealed as a form of packaged status whose relationship to the actual making of music always was incidental.

I like the band myself sometimes, but some of Miles' points seem sound to me. The band was too "New York-studio muscular" for my tastes, like the atmosphere of an athletic team's locker room. Lots of "proud" biceps and sweat. Among possibly comparable roughly contemporary big bands, I preferred Gerald Wilson's, for one. By contrast to Wilson, some of Thad's very clever writing was IMO too clever for its own good at times.

Miles Davis 1968 Blindfold Test 2. Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Bachafillen (Live at the Village Vanguard, Solid State) Jones, flugelhorn; Garnett Brown, trombone, composer; Joe Farrell, tenor saxophone; Roland Hanna, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Lewis, drums. It's got to be Thad's big band. . . . I don't understand why guys have to push themselves and say "wow! wee!" and all that during an arrangement to make somebody think it's more than what it is, when it ain't nothing. I like the way Thad writes, but I also like the way he plays when he writes. I like when he plays his tunes, without all that stuff - no solos, you know. It's nothing to play off of. Feather: There was a long tenor solo on that. Davis: Yes, but it was nothing; they didn't need that, and the trombone player should be shot. Feather: Well, who do you think wrote that? Davis: I don't really know, but I don't like those kind of arrangements. You don't write arrangements like that for white guys . . . [humming]. That ain't nothing. In the first place, a band with that instrumentation fucks up an arrangement - the saxophones particularly. They could play other instruments, but you only get one sound like that. On that arrangement, the only one that rates is the piano player. He's something else. And Richard Davis. The drummer just plays straight, no shading. I couldn't stand a band like that for myself. It makes me feel like I'm broke and wearing a slip that doesn't belong to me, and my hair's combed the wrong way; it makes me feel funny, even as a listener. Those guys don't have a musical mind - just playing what's written. They don't know what the notes mean. Feather: Have you heard that band much in person? Davis: Yes, I've heard them, but I don't like them. I like Thad's arrangements, but I don't like the guys pushing the arrangements, and shouting, because there's nothing happening. It would be better if they recorded the shouts at the end - or at least shout in tune!

Try this: Or this:

The movie star Ann-Margret? I've always liked her. So sexy. She must have been a knock out back in 59'-60'. Yup. She was something else in high school, like vintage Rita Hayworth. In the school variety show she sang a number (I think it was "Steam Heat" or something like that) in a tight red dress that was slit up one side -- way up. There were fathers of students who came to every performance.

Brimfield was a key soloist in our unofficial high school jazz band back in 1959-60, made up of students from New Trier and Evanston high schools, led by bassist Bruce Anderson. Drummer was the late Steve Bagby, succeeded by my longtime friend Doug Mitchell. Vocalist, until she was let go, was Ann Margret. She was a good enough singer but too much the chanteuse in manner. Years later wrote a favorable review for the Chicago Tribune of a band with Brimfield in it at a Hyde Park restaurant. He wrote or called to say thanks but in a manner that implied (or so I thought) that I was being kind to him for old times sake. I wasn't at all; he sounded excellent, a bit like Bill Hardman.

In addition to whatever else might be involved, the initial marketing of WM and all that came in its wake was perhaps the most remarkable piece of social engineering I've ever witnessed directly and in an area that I care about a great deal. Further, it involved a number of people whom I respected, even loved, saying and doing things that I knew and they knew they did not in their own knowledgable hearts and minds believe to be true. In particular, I still can't forget the time one of WM's more prominent defenders in the jazz community told me, "Wynton is not a jazz musician" -- and he then said, "Don't ever tell anyone that I said that." I still find this disturbing and, as I do about what I mentioned in the first sentence, ominous. In effect, then, while there is an actual WM, a "him" who produces actual music, etc., and can be liked or disliked on that basis, in my view it's the underlying pattern involved here -- that what is IMO a "big lie" has become a generally accepted part of (as Jim Sangrey might say) our CULTURE -- that still bothers the heck of out me, still has not been adequately understood, and is the kind of thing that has cropped and probably will continue to crop up all over the map, far far away from J@LC.

Jacob Wick!

I'm not nearly concerned as much with what happens while it's being made or who's making it as I am with what happens to it after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does). Because then the creators aren't around to fight back even subversively. That's when you end up with Culture. Make mine fluid, please. By any means necessary. Make mine fluid, too. But as for 'what happens to [art] after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does),' as I see it, "ownership" more often than not, and in the ways that matter most, significantly belongs to/devolves onto the music itself, to its course and meaningful evolution over time. To take one example among many possible, you're aware of the brilliant take that Air did back in the mid-1970s on the music of Joplin and other ragtime and early jazz figures -- this initially IIRC because they were asked to provide music for a Chicago theater company's stage play that had events of that era as its subject. As it happened, of course, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall had in their musical-emotional-expressive sensibilities just what it took to run with this material and make something that was at once beautiful and new and full of deep fluid insights into what the original music was about. So it can happen -- if you've got someone like Threadgill involved and he's really interested. Was that an act of Culture or not, by your standards? In any case, I think I'll trust, until proven otherwise, that enough Threadgills will arrive periodically to keep the ball rolling. Also -- and again in any case -- I see no significant remedy for the ownership problem/issue that is not finally a matter of artistic expression being allowed to take place with the requisite degree of freedom, and I can imagine a lot of more or less political remedies for the ownership problem/issue that would turn those essential acts of artistic expression into poor relations/tails of the dog, etc.

Jim -- I believe that the history of art is essentially the history of artistic expression. Kings, popes, commissars, businessmen, democratically elected governments, etc. all can have their say and, they can encourage, suppress, dictate, etc. up to a point, but they cannot generate art without the need/desire to express in particular various ways on the part of those who actually make it. Check out, for example, the Council of Trent, when the 16th Century Roman Cartholic Church tried to suppress all liturgical polyphonic music because it obscured the clarity of the liturgical text. Suppress they could, up to a point, but they could not then generate the creation of any artistically meaningful body of non-polyphonic liturgical music. http://www.hoasm.org/IVF/Palestrina.html There's some myth-making involved in this story (see above), but its core remains sound IMO.

Again, jazz and classical music are different here. Classical repertory performances are worthwhile because otherwise one only has recordings or individuals reading scores to go by, and a good or better "live" performance of a worthwhile repertory classical work is a different animal than a good or better recording of that work. In jazz, the value of repertory performances is different and arguably less essential, in part because the distance (in a good many ways) between original performances and repertory ones tends to be so great in jazz -- much more so than is typically the case in classical music, where the rubric "original performance" denotes something that is again typically quite different than it does in jazz. Further, of course, the means of giving repertory jazz performances sufficient "life" are so much more chancy than is the case with classical music IMO.

Factoring in the very real impact of technology on information dissemination, my point is that a natural evolution such as this is part and parcel of "the human spirit" - but so is an enforced conformity/anti-evolution (aka "consistency") in the service of interests other than those of the immediate participants, one that is put into place to ensure control of both input and output. At some point, resistance becomes futile and volunteered slavery sets in, which is all well and good as long as we know it for what it is. It's when it reaches the point where we think it's something other than that that fucks people up. That's what I'm seeing in LCJO, and that's what I've experienced in waaaay to much "classical" music. Too bad, because there's some "fine music" there. But it's over as far as being relevant as anything other than an "institution", and jazz is irrevocably headed the same way. Watch it happen and ask yourself does history repeat itself, and if so, what can we learn from watching it do so. But don't worry - there will come a time when Wise People speak of Ellington as Wise People Today speak of Mozart. The Tale shall be told, and believed, for All The Same Reasons too! I hope I'm dead by then. I know the music will be. The "issues" involved in preserving/presenting just about any jazz work after its initial presentation/performance are different than those involved in presenting just about any classical work after its initial presentation/performance. Sure, politics and economic/social control stuff of various sorts play roles here, but I believe that they're less important than the inherently different natures of the two musics. Yes, both musics may be going to hell in a handbasket, but even then, I think they'll still be going to hell by different routes and for different reasons.

I would have thought that the most recorded jazz standard of all time was "I Got Rhythm." As for great recordings of "Body and Soul," aside from Hawkins', two that come to mind are the Chu Berry-Roy Eldridge version and Serge Chaloff's.

So, you're saying that the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries has been a more-or-less naturally occurring phenomenon not particularly influenced by "outside considerations"? Hmmm...not sure but that I'd not be suspicious about that...music created for (figuratively and literally) the court and/or church and/or patron and used to sustain same...and there's never been any times where people wanted to do it differently in either the composing or interpretation only to be smacked down by those powers, net/cumulative result being that don't even bother any more, this is "the way it is" now and forevermore? For every heroic defiant "rebel" we've heard about, how many not-quite-as-willful-beatdowns have there been that we haven't heard about? Or was that some sort of Golden Age where no outside influence was never imposed? The way they do it now is the way they did it then, and the way they did it then was because they wanted to do it that way, exactly? From what I know of the courts and churches (and many patorns) of those times, I find that juuuuuussssst a little hard to accept, never mind believe. And from my experience in contemporary equivalents of same, I find it impossible to accept. And to believe. Them that pays the piper tend to buy the tobacco as well. Smoke it as offered or go get your own. Truthfully, I think that LCJO is more or less a con. But I don't think it's any kind of a new con. Hardly! But I do think they're succeeding in turning jazz into "America's Classical Music", and more's the pity - and the con. Re: Side comment. OK -- not in some portions of the contemporary jazz world but certainly in others. My point was in particular that styles of jazz drumming had changed enough for that LCJO guy, assuming he could very well play in any style, to have virtually no clue as to how to play on "D&C in Blue." As for your 'So, you're saying that the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries has been a more-or-less naturally occurring phenomenon not particularly influenced by "outside considerations"?' No -- I'm not necessarily saying that at all: I'm saying what I said: That 'the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries' is greater, for whatever reasons (and I mentioned some), than the relative consistency or continuity (or lack of continuity) of styles of jazz performance over the course of that music's very rapid (arguably up to a point) development. I mean, could any member of Morton's Red Hot Peppers have played on Bird's recording of "Klactoveedsedstene"? Or vice versa? Bird, maybe, if he was in the mood, because he was Bird -- but otherwise? And the gap there is only about 20 years.