Larry Kart

A number of Les Rois du Fox-Trot videos can be found on YouTube, but they can't be linked to: I particularly recommend "The Terror."

We '"accept" the principles and practices of so much "classical" music without some similar suspicion' because that suspicion by and large isn't warranted -- certainly not as much as it is in jazz. For one thing, the relationship between jazz performance practices and classical performance practices (as varied as the latter have been over the course of however many centuries one wants to place under the umbrella) is nowhere near the same. In particular, jazz "works" (many of which were not created with repeated performances in mind, as many classical works significantly were after a certain point in musical history) tend to rely far more than most classical works on close-to-non-notable details of rhythmic articulation and timbre. Further, styles of jazz performance continually change, and at a far greater rate, than styles of classical performance do. For example, that LCJO drummer is separated from Sam Woodyard by only about 50 years, but I would bet that his normal style of drumming is far removed from Woodyard's; certainly, what he comes up with on that performance, which I assume amounts to an attempt on his part to modify his normal style and come up with something "older" that fits, is way off ... I was going to say "the mark," but it's also off any mark I could imagine, a beat expressive only of the man's lack of imagination/knowledge and (probably) his resulting sheer discomfort. Again, only 50 years, and the tree of knowledge/empathy/continuity/you name it has pretty much withered away -- perhaps inevitably so, given the nature of jazz, though there are some (a few?) re-creative-minded jazz people who do really know and care how, say, Morton's Red Hot Peppers played and how to bring that music to life again, to the degree that's possible. Safe to say, though, that they don't have anything to do with J@LC. . But about the classical comparison, I'm hear to tell you that, say, a mid-1950s Isaac Stern performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto would not be alien to a Szgeti or Huberman one from 1925 or a Midori one from today -- not the way those two "D&C in Blue" performances were. P.S. Oddly, or not so oddly, the jazz re-creators today who really are doing it (and doing something more than that, at best) are not in the U.S. for the most part. Check out Jean-Pierre Morel's Les Petit Jazz Band and its bib band offshot, Les Rous Du Fox-Trot. Here are some videos of the superb IMO late '70s predecessor of Les Petit JB, Charquet & Co.: Dig Michael Bescont's tenor solo, Marc Bresdin's bari solo, and Alain Marquet on clarinet!)

I get that, but I still don't hear a lot of "good carpenter" instrumental proficiency from these guys -- e.g. that drummer? Though he does sound a fair bit like a carpenter.

Speaking in terms of instrumental proficiency, yes, great players. I will respect that if I don't anything else (which I pretty much don't...). Instrumental proficiency? At what? Saint-Saens? Guy Lombardo? And how can you tell based on this IMO f---ed up performance? I mean, if they can't play this score decently, it's kind of like saying of a baseball player that he's athletically proficient because he's in great physical shape, has excellent bat speed, oodles of quick-twitch muscles, and can run like a deer, even though he still can't catch a fly or put his bat on the ball.

I don't know about "great players." That LCJO performance is just terrible IMO, especially rhythmically (so darn stiff) but timbrally as well. OTOH, I can imagine a "relevant" contemporary performance of "D&C in Blue" with players other than those LCJO zombies. Paying reasonable attention to/understanding how the music ought to go would help a bunch.

A comment on McCabe's Haydn from a knowledgable fellow on Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings: "I think it's terrible -- he irons out dynamic contrasts and accents, narrows Haydn's rather wide range of tempi to a sort of moderato ma non troppo; they all end up sounding pretty much the same, in a bad way."

As someone said on YouTube of Hamelin's Sonata No. 50 first movement, "It sounds like he's playing an etude."

But then there's Glenn Gould's stop and start No. 50 on Spotify -- a hoot as one might perhaps expect; at times he sounds like he's playing a toy piano. I have maybe four LPs of Gilbert Kalish's Haydn on Nonesuch, never transferred to CD. A bit precious at times, IIRC, but definitely in the game.

I know what you mean about Jando recording so much raising doubts, but often I find that he's very good or even better; e.g. his fine Bartok piano concerti. As for his Haydn versus Bavouzet's, compare Jando and Bavouzet's approach to Sonata No. 50, first movement -- the latter IMO diddly and mincing -- all "articulation," little sense of the music's harmonic meaning/movement -- the former right on the money in that last IMO crucial realm. Rangell's performance of that movement likewise, although it's also different than Jando's, more "shaped," which might not be to everyone's taste. Rangell's Sonata No. 50 can be found on Spotify.

The Ring Cycle? Immensely powerful to be sure, but IMO not wise the way "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are. In fact, I'd say, going a fair bit over the top, that The Ring Cycle is a dramatically enacted disease and that "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are, as much as this is possible, cures and/or at the least very good medicine. Of course you could say that that is the point, that The Ring Cycle more or less says that the world or universe is profoundly, fatally diseased, take it from there. But I find balm in Mozart, and not, I think, evasively so.

I shouldn't, I, whatever you think of JALC it EXISTS-and in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world. I'd like to see any of US pull THAT off, raise untold funds, not to mention the political legerdermain (sp?) required. Did you ever stop to enquire about/question several things? One -- what does "it exists" mean, beyond the fact that JALC exists like, say, Seventh Ave. exists? Two -- what is the relationship, both in terms of how JALC got there and what it is doing there, i.e. between that existence in the first sense and its existence "in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world"? This is incidental? What interests are served by this cozy relationship? What was/is going on behind the scenes there? As for "raising "untold funds," where do those funds go? To what ends? What purposes are served? As for "political legerdermain," I have it on high authority that Rahm Emmanuel will take over from Wynton at JALC.

For my money, "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are two of the greatest works there are, regardless of medium. "Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," too. As perpetually hip, wise, and, if performed well, as moving as Shakespeare.

Have you tried Jeno Jando on Naxos? I have several volumes of that series and am happy with them. Also, it's just one disc, but I think this Andrew Rangell Haydn album is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Rangell-Plays-Haydn-Sonatas/dp/B002VRNJ9E/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1349570914&sr=1-1&keywords=rangell+haydn

Rehearsing a new, harmonically complex Thad Jones chart with the Jones- Lewis Orchestra, Pepper Adams listened to a fellow member of the band complain about its difficulty and said, "Don't worry -- it's the same changes as 'Death and Transfiguration.'"

Your post was deleted because it set up a duplicate thread on the topic and added no particular information about EH that hadn't already been posted on this one. I'd have combined the two threads but I no longer have the capacity to do that -- don't know why that's so. If you find what I did without an added explanation to be discourteous, I'm sorry, but that's the way it going to be in such situations unless and until I'm not a moderator or until someone can restore my capacity to combine threads. As for discourtesy, I find it thoughtless to start a new thread about someone who has just died without checking to see if there isn't a thread on this topic going already, when that's quite likely.

I can make that happen. No need.

I'd rather have my teeth drilled.

Don't have an interest in my "ratio," but Wynton after a certain rather early point is IMO a train wreck (aesthetically, both as a player and a composer, and as a social-musical figure, but perforce someone whom one has to keep track of to a certain degree, if only to be aware of how bizarre it all is/has become), while Branford in my experience is pretty much a cipher musically -- OK at best, but so what? -- though he is capable of saying some really stupid things in a jive ex cathedra manner.

This is a quaintly outdated warning. Satire is satire, whether topical or not. But less poignant if not. MG The out-of-dateness -- using an ancient phrase of grumpy complaint -- was part of the satirical thrust, no?

Let's get Lee Konitz a gig in Saudia Arabia! And Harold Danko, too!

The wisest man in this field IMO is the historian Saul Freidlander, author of "Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vols. 1 &2." In the name of fairness, I'm linking to a passage in which Friendlander both supports and steps away from my previously stated views on Wagner's anti-Semitism: http://www.zupdom.com/icons-multimedia/ClientsArea/HoH/LIBARC/LIBRARY/Themes/Policy/Friedl2A.html "Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist world view, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a world view in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages. "Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews -- as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation.... "Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in voelkisch ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill voelkisch obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the voelkisch ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Duehring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle. "I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been non-existent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner's anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his Das Judentum in der Musik ( Judaism in Music ) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner's ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally accepted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews?" Etc. [My emphasis]

I don't read Ross as "normalizing" anything, especially not Wagner's views on Jews. He's pointing out the irony that even the grandfather of the Jewish state drew great inspiration from Wagner's work, yet it's still off-limits in Israel. Your last two sentences appear to be suggesting that Herzl, who was 23 when Wagner died, couldn't have possibly been aware that Wagner was, personally, a raging anti-semite. That appears to be very much false: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/opinion/editorial-notebook-wagner-israel-and-herzl.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm I stand corrected, in part: "Herzl admired Wagner's music but abhorred his racist opinions." http://www.herzl.org/english/Article.aspx?Item=515&Section=491

Mark -- Yes, "there was virulent anti-semitism in Germany before Wagner" and throughout much of Europe as well. But Wagner's particular contribution to the stream (and though it was not exclusively is, his formulations of it were to a fair degree his own and profoundly influential) was this: That there was a political/moral fracture in German society and the German soul, that the presence in German society of the Jews and their influence was the source of this fracture, and that both the solution to and the redemption of Germany's society and soul could come only through the purgation of that Jewish influence. Such thinking, once it entered the stream, gave a peculiar force to German anti-Semitism because its premise was that the volk as a whole were diseased and profoundly threatened by the almost literal bacillus of Jewry (viz. the Nazi's frequent image of the Jews as vermin), and that the only cure for this disease of the German volk was not merely the lessening of the Jews' pernicously un-German influence on the volk but a revolutionary elimination of the Jews. To repeat -- Wagner's strain of anti-Semitism was marked by a belief in the inherently diseased state of Germany's society and soul and that this disease could be cured only by revolutionary means. This was a new flavor, and one that was more or less unique to Germany (other major European and Eastern European nations did not have identities that were anywhere near as fractured along these lines as 18th and 19th Century Germany's was), and it was very influential. As for Wagner's numerous Jewish friends and associates, I've dealt with that before -- Wagner was for himself in addition to everything else and was inclined to look with favor on those who also were fervently for him.

It's pretty simple, I think, but perhaps an analogy would help. Let's say that Albert Einstein was who he was as a physicist and as influence on general Western thought (think of the meaning his theories gave to the notion of "relativity" in many spheres of activity and indeed to our idea of man's place in the universe) but that he also had particular views about the Jews that were identical to Wagner's and had, as I believe Wagner did, a profound influence on the course of anti-Semitism. Now, if someone were talking about the nature and influence of my imaginary Einstein's anti-Semitism, it would be IMO egregious to somehow try to "normalize" that side of the man by citing both Einstein's undeniable eminence as a physicist and the broad influence his scientific theories had on the culture as a whole and on specific members of that culture (a la Ross' citation of Herzl as a Wagnerian) who were unlikely to have any truck with an extreme anti-Semite. But if the analogy doesn't help, I simply meant that while Wagnerism (the music, the syncretic concept of the arts that underpinned it, etc., etc.) was tremendously influential on Western culture in the late 19th Century, the breadth of that influence didn't mean that most Wagnerians of all the various stripes of Wagnerians there were at the time were well-informed about Wagner's dark view of the Jews -- views that again were to be profoundly influential on those who were inclined to be influenced by them. Thus that latter-day virtuous and/or anomalous person X was a devout Wagnerian doesn't normalize Wagner's anti-Semitism; and to suggest that it does, a la Ross, seems disingenuous to me.

Big Wheel: About "There's a difference between having empathy for the victims of persecution and making a persecution complex into national policy" -- sure, but how about the to my mind not unrelated issue of having your nose rubbed in it, which is how some Israelis feel about Wagner. About the political arm-twisting, acknowledging that 'the issue of Wagner has obviously been "politicized" in Israel since pretty much forever,' first, there's good reason for that IMO, as I said/explained in my first post, and, second, making this an issue from the other direction seems to me to be (in part, and on the part of some) an attempt to paint Israel as a uniquely/foolishly intolerant nation. So let the discussions happen to a fare thee well, but allow me to remain suspicious of the motives of some of the participants. Mark: You meant "how elusive" and then, further down, "horrific allusions," no? In any case, about the "complexities and contradictions" of Wagner, when it came to the Jews, I think it's quite clear (as I said above) that he was close to some Jewish musicians who admired and could help him, and that as for the rest he was the among the godfathers of German Revolutionary anti-Semitism. That Wagnerism in one form or another cast a very wide social net in the late 19th Century is obvious, but I think that the breadth of his musical and social influence ought not to be used, as I think Alex Ross did by citing Herzl, to suggest that Wagner himself, in this one particular area of his thought, necessarily was a figure of comparable (i.e. comparable to his influence) breadth, complexity, or, if you will, diffuseness. Finally, speaking as a Jew who finds that he can't not afford to listen to Wagner's music, while I've sorted this out for myself in my own hand-to-mouth manner, I'm unwilling to tell that portion of the Israeli public that feels otherwise that they, by contrast, are inconsistent hypocrites. Should they change their minds on this, fine. Should they not, we'll all survive.