Larry Kart

Right -- you've got a point there.

If you wanted to play the lineage game (and it's a mug's game for the most part) you could identify, in pretty much concrete terms, the things that Herbie shares with impressionist French antecedents. "Impish and feline" isn't going to get more concrete than that. If you can't hear the Frenchness in Solal, I can't help you. But that's OK by me -- if you don't hear it, you don't.

About Solal, I was thinking of his impish, feline wit/playfulness -- impulses/habits that seem to me to crop up in a lot of French art of all sorts, though of course Solal's native land is Algeria. In any case, Herbie's "impressionism" seems to me to be a different kind of thing. I think it's been pretty well established in other conversations on this board that African-American musicians should not be allowed to claim African influences because everything that's pointed to as "African" gets rebutted as not being exclusively and/or specifically African. Or something like that. The people who make those rebuttals are smarter that me. Or, if not smarter, at least more certain. So hey, sorry guys, your music can't be African and it can't be fully American (or even African-American) without somebody getting their snoot in a snit about it. Must be a tough gig, that's all I can say. Who here is saying it can't be "fully American"? Exclusively and/or wholly American -- perhaps not over the course of time, but fully American in origin and essential development for a good long stretch, sure.

Those "cynical" comments have been deleted because they violate forum rule 8: We do not allow commenting on the price of wares in the "Offering/Looking for" forum. No those comments don't actually say that the prices being asked are too high, but the clear implication that one would have to be deluded to buy such things at all certainly has that effect. A separate thread about why such things are objects of audiophile fantasy or some such would be perfectly legit.

So Jim, is that "American jazz with a fill-in-the-blanks accent" or not? It almost certainly wouldn't be at all if it weren't for American jazz, but the non-American aspects are so strong and so essential to what makes work that I wouldn't want to be Solomon here.

Sure, but that's not what Hancock was saying -- or so it seems to me. And/or are you saying that, for example, jazz with a strong Czech accent and perspective, if there be such a thing (BTW, on that particular question I just don't know enough to have an opinion) is not Czech jazz but something that's essentially American? BTW, speaking of Vitous, I wouldn't say that there was much of anything about his music that made him sound like a notably/significantly non-American jazz musician. But what, then, of Aladar Pege?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladár_Pege Not my favorite bassist, but Pege sure sounded Hungarian. In any case, it sounds like Hancock might be talking about ownership from a "No, no, they can't take that away from me" point of view, which is understandable but not necessarily enlightening.

According to this review, Joe Posnanski's new Joe Paterno biography reveals, among other anomalies, that Paterno and Jerry Sandusky despised each other for many years! http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/19/3769516/posnanskis-paterno-complicates.html

If he said that, he's wrong. Anyone for Django, for example? Martial Solal's music isn't profoundly Gallic? Lars Gullin's isn't deeply Swedish? And on and on and on....

I heard McKibbon in-person once, in a Billy Taylor-led trio with Freddie Waits. McKibbon was a revelation, put "one" in a unique place, balanced right on top of the beat IIRC but placed there with much suppleness. The resulting lift this gave to things -- wow. Actually, quite similar to Israel Crosby. Also, McKibbon's sound was as big as he was.

Semi-guilty pleasure, but lately I've been enjoying the Shearing quintet in general and the group's series of '50s Capitol "Latin" LPs in particular as they show up from time to time for $1 at my local Half-Price Books store in playable shape. Yesterday it was "Latin Escapade" and "Latin Affair," the former with a "classic" version of the group (Emil Richards, Toots Thielemans, Al McKibbon, Percy Brice, Armando Peraza), the latter with new members Warren Chaisson, Carl Pruitt and Roy Haynes(!!). The formula remains consistent, but I find enough subtle variation in the charts and their execution to be satisfied, and Peraza is a gas. Also, without being IMO at all soporific, the band is SO relaxed and "in there." So-called "light music" usually is something I don't much like, but either this music isn't that, or merely, light or I'm getting soft in the head.

Sorry -- I can't moderate behavior that takes place while I'm asleep or otherwise occupied. In particular, Goodspeak -- at first glance, and I'm not going to go into this further, having wasted much time and effort doing so before, you are the main hurler of insulting remarks here. Further, while of course I'm not, as a moderator, in a position to judge the rightness or wrongness of your more than familiar stance on this issue, it is, as has been pointed out, more than familiar to all of us, and you have to my and our knowledge failed to make a single convert here to your point of view. Thus, I would suggest that from now on you either keep a strict hold on your emotions on this thread or simply stay away from it. It that fair or equitable? -- probably not. But in certain straits (and this is one of them IMO) we moderators are like school teachers handling a disruptive classroom. When the air gets filled with wads of gum, erasers, half-eathen peanut butter sandwiches and insults, one answer (and it's the one that's going to apply here unless I'm overruled by Jim or my fellow moderator) is simply to separate the combatants. Thus because without Goodspeak there would seem to be no combat on this thread, and because there is no sign that this Goodspeak-against-nearly-all combat has led or could lead anyone to change his mind, I again emphatically suggest that Goodpeak on this thread should either censor himself a good deal or just chose not to comment. And "emphatically suggest" is not the final step -- got it?

Yes, Jim -- not easy or difficult but appealing. Easy can appeal, as can difficult. But not appealing can be turned into appealing hardly ever. OTOH I see no need to apologize for the wide range of music that's appealed to me over the years, nor any need on my part (beyond a certain reasonable point of paying attention/gathering information/satisfying curiosity) to try to get with stuff that appeals to others but not to me. Further, if what appeals to me turns out at the moment or down the road to be a "minority" matter, so be it. In the end, as Keynes put it, we're all dead.

Chuck -- Remember the time that Bud and an all-star band that included Al Cohn was playing at the Blackstone in the largish ballroom on the other side of the hall from the Jazz Showcase? Afterwards Al mentioned that the reason during his solos Bud quite oddly played facing almost directly to the left side of the room rather than facing forward toward the audience was that the left side of the room was almost completely covered by a large mirror in which Bud could see himself.

Roy Fisher's "The Thing About Joe Sullivan": The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence In one chorus -- approach, development, climax, discard -- And sound magnanimous, The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff -- belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go -- And that thing is his mood: A feeling violent and ordinary That runs in standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

I vaguely recall an account from Dan Morgenstern or someone with similar knowledge and stature of Mezz's vast fabrications in "Really the Blues." The conclusion was that the book is essentially a work of fiction.

Triumph looks Irish to me.

About Von sometimes needing to nerve himself, Chuck can weigh in here to correct me (if he wishes), but IIRC Von understandably was rather uptight at the "Have No Fear" recording session (understandably so because he sensed/knew that these were going to be ideal circumstances for him to make his mark on record) and resorted to some vodka (and orange juice?) to settle himself, though clearly not enough to impair him. Renewed thanks BTW to Chuck for letting me be there. History was made.

Watching that terrific Von-Clifford Jordan video, I was reminded of what a magnificent physique Von had. It served him well.

More from the Von-Patrick-Hill band -- dig the way Von flies into his solo:

Well, it's good way to market Krall. You can send one of those Krall dolls up to my room.

I said it was "'smartly' verbal." Putting "smartly" in quotes meant that IMO the gags themselves weren't all that clever/intelligent/sharp but that Allen was more concerned with self-consciously conveying to the audience that he himself was a smart, intelligent fellow. Further, I think that one of the chief reasons for Allen's success is that he does manage to convey just that to a fair-sized portion of his core audience, who are in turn then able to congratulate/reassure themselves that they are among the world's more intelligent/clever/sharp citizens. Funny how one of Allen's chief models, Mort Sahl, had such a shrewd fix on exactly this social game and made it the center of some of his sharpest satire. For example, one of Sahl's bits, pre-dating"Take the Money and Run" by some years, was about a bank robber who comes up against an intellectual teller in a bank in San Francisco. The robber hands the teller a note that says "act normal." The teller writes back, "define your terms."

Valeria -- I didn't "back down." My original remark was '[Allen] not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that).' [Emphasis added] My main point was the first one; my secondary point (clearly a subset of the first, signified by the word "also") was the one you said I backed down from by amplifying my primary point with an example from "Zelig." When I said that I'd need to see the early films again before I could cite chapter and verse about the secondary point, how was that backing down? Or should I say, "Hands up, I've got a gub"? Also, I didn't say that the gags in the early films were all verbal but typically verbal.

Really? I don't think so. That is, I think it's more than "a relative handful of specialists."

Valeria -- About verbal versus visual gags in Allen's early films, let me step back from that particular issue for the moment (because I don't have the time or the impetus to pore over those films right now) and instead choose an example from a later film "Zelig" that exemplifies what my main point was there: Allen's frequent willingness to sacrifice dramatic versimilitude/plausibility for the momentary gag. Now "Zelig" IMO, as a mockumentary, would seem to need to maintain a strong semblance of dramatic versimilitude/plausibility throughout in order to maintain its central comic conceit -- that there is/was a man named Leonard Zelig, a "human chameleon" whose overwhelming desire for conformity gave him the ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happened to be around at the moment and who thus was able to sidle his way into many key scenes in 20th Century history. Signs that an atmosphere of surface plausibility was felt by Allen to be crucial to this conceit are the constants use of "newsreel" footage, the deadpan performances of Mia Farrow as Zelig's psychiatrist, and the frequent and again deadpan in both words and demeanor cameos in which such figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, and Bricktop reminisce about Zelig and speculate about the meaning of his career. All well and good, and then Allen pisses it away for one cheap gag. Zelig has been confined to a mental hospital where one important doctor thinks that his problem is not psychiatric, as Farrow's character thinks it is, but chiropractic. So we see "newsreel" footage of Allen as Zelig lying face up on a gurney and being drastically manipulated by the chiropractor so that his prone legs with feet pointing toward the ceiling are eventually turned into prone legs with feet pointed toward the floor. In a Three Stooges feature or a Tom and Jerry cartoon, sure, but not in a movie that's set up the way "Zelig" is. And then, the reversed feet gone, we're back to the deadpan stuff, over and out. It's as if Miles Davis in his "Kind of Blue" solo had inserted a quote from "Mairzy Doats." Fasstrack -- Just to be clear, I said that I responded positively to "Annie Hall."