Larry Kart

About Blakey and Caucasian musicians only being able to swing from a rope, I forget to mention that Dave Schnitter auditioned in blackface.

From Art Taylor's interview with Blakey in "Notes and Tones": "You should be given credit if the sun comes up and something happens and you’re discovering something. Cats like Beethoven and Bach went through that. They really knew what they were doing. This was their field. The black musician has nothing to do with that. His thing is to swing. Well, the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope." FWIW and IMO "The black musician has nothing to do with that" is no less annoying in its implicit and explicit assumptions than "the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope." For the former, talk to George Lewis, Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell et al. about the fact that the "black musician" can have "to do" with whatever music he can and wishes to have to do with. For the latter, talk to the various Caucasian musicians who were members of Jazz Messengers, from Ira Sullivan on. The list while not endless is extensive.

I'm with him, too, until my car breaks down in the desert. Then I want some of that shaped by information stuff.

It "requires" neither, Larry, just as it is not "required" to get all scoldy about the weirdnesses. If I'm in a business meeting or a classroom learning situation, I expect to be corrected at every appropriate juncture. If I'm standing out in the front yard listening to my neighbor tell me stories about their summer vacation, I don't really give a damn if they think the Grand Canyon was in New Mexico, I can still get the gist of the matter from their tone and the overall coherency of the narrative. If the author of the Green bio were telling me stories about her summer vacation, I'd have no problem with the book. But it may be the only Green bio were going to get, and it does sit there on the shelves of libraries, where people who aren't as hip to what's up with Green and jazz in general as you and Freelancer are will or may take it for the simple truth. Again if I feel, as I get further into the book, that it's soulfulness and its sloppiness are inseparable, then so be it -- life can be like that. But I'm saying, again, that you and Freelancer are protected against its sloppiness/weirdnesses because of what you already know; that one of the reasons, or so it seems to me, to get "all scoldy" about such matters is that are lots of other readers without such knowledge who will be confused or misled; and, finally, that it just ain't that hard to get the whole fish in the boat if you take the trouble to try. P.S. I very vaguely recall some of the stuff that Chuck was referring to in the Radano book about Braxton. A different sort of case but really insidious because where do you go to get a piece of your life back when it's down in the books backwards, upside down or even not at all when it damn well should be.

Well if you made it to page 24, Bob Porter is quoted as saying, "you could go and hear him play the funk all night long, and he'd simply sit back and play impressions of something and knock everybody on their ass". So probably it was meant to be, 'play Impressions or something' - or perhaps even - "play Impressions instead of Something" So maybe it was hard to transcribe the interviews from one of those old hand held cassette tape recorders, and hard to hear Pee Wee Russell for Stevie, when you don't have the genre knowledge to fill in the gaps. I still think with regard to the wealth of information the biography contributes - to what was not presently in the public record - these oversights are like complaining about piffling minutia. Freelancer -- You are in effect protected from the author's errors and gaps in knowledge because you yourself by and large possess the knowledge she does not, thus you notice most of the errors and gaps, and usually are able to make the right corrections. But how is this a good thing, and how necessarily (as you and Jim seem to imply) is it related to the book's soulful virtues? About the "is this a good thing?" part, imagine that the author is writing about a subject in which you don't have much of a background (say, the invasion of Normandy in WW II or the history of the space program) but are interested in. If the author of such a book proceeded as the author of this one did, and you yourself didn't have the background to notice errors and fill in gaps, you'd be seriously screwed, as would anyone else in your shoes who took what the author said as reliable. Backtracking a bit -- that's the virtue of scholarship when it deserves the name; no, it's not laboratory science, a world of repeatable, verifiable experiments, but it's a discipline/method that asks that would-be "facts" be tested and verified insofar as that's possible and aspires not to be half-assed when getting the whole fish in the boat is something that almost certainly can be accomplished. And I don't see why getting the whole fish in the boat would do damage to the author's "soulfulness." BTW, in case you think this is a black writer versus white writer problem, check out Nick Catalano's execrable bio of Clifford Brown (Oxford U. Press, 2000). Mike Fitzgerald, no less, compiled a list of its gross errors of fact and emphasis that ran about 10 pages. And yet there the book sits on the shelves of how many libraries, filling the minds of those who don't/can't know any better with cornucopias of misinformation. Finaliy, about the "impresssions" thing. Good catch, and it's funny too, but that's one of the side effects of reading an unnecessarily half-assed book -- you notice the things that leap out at you (as "Stevie Russell" did for me) and don't notice other goofs that probably you would have noticed otherwise. Again, I'm not saying that the Green book doesn't have some genuinely soulful virtues; I just don't see why those virtues require that one sit still for or even celebrate its sloppiness. It's not like we're asking Don Cherry to be Adolph Herseth, or worse, assuming that Don Cherry's art was something that he just picked off a tree and didn't work at like a M.F.

Actually, Nat meant Stevie Ray Beiderbecke.

Moving on through the Grant Green bio today, I was nonplussed by this, from p. 21: "'Well that's it. Pain is universal, [Nat Hentoff] agrees. 'There have been white players with great inventiveness. One of my favorites is Stevie Russell." Pee Wee Russell?

Wallace Stevens obviously never had car trouble in the desert. That seems to have been Frank O'Hara's verdict in his "Biotherm": ...JOUR DE FETE 'jai compose mon "Glorification" hommage au poete Americain lyrique et profond, Wallace Stevens but one of your American tourists told me he was a banker quel delices I would like tell you what I think of bankers but . . . except W.C. Fields What do you want from a bank but love ouch but I don't get any love from Wallace Stevens no I don't I think delices is a lot of horseshit and that comes from one who infinitely prefers bullshit and the bank rolled on and Stevens strolled on an ordinary evening alone with a lot of people...

Wallace Stevens reflecting upon Bird's "Klactoveedsedstene" solo in his "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds Not often realized, the lighter words In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea, Flickings from finikin to fine finikin And the general fidget from busts of Constantine To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank, These are the edgings and inchings of final form, The swanning activities of the formulae Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at, Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet, A philosopher practicing scales on his piano, A woman writing a note and tearing it up. It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Be bop. But how do you pronounce "Klactoveedsedstene"?

No way; no sir.

It's pronounced ""So-lar" because of "Jor-du."

It's not "Moon" changes, but not bad for a 21 year old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azyk7_pgceU

I don't know. It plays OK for me F For me, too.

:tup And not up my ass (I hope).

At last! Thank the Lord!

Oh, Jim -- yes, yes, of course, but when you're at a carnival and approach a small table upon which three walnut shells and a small rubber ball rest, is it that "complicated" (or merely almost certain to be vindicated common sense) to grasp that one is in the presence of an ongoing con game? Or to put it another way, lots of people are big fans of 'What makes us think that those complications and contradictions can finally be "solved" once all the parts stop moving?' until and unless those parts are part of the car they've been driving and that has broken down in, say, the desert. Then one wants and needs a competent problem-solving mechanic, not someone who broodingly observes that '"facts" are just a part of "truth", and perhaps the least determinant part at that. After the facts, conclusions are drawn, and that's where we believe what we want to believe about what it is we think we've found.' Either the car runs again or it doesn't -- that doesn't depend on "what we want to believe about what it is we think we've found." I'm all for cosmic navel gazing, but only after I've checked first to see if I've got my head up my butt.

Oh, Jim -- yes, yes, of course, but when you're at a carnival and approach a small table upon which three walnut shells and a small rubber ball rest, is it that "complicated" (or merely almost certain to be vindicated common sense) to grasp that one is in the presence of an ongoing con game?

Re: Mark Stryker's wise remarks about oral histories and interviews -- It is now close to gospel that Art Blakey visited and spent a fair amount of time in West Africa in 1947 (this trip being something Blakey spoke of in numerous interviews, on the recording "Ritual," and IIRC in Art Taylor's "Notes and Tones"), and then revamped his style of drumming accordingly, taking off on what he heard and learned there. But even though this "fact" has led to at least one would-be scholarly article, Ingrid Monson's "Art Blakey's African Diaspora," and though it's hard to prove a negative, the preponderance of evidence/testimony from any number of sources (Blakey's lawyer, Horace Silver, etc.) is that Blakey was a habitual fabulist and that in particular (this from the lawyer) Blakey left the U.S. for the first time in 1957, for a European tour. A subsidiary point: That musician X said such and such about himself or musician Y is at the least under some circumstances what musician X believed or remembered at the time he made that statement. But some figures (Blakey apparently being one) just made up a lot of stuff, and much of what they said is evidence mostly that they chose to/felt it was worth making up that stuff when they did so. Big difference.

I did read or tried to read the Green book once upon a time. I'll look for it and try again. P.S. A nearby library has a copy: I'm there.

Yes -- but Bird at Minton's in 1960? And what's with that 'White-Male-Jazz scholar's" thing? If I were an African-American jazz biographer, I'd be pissed at the implication that as an African-American jazz biographer I shouldn't be expected to be more than anecdotal, nor should I be expected to have much background in the music as a whole or get certain basic facts right. Or would an African-American jazz biographer who proceeded otherwise be imitating/beholden to 'White-Male-Jazz scholars"? Eeesh. Tell it to Robin D. G. Kelley.

I recall reading (maybe here or on the BNBB) that that Grant Green book was chockful of Bix-ing. One reference to that effect, I'll look for more: http://fretterverse.com/2011/02/10/the-worst-musician-biography-ever/ Another: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/jan04/Green_book.htm and another: http://www.jazzhouse.org/library/index.php3?read=hale10

I suppose any gig is or should be a performance. And every performance one gets paid for (or even if you don't get paid, if you feel that why about things) is a gig. I'm reminded for some reason of an old LeRoi Jones remark: "I knew a man back in Newark who could whistle with peas in his mouth, but nobody every said he was hip." As for Allen deserving "wider popularity in his native country," why? There are plenty of players around who are more individual and inventive, even within the style or styles he favors.

Ah, yes -- here it is: "But that's a priceless Steinway!" "Not any more."

The best scenes in "The Return of the Pink Panther" never fail to make me laugh: E.g. and the following scene where Sellers questions a group of suspects.