Larry Kart

Depends on what brand champagne was being served...and can an a-g jazz artist afford assistants? My guess is that he doesn't need to afford them, that they're probably acolytes. Maybe Ratliff wasn't afforded the space to write an extensive article.....or five covering the details of his conversation with Cecil? Seems to me that Ratliff had a good deal of space. I'll bet that instead he didn't know what to make of whatever Taylor said and/or thought his readers wouldn't know what to make of it. The lede about the ladies lighting cigarettes and serving Champagne suggests that he needed to plug in something to show that he'd been there. He certainly finds the space to quote Taborn and Iyer. Again, I've been in such spots, if I'm right about what Ratliff faced. They're a journalist's nightmare. Had a "yup" and "nope" beaut once with Richard Pryor; through a twist of fate I figured out a way to save it. OTOH, I was utterly defeated by two determinedly non-committal types: John Lewis and Benny Carter.

I didn't get any sense from the original post that the poster thought Taylor was being disrespected. Instead, the poster seemed to be puzzled. as was I as a former journalist, why so little that Taylor said during those five hours was deemed worthy of being quoted. Could be that what he said was just too abstract and/or spacey in Ratliff's estimation? I do recall interviews that left me frustrated and more or less at a loss as to how to write them up, but not five-hour ones. I also recall an interview with Sam Kinison (ostensibly) that turned out to be with his younger brother pretending to be Sam because Sam was too wasted or couldn't be bothered to talk. Fortunately, I figured this out in time. Depends on what brand champagne was being served...and can an a-g jazz artist afford assistants? My guess is that he doesn't need to afford them, that they're probably acolytes.

I remember a Monitor spot or series of them about Bob and Ray's Trophy Train. Much laughter. I've got some of their stuff on CD and cassettes. I remember being disappointed when Martin Williams (he was something of a comedy guru, too) dismissively referred to their work as "college-boy funning," or something of the sort. But then Martin didn't get Albert Brooks either, told me that he thought that "Modern Romance" wasn't at all funny but an attempt to justify Albert's own self-indulgent behavior. I admit that the space between Albert himself and the characters he portrays is often a narrow one, but come on! That's inseparable from why his work works. OTOH, Martin was big against self-indulgence, could detect it with alarming zeal. I've told the story of his reaction when, sitting next to him in an audience, I began to chew a piece of gum.

She's toast.

And then large birds swooped down and ate up all the turtles.

Think I prefer the old look -- i.e. on the board heading. That orangish tint gives me a headache.

My nominee for Mother Of The Year. How did you get that shot of my girlfriend? Oops! Are you the one who's getting her to quit smoking, is she doing that for you or because of you? Either way, might be time to show up with a fifth and some massage oil (when that snotfuck of a kid's not around, if in fact he ever is not around...). That lady is stressed! I'm concentrating on her getting a new pair of glasses. I've learned to live with the tattoo and a few other things -- e.g. her taste in clothes and home furnishings and the way she looks with her clothes off.

My nominee for Mother Of The Year. How did you get that shot of my girlfriend?

When Rogers wrote "Keen and Peachy" he was on the road with Herman and was not yet a West Coast guy, literally or in terms of the so-called West Coast "school," which at the time he wrote "Keen and Peachy" essentially did not yet exist.

Sorry, Allen -- Jazz Lips is a bootleg label; can't sell bootlegs here. See forum rule 7: 7) We do not allow sharing, trading, or linking copyrighted material that is being offered illegally, including bootlegs.

yes

His radio interviews in recent years were hilarious. A fantastic storyteller and clearly a great guy.

Allen -- Was it you or someone else who once wrote that by the later stages of his career/life Albany, despite moments of brilliance, couldn't be relied upon to play on the form of many of the tunes he was playing on -- short-term memory loss or something like that? If so...

More angular, pedal-pointy at times, but also a bit tentative at some points, as one might expect given that he was subbing on short notice. What I noticed as much as note choice was the springy time feel. If I'm not mistaken, Monk seemed to dig that, at least as a change of pace. Rouse, as I said above, also seems stimulated, but at times he pauses uncharacteristically, perhaps in response to Swallow not voice-leading in ways he's come to expect from I guess it would have been Larry Ridley at the time. In the notes, Swallow says that he later (early '70s?) was asked to join the group but had to refuse because he'd been playing electric bass exclusively and no longer owned a string bass.

See that this has been mentioned before upon its release, but I don't see an estimate of its quality. Just got it, and I think it's top-drawer for Monk's Quartet -- this is the Ben Riley version, with Steve Swallow sitting in on bass at the last moment (he was on the bill with Art Farmer). Rouse and Monk are in very lively form, and Swallow's contribution is interesting -- he adds a different spring to the time feel. The last two tracks add a Buddy Collette-led ensemble and are quite effective -- Bobby Bryant solos with considerable boldness and zest, certainly unintimidated by Monk's presence, and Collette play a fine alto solo on "Straight, No Chaser." Only drawback is that the sound breaks up a bit at times, but I'm OK with it.

Returning (in case he or anyone else cares) to the friendly tussle between Jim and me over his "words are toys" remark and what underlay and led up to it, I just ran across this in a current New York Review of Books essay by Charles Rosen that more or less supports/justifies Jim's point of view: 'In his discussion of humor, Sigmund Freud ... after treating at length the kind of humor that allows a safe and neutralized outlet for the taboo expression of sexual desire and of social aggression, arrives finally at “pure” humor, the jokes that are innocent of repressive fantasies, but just simple word games, silly puns that are only a form of play. (I can remember a superannuated example from my junior high school days: “Why do radio announcers have such small hands? Wee paws [we pause] for station identification.”) 'To explain our delight in such foolishness, Freud invokes the lallation of very small children, who sit and repeat long strings of nonsense syllables (“ba, da, ma…mow, bow, wow…etc.) at great length for their own amusement. Learning a language, being forced to attach a meaning to a sound, is a burden to the child, who, in reaction, strings together senseless rhyming noises as a form of escape. Even for adults understanding speech is not devoid of effort, and can be a source of fatigue. With a silly play on words, there is a split second when a word suspended between two incompatible senses briefly loses all meaning and becomes pure sound, and for a lovely moment we revert to the delighted state of the child freed from the tyranny of language. Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know. [My emphasis] The whole thing (haven't read it yet myself, but I will right now): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/freedom-and-art/

Allen -- When you actually see people who are doing things right/changing things for the better, as has been the case on much of the Chicago scene for more than a decade, the difference can be breathtaking. OTOH, it does call for there to be a good many musicians around who can really play and want to do things in one of the right ways, but it's also fairly circular -- gpod new people arrive and get into the swim because they know about/have heard about what's happening, and the sensible-communal aura is hard to resist once you get a good taste of it.

I got to see the Doris Duke Foundation people do their thing at a big conference in Chicago several years ago about how to help the jazz scene there (there were hundreds of us invited), and the amounts of pernicious b.s. that were served up was beyond anything I could have imagined. Further, the "conclusions" that we all supposedly reached (e.g. to build a big brick-and-mortar downtown jazz venue cum museum) were the conclusions they had reached beforehand and were ooched into place by some blatant engineering that would have done credit to the Politburo under Stalin. Fortunately, nothing concrete seems to have come from this nonsense so far, no doubt thanks to the recession. In any case, it seemed clear to me that what they had in mind would have served only themselves (all those executives need to be paid, and board members must get their perks) and/or some property interests, a la Jazz @ Lincoln Center. Finally, someone in the know told me how much dough had been spent to mount this conference, some $300,000. He said, Imagine if that money had been given to existing and arguably already flourishing local jazz instiutions to mount concerts, commission works, bring in musicians from other cities and countries, etc. And so it goes.

IIRC what happened to Quill (I think this account was from an interview with Woods) was this: Gene was an extremely feisty, fiery guy, quick to take offense and quick to put his dukes up, and while working in Atlantic City he got into with some guy (or guys) of the sort one shouldn't get into it with and was beaten to within the proverbial inch of his life. He lived on for a while after that (for how long I don't know) but never came close to recovering. Alcohol and drug problems he may have had, but I think this is the story.

It wasn't Woods' "edge" that drew to his playing up to 1957 or so; in fact, it's the IMO often put-on hot "edge" of his later work that gave me the willies. Rather, it was the shapeliness and lucidity of his lines, the way he could conjure up almost literal shapes and play them off against each other, that I admired in his early work. That can be heard in a whole lot of Woods' recordings as a leader and a sideman from back then. Two of my favorites for him are Quincy Jones' "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" and Jon Eardley's "Pot Pie," but he was playing at a consistently high level.

According to the Bruyninckx discography Sugan (July 19, 1957) was a Phil Woods date; Ruppli's Prestige discography lists Garland as co-leader. FWIW, the album cover says "Phil Woods with Red Garland," both names in the same size type. I'd say they were co-leaders.

Just to be clear, I'm a big Phil Woods fan up to a point (probably his sideman appearance on Red Garland's "Sugan" from, I think, 1957), but after that not much at all.

I seem to remember that Ronnie was also a Joe Henderson man. I suspect that his prime formative model was Wardell Gray, though I know he admired Mobley.

Don't miss the "Three Bones and a Quill" album. The bones (Jimmy Cleveland, Jim Dahl, and Frank Rehak) and Quill were all members of Johnny Richards orchestra, and the togetherness shows. Haven't sat down and studied this, but on the whole I like Quill best when he was apart from Phil Woods; together, things seemed to get a bit too "athletic" for my tastes for both of them, though the time of their partnership was still before Woods came to be rather artificially "hot" IMO. But we've been down that road before; sorry for mentioning it.