Larry Kart

I love Green's minimalist but IMO ideal comping behind Baby Face Willette:

Well they did share something deep on a formal level. Strong clear tone, heavy use of be-bop chromaticism, sure. The deeper the space Raney presented on record with harmony-melody, was matched by what Green alternately presented in blues feeling and rhythmical slipperiness. However, to say that Grant Green idolised Raney (and thereby infer he studied his lines in more than a cursory way) is a different matter. Green did say he spent many hours studying Charlie Parker. And he obviously did the same with Sonny Rollins. It's a similar call perhaps to the arguments about Hancock that often emerge here. ie. Raney-Green as opposed to Hancock-Tristano/Evans. Raney was on record when Grant Green was still learning in St.Louis. And Grant Green didn't/couldn't listen to records when he was still learning in St.Louis? Isn't that when guys tend to do that a good deal? Also, aside from the obvious trait of bluesiness, Green sounds a whole more like Raney than he does like Bird, IMO. Also to idolize is one thing, to dig is another. I said that Green quite likely dug Raney.

Well, I love Grant Green and Jimmy Raney -- so there. The evidence for Green digging Raney may just be that one quote (maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't think that Green was a guy who made a habit of talking about his music that much), but different though he and Raney sound from several points of view, I think they did share something deep -- a feel for the pull of tonal gravity and how much one could do, rhythmically and melodically, by subtly, linearly pulling against it. In particular, both men knew the secret of how to make one's succession of pitches more or less swing by themselves (as those pitches pulled variously against the tonal gravity), quite apart from how individual notes were attacked. Yes, Raney was quite chaste in not attacking notes much, doing so less often than Green did, but even so, with Green primarily it was the pitches that swung, which is why he sounds a good deal different IMO than a lot of more conventionl bluesy-greasy guitar players. In any case, given that resemblance between Raney and Green, Green's quote, and the fact that Raney was around and prominent when Green was fairly young, I think the possibility was quite possible.

Which of course has little or no connection with the authenticity of the lives of other people let alone the authenticity of the lives of other groups of people, such as they may be. "No man is an island...' You can't worry somebody else into or out of "authenticity". That's for them to do themselves, if they become so concerned. As far as "authentic feelings", geesh, there's a job for a new breed of thought police. Again -- no man is an island. "Authenticity," as dubious a term as that might be, is not only an individual matter but also one of the individual in relation to his social surroundings, such as they may be. And no one (at least not me) said anything about worrying "somebody else into or out of" it.

Which of course has little or no connection with the authenticity of the lives of other people let alone the authenticity of the lives of other groups of people, such as they may be. "No man is an island...'

No, we're not disagreeing, but I think the middle class' penchant for turning critically upon itself needs to be taken into account, and I'm not sure that it's wholly a form of resistance --rather, off the top of my head, it's a kind of semi-unconscious collaborative effort that keeps the whole shebang rolling along.

Or change the title of this thread - Jonathan can do that himself: click on "edit" --> "use full editor" --> thread title at the top. Done.

One thing about the benighted, culturally destructive middle class -- it's generated its own most adamant and at times most trenchant critics, who proceed to attack along just those lines. See previous post. Thus some rethinking of the dynamic here would seem to be in order. And it often works that way in creative terms, too. Mike Bloomfield was a child of the middle class if ever there was one.

"Since I know Larry Kart and Allen Lowe are as knowledgeable a pair as there is in the world of jazz..." Oh, my God, no!

Just listened to all the electronic Herbie cuts that Jim and others have posted, and I have to say that I like them all much more than I do "Speak Like A Child." Seriously.

Oh, they get the Blues in Scarsdale, too, Baby! Oh, they get the Blues in Scarsdale, too, Baby! The yogurt shop's out of Cappucino Supreme and my 401K is down to $1 million, maybe!

That was among my points, I think, though I'd rather say, again, that timbre can become rhythm, just as any other parameter (sorry for that word) can become any other (as in take on some of the essential in-action language qualities of the other in the course of the making). Fpr me, "is" a tad too determinative; it tends to imply that rhythm (or something else, but in this case rhythm) is the obvious, righteous boss. Tain't always so, McGhee -- not IMO. Show me anything that happens at any level without vibration, and you'll be showing me something that doesn't exist. Everything is vibration. Now, if it suits your personal frame of reference to say that vibration is boss instead of rhythm, that's a deal I'll make on nothing more than a smile and a handshake, no problem. I'm good for that one. But- once you get past semantics and general usage oversimplifications of "rhythm = beat" and the like, I don't see how you get around vibration & rhythm being the same thing. Sure, nothing happens at any level without vibration, just as nothing in the material world happens unless atomic particles are whirling around and bumping into and off of each other, but the thoughts, acts, and reactions of human beings are not caused by atomic motion. At the micro level where vibration is everything, there are one would think no rhythms, because at that micro level no human ear can perceive or differentiate, nor can human muscles or machines generate, a vibration that can't be broken down further to the universal vibratory hum. Even the subtlest rhythms one is aware of take place many levels (of perception and action) above the micro one where vibration is everything. My point then is that while all the musical parameters -- rhythm, harmony, melody, and timbre -- are vibratory, even the subtlest perceivers and actors among us deal with them at a level well above the micro level where vibration is everything (that's "above" not in terms of value but as in a level where things are more coalesced -- think perhaps of sounds< words in a specific language< sentences in that language, etc.) .

@ Ben -- by "modal jazz" ( in quotes), I meant "the Miles/Evans modal project" and what flowed from it, not the Coltrane-Tyner thing. First, the Miles/Evans thing and all that flowed from it came first; second, it was (so I think) significantly about "protecting from disturbance a potentially fragile lyrical growth" -- which was not at all the case with Coltrane-Tyner; their music was about (if you will) the fact or the illusion of intense expressionistic heat (as you yourself pointed out a few post ago, Ben, in speaking of Tyner's differences from Hancock).

That was among my points, I think, though I'd rather say, again, that timbre can become rhythm, just as any other parameter (sorry for that word) can become any other (as in take on some of the essential in-action language qualities of the other in the course of the making). Fpr me, "is" a tad too determinative; it tends to imply that rhythm (or something else, but in this case rhythm) is the obvious, righteous boss. Tain't always so, McGhee -- not IMO.

I think that in music in general (with obvious historical-stylistic exceptions) and in jazz with particular and arguably unique detail and force, one of the main things is that any one of the four (or more?) parameters -- melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre --can be transformed into the other(s) tout de suite. That is, what is and/or seems to be primarily or exclusively a harmonic event can be revealad to be a rhythmic one etc., etc. -- and round and round we go. Is Bechet's timbre or Lester Young's a matter of timbre per se, or is it interactive with and more or less inseparable from their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic acts? In jazz at its strongest nothing is clothing, everything is language and structure. What's the Blues in Jazz? Language, structure or clothing? Language and structure when it's present -- but it needn't be always. Clothing, too, when the blues is being dished up by some b.s. artist.

I think that in music in general (with obvious historical-stylistic exceptions) and in jazz with particular and arguably unique detail and force, one of the main things is that any one of the four (or more?) parameters -- melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre --can be transformed into the other(s) tout de suite. That is, what is and/or seems to be primarily or exclusively a harmonic event can be revealad to be a rhythmic one etc., etc. -- and round and round we go. Is Bechet's timbre or Lester Young's a matter of timbre per se, or is it interactive with and more or less inseparable from their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic acts? In jazz at its strongest nothing is clothing, everything is language and structure.

P.S. Can't point to a whole bunch of them off the top of my head --except for some of his lovely solo on "When Lights Are Low" from "Cookin,'" especially the way he gets out of it -- but there are a good many Miles solos from that period that IIRC are very Richard Rodgers-like melodically.

Not exactly, Mark -- or so I think. One needs to look at this historically, in particular at two closely related in time and circumstance periods in jazz -- the time in the mid to late '50s when fairly complicated chord setups were often the thing, as in, say, some of Gigi Gryce's pieces and of course a good deal of West Coast stuff (and actually a lot of Horace Silver, too, much as he dissed the West Coast style) but where some thoughtful actual musicians (like George Russell explicitly, and other figures implicitly, by their practice if not always their words) began to chafe at those setups for two virtually inseparable reasons: That the melodies of such pieces more or less tended to be the top line of the chord patterns, and that the density of the changes turned the improviser into someone running any obstacle course -- that creativity wasn't being furthered here but curtailed. Then ... well let me quote some of what I wrote in my chapter THE AVANT-GARDE, 1949-1967 from "The Oxford Companion To Jazz": 'Reacting to the music of Ornette Coleman, who had arrived on the national scene less than a year before, composer George Russell explained in the course of a June 1960 dialogue with critic Martin Williams that “if there weren’t new things happening in jazz since Charlie Parker, jazz wouldn’t be ready to accept Ornette.... The way has been paved and the ear prepared by rather startling, though isolated, developments in jazz since the ’forties.”.... Russell’s focus in that dialogue was on specific musical issues, especially on the “war on the chord ” that he felt had been going on in jazz since the bop era and that Coleman had taken up in his own way, liberating himself , in Russell’s view, “from tonal centers’’ in order “to sing his own song ... without having to meet the deadline of any particular chord.” ... 'Ornette Coleman’s “daring simplifications” (the term is Max Harrison’s) seem to come from a different world from that of all the avant -garde jazz that preceded it. Coleman was a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and his early music sounds as though the techniques of Charlie Parker were being read backwards until they trailed away into the jazz, folk, and pop music pasts of the American Southwest—from the loping swing of Charlie Christian and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys to the blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Coleman made pitch a flexible, speech-like entity (you can, he famously said, play flat in tune and sharp in tune ), while the irregular length and shape of his phrases, and their relation to his no-less plastic sense of harmonic rhythm, took on a freedom that seemed to violate jazz’s norms of craft professionalism.... And yet harmony for him would remain an area of intense potential meaning; in virtually every Coleman performance, powerful cadential events can occur. For that reason, his music should not be thought of as modal in the sense that modality was used to describe the music that Miles Davis and Bill Evans began to make in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Modality for these men, and the host of musicians they influenced , essentially was a means of protecting from disturbance a potentially fragile lyrical growth—witness Davis’ remark that “When you go that way [radically decrease the frequency of chord changes and increase their ambiguity] you can go on forever ... [and] do more with the [melodic] line .” But Coleman’s melodic drive and his appetite for cadence were equally vigorous; there was no need for him to curtail the latter in order to bolster the former. What he and his partners wanted was to be cadential when and where they wanted.' [My emphasis.] So we have -- historically and in very short order -- a proliferation of harmonic density followed (causally, it seems ) by a radical restriction of it. And I think that the root of both developments was in good part similar, as different as the results might be -- a disruption in the three-ply (or four-ply) relationship between harmony, melody, rhythm, and timbre. The cause of that disruption? Perhaps just the examples of Bird and Bud, in the sense that their meaningful (extremely virtuosic and often emotionally extreme as sell) organic (even at times seemingly driven) juggling of those parameters was in some fundamental ways beyond what other mortal improvisers could or would be likely to achieve, and that in practice some of those parameters might need to be relatively fixed or rationalized (as in, let's say, the Gryce example) or so significantly and "tastefully" weeded out in a streamlined manner (a la Miles and others) that "a potentially fragile lyrical growth" could in practice grow more securely, could "go on forever." Again, though, see the IMO virtual storm of cadential events that Ornette could summon up within his so-called "free" playing, let alone the music of Cecil, late Trane, Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, et al., which introduced various and quite different ways to speak than the aforementioned chord-dense and "modal" approaches that followed so closely upon each other. P.S. What makes a melody organic in my view (apart from what may be purely subjective considerations) is not its lack of dependence on a more or less pre-existing harmonic framework that is, when the results are not organic, essentially "filled out." Rather, it's that the relationship among melody, harmony, and rhythm almost always tends to be contrapuntal in the broad sense -- i.e. any of those parameters can take the wheel of the vehicle at any moment, while talking meaningfully and freely to the others. Much as I love Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, et al., in the history of American popular song, I'd give top marks here to Richard Rodgers. That may be why I was so tickled by the fairly recent Ornette concert performance of "Turnaround" (don't recall which album it's from) where he begins his solo with the melody of "If I Loved You," and it sounds like the most natural thing imaginable. (And I think that's not the only Ornette performance of "Turnaround" where he does that.)

Ben's post is very interesting; lots to think about, especially: "It is much harder to hear organic ideas and execute them in such a complete, clear, and relaxed way that they sound almost as if they were composed than it is to bang out endless permutations of pentatonic cells with sufficiently frenzied fire that it sounds as if the ideas are coming from the very (fiery) soul of the improvisor." OTOH, re-listening to one of my favorite Hancock solos -- on "My Joy" from Hutcherson's "Oblique" -- I just don't FWIW hear much if any "singing" melodies (not that that is in itself a damning thing). What I do here, though -- and to me this raises doubts -- are passages that seem to me to want to be taken as organic singing melodies when they are instead (or so I feel) essentially harmonic patterns strung lengthwise, with the "melody" being determined by/almost at the mercy of the harmonic flow. So what? you ask. Well, one reason that this kind of music-making is not my favorite thing circles back to what Ben said here: "I'm interested in Larry's original point about some fundamental rhythmic divide between bebop (Powell, Flanagan, Harris) and post-bebop (Hancock, Tyner). I'm wondering if this is a similar to Harris's own dismissal of most post-bebop pianists. I'd agree that there's nothing quite like Powell or Parker when it comes to rhythmic punch. I wouldn't agree that any jazz improvisation which lacks this particular flavor of rhythmic vitality is thereby flaccid and uninteresting. Tristano, for one, had different ideas about rhythm, some of which I'd say influenced Herbie's (and Evans's) penchant for detached evenness." To amplify, now that I think about it, in Powell's playing for one, all three parameters (rhythm, harmony, and melody; four if you count attack/timbre) tend to be vigorously interactive at all times; thus, I would think (or argue) the potential organic nature of the evolving whole, because anyone one of those parameters can at any moment step to the foreground/take the lead. (By contrast, thinking of another sort of music, Stephen Sondheim's theater scores seems more or less a-melodic to me because, again, they seem to be essentially harmonic patterns strung lengthwise, with the "melodies" being determined by/even at the mercy of the harmonic flow.) Now the latter part of Hancock's solo on "My Joy" seems quite brilliant to me because there he isn't trying to turn harmonic patterns into what might be called pseudo-melodies. Instead (and I hope this doesn't sound like vague b.s.) Hancock begins to give us landscape of alternately coalescing and opposed harmonic shapes, where melodic flow, organic or disguised, is no longer an issue. The thinking here is virtually Monk-like, though it doesn't sound like Monk, and I think it's really special.

To quote yourself back at yourself, "You're just wrong." Yeah, that happens. I live with it. If being "in the moment" meant that everybody was being their own proactive self all the time, there would be no such thing as interaction. No. Being the reactor is every bit as much a part of being in the moment as being the proactor, perhaps even more, because if an action does not cause a reaction, was it really an action? Glad we cleared that up. BTW, leaving aside the slight tinge of irony in your "Glad we cleared that up," can you see how it's kind of annoying to be lectured about obvious aspects of jazz performance/creation? Sure. Can you see how it's also kind of annoying to have to respond to something like "So he's in the moment except when he's not? Gotcha."? Yes, but my next words were "Also, to be serious..." which implies that before I was kidding, no?

If being "in the moment" meant that everybody was being their own proactive self all the time, there would be no such thing as interaction. No. Being the reactor is every bit as much a part of being in the moment as being the proactor, perhaps even more, because if an action does not cause a reaction, was it really an action? Glad we cleared that up. BTW, leaving aside the slight tinge of irony in your "Glad we cleared that up," can you see how it's kind of annoying to be lectured about obvious aspects of jazz performance/creation?

To quote yourself back at yourself, "You're just wrong."

Mark -- Yes, to the Bill Evans qualities, but for me there were at least three versions of Bill Evans, and I admire the first two -- 'New Jazz Conceptions"-"Everybody Digs," and then "Portraits in Jazz" through the first Vanguard recordings. After that, not so much or at times not at all, though the last stuff from the Keystone Korner ("The Last Waltz," right?) is often lovely --can't take the latter-day Vanguard recordings. As someone who knew him well once said, after the first Vanguard recordings there were three further phases of Evans -- Heroin Bill, Methadone Bill, and Cocaine Bill, though Heroin Bill began before the first Vanguard recordings (see the cover of "Explorations"). Jim -- "Herbie from this time is always in the moment. It's just that he sometimes takes his time to survey what that moment is before contributing to it." So he's in the moment except when he's not? Gotcha. Also, to be serious, Herbie surveying things as an accompanist is to me rather different in effect that Herbie surveying things as a soloist. I can handle a good deal of surveying from a player in the latter role if I feel there's a sufficient pay off -- strong musical material emerges that couldn't have emerged otherwise. With Herbie in a solo role, I often feel that his "surveying" pauses and ponderings just don't lead to much. To me, a classic case of a sometime surveyor where the surveying can have a big payoff would be Duke Jordan. When Duke ponders/takes his times -- e.g. on his great trio recording of "They Can't Take That Away From Me" with Blakey and Percy Heath -- the results can be overwhelming. And then there's the probably all-time surveyor, at least some of the time -- Monk.

Mark -- I feel I was wrongish in that review in pointing so much toward Coltrane (pianists are by and large pianists, no?), and certainly I was off about McCoy, whose finest work was yet to come. Herbie the accompanist with Miles et al. was something else, but I admit to never having been that interested in most Herbie piano solos (an exception would be one track on that terrific Blue Note Bobby Hutcherson quartet album with Albert Stinson and Joe Chambers) because they so often seem to ... I don't know, rather pre-determined and "glassy" to me. The concept, so to speak, and the execution seem to separate; not much sense of in the moment (but I can see where that might be a partial goal on his part). The electronic Herbie is a whole other ballgame, I would say. P.S. OTOH, about McCoy, weren't the glories to come in good part because he stepped away from his version of patterned glassiness and became much more rhythmically and harmonically turbulent and in the moment? (Albeit, in later McCoy rhythmic and harmonic turbulence were essentially one.)

Actually, in elevators in Chicago there were actual guys playing Fender Rhodes.