Larry Kart

Listened again to "Have No Fear" yesterday. IIRC I was in the studio, sitting on the floor with my back to a wall, when it (or some of it) was recorded. Amazing music. As Terry Martin has pointed out elsewhere, listen carefully to Von's second solos -- he literally retains in his memory just about everything he played in his first solo on a given piece and then looks at this material again, spontaneously reshapes it, reflects upon it, sums it all up. Now that I think of it, Roscoe Mitchell does/can do something like that, too. What are the odds? Alexander Hawkins on the "Have No Fear" rhythm section. I think everyone was on a mission from God that day.

But Moms is a black woman -- a very funny one, too,

Yes. It's obviously not Harris, and pretty clearly the R. Lewis Trio. In particular, Eldee Young's bass solos are quite distinctive. I'm far from a Lewis fan, but they're locked in behind Stitt.

Now if you'd said that Stitt on tenor is no Wardell Gray or on alto is no Art Pepper -- yes on both counts. But less doesn't necessarily mean "futility" or "rot."

For those with Spotify, check out Stitt's "Propapagoon" from the 1958 Argo album "Sonny Stitt," backed by (have mercy) the Ramsey Lewis Trio. If you like that, the whole album is there.

Moms -- I was there, too. Wish you could have heard Stitt at a Chicago gig at the Jazz Showcase in the late 1970s with Mal Waldron comping behind him and Stitt paying close attention.

Moms -- why must you come on so often like a two-bit iconoclast? Everyone knows that Stitt takes a lot of sorting out, but to deny that there are gems to be found? I suggest "Sonny Stitt" on Chess-MCA (originally Argo 629, rec. 1958) and "Tune Up!" on 32 Jazz, and the date with Dizzy and John Lewis for Clef that produced "Mean To Me" and "Blues for Bird."

Wrong and dishonest, yes, but it seems like an additional (and perhaps fundamental) problem here might be that the host/co-producer was simply lazy to the point of stupidity. I would guess that he didn't even know that Hammond is not a universally revered figure but an equivocal one. In particular, he could hardly have read Otis Ferguson's famous portrait of Hammond, which was written more than 70 years ago!

Just arrived. Listened to the first three tracks of the Roscoe -- elegant cover design BTW, Carla -- and I was transported as if by a time machine back to 1965 and to how astonishing the sureness, force, and clarity of Roscoe's playing was at age 24 or 25. Listen to the way he edges into his solo on "Outer Space" -- as Terry Martin says in the notes, he "builds meticulously" (my emphasis); this doesn't sound like a young man's music.

Good point! I don't know if his style has been a big influence on a lot of players. It's not too easy to emulate :-) He is, however, a very important jazz tenor sax player! so says me = imho Yes, he's a big influence in certain circles.

My favorite tenor saxophone taxonomy: DAVE PELL Nino Tempo arthur rollini ziggy vines You have to guess who this is. You've got me. Who? (Anyway, nice to see Ziggy there, although for what obscure reason I don't know ... but he could play!) Q Sorry -- just an attempt on my part to construct an impossibly incongrous imaginary player. Maybe I should have stuck with my first thought: FRANK TRUMBAUER Big Jay McNeely

Probably related to that rash you get from Cannonball.

I hope they don't have to learn that interminable overrated solo from Newport. I recall that David Murray once orchestrated it. Be still my foolish heart.

I was assuming that, even though I didn't say it.

And Stovall with Red Allen, J.C. Higginbotham, and drummer Alvin Burroughs in a soundie!

Another excellent but semi-forgotten earthy "jump" altoist of the time was Don Stovall. Check out on Spotify his "Check Up" with Red Allen from (I think) 1947. And some Stovall on YouTube (with some nice Byas and top-drawer Lips Page on "Lafayette"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv1Dthm22Vw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O90qaOLXjZw

"Unlucky Woman" is on Spotify, along with a lot more vintage Pete Brown. And Humes sings her butt off on "Unlucky Woman," too.

As for early Bechet versus early Armstrong, here they are in 1924: Just speculating, but I would say that Bechet's arguably greater rhythmic fluidity at this point in their lives (Bechet age 27, Armstrong age 24) is mostly the result of Bechet's greater mastery of his instrument(s) -- he rides the soprano and the clarinet like a champion bronc buster -- while Armstrong's sense of where he wanted to get to as a soloist to was already a bit more long-lined/horizontal-dramatic that Bechet's. Another way to put it would be that Bechet's horns almost seem like literal extensions of his physical being and breath, while Armstrong is still playing the cornet, the way one might drive a car.

Chuck. are you pulling our appendages? My copy: Duke Ellington - The Private Collection 1924 \ Duke Ellington - The Private Collection - Vol 1\CD 1\13 The tenor plays eight bars of melody in the low register and sounds like he's a doubler fighting a borrowed leaky horn. Hope I'm not out of line. I have the same question. But assuming that Chuck isn't pulling our chain, I have two more questions: 1) Steve Lasker's liner notes to "Early Ellington" say that "The second reedman [on the "Immigration Blues" date] ... has never been positively identified by discographers". 2) If you are genuinely enamored of those eight bars on "Immigration Blues," why assume that what one hears there is unique to Robinson or whomever? A lot of jazz had been played on the saxophone by Dec. 29, 1926, and while my knowledge of recorded jazz of that era is certainly not comprehensive, I wouldn't be surprised if Robinson (or whoever) had stylistic predecessors.

I know that he himself was a Lester Young disciple, but I would say Stan Getz. Perhaps.

Q.E.D. in-DEED! Earl Anderza, too: And Jimmy Woods:

CD reissue, but this was the cover of the original LP: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&rlz=&q=sonny+rollins+plus+four+lp&gs_upl=1461l6574l0l10428l23l23l0l8l8l0l197l2072l3.12l15l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=8040273439003800100&sa=X&ei=5MWITqrmD-eFsgKI892zDw&ved=0CEgQ8gIwBA I bought it at E.J. Korvette's.

Happened across the article by Kyle Gann article on the web and was going to post a link, then discovered 7/4 had already posted it (not surprised and thanks!). It is an excellent article.and worth bringing to the forefront again. I like this little snippet: One of the most important stories in 20th-century music is the famous one in which Cage asked the young Feldman how one of his pieces was written. Feldman weakly replied that he didn't know how it was written, and Cage jumped up and down squealing like a monkey and shouting, "Isn't that wonderful! It's so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he did it." That story alone is enough to mark the private onset of a new historical era. Also: One of my favorite stories Feldman liked to tell was of Marcel Duchamp visiting an art class in San Francisco, where he saw a young man wildly painting away. Duchamp went over and asked, "What are you doing?" The young man said, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!" And Duchamp patted him on the back and said, "Keep up the good work." In music, it was Feldman, more than anyone else, who gave us permission not to know what the fuck we were doing. Read the rest of the article at the link. Finished Feldman's GIVE MY REGARDS TO EIGHT STREET. Filled with insights, humor and personality. Brooklyn meets high art. Brooklyn wins. BTW, I went to NYU and spent many an hour trooping up and down Eight Street. Feldman knew what he was doing, even if at some points he discovered what he was doing.

My review of Arthur Rollini's "My Thirty Years With the Big Bands," a likely to be passed over gem: ARTHUR ROLLINI [1987] Arthur Rollini’s name does not loom large in the history of jazz, even though he was the younger brother of a major artist (bass saxophonist and mallet percussionist Adrian Rollini) and a member of Benny Goodman’s saxophone section from the inception of Goodman’s band until 1939. But perhaps because of his cog-in-the-wheel status, Rollini has written a very moving autobiography , Thirty Years With the Big Bands --a book that captures the feel of the Swing Era from a sideman’s point of view with an attractive blend of stoicism and wit. Rollini’s tale also is suffused with a casual, peculiarly American grace, as though, like one of Sherwood Anderson’s narrators, the seeming innocence with which he addresses us were essential to his message. Rollini records that any early childhood memory was of “the brass and crystal Ansonia clock on our mantel, which never ceased functioning as long as it was wound every eighth day. It was always wound on time, and its little mercury pendulum kept beating back and forth and intrigued me. I would view it for hours.” Nothing more than nostalgia, one thinks, until, several pages and decade or so further on, Rollini’s father dies and “the only sound in the living room was the little clock on the mantel, which ticked away and gonged softly on the hour and half hour, its little pendulum still beating back and forth in perfect rhythm.” Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Rollini was a professional musician at age seventeen--traveling to London to work with Fred Elizade’s orchestra at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince of Wales often sat in on drums. (“He was, let us put it this way, not too good,” Rollini says.) Jazz fans will be most interested in Rollini’s account of his time with Benny Goodman, which confirms the widely held belief that Goodman was a difficult man to get along with. “Inconsiderate Benny, the best jazz clarinetist in the world!”--Rollini uses that tag, and variations thereof, time after time, even when a harsher adjective than “inconsiderate” might apply. Rollini and Dick Clark were Goodman’s initial tenor saxophonists, and “even at this stage,” Rollini says, “Benny would look at Dick’s bald head with disdain. He wanted a youthful looking band. ‘Fickle Benny,’ I thought, ‘the best jazz clarinetist in the world!’ Dick was a good player.” Quietly authoritative, Rollini’s tales of the sideman’s happy-sad life have a cumulative power. And two of them, when placed side by side, virtually define the big-band musician’s paradoxical role. In the first, Rollini is playing a dance with Goodman when he meets an old high school friend, one Johnny Baker, who requests that the band play “Always,” on the recording of which Rollini had a solo. At the dance, Rollini deliberately plays “something entirely different from what was on our recording, and after it was over Johnny Baker said to me, ‘What did you change it for?’” Then, in the mid-1940s, when Rollini was an NBC Radio staff musician, he stops in a Manhattan bar after work and notices that “two young men were playing the jukebox and had selected Will Bradley’s ‘Request for a Rhumba,’ which we had recorded in 1941. Finally I stepped off the bar stool and asked, “Boys, why are you playing that record over and over?” One replied, “We like the tenor sax solo.” I felt elated, but did not tell them that it was I who played it.” Arthur Rollini died in 1993.

Does "Gravy" have the intro Miles uses? (The Leo Parker sort of does.) "Gravy" does not have the Miles intro, which "El Sino" certainly hints at. Not at the beginning, but Gravy actually has it as outro! (El Sino and Walkin' use it both as intro and outro) I couldn't find a video of Gravy, but it exists on Spotify for those who have that. I have Spotify but don't find Ammons' "Gravy" there.