Larry Kart

Sorry -- guess I was wrong.

OK -- but let's be careful here about assuming that this is our Bill Barton or, if it is, that these charges are true.

But there is no list of jazz events in the print edition of the Sunday NYT that I get in suburban Chicago, and there used to be one there.

Don't know whether it's just this week or a recent change that I hadn't noticed before, but there is no "Jazz' category in today's Sunday NY Times "The Week Ahead" listings on page 2 of the Arts & Leisure section -- just "Theater," "Film," "Television," Pop," "Dance," "Classical," and "Art."

Check out Johnny Frigo (one of the composers, along with Herb Ellis and Lou Carter, of "Detour Ahead"). Frigo's way with the jazz violin was not the only way, but I like it a lot: http://www.npr.org/search/index.php?programId=24&prgTitle=Piano+Jazz&searchinput=johnny+frigo At the time of this encounter with Marian McPartland, he was a mere 81.

You had confidence in it? Why?

The Casals. I was impressed by the transfers. Best I'd heard of that material.

My already low hopes have been dashed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j9JOYtWpr0

Above I said that IMO Dave Binney sometimes runs figures into the ground. I've just heard his 2010 album "Barefooted Town" (CrissCross) and don't hear anything of the sort.

GRRR!

Got me some Mother Teresas signed by John Wayne Gacy.

The autographed by Wynton thing is kind of mind-boggling. How could anyone involved think this was a good idea?

You got a point there.

Thanks, Jim.

Thanks, Niko. I keep forgetting about the Smalls archive because normally I don't listen much to music on the computer.

Thanks everybody. I'm listening to clips. So far I like Jaleel Shaw's relaxed fluidity and would like to hear more of Logan Richardson, though he may prove to be too system-driven for me; again, I'd like to hear more. Even though he's been around for a good while and made lots of records, does Dave Binney count here? Some Binney I've liked a good deal; other Binney not so much. At times he seems to play beyond the point he should IMO, runs figures into the ground. BTW, does anyone have an answer to this YouTube problem. Some clips play right through, others stop and start with that rolling white ball effect, which leads me to depart. Any remedies?

No, Lage Lund is a guitarist, and because he's on Vinson's album and Vinson is on an album by another guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg I took the liberty (so to speak) of introducing that side topic. BTW, unless you're just toying with me, my original post identified both Lund and Kreisberg as guitarists. Radley is too.

After a post in praise of Vinson by Tom Storer on the "Live Music" forum, I weighed in to say that I'd found Vinson's playing attractive on a recent album by the at times rather slick but IMO talented guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, "Shadowless" (Vinson is a member of Kresiberg's band). Since then I bought a copy of Vinson's "Stockholm Syndrome" (Criss Cross), with guitarist Lage Lund, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Orlando LeFleming, and drummer Kendrick Scott. Though I basically like his rather lean, lithe, pony-like tone, this second encounter with Vinson left me feeling that there may be too many near-rote melodic and harmonic gestures in his playing for my taste, that it's too much about patterns of "substitutions," a la Osby perhaps. Vinson admits to a fondness for Paul Desmond -- not a negative in my book, though Desmond for that matter could get overfond of sequences, as Lee Konitz once pointed out. Oddly enough, though, I also hear a connection to circa 1958 Cannonball Adderley, when he was alongside Coltrane in Miles' sextet. I know -- how could "rather lean" go together with the inherent juiciness of Cannonball's timbre? Well, Vinson's timbre does seem to echo the relative evenness of Cannonball's characteristic timbral "gargle," albeit Vinson bleaches it out in a personal manner; and he also echoes the rather fiddly harmonic busy-ness that Cannonball got into while playing alongside Trane. I wonder if Vinson knows the work of Hal McKusick, who also had an at once lean and gargle-y tone and often wound up juggling a pack of similar melodic-harmonic gestures, though they were his own? I'll probably keep listening to Vinson but wonder what other altoists in this general bag have caught the ears of others here. If indeed they are in this bag, two that I've been impressed by are Greg Ward (from the Chicago area, now mostly based in New York), and Loren Stillman. (Edited to add: I know from abundant experience that Ward has a broader range than "mainstream modern," extending well into what is called "free" playing, and I believe Stillman does too. That the consequences of their broader range(s) can be heard in their "MM" work is probably among the reasons I'm drawn to them.) BTW, I've seen praise directed at Lage Lund, but so far I don't get it. If I had to pick, I'd take Kreisberg, for all his sometime slickness, or Nate Radley, though I've heard less of him recently than I would like, or Liberty Ellman (a very "system oriented" player, but for me his system works and doesn't seem to be playing him).

Thanks, Shawn. I thought I was losing my mind.

Running OS X Version 10.6.8 on the IMac I bought back in April, and tonight when I went to YouTube to listen to something there was almost no sound. Checked the volume control, and it was where it should be, diddled with it and still almost no sound. Went it to System Preferences; fiddling with the output volume slider there did nothing. Oddly, when I rebooted the computer, its "I'm back" sound was the same volume as always. Any thoughts, suggestions? P.S. I just played something on ITunes. Volume there is normal.

Nope. But this particular tale did seem rather Byzantine to me, especially the Phil Spector part.

Speaking as a guitarist and a jazz player generally I don't think Pat really changed at all. I heard him right at the beginning of his comeback (ca. 1984)and it was as if nothing had happened to him. Pretty remarkable. I think he changed some of the trappings, like switching to a solid-body. It sounds like his touch lightened some and that he might have switched to a lighter gauge string. But if you really listen his sound was always bass-heavy and dark, and still is. The content and concepts---the approach, and I won't go into all the details here---though relearned reveals no radical difference to me. No radical difference to me, either. OTOH, though I'm not aware of any recorded evidence of this, I did hear Tal Farlow in a club late in his career and was astonished by the increase in fluidity and timbral shading in his playing. He always had been a favorite, but this was Tatum-esque, almost more than my mind could absorb in real time. BTW, I'm aware that on some of his recordings for Concord, Tal had time problems. All I can say was that he sure didn't on these nights. One wonders if, like Raney, Tal had significant hearing loss, which of course could really screw you up time-wise, and either managed to make an adjustment or got hearing aids.

Among the many interesting details, there's this: 'Lesley Gore recalls that "It's My Party" was among some two hundred demos producer Quincy Jones brought to review with her in the den of her family home in February 1963. On hearing "It's My Party" Gore told Jones: "That's not half bad. I like it. Good melody. Let's put it on the maybe pile." The song proved to be the only demo Gore and Jones found agreeable.' (My emphasis ... and note Gore's fully collaborative role.) Also, the arranger-conductor on the demo recording that Gore herself then made and that was released (after much hugger-mugger) and became the big hit was Claus Ogerman.

The story behind the Gore recording of "It's My Party" is Byzantine in its complexity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_My_Party_(song) BTW, the "hook" of the song IMO is not so much the title phrase but the harmonic role played by the descending note that the words "Johnny" and "walked" fall on in the phrases "Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone..." and "Judy and Johnny just walked through the door..."

The Artie Shaw of the Swing Era and the Shaw of his 1949 big band and his small combo of the '50s were pretty different. And, though his name has come up in regard to his influence on Land and Golson, how could we forget Coltrane? Also, I hear a lot of change-evolution over Coleman Hawkins' long career. Rollins' too.