Larry Kart

Don't know where to find it right now, but somewhere on the 'Net I once hear a wonderful snippet of tape from a London recording session -- maybe not the "Cry Me a River" date, but one with the same guitar and bass backing -- where she profanely, earthily expresses her unhappiness with the chosen tempo and other specific musical details, including her own intonation and/or uncertainty about what key would best suit this song for her. Clearly she was one hell of a terrific woman, and she sure did know her music.

Actually, barring copious use of laxatives, defecating on stage is very difficult to do. The presence of other people tends to tighten the sphincter. I speak from personal experience, of course.

I'm sorry, Joel, but while there's nothing I could argue with in what you said, it's also so broadly based that I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with, say, your "of course originality is good, but with certain qualifiers, i.e.: if it's based on what came before (since I know of nothing that comes out of nothing) and has some meaning to someone other than oneself." Who doesn't fit that criteria that anyone of us here would want to pay attention to?

If we all got jazzed first thing in the morning, the world would be a better place.

Of course. But that welcoming vibe is a function of his belief in/involvement in his music. People get that and dig it.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra (and countless other interesting and very popular outfits down through time -- for the young Sonny Rollins it was Louis Jordan) have no doubt served as "gateways," but what they did was not conceived or executed by them in "gateway" terms and/or in order to perform some "gateway" function. Think that way and you've got Wynton trying to be Leonard Bernstein at one end of the spectrum and Lord knows what at the other. To put it another way, if the people making the music aren't doing what they really want to do, why should they expect that anyone else would really want to experience it? IIRC, the Mahavishnu Orchestra played balls out con amore -- as did (for that matter) Roscoe Mitchell.

So,,,you're saying that you want people to leave home, spend money, and just sit there and watch you work? Gee, when you put it that way, it's a miracle anybody goes out! But that's what I go out to do about three times a week and am almost always richly rewarded. About the dancing, you might say that I'm dancing in my head. I certainly don't sit there solving formulas, drawing diagrams, and wondering about sententious remarks I might make. To borrow an old phrase, It's the most fun I can have with my clothes on.

Doesn't prove anything either way, but on p. 288 of John Chilton's Hawkins bio, there is this 1957 quote from Green (after he'd listened to Hawkins' album of ballads with string orchestra backing, "The Gilded Hawk"): "If the improviser can improve on what the composer wrote instead of destroying it, more power to his embouchure."

I agree that Gil's writing is not "dated," though I suppose it is dateable. As for playing these charts with another trumpet soloist, it all depends on who that is. For instance, Leo Smith just kills IMO on those versions of electric Miles-era pieces. Someone I can imagine playing beautifully and individually on the music Gil wrote for Miles would by John McNeil. Also, our sometime board member Trumpet Guy (Phil Grenadier). Hey, Dave Douglas might be nice too. It should be someone with some poetry in his or her soul but who is essentially his own man (or woman -- Ingrid Jensen? my pal Jaime Branch?) and who isn't a Miles emulator (that's why I wouldn't think that Blanchard or Wallace Roney would be that satisfying -- you and they probably would be thinking in terms of how close they are to the model).

Just asking for information -- no "reason" to get testy about it. And, please, I'm not one of those professional "jazz savers" that rightly get your back up. Yo man, I'm so not "testy" about this! I cashed my reality check long enough ago to know that it's gonna be what it's gonna be, nothing more. Been thinking about changing my name from Sangrey to Sanguine, in fact. fwiw/the fact that this "testy" post came after a post of yours, and in the middle of a dialogue between us should not be construed as a comment to/at you or your post(s). Maybe I've gotten enough of a Digital Mentality now that I post a "general" comment in the middle of a series of "specific" ones and not even notice it, much like how at work now I can email, IM, and interact w/task-specific software all at once (it did take some readjustment time, though, like...years...). Anyway, that's the deal, really. sorry if i failed to properly "directionalize". OK, I get it. No problem. Also, I've been talking and thinking in a contentious bag on this thread, and sometimes one "projects."

Just asking for information -- no "reason" to get testy about it. And, please, I'm not one of those professional "jazz savers" that rightly get your back up.

Agree totally with Fasstrack about the dumb, exploitive nastiness of Gavin's Baker bio and the virtues of Jeroen De Valk's. Gavin's real subject, as the book eventually makes clear, should have been filmmaker-photographer Bruce Weber ("Let's Get Lost" and those sexually equivocal ad photos of naked young men and Labrador retrievers romping around in swimming pools). It's Weber that Gavin really knows and cares about, though Gavin cares about Weber so much because he pretty much hates him.

I dunno, Larry -- that's just a clock (and a boring one, according to Harry Lyme). Surely the Chairman of the Board would expect his own spelling... Geez -- to be "cuckoo" means to be "nutty." Consult a dictionary.

Looks and sounds like a heck of a lot of fun, and maybe a good deal more than that, but it happened over there and not here for what reasons do you think? That is, is it a function of their virtues and circumstances, or of our scenes' failure to be in a certain way? And is it over there a response to recorded music that already exists, or is it interacting with music that is being made by musicians over there right now?

If I called bullshit on JackChick25/Carole, then I must equally call it here. No energy for detail right now, but let me ask you this - why would anybody take the word of a "jazz musician" as to what people are or aren't dancing to? That's kinda like asking a vegan who's making the best steaks in town. Point taken. But I still agree with my friend that whoever is or is not dancing to what music these days, that "certainly isn't the fault of jazz" -- if only because, as I think Jim would agree, it isn't in the power of "jazz" these days to remedy that "fault" in any significant manner.

Everyone is accepting the statistics in that NEA study: http://www.jazz.com/jazz-blog/2009/7/7/ugl...e-jazz-audience as sound when IMO they are extremely dubious. In particular, I find it very hard to believe that 17.5% of adults 18-24 attended a jazz event in 1982 (this being the base-line figure that the study gives us). Do you know how many Americans were in that age group in Nov. 1982? No less than 29,917,000: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/v...916/p25-916.pdf So that means that some 5,235,475 people in that 18-24 age group (17.5% of 29,917,000) attended a jazz event in 1982? (Remember, that's only 18-24 year olds, which means that 5,235,475 people would have to be a good deal less than the total jazz audience in 1982-- and also that's people who went to actual "events," not people who just bought records or only listened to jazz on the radio). Well, no matter loosely one defines jazz, I think that's an absurdly large figure, especially when you recall what 1982 was like on the jazz scene. And if that base-line figure is absurd, why trust the other figures? Remember, we're talking about trends that are not merely anecdotal but supposedly have a rock-ribbed statistical basis. BTW, while I'm at it, a digression: As you can see, there's only one category in the NEA study where median age and attendance shows almost no drop off from 1982 to 2002 -- art museums. OK, let's accept that as fact for the moment. Why would that be so? What are the art museums doing right that everyone else is doing plumb wrong? Are art museums, for instance, doing OK because they're reaching out to young audiences in hipper, more attractive, or energtic and effective ways than everyone else is? Well, I'm sure they're trying, we've all seen evidence of that, but enough to account for that supposed big difference? Nonsense. It's that the loose-limbed forms of entertainment/amusement/enlightenment that art museums offer to young couples is ... well, art museums are relatively cheap casual-date places with pleasant trimmings and full of stuff you can talk about if care to. You can do things if you're in charge of a museum that will drive people away, like filling the galleries with hot-steaming offal and charging $100 to get in, but otherwise you're going to be OK; a good museum is like an indoor park, and what's good about it in 1982 isn't going to be, or need to be, that much different in 2002, 'cause Renoir and Rembrandt and Velazquez and Vermeer tend not to go out of style. No great lessons there, and in particular no endorsement of the need to engage in great gobs of "outreach" to youth or whomever as a form of solution/salvation.

No -- "cuckoo."

Good morning! http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...st&p=942341 The golden oldies always bear repeating.

Also (with apologies to Chuck), Duct tape, WD-40 and a hammer.

And drugs, sex, and fried chicken.

Big Beat Steve -- But you said that "stabs in the back administered by those who felt themselves to be the true and only 'keepers of the flame' of jazz" did in the neo-Swing movement." Show me one piece of evidence that that is what happened. It was fun or kind of fun, it did some good in spreading the good word (in the ways that you described), and then it kind of went away. Nobody chased it away AFAIK; enough of the people who enjoyed it eventually moved on to other things or were no longer of an age where they had the time and the inclination to go dancing that much. And the next semi-generation of dancers wanted to dance to their thing. Or let me turn that around -- can you think of any comparable movement and/or fad in any form of entertainment of that era that has remained as popular as it once was and that has done so because there were no self-appointed keepers of the flame expressing doubts about it?

Ah, yes, the Squirrel-Nut Rabbis. You really think that those Neo-Swing bands were on the verge of successfully "turning back the clock" in some long-term manner but failed to do so because of "stabs in the back administered by those who felt themselves to be the true and only "keepers of the flame" of jazz? It was, as you say, a more or less amiable fad, and when it had its day with one segment of the young dancing crowd, that was that. The objections of curmedgeons like myself was to those who proclaimed this stuff to be the music's artistic salvation, and I can't believe that one single dancer, booker, or club owner was deterred by what we had to say, assuming they were even aware of it. Those acts got gigs when they drew and didn't when things cooled down. Shades of Andrew Dice Clay.

A response to Teachout's piece from a friend of my age who once was a very good amatuer drummer (he played in a band with bassist Cameron Brown in college): I quickly read that Teachout article and it seems way off to me, starting with its statistics. The audience for everything is shrinking -- that's what audiences are doing in the 21st century as available options multiply and attention spans wither. I don't believe that, in 2002, 10% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance -- I just don't believe it. My guess is, the figure would be closer to 1% or 2%. And what was the percentage back in 1961 or '62 -- 5%? Teachout's thing about jazz evolving from a genuinely popular song-based idiom into challenging concert music is the same point that Ken Burns "Jazz" tried to make, and it didn't seem relevant to me; nobody's dancing to anything but rock 'n roll, which certainly isn't the fault of jazz.

Terry Teachout is an intelligent guy, but the last paragraph of this piece makes me want to scream: "By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now." It's not a matter of "how to pitch it" -- to "young listeners" or to listeners of any damn age. It's a matter of how to make some music that will inherently/more or less naturally be meaningful -- and by that I mean meaningful in that it fully, unapologetically engages the mind and heart, not "This is good for you" meaningful, or "This is better than something that we think is crap but won't say so 'cause we're doing some pitching here," or "Please like our stuff because it's a national cultural treasure," or "Try this Kool-Aid Lite version of our stuff that isn't wholly unlike some stuff that we already think you like," or "Dig this -- it's a swinging little musical story about Barack Obama, and you already voted for him, right?" etc. I mean, when jazz did have audiences that sustained the music economically, socially, spiritually, etc,, how did that work? Look into the mirrors of our own life experiences, and we all know the answers. Did "pitching" play a key role in what grabbed our attention and earned our loyalty? I don't think so, not much and certainly not pitching of the "This is good for you" sort. (The only sort of pitching that did work up to a point, though it also had its problems, was the "This is hip" sort.) Availability/exposure -- yes, that is a problem. If you don't ever get to hear the music much, there ain't much hope. But if the music has that "thing" and is in circles/places where it can be heard in a comfortable/accessible manner (I know "comfortable" is a simple word for a potentially complex set of circumstances), then people will find it out. The current Chicago scene is a sterling example; it works, within economics limits to be sure, but it does work: good novel music is being made that has been found by audiences that find it engaging, and is found by them because they find it engaging. Further, in my experience most of the kind of pitching that Terry T. and others (especially most of the arts organization/foundation people) inevitably have in mind is virtually antithetical to the sound circular process that I briefly described above ever the hell taking place. Yes, those arts organization/foundation folks have money, and properly applied dough is never unwelcome, not at all. But what most of those people want to do is march at the head of some cultural parade while they also get credit for there being a parade in the first place. What they won't do, except in very rare instances, is take a look at what already is working and that might work better and more easily with discreet applications of dough, and just provide the dough to the right creative people who also know how to make things happen practically and then just get the hell of out the way. But they can't do that; it leaves them feeling useless, or not "useful" in the ways that they want to/need to feel. To put it in another but perhaps usefully crude manner, you can't be coerced, nudged, shamed, chucked under the chin, etc. into really wanting to f--- someone. And if you do f--- him or her under those circumstances, you're probably not going to want to f--- him or her again. Oh, wait -- that brings to mind the one real answer that Terry T's cry of woe implies (at least to me): Rather than come up with more chin-chucking, beard-pulling cultural schemes and the like, let's just pay people to go hear jazz, pay them all the money that the arts organization/foundations would have poured into projects that had no real artistic reason to get off the ground or that just would have fallen between the cracks as it gets passed along. Bingo -- the jazz audience problem is over!