Larry Kart

BTW, Joe Benjamin plays great on "New Orleans Suite" -- really orchestral thinking/understanding; he's like a section all by himself. And Rufus Jones is in fine form, too, not indulging in his "speediness."

His writing often has a random, off-the-top-of-my-head quality, and sometimes the top of his head randomly ends up where it ought not to be. Some people seem to think that writing about jazz means that you should "improvise."

This is the one that blew me away in its original Folkways LP form: http://weeniecampbell.com/mambo/index.php?...5&Itemid=42

Am enjoying the set, which arrived Tuesday, but reading through Friedwald's booklet, I came across this: "'I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me' provides a swinging opener.... Lee sings with such clarity that it amplifies the oddness of the opening lines, 'Your eyes are blue/Your kiss is too.' (What does that mean? What is a blue kiss? Punk lipstick?)" The answer of course is that the song's lyric begins: "Your eyes of blue/your kisses too/I can't believe/that you're in love with me." But then I once believed that paramedics were medics who arrived at isolated accident scenes by parachute.

From here: http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showpost.ph...p;postcount=288 Covering the recording sessions for Jazz Journal, Stanley Dance remarked that, "when he (Tubby) came to record for Columbia, he was even more impressive. It was midnight on October 3rd and the trio assembled in the studio to accompany him consisted of Horace Parlan, Dave Bailey and George Duvivier. Between sets at Birdland with Gigi Gryce, Eddie Costa came over and joined in on vibes. The next night, the same personnel was augmented by Clark Terry...."

I like it very much. Would like to say whole lot more, but I'm kind of hung up on figuring out why Denny sounds a good deal less like Bill Evans to me now than I thought he did at the time. Actually, I think I know why, but I lack the technical vocabulary to go into detail with anywhere near the security I would wish. In part, though, it's that in Denny's music the relationship between bass lines and right-hand lines is always so clean and clear, and things are so clearly (again, that term "clearly" -- sorry if it doesn't help) parcelled out among registers (in this, and at times in his touch, he reminds some of Horace Silver, odd though that may seem), while in post-Village Vanguard Bill Evans there is IMO a tendency for things to get rather uncomfortably (even, I would say, almost unfunctionally at times) "scrunched" or "stacked up" in the middle register and also "scrunched" in terms of placing several layers of somewhat askew harmonic sweetness on top of another and rubbing those semi-askew sweetnesses against each other to create further levels of what I think of as the musical equivalent of bitter chocolate. The effect is close to fingernails on a blackboard for me, but I'm in a tiny minority here. In any case, Denny doesn't do any of that, and aside from certain Evans-inspired rhythmic ideas and the overall concept of how a piano trio should/could operate, he seems to be mostly his own man. Probably not a set to listened to in one swallow, as I pretty much did, but already I'm going back to pieces and hearing things I missed the first time. On the other hand, the aforementioned clarity does come a bit close to neatness/cleverness at times; one of the young Zeitlin's models was Billy Taylor. Also, as I think I may have mentioned in a prior post, I heard Denny a good deal at local sessions beginning in 1957, and he was amazing back then.

What a lovely midi realization..... Doh! Because it's midi, it's not actually from "Dumbo" but "as heard" in "Dumbo." Wonder if anyone ever asked Mulligan why he thought it was amusing to wrap up so many tunes this way (at least it seemed to be so many but might have been just "Bernie's Tune"), especially in the days of the Mulligan Sextet. I found myself dreading those codas.

"Entrance of the Gladiators" or "March of the Gladiators" or "Entry of the Gladiators" (originally titled "Grande Marche Chromatique") is a military march composed in 1897 by the Czech composer Julius Fucík. http://themes.mididb.com/disney/ The above, almost incredibly manic clip (it may be dangerous to your health) is from Disney's "Dumbo."

Two that come to mind are All The Things You Are But Not For Me The former for musical reasons, the latter for the Ira Gershwin lyrics as well (capitalization, punctuation and line breaks are his): Old Man Sunshine -- listen, you! Never tell me Dreams Come True! Just try it -- And I'll start a riot. Beatrice Fairfax -- don't you dare Ever tell me he will care; I'm certain It's the Final Curtain. I never want to hear From any cheer- Ful Pollyannas, Who tell you Fate Supplies a Mate -- It's all bananas!

Whence cometh the prancing-on-tiptoes intro to "Shaw Nuff"? Sounds kind of mock-Spanish, like a bullfight-associated thing that ought to be from "Carmen" or something else by Bizet, but I've never been able to pin it down. Probably it's from another 19th Century piece that used to be played on a lot of parlor pianos but is now obscure. Any ideas? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4BpN-YMck

My sense is - and feel free to correct me, anyone - that most of the "with strings" jazz albums were created with the goal of trying to quickly broaden the audience for jazz artists. Maybe that is why more thought didn't go into choosing the arrangers or aiming for more adventurous approaches. Still, some of these albums are better than others. I like Ralph Burns's arrangements for Lester Young. Also like the arrangements on the Sonny Still album (can't remember who did them). If you mean the Stitt album with strings of Ellington-associated material on Catalyst, the arranger was Bill Finegan (of Sauter-Finegan Orchestra fame). There were, I believe, at least two other dates with Stitt and strings, one for Granz with Ralph Burns charts, another for Prestige with charts by Billy Ver Planck.

Might try out my recently acquired hearing aids tonight on this: 10:00PM at the Hungry Brain, 2319 W Belmont, 773.935.2118 Mike Salter Group Little Women : Darius Jones, Travis Laplante, Ben Greenberg, Jason Nazary am unfamiliar with both bands, though sound samples of Little Women suggest that they're not for someone with new hearing aids.

Holy cow -- without knowing about it in advance, just tuning it in, I saw the very first episode of the MTM Show on local TV tonight. Magic. It's the one with Ed Asner's famous line: "Mary -- you've got spunk [beat...beat]. I hate spunk." Also, the episode's final scene, in which Mary dumps her old visiting boyfriend, is beautifully written and played -- very emotionally true, I think, to what a lot of real-world analogues to Mary Richards were doing and feeling at the time. Finally, kudos to the writers for making it perfectly clear that the old boyfriend is there only because he thinks he can ball Mary that night.

Frank Whostock?? Here ya go: http://www.archive.org/details/psych-out_06

You're not wrong, lovely stuff. I think Cliff likes you, Larry...... The sly trombone strikes.

So I talked myself into it -- just ordered the set, which I should have done long ago.

Or this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-gO9TpElS4...feature=related No Barbour solo here, but what he plays with and behind Lee is unreal.

Or this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2ho19VbOiU...feature=related where the implicit sexual frisson between them is something else.

Could have been this clip, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ1TA-LwQKw...feature=related but as nice as Barbour is here, my admittedly vague memory says that it was something even more impressive. Also, he sounds more Charlie Christian-like than I recalled (that languid swing!), though perhaps drawing from common sources (Barbour was with Wingy Manone as far back as 1934).

Wow -- I have no memory of that, though I do recall once hearing a Lee-Barbour performance of that vintage (perhaps it was a film clip) where Barbour took a stunningly good solo that very much in his own bag stylistically, IIRC hip and modern in every good sense but also related to the Carl Kress-George Van Eps tradition.

Solal makes the date.

I interviewed Newhart once, over lunch at I think the Bel Air Country Club in connection with that movie ("The First Family"?) in which he played a befuddled, Jimmy Carter-like president, with Madeline Kahn as his wife and Gilda Radner as his daughter. The movie was not so hot, but Newhart's account of it (I hadn't seen it yet) was hilarious. What a nice guy. One thing I loved in particular -- and this comes through in much of his work -- is that if he thinks something funny is up, he can (even if it's his own doing) step back from it a bit and find it genuinely funny himself. It's as though his sense of the multi-faceted absurdities of life is never-ending.

Lyle Delp.

That's it! Rickles was quite good and in character throughout, especially in the first episode. One heck of a Garry Marshall-Jerry Belson script that was.

Last night saw another MTM (an unhappy Lou at an awards banquet), part of a Newhart (another early rather blah one), and two Dick Van Dyke shows last night -- the one with Don Rickles as the hold-up man in the elevator, and the sequel where the the A. Brady show people entertain inmates at the prison where Rickles has been incarcerated for eight years (though Rose Marie's "hotcha" number could be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment). Lord, was Van Dyke a brilliant physical comic when things called for that, as these two episodes do -- very Keaton-like. And MTM on both her show and the Van Dyke shows -- given the "normality" of her characters, one tends to forget (or at least I do) what a terrific subtle performer she was. Those "takes" of hers!