Larry Kart

I remember being knocked out by a band that Freddie led in 1969 at Ahmad Jamal's Club Tejar on S. Michigan Ave. -- James Spaulding, Kenny Barron, Junie Booth, and (I think) Louis Hayes. That was some rhythm section. Don't believe this particular quintet was recorded.

Thanks. And McKusick had a way with the alto. Excellent clarinetist, too.

What you wrote, and what I have some problem with, is the second sentence of this: "I've heard a lot of his records as a leader and sideman and they're really not much in the scheme of things. Unless you're white and have a thing for neglected Negro jazz musicians." What that says pretty clearly is that the only reason those who think that Gryce is more than "not much in the scheme of things" could have for thinking so is that they are "white and have a thing for neglected Negro jazz musicians." The phrase "unless you're white" doesn't seem to leave much wiggle room. My feelings about Gryce, which are that he's a talented composer and a fair-to-middling soloist, don't have anything to do with his sounding like a "Negro." In fact, if you'd played a Gryce recording for me way back when, before I knew who he was, I might have guessed that he was a blood brother of Hal McKusick (who IMO is a more interesting player, in a somewhat similar, rather delicate-agile vein). On the other hand, I don't think you're a racist for saying what you did -- just someone who's out to provoke.

I've been reading it since the late 70s - the biggest change I've noticed in recent years is that the writers are as likely to have become interested in classical music as a result of listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer as from the what they heard in the music room at Eton or at Mummy's soirees. When I first started reading it there was an assumption that you already knew certain things - it had a rather gentlemen's clubby atmosphere. Today its writers seems very aware that the person reading the magazine might be right at the start of an interest in music, with a very limited background. Some can still be snooty at times but thankfully most seem more concerned to share an enthusiasm for music rather than show off how hard it is to impress them. Its changes reflect the social changes of the last half-century in Britain where interest in classical music has broadened beyond the social and intellectual elites who once saw it as their exclusive domain. ********** I seem to recall the jazz reviews were there in the late 70s, disappeared in the 80s, came back again for a short time (can't recall when), then vanished for good. Yes, the current/recent Gramophone reflects those changes, but I would read what happened differently -- through the lens of the publishers' and editors' (and eventually of course the writers') anxiety to think of some attitude to strike that would woo (or at least not alienate) this new, less elite audience for classical music. The problem, though, is that to the degree that audience exists, I don't think it really needs or wants the Gramophone in any conceivable incarnation. What I would call the pandering and dumbing down that is characteristic of the magazine in recent times (yet another story about some artist whose chief virtues are that he/she is young and cute or voluptuous or handsome and, one hopes, British and, say, plays Radiohead pieces arranged for mallet percussion and orchestra) only further alienates what's left of the old audience without winning over a new one. A further aspect of that problem -- when one read, say, Alan Blyth on opera or song or Robert Layton on Scandinavian symphonists one felt that within reason that they actually believed what they said, that their enthusiasms and disparagements were genuine and based in their responses to the music at hand. Today, I find few Gramophone reviewers and virtually no writers of feature articles who give me that feeling. Instead, their eyes seem to be on their, or their bosses', sense of who we might be and what we might want to hear. It's just another version of what began to happen to newpapers (in America at least) back in the 1980s. Faced with downward readership trends, the bosses decided that readers were being put off by the papers' implicit or explicit air of authority and decided to give it away in public, in effect -- as though this act would in itself be regarded as winning. Our editor famously said: "We want our readers to think of the Tribune as their friend" -- by which he meant, "Tell us what you already like, and we'll give you that." Problem is, even if we were right about what the readers already liked (Lord, the days of focus groups), why the heck assume that they wanted that from us? I mean, even if the evidence about what they already liked was accurate, a moment's thought would suggest that this probably meant that they already were getting a good deal of that from somewhere else. Meanwhile, of course, a paper that had shorn itself of authority in public was only accelerating its eventual worthlessness.

I got on after a glitch or too. Keep trying. Should be fun and useful, too. I have fond memories of the Grandma Gramophone of the old days, before things went haywire -- rampant boosterism (always present to some extent in pockets, but this was madness) being followed by a desparately whorish abdication of all judgment across the board. IIRC, this happened in stages beginning in the mid- to late-1980s. Now it's virtually worthless IMO. Hey, Max Harrison wrote about romantic piano music for them off and on for some years, though I don't see a way to search by authors of reviews.

Well, perhaps you could advise me about a better set of Cab Calloway, Larry. MG I like the orchestra, but Cab himself gives me the creeps, so I'm not the best person for advice. The Mosaic Chu Berry box?

This Mozart Symphony box with Ernest Bour, which I've seen recently at Half-Price Books, is a gem: http://www.amazon.de/The-Essential-Symphon...2786&sr=1-7 or in English but without sound samples: http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Symphonies-No...3106&sr=1-2 Got mine a couple of years ago. Don't know about any of their jazz stuff. Would be reluctant there on moral grounds in any case.

Bassist Eddie DeHaas and pianist Bubi Chen -- both from Indonesia.

Sun Ra

Leaving aside the whole Stalinization thing and probably the notion of deception as well, a great deal of what's cropped up over the years (certainly from WWII on) in Europe and various other non-American scenes fits this description in several respects. First, on the Swedish scene, say, there's been the natural, meaningful infusion of various elements -- folkish, temperamental -- that are part of the national/regional character. Lars Gullin would be one of many examples. Second -- and this is particularly tricky and often fascinating -- when you've got undeniably talented musicians who are attuned to what's going on in the U.S.A. but lack total deep familiarity with that music's context, especially the U.S. scene's elusive sense of what's hip, choices will be made that are very interesting and subtly different than the choices that were being made and would ever be made back in the U.S. A favorite example, because the music's stylistic boundaries are not at all openly unconventional, is the early 1960s work of Sweden's excellent Harry Arnold Orchestra. Some of the writing, by pianist Jan Johannsen and others, might be a personnel offshoot/translation of George Russell's thinking, and who in the U.S. was writing arrangements for big bands in 1962 that showed an interest in George Russell, let alone taking it to personal places? Also, there are two arrangements of Ornette pieces, and both the band and the soloists, especially Arne Domnerus, are way ahead of any of their U.S. counterparts in their understanding of and sympathy toward what Ornette was doing. In part that probably had to do with a certain distance from U.S. scene's then prevailing stylistic/social warfare. Can one imagine, say, Phil Woods playing an Ornette piece with understanding and sympathy in 1962? And then there's the whole crazy Dutch scene, and Germany, and France, etc. Another favorite example is that Tadd Dameron's music had a much greater impact on musicians in Great Britain in the 1950s, hear Jimmy Deuchar's album "Pub Crawling," than it did in the U.S., and that those musicians, many of them Scots like Deuchar, took it to a place of their own.

And plays his ass off!

Here's another way to look at it -- and again I'll come back to my current favorite example, Harold Land, with a sidebar for Kenny Dorham. I think I'm drawn to those men as examples in part because they're both very distinctive players who became distinctive players more or less in front of our eyes (Dorham more so than Land, but that's probably because there's more early Dorham on record than there is early Land), and also because neither of them was a dazzling virtuoso -- thus there's little temptation, if you respond to their work, to think of it as being essentially the product of the sort of study and application that rhymes with unusual physical skills, unusual rapidity of mental functioning, etc., though of course both men were quite learned musicians. Further, I like Land and Dorham as examples because their early influences were fairly clear -- Coleman Hawkins. Lucky Thompson, and Charlie Parker for Land, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, and Miles Davis for Dorham. I'm not enough of a student of Dorham's early career to be exactly certain when he made his first recordings that show a distinctive personality, but I know he made a good many early on that do not. I'm thinking in particular of that 1946 Kenny Clarke 52nd Street Boys date with Navarro alongside him in the front line where Dorham sounds like a Navarro wannabe who isn't really making it -- nor, I'm sure, would Dorham have ever become a truly successful player if he'd continued to try to build something personal in response to Navarro's virtuoso lyricism, or, as is apparent in other early KD recordings, in response to Gillespie's differently virtuosic ... terms, fail me here, but how about virtuoso surrealism for DG? In other words, Dorham had to realize, had to find in himself, that a certain deep sobriety, a lyricism that was not ecstatic but almost methodical in the way it so carefully parsed things out, was the way he needed to go. And while Miles's playing certainly pointed KD down that path, KD's almost French horn-like timbral colorations, which are so crucial to what he eventually came up with and inseperable from his similarly "shaded" harmonic thinking, are his things alone. What I'm getting at here, is that as men like Dorham and Land worked at their music, sorting through what was in the air and what they liked (discarding in KD's case in particular some things that they dug but that didn't suit their skills and temperaments), they uncovered/exposed/developed what might be called the "grain" of their selves -- the way someone sculpting a chunk of wood will find himself interacting with/taking account of the grain of that material. Or, to switch images -- both Land and Dorham are IMO intensely vocal players, and I think it's safe to say that the personal "voices" they developed were, given their acknowledged influences, more an act of discovering and then refining what already was potentially there within themselves, the way one's actual singing voice can be developed and refined through study but remains in and of you. Thinking of Land here, while his influences are again quite clear, even the most obviously pregnant example of Lucky Thompson does not I think lead that readily to the unique "keening" timbre (and all that goes with it) that makes Harold Land Harold Land. In particular, I know of pedagogy that suggests that one play their respective instruments, in timbral terms, the way Land and Dorham came to do. Especially revealing in that respect is that while Dorham, once he was fully formed, remained more or less in the same lovely place, Land became caught up in the wake of Coltrane, absorbed a heck of a lot of Trane with (some feel) some loss of individuality on his part, but still remained recognizably clearly himself -- this, I feel sure, because the grain of the vocalized self that Land previously had uncovered/exposed/developed was so strong and deep that he couldn't, in an "objective" manner, a la that Virgil Thomson quote, have emulated Trane without his own personal/ lyrical/vocal continuing to be present -- though we're all aware of lots of players who did emulate Trane at that time in an "objective" manner and ended up sounding both fairly false and faceless.

Zoot Sims -- "Zoot Sims Play Four Altos" (ABC-Paramount). Does that count as four sessions? Pretty remarkable album BTW, both for Zoot and for George Handy's writing. On the previously mentioned John Benson Brooks "Folk Jazz USA," Zoot's alto on (I think) "Sara Jane," is otherworldly in the way he connects with the old-timey, hill-country feel. Believe it or not, it reminds of something Roscoe Mitchell plays on either "Numbers 1&2," "Congliptious," or "Old/Quartet" (all Nessa).

Jim -- Is that the Bluebird of Happiness?

Toward the end of this long but IMO very interesting 2005 interview with Marty Khan: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=16904 there is much chapter and verse info on "the Lincoln Center establishment depriving other jazz artists of gigs due to their draining of non-profit or foundation budgets" and a number of related topics. P.S. Even if you find Khan hard to take, mosey on down to toward the end of the interview to the parts I mentioned above.

I may be missing your point, Larry, but it seems to me that jazz HAS to be both at the same time. It has to represent the community and ALSO to be a personal expression. Failure to do both together leads, on the one hand, to ivory tower-ism and the need for a charitable grant and, on the other, to Najee and Gerald Albright. In both cases, the musicians rely on suits for their income - different kinds of suits, I'll agree, but one kind's no better than the other. But there always was - and I think still is - a wide variety of musicians doing both, from Trane to Gator Tail, Von Freeman to Gloria Coleman (to ensure that those still around aren't missed out ). These musicians were/are all a part of their community and their voices are both their own and the voice of the community. But, as Thompson said, there's no prescribed way to do it. Gator is no more right than Trane; Von no more right than Gloria. MG Thomson is talking about something else altogether, as I understand him. But first let me put his whole quote back up: Distinguishing between an “objective” music in which one can “represent other people's emotions” and a “music of personal lyricism”(which would seem to be the kind of art that jazz is), Thomson goes on to explain that “you can write or execute music of the most striking evocative power by objective methods, but you cannot project a personal sentiment you do not have. If you fake it knowingly, ; and if you fake it unknowingly, you are, merely by deceiving yourself, attempting to deceive your audience. Naturally, experienced persons can teach the young many things about the personalized repertory. But there is no set way it must be rendered, and any attempt to impose one on it takes the life out of it.” My understanding is that what Thomson means by an “objective” music in which one can “represent other people's emotions” is a music that is some essential ways dramatic -- like all opera and oratorios or Beethoven's Egmont Overture or Strauss's Don Juan, or Sibelius's Finlandia or his Tapiola, or Debussy's Le Mer and his piano pieces or Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, etc., etc. -- but in which the emotions being conveyed and evoked are not essentially personal to the composer but represent what the characters are feeling or the mood of the more or less dramatic situation/story/external states of mind being portrayed. A "music of personal lyricism," on the other hand, is just that, a music in which one has little doubt that the sentiment being expressed is that of the composer/player. From Schumann on, examples abound, and in jazz it is the norm, though not with every performer -- a figure like Jelly Roll Morton or Coleman Hawkins, not so much or not as directly; a figure like Ben Webster or Lester Young, very much so. And as Thomson says, you cannot "project a personal sentiment you do not have" (by "project" here, I think he means "dramatize" for consumption by others -- i.e. you must transmit it "directly" ("it" being the personal lyrical sentiment) because you yourself feel it. If you don't feel it but have mustered the "objective" means of representing that sentiment that is the expression of another person, you're either knowingly faking or unknowingly deceiving yourself. To bring this back to jazz terms, think of (off the top of my head) Harold Land. As with most talented jazz musicians, he has a readily identifiable style or styles (the way he played changed some over time), but one always felt that what Harold Land played essentially was Harold Land. Now if you were influenced by Harold Land in the course of your own development as a man and a musician, that would be one thing -- his self and soul reaching out to your self and soul, or probably vice versa. But if you chose to take the forms of Land's personal lyrical self-expression and, for whatever reason, re-create them objectively and more or less externally, without placing your own self on the scales or in the mix, you might be precise as heck with those objective externals, but you will be "dramatizing that which should be transmitted directly" -- either by Land himself or by a you who has put his own self in the balance. I know -- these terms and this talk is probably getting too verbally vague to be of much use. Bur it's the best that I can do right now.

Yes, there is, thank the Lord. But how is any of this "maybe even partly because of -- Marsalis and JALC"? None of that creative music IMO is related to anything Marsalis and JALC have done in musical terms. Or do you mean that in the face of the b.s. "success" of Marsalis and JALC, some people decided that they had to take care of the business of the business part of their relatively small but at best musically genuine scenes much more assiduously than they would have done before? Maybe so, but by that token you can justify almost anything -- like maybe Grendel was the best thing that ever happened to place where Beowulf hung out.

I went on about this at length in my book, but it's important to remember that the WM and Friends thing was at least two things at once -- a breakfast spread and a contraceptive jelly. The power grab aspect Jim has amply described above, though I think it's important to mention a perhaps unintended role that Jazz@LC has played over at least the last decade, as the highly priced touring offshoots of Jazz @LC have killed off the ability of many worthwhile "name" jazz artists of artistic stature to put together regional tours of colleges and performancing arts centers, as they used to be able to do. If you live in a city the size of, say, Baton Rouge or Boulder or Asheville or Spokane, you used to be able to take in whatever the local scene had to offer, plus on a nearby college or performing arts center "cultural" series, two or three gigs per years by the likes of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra or James Moody or Vijay Iyer or ... you get the picture. Well, a good many of those gigs now go to Jazz@LC related ensembles, and because Jazz@LC's prices are so far above what used to be norm (this for the "imprimatur"), the jazz budgets for such series are pretty much gone in one fell swoop; little or no room for anyone else. (A key factor here is that the people who are booking such places typically don't know much about jazz; they only want some jazz acts in their list that they can feel secure about, and the Jazz@LC brand name takes care of that. I've heard about this from musicians who were affected, and IIRC veteran jazz presenter Marty Khan went into this in great detail on his blog, which may no longer exist. To perhaps needlessly emphasize the obvious, the virtue of such gigs was not only that they provided employment for worthy musicians but also that that they brought good jazz of various stripes to audiences who quite often were series-subscriber-type people who might get turned on to the music now that they've had a chance to experience different living strains in-person. Now all they get, by and large, is the same-y (and arguably not very good or even that life-like) music of Jazz@LC and its offshoots. I see now that this in large part repeats Allen's post below, but amplification up to a point may be worthwhile. Finally, and perhaps most important, the WM thing was and is not a traditionalist movement but a revivalist one. To begin to explain why and what that means IMO, I will have to quote from the damn book. (BTW, the pieces excerpted below were written in 1985 and '86 -- the passages quoted from Stravinsky and Virgil Thomson [i marked them ***] should not be missed, I think): Always able until now to renew itself from within, jazz seems be circling back on itself, forgoing its history of near-ceaseless invention in the name of various kinds of re-creation and revivalism.... In any case, quite a few observers believe jazz has entered its neoclassic phase, an era in which the music will devote itself, in the words of critic Sam Freedman, to producing “personally stamped recombinations of existing knowledge.” There is nothing new about the neoclassic impulse, which first surfaced in jazz in the early 1940s, when Lu Watters and Turk Murphy tried to re-create the music of such twenties figures as King Oliver and Kid Ory. And one can see the logic in these and other attempts to revive the past, for the evolution of jazz has been so swift that all sorts of fruitful positions were abandoned long before they were played out. What is new, though, are the nature and extent of the neoclassicism that runs through so much of jazz today. The first generation of jazz revivalists were few in number and confined themselves to early styles. Now, however, almost the entire jazz past has been colonized by re-creators of one sort or another, including many who try to emulate and, in some cases, tame the music of such radical players of the1960s as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. And while these developments have produced some attractive music, one wonders about the well-being of an art that has so totally devoted itself to re-examining its past, especially when this trend coincides with a series of events that may have had much do with inspiring it--the passing from the scene of more and more of the first-, second- and third-generation creators who were, in effect, the music's living tradition.... But why can't jazz continue as it always has, generating vital new artists to take the place of those who are gone? And why should there be any doubts about this neoclassic phase? Isn't paying homage to its past one of the healthiest things any art can do?.... [T]oday's neoclassicism ... ostensibly seeks to revive the values of warmth, soul, and forthright swing that once were the hallmarks of jazz and, in the process, reach out to a wide audience in the same uncompromising way that Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington were able to do. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is among the key figures in this trend, and listening to him one finds much to admire. Marsalis, in particular, is an artist of great technical and intellectual gifts, seemingly capable of realizing any idea that comes to mind. And one also has no doubt that his heart is in the right place. Lurking behind the neoclassical enterprise, though, there is a lingering sense that it is more a willed event than a natural one, despite its eagerness to restore to jazz those qualities that were, indeed, natural to the music before free jazz came along. Warmth, soul, and swing certainly are among the hallmarks of a Ben Webster or a Dexter Gordon, but for them these things seem not be sought after in themselves. Instead they are an inevitable byproduct of the act of playing jazz, virtues that arise as a matter of course when one makes musical and emotional contact with the material at hand. And it is this sense of contact with the material that seems to be lacking in so many of today's neoclassicists, perhaps because the medium of line-against-harmony that their predecessors found so usefully resistant no longer provides them with the same kind of challenge. In David Murray's case, it is logical that this should be so, for he once was a fervent disciple of the most radical free-jazz saxophonist, Albert Ayler. As critic J.B. Figi said of another young neoclassicist, Murray “fills roles rather than playing from self,” and one can hear the difference on the version of “Body and Soul” that appears on Murray's recent album Morning Song. Sticking to the harmonic pattern of the tune until he ends his warm-toned solo with an Ayler-like squeal, Murray leaves one with the feeling that his relative orthodoxy is very much a matter of conscious choice and that his decision to play “Body and Soul” in this way ought to be a cause for congratulation. In fact, to the degree that the solo has any emotional content, it seems to lie in that dramatized sense of choice, in Murray's eagerness to gratify his and his audience's desires to experience in the present a way of playing jazz that a short while ago seemed to belong only to the past. But aside from his need to please us in this manner, who David Murray is remains a mystery--which is odd, because the style Murray seeks to emulate was one that called upon the soloist to declare and explore his identity in every note and phrase. [Me in the present: I know, it may seem peculiar to have thrown David Murray in there, but I'll let it stand.] There are other neoclassicists who are very aware of these problems and have come up with intriguing solutions. In particular, there are the slyly ironic Henry Threadgill and Chicagoan Edward Wilkerson Jr., a genuine romantic whose involvement with the materials at hand is never in doubt. But Threadgill and Wilkerson may only be neoclassicists in disguise, artists whose jousts with the music's past really have more to do with the specific musical issues that were raised by free jazz and that still need to be dealt with if the music is going to become something more than a museum that mounts a series of jazz-tinged puppet shows. I am afraid, though, that this is what jazz may have in store for it, as the creators for whom the making of the music is not a self-conscious act continue to pass away and the younger generation keeps trying to evoke the spirit of the past by trying on its outward forms. [***] In the words of Igor Stravinsky, who certainly knew what neoclassicism was all about: “The borrowing of a method has nothing to do with observing a tradition. A method is replaced; a tradition is carried forward in order to produce something new. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit.”.... [***] ....Perhaps today's jazz neoclassicists ought to ponder these words from composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Distinguishing between an “objective” music in which one can “represent other people's emotions” and a “music of personal lyricism”(which would seem to be the kind of art that jazz is), Thomson goes on to explain that “you can write or execute music of the most striking evocative power by objective methods, but you cannot project a personal sentiment you do not have. If you fake it knowingly, you are dramatizing that which should be transmitted directly; and if you fake it unknowingly, you are, merely by deceiving yourself, attempting to deceive your audience. Naturally, experienced persons can teach the young many things about the personalized repertory. But there is no set way it must be rendered, and any attempt to impose one on it takes the life out of it.” [The following epilogue was written in 2002]: Almost twenty years have passed, and it now seems clear that despite the prominence that the engines of cultural politics and publicity have given to Wynton Marsalis, his music (especially his latter-day orchestral work) is a non-issue aesthetically and has been for some time. Such Marsalis pastiches as the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite In This House, On This Morning (1993) and the ballets Citi Movement (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come from a strange alternate universe --one in which some of the surface gestures of Duke Ellington (Marsalis's chief model) have been filtered through the toylike sensibility of Raymond Scott. Marsalis remains a skilled instrumentalist, but he has never been a strikingly individual soloist. As for his orchestral works, their relative poverty of invention becomes clear when they are placed alongside the likes of George Russell's Chromatic Universe and Living Time, Oliver Nelson's Afro-American Sketches, Bill Holman's Further Adventures, Muhal Richard Abrams's The Hearinga Suite, Bob Brookmeyer's Celebration, John Carter's Roots and Folklore, and, of course, the more successful orchestral works of Ellington himself. A brief comparison between one of the major vocal episodes in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and the opening vocal movement of Ellington's otherwise instrumental Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler), might be revealing. The works are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned by the West African republic of Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847--and both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which lasts nine minutes) and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative semi-laments in which hope, pain, frustration, and doubt are meant to joust with each other. The melody of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace (climbing in pitch toward a point of harmonic release it cannot reach, it expressively stalls out on the words “raised up high, far out of sight”), while the key turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” (my emphasis) is commented upon and deepened by a tapestry of orchestral and solo voices (particularly those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast, the three verses of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere in twice the span of time. The melody itself, despite Wilson's attempts to shape it, is hardly a melody at all but a lumpy recitative that sounds as though it had been assembled bar by bar, while the ensemble's instrumental interventions and the solos of pianist Eric Reed merely distend things further. It could be argued that within the overall dramatic scheme of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant to be an episode of near-paralysis, and that the music ought to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself how often you have heard nine minutes of music pass this uneventfully. Why, then, the Marsalis phenomenon, such as it has been and perhaps still is? One struggles to think of another figure in the history of jazz who was a significant cultural presence but not a significant musical one. Dave Brubeck? Perhaps, but there is no counterpart in Marsalis's music to the lyrical grace of Paul Desmond or to those moments when Brubeck himself was genuinely inspired. Paul Whiteman? Yes, in terms of the ability to marshal media attention, but if we credit Whiteman with all the music that was produced under his aegis, the comparison probably would be in his favor. Think again of Whiteman and Marsalis, though, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled. In both the 1920s and the 1980s (when Marsalis arose) the popularity and respectability of jazz were felt to be key issues--the difference being that in the twenties some part of the culture found it necessary and/or titillating to link a popular but not yet “respectable” music to the conventions of the concert hall, while in the eighties jazz had come to be regarded as a music of fading popular appeal that needed the imprimatur of respectability in order to survive--and to be subsidized, like the opera, the symphony orchestra, and the ballet. Thus the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini; thus Marsalis the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop. But while the byplay between notions of what is lively and what is respectable may be an unavoidable part of the cultural landscape, a music that springs from such premises, as Marsalis's so often seems to do, eventually stands revealed as a form of packaged status whose relationship to the actual making of music always was incidental.

The bassist on that date, Bruce Anderson, is now a Lutheran minister in Morton Grove, Il. IIRC, he then owned a nightclub in the Quad Cities area: Davenport, Iowa Moline, Illinois Rock Island, Illinois Bettendorf, Iowa East Moline, Illinois Bruce still plays and sounds better than ever. At this summer's Chicago Jazz Fest, Ira Sullivan volunteered that he'd recently played with Bruce (perhaps at his church; Bruce holds Jazz Vespers service there), and was very impressed. Bruce was the leader of our unofficial high school jazz band (there were few if any official high school jazz bands in 1959-60). The drummer was the late Steve Bagby (eventually with the Ira-Red Rodney band), one of the trumpeters was Bill Brimfield, the vocalist was (gulp) Ann Margret. There were a lot of good players in that band.

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention. It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random. I don't trust it. I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut). A couple of things: In part I was reacting to what seemed to me to be the context of EI's own doubt/uneasiness about his own, in his view, culturally cloistered and terribly "white" upbringing (FWIW, and to the degree that this involves EI's view of WM artistic stature and role, I'd say that EI stands somewhere in a very long line of guys who are WM's age or younger who are more interesting jazz musicians than WM is -- not that there has only been one WM; I'm thinking more of the music of WM since he became a professional role-model who touches little kids from "West Chicago" (he means from the West Side of Chicago) on the head and tells them The Truth. Next, I was reacting to the clip from "Air Lore" that EI attached. It's from a performance I've know since it came out, and I've never had a "problem" with it for a minute. I'm not saying I'm right or EI is wrong about that, just that when I encountered in its original context, it worked for me and still does. By contrast -- yes, I'm among the ones that can't take Braxton on standards by and large. But I think it may be a mistake to put so much emphasis on "trust" and "doubt" in what I sense may be a "Are these guys, or is Braxton in particular, conning me/us?" framework. In particular, I'd say that there's a fairly simple, useful answer to this: "But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention." First, that the "how do you ... convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you" stance sounds rather judicial, as in black robes and white wigs and gavels. Second, my experience has always been that when I'm convinced by a work or act of art, I'm convinced pretty much right away by some form of the pleasure principle. If I'm not convinced like that, if I'm not interested in and of myself, no exercise of/appeal to "authority over materials" is going to mean much. The question of whether I as an individual have enough good sense and experience/context for my particular responses to mean much to anyone else always remains open of course, and I'm certainly willing to learning more about what I think I already know and what I don't know. But in this art in particular, after spending 55 out of 66 years with it, I think I'm a reasonable version of the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- in part because I believe that (like that canary) I'm not predisposed to chirp or keel over for reasons other than the actual quality of the atmosphere. BTW, I'm not saying that you are that way, Mark, but I do feel that EI shows signs that under certain kinds of stress, he may be.

Thanks for reminding me of that -- a very shrewd stroke on Braxton's part. What he meant in part, I think, is that the "whole Wynton/JLC mindset" ain't self-determined but, as some sociologists used to say, other-directed.

It ain't so much the back of my head that's the problem. Though there is that damn bald spot too. It's like my internal default setting somehow remains me at age 45 or so, and at age 66 that ain't so any more.

It ain't so much the back of my head that's the problem.

When you get to be his age -- this was 2004 or so, when Sam was in his mid-70s -- lots of strange things can happen in the realm of appearance/grooming without the person involved being that aware of it. I mean, on those deliberately rare occasions when I look at myself in a three-way mirror at TJ Maxx, I think that there's no way the guy I see there is me.

Heeere's Sandi! http://www.talsanmusic.com/photos/pages/Sandi_Vic.html