Larry Kart

I heard Dylan play in a dorm room at the U. of Chicago in 1961-2, when he was still Bob Zimmerman, later at Gerde's Folk City in NYC when he had just become Dylan. He was far from the best player in that dorm room (there was a yeasty old-timey folk scene, a la the Harry Smith anthology, on campus), but those playing with Dylan that day sounded better than usual, probably because he had some leadership genes. His own music -- lyrics in particular -- makes me want to throw things/throw up. But then I've never known what is happenin' here or which way the wind is blowing.

So I even got it wrong that the non-film composer was "the East Coast" John Williams. No, you were right. It's that they're both John T. Williams; the film composer's middle name is Towner, don't know what the other Williams's "T" stands for. Can't find it now, but the Getz sideman John Williams eventually moved to a Florida city of medium size (Vero Beach, maybe?) and became parks commissioner. There is a park named after him.

John Williams the film composer is John T. Williams. The "T" stands for "Towner," and he was billed on some early recordings (Kapp label stuff, for one) as John Towner -- maybe to separate himself from the other piano-playing John Williams (who was quite a fine, distinctive player; Towner himself was nothing special IIRC), maybe because he was already getting his toes wet in the film-scoring world and didn't want be typed there as a jazz guy.

Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland." Very pertinent to our current electoral dustup. Rick is a very knowledgable jazz fan BTW, as well (so he volunteered a few years back)as an admirer of the work of yours truly, so how bad can he be?

As we know, then President Clinton said of Butman at a state dinner for V. Putin at which Butman played that he "may be the greatest living jazz saxophone player who happens to be a Russian." A curiously political remark, now that I think about it. Did Bill suspect that Putin himself might have a sax-playing relative woodshedding in a dacha somewhere?

Yeah, but you thought about it.

Images from "The Window" can be seen here (including one of Paul Stewart -- very creepy half-smile): http://filmfanatic.org/reviews/?p=5778

"The Window" (1949), with Bobby Driscoll as a too imaginative, tale-telling ten-year-old who while sleeping on the fireplace one hot night sees the couple in the apartment next door kill someone, can't get anyone to believe him and then is kidnapped by the killers. Scared me out of my wits at age five, and I believe it's a pretty good movie too, with Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy as the boy's parents and Ruth Roman and Paul Stewart, who played the unctuous/sinister servant at Xanadu in "Citizen Kane," as the killers. Familiar from many supporting roles, Stewart had dark bushy eyebrows and silvery hair and a slight lisp, an eerie combination of traits that he must have been well aware of. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042046/maindetails

Used to have a copy of "Havin' Myself a Time" with Kenny Drew; IIRC it was pretty good. By the standards of today's jazz thrushes, she'd probably sound like a goddess.

Nice picture, though, Chris. She looks like an interesting, soulful lady. No doubt that's where you got it.

About what stands behind my supposition, see the post at the top this thread: Because there is no logical connection (at least none that I can see) between their initial statement about Dameron and their "what we should have said" reasons for modifying it, I conclude (as I already suspected from their remarks about Woody Shaw and other stuff) that these moves were essentially arbitrary in content and done for show. The second lie confirms the existence of the first. One feels like a primary grade teacher looking out at the classroom and seeing right off which faces have that tell-tale smirk. As for there being "far better examples of that on this site," on what "insider knowledge" do you base that conclusion? Probably the same sort I'm using -- the presence of "off," puffed-up tones of voice; lack of logical connections in the initial argument, followed by even more farfetched explanations; and, again and almost always, those tell-tale smirks or their equivalent. Maybe I was a primary grade teacher in another life; I certainly was an editor, and that's close.

I guess either no one agrees with or gets my point: It's not the authors' opinions/prejudices that I have a problem with; it's what I believe to be their faked-up in order to appear to be edgy non-opinion "opinions." That is, I believe that their distaste for soul jazz or blowing sessions is almost certainly a genuine opinion of theirs, and I can work with that and things from them like that if I need to. Their "opinion" about Dameron's music or their account of Woody Shaw's career is, however, just fake edginess IMO; when pressed, they themselves don't believe this stuff, and they never did. They just made it up in order to sound edgy. It's not that their viewpoint of, say, Dameron is one that I disagree with; it's that this "viewpoint" (which I would disagree with if it were real) is almost certainly not one that Cook and Morton themselves ever really entertained. Cross-Atlantic differences of taste have nothing to do with this; it's just pretend grouchiness on the part of the authors, cynically adopted by them because genuine mavens can be grouchy, and genuine mavens is what they wanted to be taken for. There's nothing to be "learned" about X or Y from such fake-opinions, other than how to detect the presence of a certain kind of fakery. Not to wander into politics, but it's like John McCain the maverick -- establishing such an image is useful, so one looks around for things to say that will make you sound maverick-like, regardless of your actual feelings on a particular matter, not to mention the tables and chairs of reality.

The presence of personal opinion in these books is not the problem; when it does crop up and is genuine, it's mostly a virtue. Rather, the problem is the presence of what is in fact (or IMO) the mere appearance of personal opinion in an attempt to establish the authors' credibility as edgy, call-them-as-they-see-them iconoclasts. That is, they often, again IMO, simply make up would-be edgy stuff to say; little thought, no genuine conviction behind it. The Dameron business is a perfect example; in effect caught out in their chicanery by a reader (though he doesn't accuse them of doing what they actually did, fake up an "edgy" oblique stance on Dameron), they offer up an explanation for what they wrote that a) makes no sense in itself b) does so in a manner that allows them to virtually dismiss the whole thing as a kind of incidental duck fart. But at the risk of being annoying: such things were not incidental to what the authors were up to overall; they were essential -- credibility mongering, they seemed to have believed, was the name of the game if one was going to market such a tome. How is this a Brit thing, Marcello? Do you mean that it's a culture where tone of voice trumps substance so often that some people just go straight to tone of voice, regardless? That fits my understanding of what Morton and Cook were up to in their weak moments, but it's no excuse.

I know, I'm supposed to stop this carping and instead write my own book, but the lingering problem with Cook and Morton is the mystery, when they do go off the rails, of what the heck they were thinking -- or perhaps that should be, How were they behaving. A little (or not so little) example I came across while leafing through, under Andy LaVerne's "Tadd's Delight": "A reader took us to task for saying in a previous edition that 'Tadd Dameron's legacy as composer is ultimately slight.' What we should have said was that only a handful of his works figure much in repertory exercises..." Do I need to explain how goofy this is -- the "What we should have said' bit even more so than the original pompous, wrong-headed remark. I mean, how could Dameron's legacy as a composer depend on the supposed fact that "only a handful of his works figure much in repertory exercises...?" It's like a politician caught in a lie whose natural response is then to tell another more far-fetched fib in "explanation" rather than fessing-up to the fact that the original act was just b.s. The true musical standing of what jazz composer depends on whether his music figures "much in repertory exercises"? BTW, that "much" is a nice ass-covering touch, the distancing "exercises" perhaps even more so. That is, the authors are faking up an explanation that they themselves virtually, albeit somewhat vaguely, disparage in the same damn sentence. Again, as I may have said outright before, I suspect that under pressure Cook and Morton were improvising in the bad sense -- when they felt to the need to spruce up the proceedings with an "edgy" opinion, they just reached for something, made up something -- almost anything, so it seems at times -- to say. Then, having had abundant time to ponder their original misstep, they compound it. The problem then IMO is that the authors are at times far removed from simple honesty -- they are, again at times, fakers and even something close to outright liars. I know that another poster on the previous thread said that they'd learned a lot from Cook and Morton. But if you don't know much about, say, Tadd Dameron and read the authors' old passage on him or their crablike withdrawal of it, what have you/what could you have learned about Dameron from them? The reason I have these books is to learn what records were out there at the time of that edition -- that's about it, plus their odd bits of genuine enthusiasm for discs they've actually listened to; not that I agree with them in every case there, but the genuineness of that enthusiasm is a big and IMO obvious relief.

Yeah --- I'm borderline psychotic about speaker placement since I was introduced to the general principles. My basement is in the process of being remodeled, and I can't wait to plunk the system back down there in a significantly new and better acoustic environment and then start fiddling. I would add that the best bang for the buck piece of a audio equipment I've bought recently is nice four-level equipment stand for about $350 (can't recall the name, but I could find the receipt on request) that is designed (as all such should be) to reduce vibration. The difference was pretty incredible.

I suppose that in classical music string tone and voices are a big giveway/sticking point for me. What string instruments and voices sound like, individually and collectively, is kind of programmed into me by experience, and when strings and voices sound the way I think they should, almost everything else is in a good place sound-wise. Allowing for differences in the way things are recorded in the first place, I think that the main thing I'm listening for there is some realistic (by my lights) sense of "grain," as in grain in a piece of wood -- the detail of overtones within a note. When I hear it, it's like you're in a movie theater and the picture suddenly comes into focus. In a few seconds you won't notice the difference anymore (you're just watching the movie, listening to the music -- as you should be), but you're dealing with more, and more accurate, information.

Yes and no. Yes, I pay attention to quality of sound reproduction and have taken what I think I are reasonable steps to make my playback system sound better over the years. No, those reasonable steps haven't led me to buy any crazy-ass expensive stuff, by my lights. I have used B&W speakers, a Cambridge 640C CD player, a Creek 5350 amp, Grado SR 125 headphones, and a 15-or-so-year-old B&O turntable and cartridge that are due to be replaced. The rest is relatively recent (except for the headphones), and I have no plans or desire to replace any of it.

No Pelt there, Mark -- would like to have heard him. Of his generation of "young lions" trumpeters, I like what I've heard from him, mostly as a sideman on Ralph Peterson albums on Criss Cross. Some of his own things struck me as a bit studied.

Related note: Lightcap is in metro Detroit for the next three nights with Gerald Cleaver's Violet Hour, also with two reeds, J.D. Allen and Andrew Bishop. Tonight in Ann Arbor at the Kerrytown Concert House and Friday and Saturday at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit. The band also played at last weekend's jazz festival here in Detroit, where they were smokin.' Heard them at The Hungry Brain in Chicago last Saturday night. A good deal of talent onstand (Bishop in particular IMO, though an aquaintance found him too slick), but after a few pieces Allen and Cleaver gave me a headache. Cleaver is f------- loud, while Allen's lines have a difficult-to-evade forcefulness but a good deal less rhythmic/melodic variety than I would wish. At times I felt like he was laying down strips of asphalt. How old is Allen? If he's no longer in his 20s, I'm not optimistic about future growth.

Thanks, Allen, but they have to be stories that I myself was a participant in because part of the deal is what I felt -- at the time and later on -- about what was going on. Not merely for reasons of ego, I hope, but because for example I need to know what it felt like to be temporarily responsible for and to try to help an apparently dying Coleman Hawkins. Not to give the game away, but basically it felt very good -- because for once at least I think I knew exactly what was at stake, did what I could/needed to do in human terms, and because what I did was acknowledged in the same way.

Thanks for the thought, CM, but I don't think I have the necessary sitzfleisch --or the money to acquire the sides I don't have or, at age 66, the time. If I do any more writing on jazz -- that is, other than what I do here -- it probably will be something personal, oblique, and semi-novelistic (as in "names changed to protect the innocent"). For example, the final chapter almost certainly would be about my taking Coleman Hawkins to O'Hare airport a month or so before his death, another would be about an afternoon and evening spent with Dexter Gordon in his hotel suite while Maxine Gregg raged, mostly out of sight, in the next room. The theme of all the episodes I have in mind would be the semi-comic dance that jazz musicians and their admirers more or less unknowingly engage in -- the ways in which this all-too-human music separates the actual humanity of its players and listeners by encouraging the latter parties to think that they know what they don't/can't know and by leaving the members of the former group significantly isolated because their own needs (as artists and human beings) are similarly divided internally.

Yeah, it's a 5 lb. 1700+ page book with a few paragraphs that would have better been left out or rewritten... We've all made errors -- e.g. assuming that we knew things what we did not in fact know them -- but this is a mistake of egregious, mean-spirited, I would even say poisonous, would-be-know-it-all commission. The question, then is how and why could the author(s) have made this mistake? -- or rather, because I believe that the passages I quoted are essentially their invention, why did they invent this stuff? It sure ain't misguided but received "wisdom" in any circles I've been around. My guess is that the chief strain in writing a book like this, aside from the sheer typing, is to generate opinion after opinion after opinion after opinion, all presumably (but perhaps we know better) with the same degree of commitment and alertness. One suspects that the opinion-forming/emitting process gets a bit mechanical and exhausting at times, and further that it can generate little fits of virtually free-form, seemingly crazed pontificating excess -- the way, say, someone whose job it is to masturbate in private as much as possible might get confused and/or carried away, pull out John Thomas, and spray his fellow commuters on the morning bus.

Just picked this up for reference purposes at a Half-Price Books sale as was astonished by this alternately tasteless and insane nonsense: "Woody Shaw's career judgment was almost as clouded as his actual vision. A classic under-achiever, his relatively lowly critical standing is a result partly of his music purism (which was thoroughgoing and admirable) but more largely of his refusal or inability to get his long-term act together...." OK, there's some truth there, but the errors ("lowly critical standing"?), the sneering, and the social-worker snottiness... But the worst is yet to come: "Like all imaginative Americans, Woody was violently stretched between opposites and inexorably drawn to the things and place that would destroy him." Cook and Morton do write "all imaginative Americans" here, so I guess that I am among the many Americans who are not imaginative enough or haven't yet found the things and gotten to the places that will destroy us. One suspects that Cook and Morton were themselves over-using controlled substances when they wrote this.

They've made the socks drinkable now? That might not work out too well... But the underwear?

What point would that be? Seriously. What I gleamed from his article is that Chicago should be spending more money on the festival. How to achieve that is open for debate, but I have to say I was underwhelmed by the festival when we played there (which is not to say I was ungrateful). I was expecting something much more grand from a city like Chicago. More money, sure. If how to achieve that is open to debate, I don't recall that Reich offered a single feasible suggestion, other than his "let's send it to the neighborhoods" notion. The underlying problem is that all the other Chicago music fests are either inherently more successful in that they draw more people and/or are connected to political/ethnic constituencies and the politicians that serve them. The jazz fest is not. The only answer I can think of is some corporate sponsor with very deep pockets who wants to improve things (as in, make things more professional in the good sense) but doesn't want to control things overmuch (as in, turn it into a pop/R&b fest under the "jazz" name). IMO, the Rollins concert last night was very boring, but based on recent recordings and accounts of other recent SR concerts, that's what I expected it to be. There were moments of, gestures toward, an interestingly complex, oblique-notey shagginess on Rollins' part, but these were just moments and gestures in the midst of pieces that, typically of SR of these times, more or less circled in place. And SR's sound, with that attached-to-the-bell mike, was (I'm sorry) virtually goat-like, though it might have sounded better if one were more close-up than I was. Gives me no pleasure to say the above; just my honest reaction.