Larry Kart

Ah, yes -- and Tony Little Sun Glover and Dave Snaker Ray. And don't forget Bukka Greenspan.

I agree, though I don't know that Storyville date. The reason may be that Rouse came up with a series of formulas/licks that allowed him to negotiate Monk's pieces on virtual autopilot (Rouse being a rather formula/lick-inclined player anyhow). On the other hand, there are moments with Monk when he is inspired or at least fully engaged (much of "Live At The It Club" IIRC, but then Monk himself is inspired there). Also, Rouse is in very good form on Art Taylor's "Taylor's Wailers" date, which includes several Monk pieces, and, again IIRC, on some of the Sphere albums, where Monk pieces are a near constant. Maybe it was less the pieces themselves and more Monk's habits as a comper during the years Rouse was with him that led Rouse to sound so formulaic so often.

I vote for Al Cohn as the tenor player. (Too bad they only show his hands during the solo). As I recall, Scott was married to the featured singer Dorothy Collins at the time. Took home two healthy paychecks from that show... Too jowly for Al at that time, I think, also looks about 10 or more years too old for him, and it sure doesn't sound like Al -- a kind of proto-Sam the Man Taylor vibe. Maybe Al Klink, who could sound like anyone on cue. Boy, I used to think Dorothy Collins was cute, which is kind of pathetic in retrospect -- going for that scrubbed, nice-girl image and the rabbity slight-overbite. An extension of the teacher's crush, but what are you going to do at age 12 or so? IIRC, the Collins-Scott marriage ending in severe strife.

The question I've always had (and this is serious, not the ususal 'me being a smart ass') is, how can recorded music be familiar to me if I've only heard it on crappy speakers? Am I just fooling myself and going for the speakers that color the music in a way that I'm used to, or what? I know that this is sneered at, and if you are used to properly reproduced music, I can understand that, but isn't there some value in comparing stats, in order to find equipment? Help! The answer is that if the music is familiar to you, no matter how crappy your speakers are, you'll almost certainly be able to tell that it sounds better on better equipment. Then once you're familiar with some reasonable level of "better" within your price range, you can sort out which equipment within that price range is the "best" better for you.

A fair bit of Scott on YouTube. Check out his "Night in Tunisia" with Ben Webster for one, his "Summer Love" with Victor Feldman for another.

I wondered about him -- nice break toward the end.

Just to be clear, the credits say "music arranged and conducted by Frank DeVol," not that he himself wrote the music. Also, Gil Fuller was pretty notorious back in the day for farming out work to ghosts and billing it as his own. Finally, DeVol wrote a pretty scary song (words and music) for no less a film than "Kiss Me Deadly" -- "I'd Rather Have the Blues Than What I've Got.' Check out the version on Audrey Morris' album "Film Noir": http://www.audreymorris.com/discog.htm

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion...0,4840856.story

Agreed.

Sure this wasn't earlier? He began to claim his name was Dylan by '61. I was class of '60, entering in the fall of that year. The dorm room thing might have happened in the fall-winter of that year. Bob Zimmerman was how he was addressed/introduced himself; Dylan never came up. I'm sure of that because when I heard of him/went to see him in NYC at Folk City a while later, I was aware then that Bob Dylan was the guy I'd heard before as Bob Zimmerman. If he had made the change earlier, perhaps he didn't yet use Dylan under all circumstances. It might have been, now that I think of it, that one or more of the people he was playing with at the U. of C. knew him from before, and Dylan felt funny about telling them that the guy they already knew as Bob Zimmerman now called himself Bob Dylan. It might have sounded pretentious and also, since most of the people in that dorm room were Jewish, like an uncomfortable attempt to disguise/deny his background.

Some of my darkest memories, though I did escape to hear Coltrane at McKie's.

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.