Larry Kart

The amount and quality of music he made was amazing. I believe he knew how grateful we were.

My favourite quote about Mel was when Jake Hanna was told that Mel had written a biography of Buddy Rich: "Really? Does he mention Buddy?"

Don't see anything wrong in Doug Ramsey's review.

The Picasso of big band jazz? More like the Maxfield Parrish. Also, onetime rocker Andrew Gold was the son of soprano/champion Hollywood dubber Marni Nixon and composer Ernest Gold ("Exodus," etc.)

It's funny you should mention that because I was just going to suggest that very model. I have one that I bought off ebay for $50. Why? Because when we were doing a northern Michigan tour one year and I tried to record one of the gigs at this restaurant, the power was so bad that my digital recorder would barely power up and would not recognize the harddrive. The next year I came back to the restaurant with that very model of line conditioner and plugged it in. The conditioner's LED let me know that the voltage of the line was extremely low, but it smoothed every thing out and my digital recorder worked great. Now I don't leave home without it. It also massively attenuates hum from my Leslie at Baker's Keyboard Lounge (they have terrible power there, too). I need to get a few more for my computers, since they are very susceptable to power fluxuations and my house is very old. Highly recommended and much cheaper than these "audiophile" ones. Just got one. Hooked my Creek amp and Cambridge CD player to it today (before I was using one of your standard power strips) and WOW! Recently had my house rewired at some expense (house's old, original equipment wiring dated from the 1950s and wouldn't have supported modern kitchen applicances if I ever want/need to go that routine), but even though the Tripp-Lite shows my AC power source is perfectly OK, what's coming through my speakers now is not what was coming through them five minutes ago. Imagery, depth of soundstage, highs and lows, you name it -- it's like I've got a whole new system, and for about $160, shipping included. I thought there might be some difference but nothing like this. Thanks, Jim.

(Edited a bit to suit my ear): A Turkish drummer dreams of traveling to America to study jazz percussion. To finance the venture, he joins the Abdul Ahmed Band, which has pretty much sewed up the lucrative club-date scene in and around Istanbul. Having saved up enough money, our hero moves to New York and for two years takes private lessons from Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes. Then he returns to Turkey and rejoins the Abdul Ahmed band. Eager to show off his jazz expertise, on the first set of the first night he plays every hip fill and break he can think of. At intermission, the leader takes him aside. "You know, I think what you are doing is very nice," Abdul Ahmed says, "very nice. But all we need is a simple backbeat on seven and thirteen."

Nor was Rosemary.

"There is something quite seductive about the smell of fresh basil."

Yes, but he cheated on her with Darlene Edwards.

Thanks, Chris. I just found a reference to that exchange in a Gary Giddins piece about Starr from his "Faces In A Crowd," though I'm sure I read it first in Martin Williams' transcription.

No, I don't see the Starr reference there, though the version of the Jazz Hot interview I have at hand is the one from The Jazz Review, which is somewhat edited (a more complete translation appeared in the magazine Kulchur -- I have that issue but can't get at it right now.). I certainly do remember (wherever I saw it) the linkage Pres made between Starr and Bessie Smith, because it struck at the time as being so odd (this being before I'd heard enough unbridled Starr to get the point).

Yes, but didn't Pres explicitly and unmistakably praise Starr in his Jazz Hot interview of about the same time. I say unmistakably because he said that Starr reminded him at times of Bessie Smith -- which is something that certainly could be said of Starr but never of Stafford.

Why does the career of anyone who is not an absolute god (and even some of those) fail to take off? Always lots of reasons, few of them unique. Ortega probably made more records under his own name than, say, Dave Schildkraut did.

I know Stephen Hough's Bowen disc on Hyperion, and those works are dishwater IMO. Compare Bowen's Ballade No. 2 (1931) to the Ballade (1929) of Bowen's contemporary John Ireland.

Pretty sure you'll enjoy it. Also, as one might expect (Scandavian meticulousness), both it and Regni are beautifully recorded. The title track of this one, a polytonal setting of "Donna Lee," is full of Broberg's serious/funny sense of humor.

I have two big band albums by Broberg (b. 1937) and his Nogenja ("Nogenja = "No Generation Jazz") Ensemble -- "Regni" (Phono Sueica) from 1995 and "Conspiracy in Flat Five" (Caprice) from 2000 or so -- that I found very appealing when I first listened to them a few years ago, and upon recent re-listening I'm even more impressed. Broberg lists his idols as Gil Evans, Monk, Dameron, Ellington, Strayhorn, George Russell, Mingus, et al., but all that has been digested and personalized; Broberg is himself. His band is full of very good and quite individual Swedish players, some of them fairly familar to me (e.g. Jan Allan, Lennart Aberg) others new to me (e.g. alto and tenor saxophonist Krister Andersson, who on alto recalls the late brilliant Konitz offshoot Rolf Billberg). In particular, Broberg's music is full of humor/wit -- genuinely musical humor/wit in jazz (that is, there's a dramatic, storytelling element of distortion of expectations that also is wholly musical) being a rare thing in my experience (e.g. Broberg's "Monkey Serenade" on "Regni" is an at once quite insane and perfectly lucid 14-minute exercise in harmonic and rhythmic wrong-footedness [based on "I Got Rhythm"], while his "Double Steps and Track Fragments" from the same album does things to "Giant Steps" that ought to be illegal -- though as I'm sure you'll agree, the idea of playing with, even toying with, "Giant Steps" is an idea whose time has come). BTW, Broberg in his onetime position at Swedish Radio commissioned George Russell's "Electronic Souls etc." back in the mid-1960s.

I could be wrong, although he's the only artist listed so far, and he's pretty clearly the headliner. But if I am right, his website says that he "writes exquisite jazz ballads" -- which is fine because those are the only kind I like to listen to.

This would seem it be the culprit: http://www.richarddworsky.com/ If so, the answer probably is simple but no less pissy: He didn't want to be preceded by a group whose leader was a pianist and no doubt a much better pianist than he is.

I see from a previous post of mine: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=38946 that it is "No Thanks."

One of Al Cohn's two charts on this Med Flory album: http://www.freshsoundrecords.com/record.php?record_id=2112 "No Thanks" and "The Fuzz" (can never remember which one it is) is just amazing, has IMO the greatest shout chorus ever written (and I'm not one of those old farts who's in love with shout choruses per se) and much else that's damn fine. I'd tell you which of those two pieces it is, but most of my CDs are still inaccessible to me.

As a friend of mine who used to do a lot of freelance technical writing for Sony once explained to me, the worst thing you can do for yourself in a corporate setting is say, " I can do that for less money (or with fewer people)."

Does everyone have me on ignore or something? Trust me--this site will work: http://www.joshhosler.biz/numberOneInHistory/selectMonth.htm OK, I get it now. "Tangerine" by Jimmy Dorsey. Thanks.

Trumpeter John Nesbitt (1900-35), who wrote a great deal for McKinney's Cotton Pickers.

Bruce is the author of a fascinating biography of Talbert, "Tom Talbert His Life and Times: Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz" (Scarecrow). I bought "Bix Duke and Fats" when it came out back in 1956 and everything else I could find by Talbert afterwards. All I lack, I believe, is "Wednesday's Child," although two tracks from that 1956 Atlantic album are on the CD that is included in Bruce's book. Seek out anything by Talbert you can find. He's in the same class as Gil Evans, and the flavor of his music is unique -- at once modern and a bit "moderne" at times (like a musical equivalent of Art Deco), it always seemed to be "curved" (if you know what I mean), but it has plenty of drive when it wants to be that way. There's some kinship musically between Talbert with Oscar Pettiford (Talbert knew Pettiford in Minneapolis in his teenage years and later wrote for O.P. in the '50s).

Different bari player every take! The whole saxophone section! The driver keeps missing the car seat so....fire the band. Maybe only one take a day? I thought that was part of the joke, reinforced by the increasingly compressed rhythm of the editing and the anxiety displayed by Jack Lemmon and Louis Nye at one point -- that the whole shtick was so elaborate that when they screwed up everyone had to start over from scratch the next day (with subs in the band being inevitable). Also, as a commentator on YouTube explains, when the actor finally lands in the seat properly, he takes a puff on a cigarette and says (in the English-language original), "Man -- that's coffee!" I need to see this movie. And the Hi-Los are fabulous -- that "shake"!