Larry Kart

In the same vein as what Big Al and Noj have said, YMMV but after a fairly early point (as early as post-Al Sleet, perhaps), however insightful, clever, etc. Carlin's routines were, they were IMO not very funny. However pissed off you are, the mechanisms of comedy (varied and vast though they are) still must be understood and in some sense respected. Lenny Bruce, even up to the very end, did.

Nice pictures, happy stuff. Your apartment is on the West Side, overlooking Central Park? If so, cool. If not, still looks cool.

Those models (or whoever they are) don't seem to be touching the monument with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Actually, I see that "You" is from 1936, the same year as Billy Hill's "In the Chapel in the Moonlight." Probably Rollins, age six, heard them on the radio. Both songs were on the Hit Parade for a number of weeks.

You... Gee, but you're wonderful, you, lovely you. You completely satisfy, I'm confessin' that is why there's nobody like you. You, So much depends upon you, tell me true, Will it be my fate at all? Will I ever rate at all with somebody like you? (Bridge:) Just to think that you love me Makes my future look strong; I swear by stars above me I'm darned if I don't feel Like writing a song, a song about You, Music and words about you, lovely you. Let me think up phrases for, Let me sing out praises for nobody but you. Music Walter Donaldson, lyrics Harold Adamson Among Donaldson's other songs were: "At Sundown" "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" "Little White Lies" "Love Me or Leave Me" "Makin' Whoopee" "My Baby Just Cares for Me" "My Blue Heaven" "My Buddy" "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" "You're Driving Me Crazy" "You" strikes me as a very 1920s, almost "vo-dee-o-do"-ish song, with its built-in skipping rhythms, e.g.: You (pause) Gee but you're wonderful you" and "You completely satisfy/I'm confessin' that is why.

"You" was the theme song of the Art Linkletter Show. Rollins played it on "Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders," along with (among other off-the-wall things) "In a Chapel in the Moonlight." I'm pretty sure that Sonny, in is his cosmically comic way, had the Linkletter Show clearly in mind.

Hot and angular like Dizzy, lyrical like Bobby. The drummer on the Prez clip isn't Miles. The now seemingly out of reach Ford video that had the Stewart-Travis performance was of most of that show; it ended with a Miles drum feature. He was about 12. BTW, look at the way bassist Vinnie Burke reacts to what Prez is playing -- anxiety, love, respect, etc. flow across his face.

He's close to the end, but this is precious. Such pretty notes. Used to have a link to another tune from this show that featured Stewart, Travis, and the two clarinetists. Easily the best Travis solo I've ever heard. Sort of a cross between Dizzy and Bobby Hackett, if that can be imagined. And Rex wasn't that far behind him that night.

I'm close to a Konitz completist but find that one almost unlistenable -- not for Lee himself but in part for the ugly recording, in part for Ohad Talmor's sour arrangements, and in part for the rest of the band (that trombonist, don't recall his name, should be severely chastised, and Matt Wilson is leaden as usual). BTW, the idea that Konitz was a bit past his peak when "Live at Laren" was recorded strikes me as bizarre. I can find great Lee from every one of the seven decades he's been playing, certainly including the present one.

Some of this piece about Art Pepper from Ye Olde Jazz Book might be relevant. (Basically, my feeling is that if any artist is a decent human being, that's a bonus. If he or she is not (in any of the usual or not so usual ways), you were looking for something you had no reason to expect to find, though we all certainly have good reason to hope to find that oneness of art and character in a gifted human being.) [1980] Like most autobiographies that purport to tell all, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper is a tissue of genuine revelations and willful posing, in which the desire to speak the truth is at war with the author’s need to paint himself as a romantic victim. But because Straight Life was written by a major jazz musician, the book does tell us a great deal--about the so-called “jazz life” and also about the tensions that affect almost every artist who functions in the modern world. There are any number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists whose lives and whose work expressed an inner emotional turmoil that bordered on self-destruction--Poe, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Scriabin, Hart Crane, the list could go on and on. But the hallmarks of Art Pepper’s music are lucidity, grace, and a meticulous sense of order. How, one wonders, can those qualities be reconciled with a life so internally chaotic that much of Straight Life reads like a suicide note? The title of the book, borrowed from that of Pepper’s swift little melody on the changes of “After You’ve Gone,” is deliberately ironic, because “straight” is the one thing the alto saxophonist’s life has never been. Born on September 1, 1925, in Gardena, California, he was the byproduct of a brief, stormy romance. His teenaged mother wanted an abortion, his father married her only because he wanted the child to live, and much of Pepper’s youth was spent away from both parents, in the care of his stern paternal grandmother. The account in Straight Life of those early years is grim, but it would have meaning only to Pepper’s friends if it were not for his great musical gifts. From the first he seems to have been a “natural,” with a drive toward self-expression that logically led him toward jazz, although the account of his youthful initiation into that world strikes a note of naïveté that echoes throughout the book. Told by a guitarist that “these are the chords to the blues . . . this is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America,” Pepper recalls that “I asked him if he thought I might have the right to play jazz.” Musically, the answer to Pepper’s question obviously was “yes,” as it was for Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and many other white jazzmen. But the fact that Pepper felt compelled to ask (or says that he did--the anecdote sounds a little too pat to be literally true) suggests that emotionally he would forever feel uncertain that his unquestioned ability to play jazz made him part of the jazz community. While still in his teens Pepper worked in predominantly black bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter and hung out in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district, where a free and easy racial comradeship prevailed. “There,” Pepper recalls, “everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it.” Young, remembering that same era, says, “It wasn’t about ‘whitey’ this and ‘whitey’ that. It was about good musicianship and people respecting one another for the talents that they had.” Pepper’s talents, which evolved further during a stint with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, required him to forge his own style, one that owed a debt to black jazzmen but was significantly different in that his music seemed increasingly to have uncertainty and isolation as its subject. Then, after a tour of Army duty that led to the disintegration of his first marriage, Pepper returned to Kenton and found, in 1950, what was for him to be the “answer”--heroin. At this point in Straight Life, Pepper makes no excuses. Having found “no peace at all except when I was playing,” he felt, under the influence of the drug, that “I loved myself…I loved my talent. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me…whatever dues I have to pay.’ I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. And that’s what I still am.” If Straight Life were an exemplary tale, Pepper’s career from then until now would be an unbroken account of personal and artistic disintegration. But while he would spend more than a third of the following three decades in jail on various narcotics charges and would involve himself in a mutually self-destructive second marriage, these are also the years of Pepper’s greatest musical triumphs. One answer to this seeming paradox might be that Straight Life is a con job, an attempt by the author to paint himself as a larger-than-life-size rogue. But even if the grimmer anecdotes in the book are discounted, Pepper’s physical presence today is enough to confirm their essential truth. A strikingly handsome man at one time--reminiscent of Tyrone Power, according to a friend--Pepper is now someone whose haunted, ravaged face clearly proclaims that he has never needed to conjure up imaginary demons. Straight Life finally does give us the information we need to resolve the split between Pepper’s willfully disordered life and his carefully ordered music. Indeed, the answer may be found in an aspect of the book that at first seems quite frustrating--in the author’s reluctance to talk about his music and in his corresponding eagerness to relate the lurid details of his sex life, drug addiction, and prison experiences. That music is important to Pepper is believable only if we already know his music; otherwise Straight Life might be the story of any junkie. But soon we realize that, for Pepper, music, drugs, sex, and prison life are, in one sense, all of a piece--or rather, they all seem to be jumbled together in one area of his mind, a realm in which instinctual intelligence exists alongside childlike cunning, in which self-determined forms of order and expression blend into the trials of shame and pride that a lawbreaker’s life tends to bring. For example, Pepper states with special pride that he has never been an informer, never turned in a drug connection. From his point of view, that is an honorable, certain, and essentially private act, a matter between peers in a closed society. And in their various ways, both drug use and sex share similar qualities. One gets high or one does not, in the privacy of one’s own nervous system. One satisfies oneself and one’s partner or one does not, also in relatively private circumstances. And so Pepper feels free to boast about all these things. But music is an exception for him because, like all forms of art, its ultimate meaning cannot be private, cannot be controlled by the artist; other people will take what the artist creates and make of it what they will. Of course, in the jazz world, particularly the world of the black jazz musician, communal agreements have often prevailed between the musicians and the audience , and almost almost always among the musicians themselves . But Pepper no longer seems to trust either of those communities, if he ever did. From his point of view, the comradeship of Central Avenue is gone forever. Instead, the isolated modern artist par excellence, he tries to create his own private world--striving for perfect, spontaneous order because only then will what he creates remain within his control. And, of course, every time he performs, he fails, for his music becomes more lucid and moving to us, and less private to him, the closer he comes to formal perfection. So, for Art Pepper, the tensions remain; and as Straight Life demonstrates, they periodically become too great to be borne. But for us, one step removed from Pepper, the tensions are resolved. And that is the final paradox, that his music may do more for us than it can ever do for him.

Two different guys. Bassist: http://www.bassplayer.com/article/avishai-cohen/jun-07/28002 Trumpeter: http://www.avishaicohenmusic.com/live/

Is this the same John Carey who wrote an awful, finger-wagging biography of John Donne some years ago?

The full D'Ambrosio "Moon Dreams" can be heard here: http://www.rhapsody.com/meredithdambrosio/bewareofspring The second vocal chorus is something else. Nice group -- Eddie Higgins (her husband), George Mraz, and Jeff Hirschfield.

Watch you language/behavior (especially toward other posters), Chauncey. I reckon you're close to the edge and soon will be over it if you continue in this vein, though it's not my call exclusively.

The Desmond/Miller is a gem, but there's also a lovely one by Meredith D'Ambrosio, which incorporates some of Gil's arrangement of the piece. You know, of course, that its composer, Chummy McGregor, is played in "The Glenn Miller Story" by the same actor who played the C.O. in "M*A*S*H" on TV, Harry Morgan.

I have heard this album in its pre-mastered form, and it is excellent, original, new jazz.

OK, in the pseudo-cabaret category, here's Alan and Marilyn Bergman's "When Summer Turns to Snow." I suspect that the incoherent parade of metaphors in the first chorus owed something to another kind of white powder. When the summer turns to snow And you’re alone once more The memories pass your eyes Like treetops from a plane You watch them slip away And helpless you try To catch one in your hand A silver year of love To prove that you were there … Were there at all Once, you memorized the night The shape of every cloud The patterns of the stars The color of the moon You memorized it all But now it’s gone As if it never was No souvenirs to show When summer turns to snow

Wow. ... I guess if a person was desperate for cash, one could always throw an ad in the paper or a magazine with a number for a dedicated phone line and ... watch the money roll in? My question is, if someone is willing to pay for a phone conversation, why not just pay for the real thing? I mean, if talking dirty is your thing (not you Dan, just in general) and your sweetie ain't the one to confess your darkest desires to (another set of issues altogether), why not hire a girl (or guy) and talk dirty face to face? Or put them on the phone line in the living room or something. Then at lease you get the added bonus of possible direct physical contact at some point. ... or ... maybe that's not such a good idea. People who want indirect contact want indirect contact. Sexual fantasies are ridiculously specific, which is why there are whole industries built around satisfying specific needs.

I'm thinking it should have been John Adams -- or better, no one. BTW, has there ever been an opera based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses? Seems like a natural to me.

Lovely, wise account. Best of luck to you all.

Upon further review, PappyK's request can stand.

In another vein, a good number of lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The worst I know of is "When Summer Turns to Snow," originally recorded I believe by Sergio Mendes back in the '60s. (I know it from a 2003 album "Love Locked Out" by talented singer-pianist Patti Wicks, who is utterly defeated by this piece of s---.) The f----er makes no sense, beginning with the damn title. This side of a Hollywood disaster movie or two, summer doesn't turn to snow, not without an intervening little season known as autumn. Unfortunately I can't find the lyric online, and I don't have the stomach to listen again and type it out.

Al Francis!

I must be wrong about Ventura, but I thought I saw a moustache. I was going by that more than any aural evidence. Eddie Shu? As for Prez-like figures, Flip had his share, and, as Allen says, the time, the overall assertiveness, the compactness of tone, etc. say Flip to me. Clearly the relation between what we see and hear on this clip is very random.

I know you were asking about those arrangers, but FWIW here's a Donahue bio: http://www.hepjazz.com/bios/samdon.html The Hep Donahue collections are definitely worth hearing. Some felt that Donahue's remolded version of the Shaw Orchestra was the best of the service bands.