Larry Kart

--- with tenorman Tim Haldeman, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, guitarist Matt Schneider, Jason Adasiewicz on marimba. Haldeman, one hell of a player, was somehow new to me until about six weeks ago, when I heard him a group led by drummer Mike Reed -- he has hair, teeth, and claws, plus he sounds like an adult, not a kid, though he's probably short of 30. Jaimie is in great, relaxed form, almost Tony Fruscella-like at times; I've long been a fan of the not that often heard, even in terms of number of gigs Schneider, etc. The album was produced by the musicians themselves (in this case a very good thing) and recorded (beautifully) by Tanaka. Ajemian's soulful liner notes are worth a look too. Disclaimer: My only connection with these people is music-based admiration and resulting (in some cases) "Hey, how are you?" acquaintances-friendships.

Interesting comment I wouldn't have thought of made at the time of the Post article by a woman who successfully plays the musical saw in NYC subway stations and who also has this blog: http://sawlady.com/blog/ The Washington Post published an article about an experiment they did: they got Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, to play incognito in a subway station. They wanted to see if without the PR he usually gets for his stage performances anybody would stop to listen. The result was - hardly anybody stopped to listen. The Washington Post analyzed it as if it were the fault of the audience, the passers by, for not recognizing such a great musician. I say - it wasn’t the fault of the passers by at all. The thing is Joshua Bell is a great violinist but he doesn’t know how to busk. There are violinists who are not even close to being as good as he is (such as Jim Grasec or Lorenzo LaRock), yet they get crowds to stop and listen to them. It’s because when you play on the street you can’t approach it as if you are playing on a stage. Busking is an art form of its own. You need to be as good a musician as to audition for any stage gig (the competition over permits is fierce) but in addition to that you have to relate to the audience and be a real people’s person. You can’t hide behind your instrument and just play, with an invisible wall between you and the audience, the way a stage performance is conducted. In busking you use the passers by as if they were paint and your music is the paint brush - your goal is to create a collective work of art with the people, in the space, in the moment with you and the music. A busker is someone who can turn any place into a stage. Obviously, Joshua Bell needs an actual stage. As a busker one needs to interact with those around, break walls of personal space, and lure people into a collective and spontaneous group experience on the street, in the moment, with you. A bad busking act is when the performer doesn’t make an effort to connect with the audience. Like musicians who play for themselves, not acknowledging the audience, just burying their heads in their instruments. IMHO that is why Joshua Bell didn’t get lots of people to stop and listen.

Nice interview with Grist, who is a remarkable person as well as a remarkable singer: http://www.usoperaweb.com/2003/spring/grist.htm

It's in black and white, Austrian TV broadcast, but the sound is good and the performances and production are ideal. Reri Grist is Zerbinetta, likewise Juranic as The Composer, and Thomas as Bacchus sings his f------ brains out, which is what the role demands. And the work itself probably is the acme of the Strauss-Hofmannstahl collaboration, which is saying something. And Bohm and Vienna Philarmonic!

Yes they did --- Craft.

Doesn't Braxton have at least 3,700 present and former students?

Weingarten's inane (and IIRC journalistically unethical) piece of dung won the Pultizer? Guess that's all you need to know about any such award. If the jurors are a bunch of monkeys...

It's a douche and a mouthwash.

Copyright 2006.

New Trier had a big swimming tradition (won the state title for many years), and in swim class, which everyone had to take, the boys swam in the nude. This may have been common at the time, for reasons of hygiene -- one showered before getting into the Olympic-sized pool, and no swim suits meant there was no issue of cleanliness aside from that of your own scrubbed body -- but I tell you it felt weird. The girls wore awful ill-fitting tank suits, which I'm told left many of them feeling weird/traumatized for slightly different reasons. Speaking of cleanliness, one would-be hell raiser stuffed a Baby Ruth bar up his butt before swim class and then released it from its hiding place while we were all in the pool, where it may have floated. In any case, swim coach Dave Robertson (something of a Donald Rumsfeld type, Rumsfeld being a New Trier grad; he was a star wrestler) almost had a rage-induced heart attack.

...much more so than by any other Penguin Guide to recordings of any sort, let along by the increasingly vile Gramophone Guides to classical recordings, which are far beyond parody now. I'm not a blues expert by any means, but the apparent savvy and lucidity of the main authors, Tony Russell and Chris Smith, make this a pleasure to read as well as, as far as I can tell from my own tastes and experince, sound in its judgments. Any thoughts?

Oh my God.

In my admittedly limited experience, I've never see a bunny tail (a smallish one) worn with more insousiance. And the charts were excellent.

By "too flat" do you mean "too dull, or boring", or are you talking about problems of pitch? If the latter, I have no complaint about Jackie, but always find Gigi Gryce too sharp. Any views on this? I mean flat, as far as pitch is concerned. And I don't like his tone that much. I listened to the CD this afternoon, and I can hear that he plays very well, and I appreciate it, but I just don't like his sound. I hear that Gigi Gryce is sharp, sometimes, but since I like his tone and phrasing, I don't mind. It's a personal thing: You like a player's sound and conception, or you don't. As Ornette famously said, "You can play flat in tune and you can play sharp in tune." IMO Jackie usually plays flat in tune, especially on Blue Note; in his Prestige days a bit less so (i.e. less in tune and more just flat), though his sound still moves me.

He did but IIRC referred to the Rolling Stones as a minstrel act. There was a big difference between the early Rolling Stones and the mature Rolling Stones in that regard. If that was MW's initial reaction to the Stones when they first appeared on the scene, then it is understandable. It was an initial reaction.

Was Samantha wearing her bunny ears and tail? I'm tellin' ya...

I watched the show after reading your post (I usually tape the show and watch it the next day). It looked to me that the drummer was playing live, at least the few times that I could see him. Maybe it was Larry who was actually on tape. That often is the case. Besides, it was past my bedtime.

The Dern/Ann-Margret movie was "Middle Age Crazy" (1980): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081157/ IIRC they play husband and wife.

Maybe she was one of the ones who made the beefy guys stiff... There's an amusing anecdote about that in Dern's recent (and quite entertaining and utterly unfettered autobiography): http://www.amazon.com/Things-Said-Probably...2110&sr=8-1 He and A-M were doing a simulated sex scene in a film, while her husband Roger Smith hovered just out of camera range. Dern, hard-pressed so to speak to know what do, got between the sheets with his undershorts on; A-M was insulted, saying something like "You're just like all those other snotty New Trier boys!" though eventually they worked it out. A-M's family BTW came from the other side of the tracks, while Dern was a scion of wealth and high social standing; his family on his mother's side founded Carson Pirie Scott department store and owned lots of downtown real estate.

The "orchestral" collective work of the rhythm section on the title track virtually defines hard bop IMO; not I think something that was or could have been done before that era, though I suppose you could say that certain New Orleans/Chicago recordings of the late '20s or early '30s (e.g. the Ory-Dodds "Perdido St. Blues") are analogous in some respects. In any case, that aspect of the title track is just amazing, never fails to thrill and delight. If it had been all written out, it would probably would be recognized for the masterly collective "composition" it is, but... Listen, for one thing, to Philly Joe; his groove is subtly, precisely different on every chorus, and he is not alone in this.

A fairly stiff actor in my experience who was effective IMO only when he was playing characters whose iconic physical and emotional rigidities matched his own nature (e.g. in "Touch of Evil" and "El Cid"). Comparing him another famous graduate of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Il. (my alma mater, too), I'd say that Rock Hudson was much the superior performer. In fact there may have been a tradition of beefy stiff guys at New Trier; I believe Ralph Bellamy went there. Of course, all that is cancelled out by a one-time New Trier student who I believe eventually moved on to a private school, Bruce Dern. And don't forget Ann-Margret, who I knew a bit back then and interviewed when she and I were both adults, if either of of us could be said to have reached that state. Not sure into which category she falls.

I was watching Disco Whatever The Hell It Was, and it looked to me like what the drummer was playing did not match what I was hearing. Certainly none of his cymbal strokes were audible, which in itself may not prove anything, but it seemed to me like nothing he did matched up.

He did but IIRC referred to the Rolling Stones as a minstrel act.

MW's sense of the cultural history of the blues may have been derived from others, but it certainly went against the then prevailing celebration of the "folk" blues; MW for one being aware that figures such as, say, Snooks Eaglin, and of course Leadbelly and countless other supposed "folk" bluesmen before Eaglin's time, were in fact hip to (and had been for all their lives) all sorts of contemporary popular and vernacular music, which they recycled as it suited their own and their audiences' needs and tastes. That is, the essential "folkness" of the blues, as the concept was understood and promulgated by so many white writers and fans from the late '50s on, was largely a fiction that served the needs and tastes and fantasies of that audience. Again, MW may not have been a pioneer in detecting the nature of that game, but he certainly was aware of and wrote about it, for which he deserves credit.