Larry Kart

About 1) it's not that there were fewer musicians then as that so many of them were so distinctive. I mean, off the top of my head, who could mistake Bill Hardman for anyone else? While, again off the top of my head, I like and respect the work of Alex Sipiagin, Scott Wendholt, Jeremy Pelt, Greg Gisbert, etc. but am not sure I could tell one from the other automatically.

Hard to say at this distance, but IIRC it was like he'd play some alarmingly great stuff and then seem to indicate -- through body position, facial expression, and a general air of withdrawal -- that he wished he could take it back, as though he too were alarmed by it. Perhaps this had something to with the fact that the general outlines of his approach were so boldly dramatic (huge tone, wide leaps, wide dynamic range, etc.), while some part of his soul might have been withdrawn and diffident.

Caught him live once at the Jazz Showcase in the late '70s or early '80s, maybe also once at the Jazz Fest later on. A marvelous player, but he also seemed to have some hard-to-define emotional hangups about playing, as though the necessary ego force one needs to have to actually step up there and play out as a soloist was perpetually troubling to him.

BTW, Danimal, I'm sure we're at some of the same performances. If so, say hello.

Even if Hamid Drake counted, I'm in EDC's camp on him. Don't know Marcus Evans or Makaya McCraven. Avreeayl Ra has never done much for me, so damn loud (sorry, I was thinking of Vincent Davis there); if he's still around, I preferred Dushon Mosley. Don't want to get into this now, because I'd need to get out more to really back this up, but it's been my impression that the last wave or so of AACM players are not what one would have hoped -- the stature accorded to the rather lightweight Nikki Mitchell not being a good sign in my book, while Corey Wilkes gives me migranes. (Talk about guys who flaunt their chops.)

How could I forget the great Steve Hunt (of Hal Russell NRG Ensemble fame) who probably is the best if you're going to pick one, but I don't much like the only group he seems to play with these days (with Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, and Jim Baker). There's also Damon Short. Marc Riordan, and Ted Sirota, though I haven't heard enough Sirota to make up my mind. Dana Hall, too, but as good as he is, he's in a somewhat different area in my mind. Mike Reed is very fine, has grown a lot in the last year.

Interesting - maybe our tastes diverge at the drummer spot or maybe I haven't heard him enough. I've seen him live probably 6-10 times and half those times I was seriously unimpressed, but he seems to get better every time I've seen him. Still, I can think of a number of drummers I'd rather see. Are there any other recordings he's on where you're fond of his drumming that I should check out? The two Keefe Jacksons on Delmark, especially the more recent one (Frank is fine on both, but the latter is a better recording), the Chicago-Luzern Exchange's "Several Lights" (Delmark), Jason Adasiewicz's "Roll Down" (482 Music), both of Toby Summerfield's "Never Enough Hope" recordings (Contraphonic), and no doubt a good many other things that I'm not thinking of but can't get at right now to check because of the aftermath of basement flooding (the CDs aren't ruined, just stashed away in stacks upon stacks where I can't get at them). What drummers on the scene do you like? There are some other very good ones, for sure -- Tim Daisy, Michael Zerang, John Herndon, Dave Williams, the now back in Japan Nori Tanaka, the rather flabbergasting Dylan Ryan all come to mind -- but Frank's "compositional" feel seems special to me. Dare I say he reminds me of the late Philip Wilson?

Don't think there is any.

Frank is the best drummer in town IMO.

From his web site, referring to those years: "Often he goes out of his way to give pleasure to his old friends."

The one with Philly Joe (and Dick Katz and Milt Hinton) was recorded at Mintons in 1953 and is his first date under his own name apparently. The other track I was thinking of was recorded at Fort Monmouth, N.J. in '53, with Sid Bulkin on drums.

I remember when I was a kid liking a Tony Scott 10-inch "live" Decca LP, recorded at an Army camp IIRC with Philly Joe on drums, but everything that I've heard from him since he moved to RCA in '56 or so has struck me as unlistenable. All he does is twiddle and twiddle -- and pretty much the same damn twiddles regardless of the tune or where he is in it. I guess you could call that wriggling outside the harmony. Also, FWIW there was Bill Crow's "famous" put down of Scott as an egomaniac in a record review in the old Jazz Review (June 1959), which inspired a letter in defense of Scott from Bill Evans. Crow review excerpts: "When he is around it is always a show, and it is always Tony's show, unless a bigger ham upstages him. Tony wants to be a star. He uses every situation as a stepping stone in his energetic scramble not for artistry, but for fame. He is so intent on his goal that he doesn't even realize how badly he uses his associates.... He plays in a tortured, rigid, sensationalistic manner that successfully attracts attention but has little to do with playing music.... His affectations of humility are loaded with egotism.... [H]e falls back constantly on his three favorite devices: five note descending chromatic runs, ear-piercing squeals and glissandos, and hysteric noncommital twittering around the changes...." Then Crow really lets him have it. And you thought it was the critics who are unkind to jazz musicians?

What's weird about this is that while Q's own writing had a readily identifiable clever-hip sound (too clever-hip for some, but certainly clever-hip) -- it can be heard on all the material he produced for various EmArcy dates and on his own fine ABC-Paramount album "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" --none of the stuff that he did not write but did but put his name on (good though it might be) had any trace of that "Q" sound at all. You'd think that either he or his "ghosts" would want those faux Q charts to sound like something Q had in fact written.

Thanks, Mark; I had totally forgotten what I said there. In fact, IIRC that was one of the last jazz reviews I wrote for the Trib. Some time in the spring of '88 I became an editor in the Books section, then became editor of the Books section, then an editor elsewhere in the paper, then took a buyout offer and left in April 2002.

I was at that 4/88 Jazz Showcase show and reviewed it for the Chicago Tribune. The review can be found through the Trib website's archives feature, but you have to pay to read it. Screw that. I'll try to get a Trib mole to e-mail it to me.

I hear he was going to pay Billy Byers to celebrate it for him.

As I said somewhere on this thread, Tal evolved like crazy in the '80s, though I don't think this was reflected on record. In particular, he heightened the fluidity of his playing (that is, lessened the sense of "attack" on most notes),and thus became, like, a third faster. More important (and this probably was the motive for the change), he was thinking a third faster too. At the level of Tatum at his best, almost beyond the ability of the mind to take it in.

EDC -- You will admit that, to some extent, music is about what musicians play. If so, have you actually heard anything by any of the people I've mentioned, excluding things they may have done with KVM, who pretty much weighs down all that he touches. I'm not saying you haven't, but you've given no sign, O Great Pontificator, that you have, and if you haven't, you don't know anything about this "scene," except that you don't like Peter Margasak. Also, what does David Grubbs have to do with any of this? P.S. I said on that Scott Hamilton thread that I've never been interviewed about my "views" on jazz. When my book came out, I was interviewed by Margasak for the Chicago Reader. I forget about that because at the time I was recovering from the worst case of the respiratory flu I've ever had and was borderline incoherent.

I'd be happy to comment on her music, but all my examples or her work are temporarily inacecssible (all packed away) because of a basement flood.

What is this "white boys with chops crowd" thing? There is IMO no such crowd in Chicago;or at least none of the musicians I've mentioned could be characterized in that way. In fact, as I've tried to emphasize, one hallmark of this scene is an unwillingess to flaunt whatever chops one has, unless and until that's what the musical situation requires. And on this scene, few such situations arise; that's just not what people are interested in doing. The analogy isn't perfect, but was Morton Feldman a "white boy with chops"? Drop this nonsense, please -- the "boys" part, especially. I didn't mention Von, Fred Anderson, Ari Brown, Willie Pickens et al. because as fine or as great (Von and Lee Konitz might well be the two greatest living jazz musicians), they've been around for years -- are except for Brown, as old, older, or much much older than I am (age 65). Willie's pianist daughter Bethany Pickens is a fine player.

Also, extending the net a bit in terms of age, in some cases: Jim Baker, Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, Steve Hunt, Jeff Kimmel, Damon Short, Chuck Burdelik, Geoff Bradfield, Paul Hartsaw, Ryan Schultz, Ted Sirota, Rich Corpolongo, Paul Giallorenzo, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Zerang, Patrick Newbery, Kevin Davis.

EDC -- We're talking players here, right, not people who write about the music? So let me say, Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, Anton Hatwich, Toby Summerfield, Matt Schneider, Jeff Parker, Josh Abrams, Frank Rosaly, Tim Daisy, Dave Rempis, Jaimie Branch, Jason Roebke, Jason Ajemian, Mike Reed, Greg Ward, Tim Haldeman, Jeb Bishop, Nick Broste, Aram Shelton (now in Oakland), Nori Tanaka (now back in Japan), Jason Adasiewicz, Marc Riordan, David Boykin, John Herndon, James Falzone, Nate McBride, Tim Mulveena, Dylan Ryan, etc. -- the list easily could be twice as long. And, to repeat, as talented and as individual as these people are, they function as a scene as I outlined in a prior post; while everyone can play, there's not a "chops"-oriented player among them. The goal, met time and again, is to make some good music collectively. Haven't seen anything like this with my own eyes since the first wave of the AACM.

I have no desire to impugn Lorraine Geller's memory, if in fact noting that her death might well have been drug-related would do so, but take a look at the crowd that she and her husband were running with at the time -- Joe Maini, Lenny Bruce, Jack Sheldon, et al., a so-called "bust out" group of people if there ever was one. Add to that that many deaths that are in some sense drug-related are not actual overdoses -- witness most famously the death of trumpeter Sonny Berman, who was shooting up when an air bubble got into the syringe and traveled to and stopped his heart. If Geller did have underlying asthma and heart problems, it takes much less trouble in that vein, so to speak, to do you in. Berman, for example, who was very heavy set at a young age, was engaging in risky behavior every time he got high. I can't prove that Geller didn't die "naturally," in a non-drug-related manner, but it doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that there would have been a "cover-up" at work here for many decades, given the behavior of the people she was hanging out with at the time on the one hand and, on the other, the apparent middle-class respectability of her social background and the fact that she was a young mother. Lord knows those would be motives, and how many people are going to be poking around to say "nay." For example, for many years, most reference sources said that Sonny Berman died of a either a heart attack or a stroke. Technically true, up to a point, but Ira Gitler finally explained what really happened (see above). Sonny not only was a great young plyer but also a very nice guy who had family, so the protective impulses that prevailed for a qood while in his case are not surprising; and they did prevail for many years.

Whoa -- your work or Ann's? Great stuff, particularly the bird footprint.

One variant that sticks in my head is the Cy Touff-Richie Kamuca "Prez-ence," which begins with the horns playing Prez's solo on "You're Driving Me Crazy" changes and, I believe, goes out with "Moten Swing." Lovely relaxed-airy feel to that track.