Larry Kart

Don't forget Morton Gould: http://www.marklevine.com/saywhat2.html

I have and like the Ciccolini but think that this collection by Jean-Joel Barbier is better: http://cgi.ebay.com/Deodat-de-Severac-Oeuv...8QQcmdZViewItem Ciccolini by comparison is a bit too all-purpose sec. Don't know the Jordi Maso because between Barbier and Ciccolini I think I have all the De Severac piano works of note covered.

As the great Debby Boone put it: "Yoooou light up my life."

sounds like you're saying something negative about trane.................... How the hell could you get this impression? when you don't elaborate, how the hell could I NOT get that impression......... By reading more carefully or thinking more clearly? If, say, Peewee Russell had been influenced by Trane and the resulting mix didn't quite work, to point that out wouldn't reflect negatively on Coltrane but merely indicate that Peewee's pre-existing virtues were not that compatible with Coltrane's. That's all that was meant. BTW, I did know a marvelous Peewee Russell-steeped clarinetist, the recently deceased Frank Chace, who also greatly admired Coltrane and beautifully integrated some aspects of Trane into his own highly individual style.

De Severac is a terrific composer -- somewhat narrow in scope perhaps but unique and focused like a laser beam.

I'm the kid in the middle.

My take is roughly that there are some things that the right musicians know that I'll probably never know and/or be able to spell out adequately (not that these are the same thing, but you probably know what I mean), while some times there are some fairly important things that a non-musican like me is going to discover or grasp more readily than a lot of musicians will because I'm not as wrapped up in the doing/don't have my nose as close to the grindstone as they often have to be. Also, just by following my un-ground nose for 53 of my 65 years, I've heard a whole lot of jazz (and lot of other kinds of music) of many styles and eras; a lot of very fine jazz musicians either don't have the inclination or just don't find it practical to do that, though of course some do. BTW, when I wrote "be able to spell out adequately," I almost wrote "properly." There's a potentially important difference there: for instance, all (or almost all) of us have lived through times in the music where the existing "proper" (and commonly used) technical vocabularies could not adequately spell out what, say, Ornette, or late Coltrane, or Roscoe Mitchell et al. were doing.

I agree and this is why (further explanation at the end, if it's necessary): Excerpts from Terry Martin's great two-part essay about Pepper, from Jazz Monthly, Feb. and March 1964 (previously posted on a Paul Desmond thread): "The white aesthetic of self-exploration dominates, but here is no self-indulgence ... each nuance of feeling is tested for strength; sometimes it gives and both listener and player feel the pain, and against this the sheer pleasure of blowing.... 'I Surrrender Dear' is not the brilliant 'Old Croix' but a deeper exploration: the inevitability of the restless theme statement rises in a reiterated and modulated motive variant that merges with the final theme paraphrase, which in turn is decorated with a brief recapitulation of this shape. The movement passes naturally to the beautifully spaced break that sets his solo lines stalking freely over the harmonies. There are marvelous ascensions from a crushed lower register and countless rhythmic shifts, suspensions, reiterations. Indeed expressive formations abound in the solo (each has the solidity of a theme), and one wonders how he has been thought to be merely another altoist.... "'Besame Mucho," alto all the way, is for me possibly the greatest solo he has ever recorded; although I often turn to it for pure enjoyment I nevertheless end by being moved by its fusion of invention, elan, and passion. It is full of mastery -- the staggering doubletime near the end of the even meter section; passion -- the gleaming tone and lyrical paraphrase; and tragic insight, the whole nervous fabric pierced with desire for a transcendent serenity, ascensions that soar above the kaleidoscopic rhythms and spaces of his underworld, analogous to the bold and equally tragic gestures on 'Parker's Mood,' 'Billie's Bounce, ' and 'Chi Chi,' reflecting back to 'West End, 'Potato Head' and beyond; almost 'style beyond style.'" And this from earlier on in the essay: '[M]elodic fragments dealt out with a sharp sense of time require reassembly if a coherent expressive end is to be served. Again Pepper seems to delved back into the middle era [i.e. the Swing era] independent of Parker; despite the fragmentation there is a constant sense of formal resolution, a tendency to symmetry... It should be stressed that total asymmetry is not essential to the modern style, but its imprint must remain. Pepper in his own way attempts to regain a classical order from the chaos revealed by the bop greats... It seems that his stint with Benny Carter may have been critical in molding his sense of form, since Carter is a master of construction.... Certainly [Pepper] relies strongly on similarities of melodic shapes, these stemming from the choice and direction of intervals, not from resemblances of melody as such.... The altoist builds not on the original melodic figure laid down at the beginning of the solo but on its shape; thus the melodies developed later need have no close relation to the germ cell in melodic terms. Here is a reason for the absence [in Pepper] of note distortions which are often used, e.g. by Parker and Rollins, to create the required ambiguity. The shapes themselves must be kept clean and unambiguous if they are to form the main constructive element; the ambiguity undeniably present springs from Pepper's individual use of rests. Carter's melodic figures, which are placed symmetrically, result in symmetry. Pepper ... places his asymmetrically and thus only tends toward overall symmetry. This is one source of his lyrical tension. "Pepper has never sought beautiful melodies for their own sake.... Rather his melody is completely absorbed in the expressive fabric of the music.... Rarely does he strive for a melodic paraphrase of the theme, being generally more interested in the emotive possibilities of interlocking fragments arising from germ cells of the theme and the effect of altered dynamics. Melody suffers change under constant redistribution of the pattern of rests; in this respect we may note the the mastery of Monk, another who is more concerned in reading meaning into the melody rather than extending further the melodic limits during his improvisations...." Me again. Not to be tedious, but note in particular these passages about the pre-Trane-affected Pepper: "...despite the fragmentation there is a constant sense of formal resolution, a tendency to symmetry.... Here is a reason for the absence [in Pepper] of note distortions which are often used, e.g. by Parker and Rollins, to create the required ambiguity. The shapes themselves must be kept clean and unambiguous if they are to form the main constructive element; the ambiguity undeniably present springs from Pepper's individual use of rests. Carter's melodic figures, which are placed symmetrically, result in symmetry. Pepper ... places his asymmetrically and thus only tends toward overall symmetry. This is one source of his lyrical tension...." Hearing Trane as Pepper did meant that he changed a whole lot of the above, in ways that I'm sure don't need to be spelled out. Not that he couldn't/shouldn't have changed, but the results IMO often didn't work that well. The air of Sturm und Drang felt somewhat external emotionally and arguably was somewhat external to the actual inner musical workings of Art's music even then, though of course the frequent air of Sturm und Drang in Trane's music was clearly inseparable from its inner musical principles. Finally, there are fair number of later Pepper recordings where he pretty much returns to and recaptures (though not at all in a revivalistic manner) the sorts of things that Terry talks about above.

Allen -- If that's the way you feel, this remarkable video will drive you up and over the wall: http://www.richsamuels.com/nbcmm/garroway/johnny_hodges.html

He's more acidic, but you might try some Roussel to see if he's for you.

Maria Butyrskaya! And what a perfect name, too.

Renee Richards?

One of Gunther's problems, which cropped up in both books at times but especially in the second one, is that he brought to bear his own experience as a somewhat professionally iconoclastic figure in the classical world and in his own personal experience/tastes as a young man listening to and playing the music in an arguably rather reckless, unobjective manner. First, his transcriptions in both books are notoriously inaccurate, and when those errors have been pointed out, GS's response, I believe, has been very high-handed, along "I know better than anyone because I'm me" lines. Second, his treatment of Tatum is not only wrong-headed and uncomprehending IMO but seems to spring directly from GS's own deep and understandable distaste for "jazzing the classics." I'm not saying that Tatum is a god whose music can't be questioned but that GS's dislike of Tatum is not IMO primarily based on musical considerations but on socio-musical ones, and are skewed even from that point of view. "Jazzing the classics" is not, except in a few instances or maybe even ever, what Tatum was about. Finally, there's GS's treatment of such figures as vocalist-accordianist Joe Mooney and his group, whose music GS fell in love with at the time. JM is certainly a charming figure, but in the totality of all that needs to be dealt with in that era, what GS says about JM and the length at which he says it almost absurd. I'm not saying that GS on anyone like him should discount his youthful musical loves; what I am saying is that you can't fall in love with them all over again essentially because, or so it seems to me in GS's case, they were the loves of your youth. And even that would be bearable if GS didn't deliver such judgments in his typical ex cathedra tone.

Sent you a PM just before you posted the above. Let me know if you don't get it, and I'll send it again, though stupidly I forgot to save it. I can remember the gist of it, though -- I'm not that far gone yet.

Though Ruby no doubt was fond of SH's playing, did he think he was better than Sam Margolis? Also, frequency of appearances together on record is not necessarily proof of what you seem to think it proves. Witness, Al Cohn and Osie Johnson, Milt Jackson and John Lewis, or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Larry, What label did Franklin and Eleanor record for? :<) Would you clarify the Al Cohn - Osie Johnson issue? That's one with which I am unfamiliar. While recording together does not always prove a lot, when a leader selects sidemen to travel with and to record with, in the large majority of cases, it does prove a great deal about what the leader likes. Sorry, Peter -- I've been asleep at the switch. Cohn and Johnson may not have been an ideal example; what I meant, though, was that while they made a ton of records together for A&R man Jack Lewis in the '50s at RCA, maybe more than Al made with any other drummer, I'd surprised if Al said that Osie was his favorite drummer. Rather, while they were quite OK together, I'd guess that this was more a matter of Osie being a member of the RCA house rhythm section of the time and of Osie being a very reliable guy and a good reader too, if it came to that. By contrast, one of those RCA Cohn-Joe Newman sessions had Shadow Wilson instead of Osie IIRC; the difference in zest and drive was striking IMO.

Here's a poem by Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski (b. 1941) that perhaps touches on one of the things that I think Jim was saying: Again someone somewhere is speaking about the generation of the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties. But I don't like sadism or masochism; I don't consider the old wiser than the young or the young wiser than the old; my ancestor, too, was Utnapishtim who lives on Dilmun island, with its fountain of youth; my children piss in their pants and play in the sandbox; my brother is the northwest wind in the branches of the willow; my sister is the sunlight edging a white cloud; I myself am a blind stone frog in an empty room, with a scar on my knee from the time I fell from my bike on a highway near Kärevere, when bottoms were still flooded and in the forests of Tiksoja violets bloomed and on the banks of the ditches and in thickets there were still patches of snow.

Yes, I'd include Jimmy Smith, although he did come out of and always could fall back on (if that's the way to put it) the world of "greaze" -- as was the case I think with Ammons, in his own way. About Bill Barton's point: "I strongly disagree that remarkable players aren't here right now and plenty more coming up." There are and will continue be (I hope) a good many such players, but I'd be astonished if any of them becomes popular on the scale, and in the way, a musician like Garner did -- that is, attracting and knocking out the "common man" without compromise.

Been very impressed by her in-person in recent years (first heard her about 10 years ago, maybe more, when she was student at, I think, DePaul U. in Chicago) but haven't felt so far that her records have come up to that level. Sounds like this new album might be the one.

One part of the problem is that there needs to be highly individual, arguably great (or at least very good) players whose music inherently possesses the virtues of near-immediate comprehensibility and charm, even though they aren't "playing down" (in some cases, couldn't play down) to anyone. Jazz used to have a lot of those players; the last of them, to my mind, was Erroll Garner. Almost everyone, except for misguided snobs, dug Garner; and most everyone who did was was digging a good part of what was really there. Ahmad Jamal? Maybe, but with Jamal I think there was some division between the genuine subtleties that made him remarkable and his trio's attractive surface (for lack of a better term) "sound." Paul Desmond? Not without "Take Five," I don't think. Likewise, perhaps, not Getz without "Desifinado" and "The Girl from Ipanema." Brubeck? Probably popular enough on his own terms in his heyday, but IMO he just wasn't that good. But Garner was all of a piece, terrifically good, completely individual, and would have been eaten up by the pretty much the same-sized audience that did eat him up if there had never been a "Misty." Gene Ammons, for sure, was another, but wasn't Ammons' appeal a good deal more tightly wrapped in his, so to speak, milieu than Garner's was? Take away that mileu and you've got Dexter Gordon after his "return" -- a great player at the top of his game, but the audience for him, though certainly large enough, was more or less that of pre-existing jazz fans. In any case, it's been a long, long time since jazz has seen a figure such as Garner, and I don't think we'll ever see one again. Jazz still has and will continue to have players that are as good as Garner was artistically, but their artistry doesn't and won't take the form of near-immediate comprehensibility and charm, while those jazz players who do manage to produce such music won't be (and won't regarded as) terrifically good players artistically. I could try to explain why, but there's probably no need to. Briefly, though, the evolving and virtually inescapable complexities of the music per se mean that if there were players who clicked a la Garner, they would almost certainly have to be "playing down" or be genuinely simple/catchy to the point where those who are interested in the music as music would soon be bored. Remember George Winston? Was he a cynic or a genuine mope? I'm not sure, but except when that thing was happening, who cares?

That's some performance, EDC. Also, as I think Chuck recently said on that Scriabin thread, the use to which pianists of Mehldau's vintage have put AS is mostly a pain in the butt. For all its undeniable, fragrant charms, there's a reason that AS's music was a virtual dead end.

A variant: Custer: "Those drums, those incessant drums -- they're driving me mad!" Indian scout: "Trouble come only when drums stop." Custer: "Good Lord -- what happens then?" Scout: "Bass solo."

Borrowed and slightly modified from another site: Two East Coast-based musicians are traveling to their next gig in Chicago in separate cars. First musician gets to the club and is told that his buddy has died tragically on a bridge in Indiana. First musician says: "There is no bridge in 'Indiana.'"

It would take a Rhino Box to hold the present-day Aretha.

Help -- let me out of here! I'm innocent, I tell you, innocent...

There we are, three musical families. And Scott Robinson is f------ nuts, in a good way.