Larry Kart

It sure is. Never heard anything of his that didn't intrigue me, though I wish there were more of it. On the other hand, a la Webern, the smallish size of his output is a sign of an at best sublimely fastidious mind at work.

It turns out that the Berger book is accessible. Here is the passage, from an April 24, 1953 review of a New York Philharmonic concert: "Mr. Rochberg, who is in his early 30s, was the 1952 winner of the Gershwin Memorial Contest, which is open to young American composers. One of the substantial rewards for winners of this contest is performance of the prize work by the Philharmonic, and it was thus that we came to hear 'Night Music.' It turned out to be a meager ten minutes of m usic by a young composer who knows how to reproduce the tenuous orchestral colors of Impressionism with a fair degree of expertness. "According to the program notes provided by the composer 'Night Music' was from a symphony that had one movement too many, and the name was given to the piece after it was extracted from the symphony. We are told that 'night' is to be interpreted in a broad way as 'a symbol of whatever is dark, unknown, awesome, mysterious or demonic.' Both this program and the grotesque opening solo for contra-bassoon immediately put me in mind of the modern dance events on Fifty-second St. Valiantly as the player tried to redeem this solo in the deep dark pitch regions that seem almost below the margin of hearing, the result was a highly unprepossessing opening. It sorely c4ried out for some strakm eexpresionsitc, tortured stage counterpart. "There followed a promising section that verged, in a mild way, on a valid episodic, spasmodic contemporary chromaticism. But in less than two minutes this gave way to a far too easy solution for the piece as a whole, namely, a prolonged sonority consisting largely of muted harmonies on the strings, against which the cello play a long improvisatory solo after the fashion of Bloch's 'Schelomo.' Laszlo Varga's cello tone was very pretty, but the music was empty and banal. "'Night Music' dates from four years ago. The composer tells us that it preceded his 'first efforts in the technique of twelve-tone composition,' and we may assume from this intelligence that he means to say he has gone on to higher things since. The Gershwin committee must have had very slim pickings, indeed, to come up with this work as the prize-winner." Sure, there may be some envy at work here on Berger's part, but "empty and banal" would-be soulful lyricism against a backdrop of the table-pounding grandiose ("'night" as "a symbol of whatever is dark, unknown, awesome, mysterious or demonic" -- love that "whatever") is exactly how most Rochberg hits me.

Larry -- I'd be interested to know more about your experience with the Rochberg quartets. While I like the few of his early chamber works that I've encountered ("Serenata d'estate"), I'm sitting on the fence with respect to much of his other work. Not essential, and not easy to track down, but I have a mid-50s Columbia recording that pairs Lukas Foss' String Quartet No.1 with William Bergsma's String Quartet No. 3. Both interesting examples of how American composers at mid-century were trying to work around the overwhelming influence exerted by serialism. Glorious mono to boot. Probably I should hold off on answering for a while, because my somewhat inchoate sense of dissatisfaction with Rochberg's music of any period (not just when he turned neo-Romantic, or whatever you want to call it) was perfectly crystallized by a review by composer-critic Arthur Berger of a prize-winning Rochberg work of the late '40s or early '50s, which is collected in a Berger book, "Reflections of a Composer," but most of my books are inaccessible to me right now. (Berger BTW is a fine composer.) It had something to do with Rochberg's music making all these sweepingly dramatic, flexed-muscle gestures, but there was so little musical substance, or even real moment-to-moment musical activity, underneath all the leaping and grunting. Whatever, Berger really nailed it, and I think it was in a review that he had to write back at the paper (the New York Herald Tribune) right after the concert.

Zemlinsky and Krenek. Rochberg. And I used to own them all, or all that were recorded. What a feeling of enlightment/liberation when I realized they needed to be dumped.

These two Andrew Imbrie (3&5) quartets (Sessions-like tough but quite individual) have never worn out their welcome with me: http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Imbrie-String...5057&sr=1-1

Don't forget Janacek and Szymanowki. Only two each, but...

Rawsthorne 1-3 on Naxos with the Maggini. There's also a Flesch Quartet disc of the Rawsthorne quartets disc that includes an early quartet from 1935. The Maggini performances are better, but I keep both discs.

Sounds like it should have been Groucho, but it's commonly attributed to Red Skelton. It's Harry Cohn BTW, subject of a famous line from Herman Mankiewicz (screenwriter of "Citizen Kane"): What Columbia Pictures released depended on Harry Cohn's determination of what Columbia Pictures should release. "When I'm alone in a projection room," said Cohn, "I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that." To which Herman Mankiewicz retorted, "Imagine, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

And don't forget Vic and Uncle Fletcher's good friend Rishigan Fishigan from Sishigan, Michigan.

They might have changed the name, but those are still the colors. Orlo Spatz is excellent. My wife recalled from her parents' generation or thereabouts Clyde Baysore and Delbert Finniger. On "Vic and Sade," members of Vic's lodge included Hunky J. Sponger, Y.Y. Flirch, J.J.J.J. Stunbolt, Harry Fie, I. Edson Box, Homer U. McDancy, H.K. Fleeber, Robert and Slobert Hink, and O.X. Bellyman. And Vic and Sade themselves were Victor and Sadie Gook.

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.

And they didn't see that coming? Well-played.

Your Dad was a Warrior?

Depending whether or not you regard the piano as a percussion instrument, the multi-talented Feldman's skills were confined to one family of instruments, two tops.

OK -- interesting. But, as you've said to me several times on other threads, I think you're over-thinking things here. In particular, given the nature of American society, in most places and at most times, if one possesses a reasonable taste for physical fun and a good deal of hand-eye co-ordination, you're going to successfully participate as an adolescent in some form of athletics and also enjoy and be good at social dancing.

My late father-in-law and mother-in-law -- born in the mid-1920s in small towns in Kansas -- were dedicated jitterbugs when young, or so I was told. Once, when they were in their late 50s or early 60s, I was over at their house when someone put on an old Glenn Miller record, something like "Little Brown Jug," and they danced to it. They weren't Savoy Ballroom flashy, but their time and sense of swing were fantastic -- total interaction with the music. And I'm quite sure that Don Lentz (that was my father-in-law's name) was never regarded with suspicion by anyone along those lines by any "regular" white male; he being one of them quintessentially, in the good sense. There was an almost genetic tradition in that family of being good on your feet. Don was a meet-winning high jumper in high school; and Jack Dobson, my wife's uncle on her mother's side, though he had a fireplug-like physique, was a remarkably skilled and graceful roller skater, could skate backwards as fast and as fluidly as he could forwards, and that was damn fast.

Pitty he never knew how while he was still alive. You're a cruel man -- or rooster.

While listening to "The Bill Holman Band Live" (Jazzed Media), rec. 2005, I learned from Holman's tune announcements that it's not "Enn-e-vold-sen," as I'd always thought, but "Een-e-vold-sen." Fine album; Enevoldsen gets two solo spots. BTW, Enevoldsen may have been among the most varied multi-instrumentalists in jazz. In addition to valve-trombone, he recorded professionally on tenor saxophone and bass (three musical families: brass, reeds, and strings) and also played trombone and baritone horn (don't know if played them on record). (BE also was a composer-arranger.) Ira Sullivan, of course, played trumpet, a host of saxophones, probably flute, and drums (maybe more), and that's at least three musical families, assuming you think of the drums as a musical instrument. Anyone else who's notable and is a three-families (or more) man? I'm certainly wowed by Tubby Hayes's skill on tenor, flute, and vibes (he played bari too, and probably some soprano) but that's just two families.

Anglo-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/fyfeholt/macnaghten.htm who wrote 13 string quartets -- all very good (in what was initially a kind of personal offshoot of Bartok and then became all her) all recorded, all those recordings now probably oop. (I have them -- I think thanks to Berkshire at one time.)

I agree with you about the quality of Ruby's work but don't think of him as a swing player, just as Ruby. While he was certainly taken up by the Mainstream-coining jazz journalists in the '50s and made a lot of recordings through their agency and advocacy, I believe that if none of that had existed, Ruby might well have never have played a note otherwise than the way he did. Further, Ruby did some astonishing things -- e.g. with space, dynamics, and use of the lower register -- that had little or no precedent in previous jazz of any era, though Ruby would no doubt say that it all goes back to Louis Armstrong (and be right about that up to a point ... but only up to a point).

Buckley's cleverly adopted and executed role back then (beginning in the late 1950s with "God and Man at Yale," his McCarthy book and his TV persona), was, in the words of critic Donald Phelps, "to give the illusion of movement to an essentially static position." When the "Movement conservatives" of recent years took over and began to actually do their aggressively evil deeds, some of which in form and substance were utterly beyond anything the likes of Buckley could have imagined let alone desired, the part of Buckley that existed in the real world and had actual patrician interests began to blanch and protest, all to no effect. He had become irrelevant within what once was his own coven.

No doubt it's been said elsewhere on this thread, but Buckley's most direct heir is Ann Coulter. That is, Buckley's chief tactic back then, and the one that brought him renown, was to give the then-grey, holding-action Conservative position an illusion of shpritizy, almost "pop' activity by stating one its actual or implict postions in the most provocative, outrageous manner possible. A famous example -- when asked when the people of Africa should be allowed to govern themselves rather than be ruled by colonial regimes, he replied: "When they stop eating each other." Again, there may have been principles at work in Buckley at some times, however vile they might have been, but essentially he was a dandaical "entertainer."

I was talking much too loosely and kind of backwards when I wrote this: "Also, I hate to mention this, but for some of these folks there was a good deal of CPUSA parlor Marxism mixed in. e.g. pioneering primal black geniuses being ripped-off by the machinery of mass-market capitalism. The CPUSA's whole 'folk music' binge coincides with this." The last sentence is true, and while such thinking was in large part cooked up by the CPSU (see the book "Great Day in the Morning" by R. Serge Denisoff, among others) -- in part as a solution to the problem of how the primarily foreign-born CPSU of the '20s could be "Americanized" or be presented as such, in part because it as felt that the avant-garde tendencies of many of the better-known CPUSA-associated composers did not speak directly to the "people" -- that thinking then became of the "Popular Front" mainstream on the '30s and had an effect on all sorts of thoughtful or would-be thoughtful people, whether or not they had any direct connection with the CPUSA. As for the second sentence, one of the passages I must have had in the back of my mind was this from poet-painter-novelist-jazz fan (and amatuer jazz pianist in the SF circle) Weldon Kees: "Popular Culture is completely at the mercy of the laws hastening corruption and decay. No other road is open. Unlike High Art, it cannot fall back on attitudes of recalcitrance for survival.... If the laws of which I have spoken could themselves speak ... their proudest boast would be reserved for the debasement of popular music. Here is total capitulation. The period from the end of the the First World War to about 1936 was one of enormous productivity of first-rate tunes.... A handful of men wrote most of them: Gershwin, Spencer Williams, Fats Waller, Youmans, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart. Most of these men are dead; there have been no successors. (Out of an earlier jazz period that stretched back into the twenties came such impressive and enduring hot classics as [a long list follows]. Almost everything written by Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Scott Joplin, Clarence Williams -- most of them musicians and bandleaders of a very high order --remains fresh and robust. Men of their quality belong to a time as enclosed and without continuance as that of the Ephrata Cloisters, Vorticism, or Lord Timothy Dexter).... The nervous, gay, compulsive music of the twenties gave way to a tastelessness streamlined beyond belief.... Even the best jazz today [Kees is writing in 1948] lacks the fresh originating intelligence at work in the late twenties.... There is an immense concern with mere preservation. The unearthing several years ago of Bunk Johnson ... was a welcome act of antiquarian recovery. "It has been the practice of some later musicians to work intensively at the inventive, though feeling has often been buried in displaying of virtuosity. Performers such as Tony Parenti, Don Ewell, Paul Lingle, Bob Helm, Wally Rose, Burt Bales, and Turk Murphy, among others, continue to resist corruption; but their ranks are systematically being thinned out by desertions for cushier swing bands, by sudden collapses of talent, and the normal high death rate among jazz musicians.... "While jazz continues to persist on records and occasionally elsewhere, the best of it increasingly feels nostalgic, depending more and more on a cultist rather than a popular base; it is almost drowned out by the racket of the large swing and popular bands. These have nothing to do with jazz, although they often contain remnants of rather gratuitous jazz in solo work.... My emphases. Kees does go on to speak of bop, of which he has some understanding but, as you might expect, little sympathy. I'd add that the views of Kees in this piece almost certainly were firmly in place in his mind in the late '30s, and that he was was far from the only person who held them. Finally, though, I know of no direct CPUSA link to SF revivalists; in fact, Kees himself IIRC mocked CPUSA group-think, if only because he was a classic "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member" type.

Will reply, John, but maybe not for a while. Today looks very busy.

Another review that gives a better idea of what the book is about. For myself, I'd say that the mythologizing narrative business is true (though damn complicated in its interaction with social-musical realities; Allen Lowe is an expert here), but only a fool could deny the power of music of Patton, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Son House, et al. About the Clapton example that Marsh harps on (as though what moved Eric Clapton and how was that damn important), I think it's pretty likely that Clapton or anyone else who so to speak "came to" the blues (including myself, in a different place) was responding both to the music and the myth-making, if only because it was virtually impossible to encounter the former without tasting the latter. It helped, though-- as I'm sure Chuck could testify more fully than I could -- to actually be around, say, Big Joe Williams or Fred McDowell a bit and take in and respond to what you thought was up in a reasonable seat-of-the-pants manner. By Caspar Llewellyn Smith Sunday January 14, 2007 The Observer In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions by Marybeth Hamilton Cape £12.99, pp246 The idea that the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues haunts the history of popular music. The alluvial soil brought forth cotton and slavery, and from despair was wrenched the howling moan of Charley Patton, Son House and the damned Robert Johnson. Even before their time - the Twenties and Thirties - the archetype existed. It was at a Delta railhead that the blues were first documented; in his 1941 autobiography, composer WC Handy recalled being woken from a reverie one night in Tutwiler in 1903: 'A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me as I slept,' he wrote. 'His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar ... his song struck me instantly ... the weirdest music I had ever heard.' Never mind that when the first commercial blues record was released in 1920, the singer was a vaudeville practitioner from Cincinnati (and a woman to boot). 'Crazy Blues' by Mamie Smith sold 75,000 copies in its first month of release and began its own craze, as labels such as Paramount discovered an audience of black Americans and flooded the market with 'race' recordings. Nor, as Marybeth Hamilton notes in her iconoclastic study, did the Delta bluesmen even enjoy much of a local audience. Even in and around Clarksdale, jukeboxes played the hits, which meant acts such as Louis Jordan and Count Basie, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. Patton's recordings sold only moderately in his lifetime and those of his followers barely at all. It is not the history of blues performers in which Hamilton is interested, nor in their prehistory - the theory, for instance, that the blues have their origins in the Islamic music of west and central Africa. But between 1890 and 1930, she observes, ethnographers studying Native American song made some 14,000 field recordings using primitive phonograph cylinders. By contrast, no one much bothered with African-American voices, but Hamilton discovers that the Georgia-born sociologist Howard Odum might have been the first person ever to record the blues - 40 miles east of the Delta in Lafayette County in 1907, 13 years before Mamie Smith's studio date. Travelling the back roads, Odum heard 'music physicianers', 'musicianers' and 'songsters', singing songs made up of a single line, repeated two or three times, and he persuaded them to sing into his phonograph in return for a token sum. But tantalisingly, Odum seems to have lost or discarded his cylinders at some point in the Twenties. Even so, it is not evident that he captured the kind of performances that later aficionados would have cherished - the blues in their rawest form, before commercial processes contaminated the results. Odum saw himself as a scientist and conceived of his phonograph as an instrument of science; it was insight into the potentiality of the 'Negro race' that he really sought. But his subjects saw the machine as a wonder in front of which they might show off and they sang 'ragtimes', 'coon songs' and the latest 'hits', which, he lamented, replaced 'the simpler Negro melodies' that Odum had sought. It is Odum and fellow travellers such as writer Dorothy Scarborough, folklorist John Lomax and a group of collectors who named themselves the Blues Mafia who are the subjects of In Search of the Blues. Its central conceit is that 'the Delta blues were "discovered" - or, if you like, invented - as the culmination of a quest that began in the early 20th century, as white men and women, unsettled by the phenomenal success of race records set out in search of black voices that they heard as uncorrupted and pure'. It is a picaresque journey, ranging from Mississippi to Manhattan, mirroring the journey that Lomax took with the ex-con Huddie Ledbetter in the Thirties. Ledbetter, or Leadbelly as he became known throughout the world, killed a man in Texas and was sent to the Central State Prison Farm in 1918. There he came to the attention of the state governor, who told his friend Dorothy Scarborough that the inmate had sung to him seeking clemency. The daughter of a Confederate veteran from Louisiana, Scarborough had studied at Oxford University and Columbia, and was living in New York before she launched a four-year journey back through the South to collect black folk songs in 1921. Captivated by an image of the 'old-time Negro', she believed the music passed down by black Southerners reflected 'the lighter, happier side of slavery'; indeed, that the songs had first been appropriated from the white plantation owners, rather than springing from their own culture. Scarborough opted not to meet Leadbelly, relying, as in other instances, on the state governor's recollections for her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs. Lomax, father to the more celebrated folklorist, Alan, their relationship always full of ambiguities, acted differently. He met Leadbelly when the singer was incarcerated in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana 10 years later. Lomax was not only amazed by Leadbelly's facility as a performer, he valued his 'primitive purity'; jail had inoculated him from contamination with the modern world. The 65-year-old Mississippian also relied upon his assistance on his journey through six Southern states in the autumn of 1933, when he sought to record other black voices. But Leadbelly came to chafe at Lomax's demands, telling him finally: 'I'm tired of lookin' at niggers in the penitentshuh. I wish we could go somewheres else.' 'Somewheres' turned out to be New York, where in 1935, Lomax presented Leadbelly in concert, advertising him to the public as something akin to a noble savage. Crowds flocked, but the singer refused to accept his role and, rather than simply sing his prison songs, he started playing new hits that he heard, whether the country songs of Gene Autry or Tin Pan Alley standards. In New York three decades later, the blues were reborn, when Columbia issued Robert Johnson's recordings, and singers such as Skip James, assumed dead, were rediscovered and brought before new audiences. Key to the blues revival were the activities of the Blues Mafia, a group of collectors who, from the mid-Forties onwards, congregated around Indian Joe's second-hand record store in Manhattan and the mysterious figure of James McKune. McKune was the record collector nonpareil, the model for the Steve Buscemi character in Terry Zwigoff's film Ghost World and everyone with a spot of Nick Hornby in them. In 1944, through a contact or from one of the second-hand stores that he frequented, he chanced upon a battered copy of Paramount disc serial number 13110, 'Some These Days I'll Be Gone' by Charley Patton, an entirely neglected genius about whom he knew nothing. McKune was transfixed, and passed his passion on to his acolytes, who went on to promote the idea of the country blues - the blues of the Mississippi Delta - to a much wider public. Fans included the young Eric Clapton in Britain and the similarly influential US guitarist John Fahey, who, in turn, was responsible for the 2001 release of Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues, a monumental seven-disc boxed set tribute to Charley Patton, hailed by the likes of the White Stripes' Jack White. If the Blues Mafia has predecessors, they were Frederic Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith and William Russell, three friends who had rediscovered Jelly Roll Morton in the late Thirties as part of a quest of their own - to identify the origins of jazz. In Search of the Blues sketches their story, too, including their pursuit of a rumoured box of wax-cylinder recordings made in New Orleans in the mid-1890s by Buddy Bolden. Smith even tracked down a woman who confessed she had owned just such a box - the mythic cornet player might be heard at last! - but the cylinders had gathered dust in her living room for 40 years and 12 months previously she had thrown them out. It is in these detective stories - these searches for obscure recordings and pursuits of an idealised past - that Marybeth Hamilton proves herself a fine and sensitive detective. The author spent her teenage years in San Diego and was a fan of prototype punks the New York Dolls. She came to the blues through the writings of critic Greil Marcus, in whose seminal Mystery Train, Robert Johnson was fancifully identified as rock'n'roll's progenitor. It took Hamilton 15 years to get around to listening to Johnson's recordings - and he only ever did commit 29 songs to vinyl, before his death at the probable age of 27 in 1938. (The story is that he was poisoned; an article in the British Medical Journal last year also posited Marfan's syndrome - a connective tissue disorder, symptoms of which, such as spindly fingers and limbs, Johnson seemed to share.) When the author did listen, she confesses: 'I heard very little, just a guitar, a keening vocal and a lot of surface noise' and certainly not the tale of existential anguish that others identified. Her brief but provocative book doesn't aim to question the artistic accomplishments of the spectral Delta bluesmen, whose recordings might all too easily have slipped from view. But it shakes the foundation myth of so much in music that followed, as well as explaining a great deal about what it is to be a record collector, itself a dying calling in the age of the iPod, when every kind of music from every age is digitally accessible.