Larry Kart

Not really. Byron was trying IIRC (heard the record back then but don't own it) to do an eccentric, more or less post-modern take on a chunk of the musical past that was already felt to be rather eccentric at the time of its initial flowering. Indeed, Raymond Scott's music was heavily fueled by that sense of eccentricity, both in terms of Scott's creative impulses and how that music was received by the public back then. As for Byron himself, already drawn to the clever-weird wedge of the cultural spectrum (he'd already done Mickey Katz, right?), the move to Scott was pretty logical. In particular, if we take Byron at face value, he wasn't involved here in moving back and away from the present to a supposedly Edenic past but was instead kind putting his name (and, he had reason to hope, a price tag) on a collage made up of weird photos from 1938.

Contrary to what Jennifer Diaz says toward the end of that Al Jazeera report, there was a great deal of intense discussion about this on the Chicago Reader website (and elsewhere too, IIRC) right after Malachai's identity was discovered: http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/post-no-bil...parent-suicide/ Now it's possible that the story wasn't prominently featured throughout the media for primarily political reasons (remember how that woman who protested the war at or near Bush's ranch was trashed as a self-serving eccentric?), but as some of the posts on the above discussion suggest, there is some reason to think that Malachai's motives were somewhat mixed and that members of his immediate family would have been hurt if those actual or apparent mixed motives were hashed over in the press, as they almost certainly would have been.

OK, so if I now read you right, Deep Blue Organ Trio aren't revivalists because they aren't doing it to try to distance themselves in time (since they're in Chicago, they can't distance themselves geographically) from the present; they're merely continuing to play in a style that, though it's no longer got a cutting edge, still has numerous musicians, who were its exemplars in the fifties and sixties, playing. MG Exactly. And I like DBOT, have bought their records. Also, while the Green Mill is not exclusively an organ bar, out-of-town organ groups do play there -- Will Blades' is one that I went to hear. (Will is the son of an old friend of mine, former Chicago Tribune Book editor John Blades.) About Wynton (and his gurus) as revivalists/fetishests/ideologues (I think they're all three, and probably some other stuff there aren't names for yet), accumulation of cultural power in the name of righteousness soon became the gist of it IMO. This was a new thing in jazz revivalism as far as I know; nobody before had ever thought that one could actually storm the palace (and/or build a palace) under such a banner. I tell ya, those of us who saw it happen witnessed one of the most remarkable feats of social engineering in the history of modern man. Some day it will be studied the way people study the Spanish Inquisition (or, now that I think it, the Counter-Reformation).

That's pretty much how I understood it (though I'm no expert on this stuff at all) -- that some pre-existing music was assembled/packaged with the goal of creating a new radio format (the assembling/packaging based on a blend of intuition of and/or research into what the audience they wanted to reach might go for), and that it was also felt that labeling the results in just the right way might be a big part of selling it in the realms where radio formats are sold, etc. If so, once the packaging/labeling process was followed by the broadcasting-under-that-label stage, it would seem that the game to some degree had been changed, though certainly in one of those good-old American ways. (Sociologist David Riesman, back in the 1950s, asked some pubescent girls why they liked the then No. 1 pop record. The answer he got was: "We like it because it's popular." Can you say, "Cuckoo for Cocoa-Puffs"?) In any case, the key limited question for me is the factuality (or non-factuality) of the poster on Jazz West Coast's statement: "I worked with a consultant who later became one of the three original smooth jazz creators." That is, were there in fact three radio people who put their heads together to package and label (with the aid of focus groups) this assembled-out-of-already-existing-material radio format, and is it true that before they did so (if indeed they did) the format, as a specific, labeled format, did not exist in radioland. Or maybe it already pretty much existed as radio format but without that label? I don't know. (I'm vaguely reminded now of a somewhat pernicious thread on the nature and origin of "Dixieland.")

That Cub-Dodgers game, as you might expect, set a record for the least amount of hits in a nine-inning major league game. As frosting on the cake, Koufax had 14 strikeouts that day.

I remember Koufax throwing a no-hitter per year in 1962, 1963, and 1964, followed in 1965 by a 1-0 perfect game against the Cubs. Even more insane, in that 1-0 perfect game, the Dodgers got one hit. Cubs pitcher was Bob Hendley.

A post from the Jazz West Coast site: Smooth jazz is not a cousin to legitimate jazz, in fact it isn't even related. When the radio consultants who cooked it up in focus groups had settled on a sound, they needed a name. They went back to focus groups and discovered that the term "jazz" had a high recognition factor so they tacked that name on. The unfortunate result is a generation of people who think they understand jazz, but in fact have never heard it. Smooth jazz wasn't part of the century-long artistic development of jazz, so it's not correct to even call it an art form. The many paths that jazz has taken have been a result almost exclusively of artists striving to find new creative directions. I don't know of any case, perhaps someone here does, wherein a school of jazz was created purely for profit potential. Smooth jazz, however, was created strictly to make money for radio stations. Artistic merit was never a consideration. Had the creators called it smooth music or something else, the identity crisis that jazz now suffers would not exist. I have mentioned here before that I worked with a consultant who later became one of the three original smooth jazz creators. Another radio network colleague of mine later created WQCD, the first smooth jazz station in the country. As far as I know, neither of these guys knew or cared anything about real jazz. Morrie

What a hit-man job that review was! Almost breathtaking in its dishonesty. I thought of saying "in its ignorance," but Marsh can't be that dumb or entirely that dumb; he's almost certainly operating here as a conscious assassin. Disclaimer: While I haven't read the book, and I think that Allen's mixed estimate of it is where I'd end after I did, the way Marsh plays the race card in this review has more convolutions to it than a coiled snake.

Koufax at his best was the best pitcher I ever saw -- it was almost laughable what he could do; batters had about as much chance to hit him as they did to hit a watermelon seed that you'd whanged on a table top with a knuckle -- but his best, through no fault of his own, didn't last that long.

IIRC, Bill James said it was Lefty Grove.

Thinking about this as I went to bed last night, I wondered whether those country club types were the same group (though perhaps not the same individuals) who filled the SS Norway for those Floating Jazz Festivals starting in the nineties, which were frequently recorded by Chiaroscuro. Because if it is essentially the same group, by then they were clearly happy to listen to the likes of Nat Adderley, Al Grey, Red Holloway, Junior Mance, Benny Golson etc. MG I think that this was in part because some of the people who played a role in booking the SS Norway things were older be-bop oriented guys. like Joe Segal of the Jazz Showcase. And any audience that liked the Gibson Jazz Party lineups and the Swing Kids players but then turned its back on the players you mentioned would have to be pretty aggressively stupid to do so.

Then we really are thinking about this differently. And I don't understand the distinction you're trying t omake. MG The pieces from my book that I posted on page 7 of this thread (especially the piece titled "Raiders of the Lost Art") are my best attempt: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...music&st=90 I'll try to add a bit more. Off the top of my head, genuine jazz revivalism in my view must involve a literal or figurative distance from contemporary phenomena and/or a desire to distance oneself from contemporary phenomena. For example, the very first jazz revivalists, the Lu Watters Yerba Buena crowd in San Francisco, was driven in part by a professed loathing for the supposedly corrupting commericialism of the slick Swing bands (yes, they meant Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, et al., and they felt this music corrupted both musicians and the public) as well as by their belief that jazz had a relatively neglected/forgotten, artistically pure Edenic past, which they could return to and revive. 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. Of course, Watters et al. also genuinely dug King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, etc., but for my tastes, they seldom were up to the challenge musically (though people whose opinions I respect disagree). Also, and this brings up another key point, though the SF revivalists didn't see it that way, they were perhaps too close -- in time and physical/social distance -- to their models. Here there was the interesting fact that Condonites, whose music was as close by as could be, had never ceased to play their version of the music they themselves had played in the '20s. Don't have chapter and verse on this, but my guess was that the SF revivalists regarded the Condonites as no less corrupt than the Goodman and Shaw bands, et al. I should add that the one great key virtue of the SF revivalists is that they regarded the pieces of the '20s that they were drawn to as worthwhile in themselves, as vehicles for ensemble performance, not merely as frameworks for solos. They themselves IMO were not able to bring this off as well as was desireable, but this was a genius insight in terms of what would come to pass elsewhere. (Footnote: Given the template I'm building here, I think that Wynton definitely is a revivalist, though of a newish, corrupt sort -- because the goals of his movement were so deeply oriented toward acquiring cultural power, under the guise of moral-aesthetic righteousness.) Elsewhere was Australia in the early 1940s. There the literal and figurative distance factor was profound. Exposure to American recordings and to American culture in general was limited, and the players who did respond were in all other respects embryonic, quirky home-grown modernists who were trying in a host of ways to define themselves in a culturally raw enivornment, not to cock a snook at the supposedly slickly oppressive Swing bands who loomed so large in the SF revivalist ethos. Two further things: The young Australian players who caught this Trad fever were in one sense amatuers but also were at best, in terms of sheer musical talent, the best players around there regardless of style; this could not be said of Watters and his people IMO. In any case, virtually everyone Down Under who was any good began to sound like himself; in particular, the SF emphasis on the compositional weight of early jazz pieces led to, from Dave Dallwitz especially, the creation of pieces that were in the style of early jazz but were distinctly his own and, I and others believe, as good as anything from, say, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Sounds crazy, but take a listen. The "Ern Malley Suite," if you can find it, is one of the major large-scale jazz compositions. On to Jean-Pierre Morel and his Charquet and Co. of the 1970s and the Le Petit Jazz Band of today. It's perhaps revealing that, as Morel has said, his music was in part based on a negative reaction to what was in France when Morel was a young man a big portion of the contemporary jazz scene -- the broadly popular and fairly crude (both in terms of music per se and in terms of its response to its supposed sources in the jazz past), show-bizzy strain of jazz revivalism that prevailed in France in the 1950s and '60s (Claude Luter would be an example of this.) Based on his own burgeoning involvement with the orchestral jazz of the '20s (Morel was collecting obscure recordings and hunting down and poring over scores), this young provincial somehow assembled a band of like-minded guys, and ... well I hope you saw and heard the videos I posted earlier in this thread; they say it all. And Le Petit's many recordings are proof that there's probably no end to this vein of precious metal. It should be added that, akin to Dallwitz in this regard, Morel's arrangements of these pieces are his own work, not off-the-record copies or literal recreations of surviving charts. The amazing ensemble zeal of these performances, and the frequently thrilling and quite individual solo work (Alain Marquet, by any standard that comes to mind, is one terrific jazz clarinetist), make it clear that these men have plunged into the jazz past in order to make something new that expresses who they themselves are -- just as much as, say, Woody Shaw or Ornette or anyone else did or is doing that. No f------- nostalgia, and no f------- post-modernism either; just a personal form of love.

OK -- I agree completely. But that's not what I thought you were saying before. BTW, I remember how much fun it was at the Nuremberg Rally: Leni, and Adolf, and me Bundled in back of the 'Benz Arbeit sure does macht frei 'Specially when you're among friends Thank you -- I'll be here all week.

I don't think of any of the people mentioned on this thread (that I know of) as being revivalists. Below are some videos, audio clips, and one set of MP3 files of some of the real (and so seldom successful) thing: First, the incredible French band Charquet and Co., which led to today's Le Petit Jazz Band: http://video.aol.com/video-detail/everybod...1978/2410587002 http://video.aol.com/video-detail/vo-do-do...1978/3619881404 http://www.mp3.com/artist/le-petit-jazzban...-morel/summary/ Then samples from two albums by Australian composer-pianist Dave Dallwitz. These are more ragtime-oriented than Dallwitz's great stuff from the 1960s and before, most notably his "Ern Malley Suite," but it's all I could find. Note that many of these pieces are Dallwitz originals: http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Ragtime-Vol-D...e/dp/B000000ZQ2 http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Ragtime-Dave-...pd_bxgy_m_img_b Videos of of the great Australian eccentric reedman Ade Monsbourgh (and there are more where these came from). Ideally, one would want to hear some Ade from the '50s, and Neville Stribling is not in Ade's league, but these will give you some idea. Ade's sources are in the past, but he sounds like no one else. Again, most of the pieces that Ade's own band, Lazy Ade and His Late-Hour Boys, plays here are his own. The lyric on "Don't Monkey With It" is worth trying to make it out: http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-aust...-hour/828602684 http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...risks/528228284 http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...th-it/620110738 http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...ed-up/617746100 As Terry Martin has written of the almost miraculous Australian Trad movement of the 1940s: "Seemingly simultaneously and independently, musicians in the southern arc of the continent (Melbourne, Hobart, and Adelaide) took spirit from the great Chicago recordings of the '20s to generate a style that, while sharing some aspects with the slightly earlier revivalists in the United States, had in its prime a joy of liberation and swing all of its own... Aspirants to earlier jazz styles are advised to seek out out the Australian traditional jazz recordings of the '50s, as well as some lalter incarnations ... as an idiosyncratic example of a historic style made new." (My emphases.) And the same goes for Charquet and Co. and Le Petit Jazz Band. It's their own identities that these men are discovering and expressing through this music, and that makes all the difference. No one is asking for extra credit because they like what they like.

About "...entertainment uber alles. Looking at it as anything else - pro or con - is so much 'wishful' thinking," I demur and offer an example, the beginning of Robert Pinsky's witty long poem, "An Explanation of America": A country is the things it wants to see. If so, some part of me, though I do not, Must want to see these things -- as if to say "I want to see the calf with two heads suckle I want to see the image of a woman in rapid sequence of transparencies projected on a flat bright surface, conveying the full illusion and effect of motion in vast varying scale, with varying focus swallow the image of her partner's penis..." etc. Even more to the point, though I don't have the book at hand and can't quote from this part, Pinsky goes on to recall a time when he was in rural England and visited a county fair, where he saw a group of people -- men and women of all ages, maybe some childen were there too -- eagerly paying money to go see something. Advancing through the crowd, Pinsky discovers what's up: In a muddy pit, somewhat deeper and bigger than a grave, a naked woman lies on her back. Then rats are introduced to the pit and proceed to scuttle back and forth over her body as she remains as impassive as possible, while the assembled audience raptly continues to watch. As I recall, Pinsky speculates that while he could imagine some Americans arranging such a event for their own private "amusement," he could not imagine a public American social gathering in which this was, as it clearly was in this part of rural England, a form of show business. But to speculate that this might have some wider meaning is wishful thinking? One hell of a gig, though.

This is very interesting. I wasn't aware that there was this feeling around in the late seventies. The idea that jazz was then turning its back on its audience, existing or potential, is quite extraordinary, since in that period hundreds of jazz LPs made the pop or R&B charts. Even Sonny Criss had a hit album! But of course, these hit albums were mostly disco, as was Sonny's, or fusion, and I can readily understand why that group of people wouldn't have been interested in that stuff (and much of it really is junk, by anybody's standards). But setting all that music aside with no further comment, if this bunch of audience was looking for musicians who could and did play their music the way this audience wanted it played, there was a whole raft of mucsicians who fitted - yes, Percy and Hal, but also Plas Johnson Kenny Burrell Al Grey Illinois Jacquet Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Jimmy Forrest Milt Buckner Billy Mitchell Wild Bill Davis Red Holloway Houston Person Willis Jackson Eddie Chamblee Arnett Cobb Harry Edison Rhoda Scott Teddy Edwards Junior Mance Tiny Grimes Ray Bryant Lionel Hampton Benny Carter Johnny Lytle Lou Bennett Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson Slide Hampton Norman Simmons Bill Doggett Blue Mitchell Bobby Forrester Ronnie Cuber (Oh, and there were a few around who could play that way, but were making money making disco albums - Stanley Turrentine is a case in point.) Now the big problem is, most of those guys had been around for a while, some of them a very long while. Only the last two made their debut albums as leaders in the late seventies. Of that list, only Plas and Kenny recorded for Concord in the late seventies. A very large proportion of them had to go to Europe to find a record company willing to put out their material - thank heavens for Black & Blue and Barclay. Norman Simmons made a number of DIY jobs. So, if there was an audience - and I have to assume that was the audience Carl Jefferson thought he could tap into - why didn't it latch on to most of these guys? Why wasn't Concord rampaging through the US and Europe trying to pick up these musicians? I think Jim Sangrey nailed it when he mentioned Scott Henderson's "dirty little secret" - only it wasn't a secret in the cases of most of the musicians I've listed; they'd all done time - valuable time, as far as I'm concerned - in R&B. Indeed, some were great names in R&B, while others had contributed classic solos to R&B hits. (And should I point out that only two of them were white? - but Cuber had long hair at the time; don't know about Forrester's hair.) So, although this audience may have SAID that it wanted music such as you've described, Larry, one's forced to conclude, since they didn't in fact want so much of the really quite significant amount that was available, that they really wanted something else but didn't want to come right out and say so. Would such an attitude give conflicting signals to the musicians who were hired? I dunno. Someone else would have to answer that. MG I think you're onto something here, MG. In particular, as you suggest in the last paragraph, what they wanted above all perhaps was for the music of their fondly remembered past to return in the guise of a young generation of players, to believe that the audience's past was or might be the wave of the future (or maybe, pace JSngry, they didn't consciously think it out like that but felt some sense of satisfaction about the Swing Kids thing that ran along those lines). About the racial component, I'm pretty sure that all of the Swing Kids were white, but I recall that the lineups at the Dick Gibson jazz parties, which preceded and fed into the Swing Kids thing, usually were racially mixed. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the black musicians at those Gibson parties were a tad creeped out by the country-club nature of much of the audience.

Well, yeah, but otoh, I doubt that too many people who are really into this stuff to the exclusion of anything else are really thinking about it this hard. Whether or not they should be is another thing, but it kinda begs the question - if all you're looking for is a good time, and somebody gives it to you in a way that satisfies you, isn't it sort of a victimless crime? I mean, I know for a fact that Dan digs Percy France hard, but is the average "Scott Hamilton Fan" really aware enough of what the difference is to even think about it, much less think at length about it? Nah... Bottom line for all concerned in this scene, I think, is that it's about entertainment & craft, two venerable qualities of no small importance to Life In General. As far as that goes, they do it well enough to keep each other happy, and they, unlike the Marailisians (no BN, I'm not referring to you specifically) tend to leave the rest of us alone. I know a few people who have a few Scott Hamilton albums who've never even heard of too much of anybody else, nor do they really care to. It's "lifestyle music" to them, and hey, good for them about that. This is one case where "live and let live" has a happy ending for all concerned, at least in my experience. Would that is was always such. You're right -- it's not usually about "thinking about it this hard," but a lot of stuff that people kind of just do has ideological roots (sorry about that) that are virtually forgotten in one sense but are still very active in others -- perhaps more effectively active because the roots are forgotten. About Percy France or Hal Singer etc., a key question to me is, if the typical SH fan encounters some PF, HS, etc. would he hear much difference? And if he did, what would he make of it? "Live and let live"? Hell, I'm as mean as a snake.

Tom in RI (and Dan and probably others her, too) -- About the "wrong" part, one of the fundamental premises of the whole Neo-Swing movement (actually going back to the mainsteam label and movement that arose initially in Britain in the mid-1950s) ... well, perhaps I'd better quote a chunk from my book before going on with this thought: "The term 'mainstream”' is in jazz parlance not merely descriptive. Coined in the mid-1950s, reportedly by English critic Stanley Dance, it arose from the belief in some quarters that bop, and modern jazz in general, was something of an artistic wrong turn, and that a number of still vigorous Swing musicians (for example, trombonist Dicky Wells, trumpeter Joe Thomas, and tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate) were far less visible on the jazz landscape than they ought to be. Thus the labeling of such musicians as mainstream was at once an expression of aesthetic preferences and an attempt to translate those preferences into permanent values. But even though the style of music that led to the coining of “mainstream” has now edged over into revivalism, if only because almost all the original Swing stylists are no longer with us, when the term is used today it retains some of its original ideological wishfulness. The belief or the hope is that within shifting stylistic boundaries a majority of musicians still agree on how the music can and should be played, that it is within this area of language agreement that the music’s most genuinely creative figures are at work, and that the course of the music will and should flow along in this manner. In fact, things are a bit more complicated than that." Me back in the present now: So "mainsteam" thinking (and beginning in the mid'70s the Swing Kids thing) is in part based on the idea (entertained by some but not all of its players and probably by more of this music's audience) that, as I said above, "bop, and modern jazz in general, was something of an artistic wrong turn" -- "wrong" in part because some of it was felt to be alienatingly hectic, angry, or just ugly (remember Coltrane and Dolphy being labled "anti-jazz"?), and/or needlessly complex, and devoid of attractive, recognizable, warm human/humane values; and wrong as well in practical commercial terms, in that jazz once was a popular music and now much of it figuratively was turning its back on any chance to connect with its surviving former audience and any new audience of similar size to boot. So the moral gauntlet was thrown down here initially by the formulators of the "mainstream" ethos, and such thinking pervades many (but not all) revivalistic or preservation-of-the-noble-past movements in jazz. (See Wynton and J@LC for the most familiar, "Fire of the Fundamentals" examples, musically and in terms of moralistic table-pounding. That the Swing Kids movement arose a few years before Wynton arrived on the scene may or may not be an accident.) In any case, want I want to hear from those musicians who explicitly or implicitly claim to be in touch with the touchstones of the jazz past (and to be of artistic value in their own right in part because they are in touch with/are inspired by those touchstones) is some evidence in their own playing that they really do understand, musically and emotionally, those elements of the jazz past that they profess to love. Tad Shull, for instance, pretty much convinces me that he is knowledgably, truly inspired by Byas and Lucky Thompson, and I'd say the same of Mark Turner's obesience to Warne Marsh, and Grant Stewart's synthesis of Mobley and Rollins (though I'd prefer fewer explicit "Sonny-isms" from Stewart and more energy at times from Turner). Among the no longer young Swing Kids per se, though (including SH, who again seems to half-fallen into the "movement" aspect of the thing au natural), I hear a lot of guys who seems to me to present some of the surface aspects of their models as though that were enough. If so, doing that alongside the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral-aesthetic claims to "rightness" that their music makes or that is made for their music, kind of pisses me off. For example, even though it's just a phrase and SH himself didn't come up with it, a website devoted to SH says that he has "The Perfect Mainstream Tenor Sound." As I said in a previous post, the Swing Kids movement was in effect looking or for just such a guy who had just such a sound, and I think that for a fair percentage of that audience, the presence of that sound and the fact that it was coming from a somewhat romantic-looking young man, was close to enough. As Allen Lowe might say: "What about Percy France? Any gigs here for Hal Singer?"

Jim -- Given what you've just said and looking back at the points you made on that old thread, I'd like to adopt your position on SH almost wholesale. He was not really one of the Swing Kids, just ended up being packaged that way -- to his benefit in some ways up to a point. I wonder, though, whether the whole thing would have gotten off the ground quite the way it did if it weren't for SH's existence; it's like the movement needed a young tenor player of that type for it to feel right, in that "Geez, maybe history can run backwards" way that, say, the existence of Coltrane et al. made so appealing in those circles. (A player I know whose career has been largely based in the Swing Kids thing, though now he's no longer a kid, acknowledges having benefitted from it but also complains bitterly about being circumscribed by it creatively -- that is, those audiences only want to hear that thing from him, though he certainly can be quite creative doing that thing.) BTW, nothing against R&B backgrounds over here. And nothing against revivalistic impulses and movements per se. It's just that in my experience jazz revivalism tends to be a very tricky thing -- yielding unique precious metal at times (e.g. Dave Dallwitz, the Bell brothers, Ade Monsborough, et al. in Australia; Jean-Pierre Morel and his pals in the Les Petit Jazz Band in France) but more often producing what seems to me to be fools' gold. The crucial factor, aside from sheer talent, seems to be nostalgia or the lack of it. Love for certain things of the past because they speak to you, excite you, yes; but embracing pieces of the past because it feels, or you think it would feel, more comfortable to be there rather than here is usually a recipe for disaster.

About SH's early background, the Wikipedia entry on him says: "He began playing in various rhythm & blues outfits in Providence (Rhode Island), but subsequently shifted to jazz and the tenor saxophone." Feather-Gitler amplifies some: "Began on piano and clarinet. Played blues harmonica in local groups 1968-70. Began focusing on tenor sax at age 16. Gained experience with tenor-organ gigs in Providence. New York-New England '71-'76 with Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames." Etc. One question would be, what kind of band was the Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames? The name suggests to me what I said before, but never having heard the band myself, I can't say for sure. On the other hand, it certainly seems likely that if SH was playing tenor-organ gigs, his style either already was implicitly big-toned and oriented toward rhythmic drive of a certain direct sort, because that's how virtually all tenormen in organ combos play; it goes with the territory, both in terms of standing up to the organ and in meeting both the expectations of audiences who go to hear tenor-organ combos and the expectations of clubowners who hire them. In any case, given that likely stylistic orientation on the part of the young SH (which probably was as much internal and it was externally determined), he then in the mid-1970s when he moved to NYC became explicitly bonded to the burgeoning neo-Swing movement, which in effect virtually wrapped itself around him and had (and still has) I beleive the somewhat revivalistic basis that I described in the piece in my book that gave rise to this dispute. By contrast, I'll mention another big-toned tenorman of Hamilton's vintage, Tad Shull (b. 1955), who is explicitly beholden to Don Byas and Lucky Thompson and has worked in some neo-Swing settings but who seems to me to be a very in-the-moment player who just happens to be oriented toward those models rather than, as in the case with many neo-Swing guys IMO, a player where the arguably respectful summoning up of the models almost inevitably implies a mood of fond nostalgia, especially in the audience. As far as revisiting specific Hamilton performances, I can't do that right now (and probably not for a long time, even if I wanted to) because the only Hamilton album I currently own is an LP of "Soft Lights and Sweet Music," with Mulligan, though I may also have a R. Clooney LP or two with him; and because, thanks to a failed basement-waterproofing job and subsequent damage, the only music I can listen to at home right now are the CDs that happened to be within immediate reach when the flood was discovered last Sunday; everything that was in the basement on shelves (including maybe 4,000 LPs and 130 boxes-worth of books) is inaccessible, packed away down there and, in some cases, no doubt completely ruined by water-damage. But I can't get at anything down there to eeven look at it until the water-proofing problem is solved, the basement can then (I hope) be reasonably remodeled, and finally everything can be unpacked and put back on new shelves.. At the moment, I'm sadly not sure that will ever be possible. So we'll have to leave our SH disagreement where it is, unless you want to burn a CD of favorite SH performances and send it to me. BTW, do you know Tad Shull's work? Also, does anyone here know a lot about basement waterproofing, especially what if anything you can do if you've been played for a fool?

Chick told me a few years after his time with Stan that he thought of himself then as filling the role of Stan's "keeper" (as in "minder"). Clearly a daunting task, and if someone wasn't doing or trying to do it, chaos could ensue, Likewise, perhaps, when I asked Gary Burton in an interview (the Chick remark was just conversation) how he'd learned to be so good (apparently) at taking care of business across the board, he said ironically that he owed it all to Stan, that he'd learned from working with Stan to do everything just the opposite of what he'd seen and experienced there. As I may have said before here, Stan somehow ran across or was told about that remark and at least two years later brought it up when we ran across each other at a club, emphasizing how deeply hurt he was by it. IIRC Jim McNeely was within range when Stan said this, and from the look on McNeely's face (which Stan couldn't see), it was fairly clear that he was now occupying the "keeper" role.

Personnel for "This One's For Basie": Pete Candoli, Harry Edison, Conrad Gozzo (Trumpets), Buddy Collette (Clarinet/ Tenor) Bob Cooper (Tenor), Frank Rosolino (Trombone), Bob Enevoldsen (Valve Trombone), Jimmy Rowles (Piano), Joe Mondragon (Bass), Bill Pitman (Guitar), Rich.

Take this with a grain of salt perhaps (or perhaps not) because I'm not a big Oscar Peterson fan, but the "Plays Count Basie" album is really nice. Among other things, when Buddy Rich was doing neo-Jo Jones, he was not only damn good at it but also seemingly pleased as hell to be doing it. You can almost see him grinning. Same groove on Rich's nice mini-big band Granz album from about this time with Marty Paich charts, "This One's For Basie."

Thanks, Mark. That's about how it was, but with Airto too. Damn -- Tony Williams should still be in this world.

That is a good one. Don't know if it's available. Speaking of "Captain Marvel," I saw that band "live" at The London House in Chicago. Probably one of the ten best performances I've ever heard. What a rhythm section -- and what loss it was when Stanley Clarke eventually went away in effect.