Larry Kart

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.

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.

I think it's excellent (disclaimer: Jackson is a friend, and I wrote the notes for that other album of his, though we became friends mostly because I liked his music). When you do get to hear this one, you'll find it's a bit different than the previous one. More writing, and that writing os more "sound"/"voicings" oriented. Also, this is a much better recording job. Delmark's own studio is rather dry.

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.