Larry Kart

Fascinating. Great stories too.

I see your point, but given the fact that there was so much Bird on record after a while, which couldn't help but reveal what he actually was doing musically, I would imagine that most players who dug Bird did so on the basis of what they were hearing him do rather than on what the Chili House anecdote and others like it said that he was doing.

Lockjaw with Basie: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8u6t7jWtLs Hide the woman and children. Also, do you know that Scottish tenorman, Lochjaw Davis?

More about this -- and related statements by drummer Gus Johnson, bassist Gene Ramey, Don Byas, and Dexter Gordon about supposed systematic use of substitute harmonies by Bird -- from Brian Priestley's "Chasin' the Bird" (pp. 115-16): "It is hard to find recorded examples of anything [like this] ... in Parker's playing..... [And] it was unusual for him to compose lines that relied on complex harmonic movement, obviously preferring to reserve an optional complexity for his spontaneous improvisations. His use of harmony was extremely sophisticated, but what distinguished his mature style was the ability to take any principle of chord complication, whether derived from Tatum, Ellington, Gillespie, or Young, and make it work in a totally non-programmed and non-schematic way. Put more succinctly, the polyrhythmic approach was essential but the polyharmonies were less so....

I was making, or trying to make, a joke (or wisecrack) by conflating the terms used for methods of recording music with Jim's metaphorical use of "analog" as he spoke of ways of responding in words to music.

Another big problem with the Biddy Fleet chili-house breakthrough anecdote is that what it says Bird did on "Cherokee" -- use "the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and [back] them with appropriately related changes" -- was not in fact something that was characteristic of his playing. Rather, these were methods used by some bop-era composers. Bird's solo work was not as schematic, and to the degree that it was schematic, it was not so in that way.

As its title suggests, Lees's "You Can't Still a Gift" also contains much b.s. from him on this subject.

I too sense a major paradigm shift in the works, one that will erase from the universe virtually everything I know and care about. This will be done not from outright malice mostly but as a semi-incidental consequence of the need to reshape things, a la what happens to what's in the way when a really big parking lot needs to be built. What saddens me, in particular, about what I expect will happen is that in the process large parts of the past -- our individual and collective historical memory -- will be bulldozed and thus probably lost forever, all this in the name of supposedly simple necessity. One perhaps oblique example of what's to come, the term "IslamoFascism." One knows why and more or less by whom it's been dreamed up, but the "need" to do so means that the historical reality of what Fascism actually was has been turned to dust. (For a powerful pocket example of some of that reality, check out the recent movie "Pan's Labyrinth.") I assume that Jim has fairly nice cosmic things in mind for the paradigm shift he sees coming, but thoughts of the major reshaping that would have to be involved leave me with almost no optimism; the major reshapers of the world in my lifetime have been sick, brutal fucks by and large.

My critical writing is "digital," not "analog," and it's 100% "effective." That's why those in the know don't stand too close to it.

Actually, I searched for it but with no success. I tried author/title/ and keyword with no luck. Do you have the exact title? You Can't Steal a Gift http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Steal-Gift-...9445&sr=1-1

"Sure"? Don't get out much, do you? I do, but let's not have this tired discussion again. "This" tired discussion? OK -- I give up. And in all "macro" senses, too.

"Sure"? Don't get out much, do you?

That's his story, and I believe it. Dern doesn't need drugs to be, as he refers to himself at times, "the Dernser." And he dosn't drink or smoke either -- all this having something to do initially with his background as a gifted middle distance runner. For a good while once he became an actor he'd run 50 or more miles a day -- like to and from his house and where the movie was being made, if that was in the LA area. He had to change course a bit, literally and figuratively, when a lung collapsed and a doctor, when Dern told him he'd been training in Griffith Park, said that that particular chunk of LA had the highest level of pollution on the planet. In any case, as a result of his lifelong taste for running, Dern has such a low pulse rate that when he takes the physical you have to take when you make a movie, he often has to tell them that he doesn't need to be rushed to the emergency room. His ambition is to live to 100 and still be working. Finished the book last night. One of the best parts comes late, when Dern makes a movie directed and written by his ex-wife Diane Ladd (Laura Dern is their offspring) that's essentially a replay from Ladd's point of view of their long-gone, very messed-up marriage (among other things, their first child died at an early age in a swimming pool accident). The atmosphere on the set is a bit sulphurous, but Dern, you might say, needs to be there.

Here's an email I sent to a friend who, like me and his wife, is a graduate of New Trier High School on Chicago's North Shore -- the school that gave us Charlton Heston, Ann-Margret, Donald Rumsfeld, Rock Hudson, Ralph Bellamy, Liz Phair ... and Bruce Dern (among others). Picked up at the library a copy of Bruce Dern's recently published and aptly titled autobiography "Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have." As totally in the voice and persona of the author as any book one could imagine, it's fascinating throughout but especially to me (and perhaps to one or both of you) on Dern's upbringing as a quirky child of much privilege in Glencoe (his mother was from the family that founded Carson Pirie Scott; the Derns lived in a lakeside estate, adjacent to the estate of Mrs. Dern's parents, whom she spoke with at length every morning before speaking to or with anyone else), then as a student at New Trier. Never met Dern, b. 1936, he was six years older, but a great deal of what he says about the North Shore in particular and in general rings a bell -- in part because he was a fraught, shrewd observer. One story: In his disfunctional family, perhaps the second most important thing on their hit parade was anti-Semitism -- this no doubt longstanding attitude being inflamed afresh because after WWII a fair number of Jews began to move into Glencoe, a community that his mother's ancestors virtually had founded after the Chicago Fire. So Bruce decides he wants to be actor, drops out of college, and eventually enrolls in the Actor's Studio (all this much against his parents' wishes). Dern is good, gets cast in a small part in O'Casey's "Shadow of a Gunman" and is brilliant in it, getting rave notices from Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr. Kerr's review, however, mistakenly identifies him as Bruce Stern. Mom sees the review, calls up Dern and disowns him on the spot, saying "You've gone over to them." That is, she thinks that Dern has changed his last name to "Stern" for the nonce to get in tight with what she presumes to be the essentially Jewish-run world of NYC theater. Bruce explains that it's just a typo, but she refuses to believe that and maintains her stance of total estrangement from her son until her death, some 20 years later. (In this, as in almost all family things, the position of Dern's father was one of near-total detachment -- while he himself came from "good" stock, his father had been Secretary of War under FDR and governor of Utah, the money was on his wife's side.) Yes, Mrs. Dern (sister of poet Archibald MacLeish) apparently was not entirely sane, but in her circles she had no trouble fitting in. Some great Jack Nicholson stories, and a funny one about a simulated sex scene Dern has to do with Ann-Margret for the movie "Middle Age Crazy" while her edgy, protective husband, Roger Smith, stands just outside of camera range. Also, Dern knows a great deal about acting and how movies are made and about the people who make them. Fairly goofy himself, I suppose, but also very smart and very soulful, in sometimes unusual ways.

She's definitely got nice assets: http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Love-Roberta-Ga...i/dp/B000FBHCP0

"That's it" as in "That's the answer."

That's it.

Picked up a couple of Cindy Blackman albums for a song yesterday, which made me think of another female drummer of about the same age and style, but for the life of me I'm blanking on the name. Any ideas? Or am I hurtling headlong into the realm where Alzheimer's Rd. crosses Delusion Ave.?

In order to explain what I feel about Gioia's book, I'd have to re-read it again, and I don't have the time right now. So that's a subject I'll have to drop. Submit your memory cards for partial erasure, please -- I'm about to erase mine. Ah, that's feels good.

If you thought that's what I was saying there, then either I failed to communicate or you failed to understand -- or both. This is what I wrote: "For instance, to take an extreme but not unrepresentative case, back in the day Horace Silver famously referred to West Coast jazz as "faggot jazz," as though the delicacy of much West Coast jazz was merely and essentially effete and thus both aesthetically and morally offensive (and/or, if you will, threatening) and further that, in Silver's view, a vitally masculine and black music was being corrupted and stolen by commercially successful white opportunists. If such rhetoric (taken one way or the other or any old way you choose) prevents you from detecting the value, such as it is, of the music of Silver and that of, say, Shorty Rogers or Jimmy Giufffre, then I think you need to go back, rewind, and begin again -- because no theories, no views, that fail to give the music itself a fair shake are worth a bowl of spit." My point was that if a musician as undeniably gifted as Horace Silver (and one who was not inherently contentious or snarky, which Horace is not -- this I assumed was fairly common knowledge) could make a statement such as this, that was fairly striking evidence in itself of how broadly and deeply Silver's segment of the jazz world felt that " the delicacy of much West Coast jazz was merely and essentially effete and thus both aesthetically and morally offensive (and/or, if you will, threatening) and further that ... a vitally masculine and black music was being corrupted and stolen by commercially successful white opportunists." OK so far? What I then say is not that Silver is right or wrong about what I think his statement amounts to but that no matter how you take what he says, the value of WCJ " such as it is remains -- "remains" both in the sense that it exists such as it is (regardless of my opinion of it or anyone else's) and (paradoxically perhaps, in the light of what I've just said) also remains to be determined by each of us. "Such as it is" here doesn't mean that the "aesthetic worth" of WCJ is necessarily high or low or what all -- it means what I just said. And in no way did I mean that Silver's remark was merely a function of his feeling threatened by WCJ. It wasn't his kind of thing, musically or emotionally. That he chose to dismiss it in the terms that he did certainly put, and was meant to put, the supposed lack of masculinity of WCJ front and center -- and this, again, from someone who is known to be pleasant, fair-minded human being.

This has long been a sticky quote for me because as much as I understand it and agree with it, I also find the presupposition that "the emotional world of pop music" was/is a fixed/limited quantity to be...problematic. It's seems to be saying that the emotional world of Nelson Riddle = that of Gordon Jenkins, that of Nat Cole = that of Johnnie Ray, or that of late-Columbia Sinatra = that of mid-period Capitol Sinatra. That simply is not true, unless one is incapable of discerning differences past a certain point of one's own preset parameters, and although I do not know JL personally (or at all for that matter), I seriously doubt that he is that much of an unfunctioning piece of offal. Yes, he qualifies it with "more hip, more grown-up", but the underlying assupmtion is that the emotional world of pop music is ultimately fenced in, like a ranch. Ok, I know that's true from one perspective, but from another, the conundrum of so much pop music is it's built in ability to be a tabula rasa to any and all who hear it. The same song/record can stir deep & powerful feelings in one person and be a mere annoyance to another. Which reaction defines the "reality" of that song/record? They both do, and although that is true of any/all subjective experiences, the assumption that it is less true of pop music (or that it is only true to a fixed point) sounds like one made by somebody who for wahtevr reason prefers to not listen to a lot of pop music for anything other than, at best, pleasant diversion. Which is certainly ok, but it goes to the point of one person's opinion being just that, and proceed accordingly, ok? Now, as that pertains to WCJ, yeah, ok, as a rule, the stuff is definitely "lighter" in both sound and (my perceived) intent, but to say that "these Califorians were not aware of the conflict of values that was the source of bop." might be taking things a little too far. It is quite possible that some of them, especially Mulligan, who was East Coat all the way and did some respectable hanging there before coming west, did understand at least some of this at more than a superficial level, but just did not find it a personally relevant source of musical inspiration/creation. This then enters into the realm of "informed choice" (the degree of informedness will no doubt vary on a case-by-case basis) rather than true ignorance (willful or otherwise), unless you want to come at it like the only way to truly "understand" something is to accept it 100%, and my, what a tangled web of slippery slopes that soon becomes, true as it nevertheless is. That then goes to the point of what you get out of anything is going to be directly proportional to how ready/willing/able (and/or with all) yoou are to accept an encounter with it on its own terms. And most of us, myself included, have found places out there that just do not connect, and whose "fault" is that, if anybody's? I doubt that there is fault, and I doubt that the existance of these places even after an examined "stripping away" of potentially distracting personal "prejudices" is a problem. For me personally, a lot of WCJ is irritatingly pleasant. But I'm not going to go off and say that the people who made it are less "deep" than those who make music that I respond more favorably to, nor am I going to not allow for the possibility that there are ears/souls/minds who can here the same stuff that bugs me and be nobly elevated by it to do the same nobly elevated stuff that I feel when I get inspired by things that get to me, nobly elevated things like being a good/better/best person in thought, word, and deed, and if that no doubt means radically different things to radically different people, well, what's the alternative, really? I certainly accept the notion of a universal consciousness, but that is not to say that said consciousness is homogenized or otherwise uniform in nature. It is merely to say that universiality exists in spite of itself, and that "same" and "identical" can be two totally different things. First, what JL pretty clearly means (if I can speak for him) is the mainstream (or recently mainstream) pop music of that time that was in the process of becoming a bit "classicized" if you will and of course could be subjected to that classicizing process, a la Sinatra's Capitol LPs with Riddle and Mel Torme's with Marty Paich. That is, songs from the "Standards" era and performances of those songs in which both the musical and lyrical content of those songs is at once accepted wholesale and either deepened (a la Sinatra) or "carbonated" with bubbles of jazzy sophistication (a la Torme). Your "fenced in, like a ranch" is a good way to describe what was going on there; I would say, though, that that fencing-in process was, at least at that point, fairly natural and arguably fruitful; much less so, we might both say, a bit later on. We're not talking, then, about Lefty Frizzell et al. on the one hand, or "Shrimp Boats Are Coming" or Doggie in the Window" on the other, or R&B, or for that matter, Sarah Vaughan or Dinah Washington, who transformed all or most that they touched in a "conflict of values" manner, whether they meant to or not. BTW, you say that for you "a lot of WCJ is irritatingly pleasant." I think I know what you're referring to by that, and it seems to me that you're pretty much confirming there the gist of what JL is saying. That is, what in the pleasantness of WCJ do you/could you find irritating other than some sense that that pleasantness is in part and in some ways evasive or too partial or too cute in reference to some other music and the sense of reality that it embodies and communicates?

I'm saying that there's no way you can get a good fix on the question HG says he wants to examine unless you have or can get a good fix on a whole lot of other things about the nature of this society and its history that Litweiler understands and that Gioia, musician though he be (have you ever listened to a Ted Gioia record? -- I have, God!), has little or no clue about. To repeat and amplify, HG's subject is about as peculiarly fraught as an aesthetic-historical subject could be. Also, again to repeat, unless you've established in your own mind (having taken into account your own "context" as best you can) the aesthetic worth of West Coast jazz, examining the racial tensions that the "definitions" of West Coast or East Coast jazz caused in the music world would be about as pointless as discussing the McCarthy era without having arrived at an opinion as to whether McCarthy's accusations were or were not sound. Finally, to say that it was "the definitions" of West Coast or East Coast jazz that caused racial tensions in the musical world is at once backasswards and sideways. The musics were different to some significant degree, by and large; and those differences were noted and remarked upon at the time by musicians, fans, and journalists from both musical and social perspectives. Yes, at a certain point, perhaps an early one, the familiar journalistic "sheep versus goats" routine played a good-sized role in all this; but the differences were real and came first -- and/or the journalistic "sheep versus goats" routine was for the most part a function of those actual differences. The "definitions" (however imprecise they may gave been) were not free-standing entities cooked up by behind-the-scenes jazz Machiavellis.

Gioia is OK on facts up to a point, not so hot at all IMO on views, but then, again IMO, almost nothing published is that I'm aware of. If you do check out Gioia, bear that Litweiler quote in mind and see if they sound like they're talking about the same music. If not, I'd go with Litweiler and realize that Gioia is wearing blinkers and/or just lacks background and imagination. "Central Avenue Sounds" is essential for testimony, but that's not all or enough.

HG, I'm assuming that you already are familiar with a good deal of so-called West Coast jazz and know in your gut how you feel about it, aesthetically and otherwise (i.e. do you find it attractive, affected-precious, necessary, a mere symptom of other extra-musical stuff, etc.). I don't mention so-called East Coast jazz in this respect, because virtually everyone here is more or less drenched in that style of jazz of that period, while West Coast jazz was (and still tends to be) a somewhat more marginal or isolated taste. In any case, I bring this up because if you aren't already very familiar with West Coast jazz and know how you feel about it, getting those things straight seems to me like the first thing you need to do. In particular, you need to do that because when you encounter either direct testimony or views that implicity dismiss West Coast jazz for mingled social and aesthetic reasons, you need to weigh that against your own assessment of its musical and emotional nature, weight, and value, and, to the degree that is possible, your own awareness of how much that assessment of yours is or is not conditioned by your own lived "context." For instance, to take an extreme but not unrepresentative case, back in the day Horace Silver famously referred to West Coast jazz as "faggot jazz," as though the delicacy of much West Coast jazz was merely and essentially effete and thus both aesthetically and morally offensive (and/or, if you will, threatening) and further that, in Silver's view, a vitally masculine and black music was being corrupted and stolen by commercially successful white opportunists. If such rhetoric (taken one way or the other or any old way you choose) prevents you from detecting the value, such as it is, of the music of Silver and that of, say, Shorty Rogers or Jimmy Giufffre, then I think you need to go back, rewind, and begin again -- because no theories, no views, that fail to give the music itself a fair shake are worth a bowl of spit. It's tricky, for sure, but it can be done and has to be done.

I would say that, yes, "this really went down," with the caveat that I don't trust anyone's published views of what really did go down (that is, any published views that I'm aware of -- and by "views" I don't mean testimony, which obviously is one key component to be weighed/sorted out here, but attempts to put together sorted-out testimony, economic/social/poltical factors and, of course, the evidence of the music itself). The only views that I trust, these cropping up mostly in conversation over the years, are Terry Martin's, Chuck Nessa's, John Litweiler's and my own. A good starting place is something that Litweiler did publish in his "The Freedom Principle": "A more literally detached emotionality [than that of the Tristano circle] arrived with the West Coast jazz inspired both by Tristano and Miles Davis's 1949 Birth of the Cool nonet, a muted scaled-down big band. The relaxed, subdued atmosphere of West Coast jazz had a healthy acceptance of stylistic diversity and innovation, but it also accepted the emotional world of pop music at face value; even original themes are treated like more hip, more grown-up kinds of pop music. In bop's freest flights it could not escape reality, but these Califorians were not aware of the conflict of values that was the source of bop." To this I would add, that the literal and figurative influence of the Stan Kenton band was crucial here. Literal in that so many West Coast figures had passed through the Kenton band; figurative in that their time there fed both their "progressive" impulses (which Kenton encouraged) and their taste for subdued subtleties (a reaction in part to the Kenton band's tendency to be brassy-blatant and rhythmically heavy-footed).