Larry Kart

In my life so far, a little Hovhaness has gone a long way, but that disc of viola works on OgreOgress is excellent. I also highly recommend this one by composer Maria de Alvera-Fuerzas: http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco2/Rec/OgreO...ressframes.html

Fine drummer.

Your recommendations have proven reliable for me in the past and when I discovered that I was able to legally download the entire Atavistic disc from Rhapsody for only $.89 (it is all one track), I could not pass. Gave it an initial listen yesterday and it was a very favorable first impression. I ordered the Stund CD 9.9.99 and hope to receive it within the next couple of days. I may also order the hatOLOGY release. Anything in particular you would recommend? I have Farewell To Sweden (Hatology), Burning in Stockholm (Atavistic), and Where Is Spring? (Dragon). If I had to pick one, it would be the last of those, though you can't go wrong with any.

The climactic scenes mentioned above are in "Riding Shotgun," not "The Stranger Wore a Gun." On the other hand, the effete, snake-like villain that George Macready plays in the latter film could well have been the model for Harvey Korman's Hedley Lamarr in "Blazing Saddles."

Has anyone mentioned Michiel Braam? http://www.michielbraam.com/ or Guus Janssen? http://www.guusjanssen.com/home.html Some wild stuff from both of them.

The late Per Henrik Wallin.

Another voice heard on Charlie Chan: By DAVE KEHR Published: June 20, 2006 Charlie Chan, Volume I In a medium founded on action, Charlie Chan remains one of the few heroic figures in American film to function proudly as an intellectual. Chan's adventures in ratiocination were first recounted by Earl Derr Biggers in a series of six successful novels and eventually in 47 films made from 1926 to 1949 (as well as in a few parodies and semi-parodies that came after). This courtly detective -- an employee of the Honolulu Police Department on seemingly permanent leave -- stands as one of the best-loved characters in American movies, a tribute above all to the warmth and gentle humor that the Swedish-born actor Warner Oland brought to the role during his 1931-to-1938 tenure as Chan. (Sidney Toler, who stepped into the role after Mr. Oland's early death, continued very much in the Oland tradition.) Twentieth Century Fox Home Video has released four of the first Oland films on DVD in the first volume of what you hope will be a complete set of that studio's Chan films. (After World War II, the franchise moved with much-reduced budgets to the poverty-row studio Monogram; MGM released six of those films last year.) The decision represents a reversal for Fox, which had once removed the films from Fox Movie Channel, apparently embarrassed by the European Oland's ''yellowface'' portrayal of an Asian character. Are the Chan films racist? Not, I think, by the standards of their time. Mr. Biggers is said to have created Chan (based on a real detective, Chang Apana, who worked for the Honolulu police) to counter the negative images of Asians being fueled by the Hearst papers' ''yellow peril'' campaigns and embodied most repellently by Sax Rohmer's sadistic ''Oriental'' villain, Dr. Fu Manchu. Mr. Oland, a popular heavy of the silent era who played practically every ethnicity available (including, on occasion, a Swede), was the screen's first Fu Manchu, in the 1929 ''Mysterious Doctor Fu Manchu'' and three subsequent films for Paramount. Recruited by Fox in 1931 for ''Charlie Chan Carries On,'' a film that is now lost, Mr. Oland seemed to spend the balance of his life and career making up for the excesses of the Fu Manchu character. In the Fox set, both ''Charlie Chan in London'' (1934) and ''Charlie Chan in Paris'' (1935) contain scenes in which Chan coolly and wittily dispatches other characters' racist remarks. Chan, whose huge intellect mysteriously did not extend to an ability to master English articles (''Joy in heart more desirable than bullet''), might have been a stereotype, but he was a stereotype on the side of the angels. In addition to ''Paris'' (long believed lost) and ''London,'' the Fox box contains ''Charlie Chan in Egypt'' and ''Charlie Chan in Shanghai'' (both 1935), as well as ''Eran Trece'' (''They Were Thirteen,'' 1931), the Spanish-language version of the lost ''Charlie Chan Carries On,'' with the Spanish actor Manuel Arbó doing a careful Oland imitation in the Chan role. It's a reminder of the sad state of film preservation that three other early Chan films remain lost, though I'm at a loss to understand why Fox has not included ''The Black Camel,'' a 1931 film with Mr. Oland as Chan and featuring Bela Lugosi in a major role, which does exist. The films have been restored from their once-familiar television syndication versions, and sound and picture quality is excellent, given the rarity and fragility of the original materials. The box set lists for $59.98; none of the films are rated.

Great stuff. Also, I had no idea that Roche's phrasing and timbre were that boppishly plastic back in '43. Sounds like she and Sarah Vaughan were thinking along related lines at the same time, when before I thought that Sassy was the progenitor. But then the quality of Roche's voice was so unusual that it's hard to imagine how she could have sounded otherwise.

Yes, indeed. I think I contributed a quote to the back -- can't be sure about that because I haven't seen a copy yet, but I liked the music and have been impressed by Falzone's playing in many settings in recent years. He's a soulful virtuoso and has a fantastic ear. In a "free" setting, he's a wizard at furthering the creation of meaningful group order/form without stepping on toes.

Clem - I'm not informed enough on the subjects of Sibelius and/or Alex Ross to comment on them. But I'd like to add that Douglas Woolf also went to Harvard. The answer is that Woolf was born into a New England family of some privilege -- wealth, social position -- and more or less dropped out (as they used to say after some 20 or so years after Woolf did so) from the world of the "respectable." Don't have all the details at hand, but here's a bit of a Robert Creeley piece about Woolf that touches upon this: "If I am to be responsible to this extraordinary person's life, I must briefly rehearse its details, such as I know them, a scatter of particular memories of our all too few meetings, letters, mutual friends such as his exceptional Grove Press editor, Donald M. Allen, others such as the writers Edward Dorn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the people who were his family. In some ways Douglas Woolf was as elusive as the proverbial woodland creature, known to be there but rarely if ever seen. I know he was son of a successful New York businessman, that his mother had difficult bouts of mental illness, being occasionally hospitalized at McLean's near Boston, that he had driven an ambulance for the American Field Service in North Africa during the Second World War and had also been in the Army Air Force, that he had gone to Harvard, dropping out before graduation. But having said that, the trail grows cold or rather grows increasingly singular---Good Humor man in Tucson, sweeper of a municipal racetrack in Spokane, householder in an abandoned miner's cabin in Wallace, Idaho. I was in touch with him in all these situations but it was very hard to join the symbolic dots so as to make some defining picture." I think I've read most of what Woolf published. He's a unique, heartbreaking writer. I wrote a pretty good longish review for the Chicago Tribune in the late 1980s of the Black Sparrow collection of his work, "Hypocritic Days," and the Dalkey Archive reissue of his terrific novel "Wall To Wall." Don't have a copy of the review around myself unfortunately, but if someone's really curious, it probably can be found on the Tribune archive for a fee. One of the unique things Woolf did, at least twice, was write from the vantage point of an animal -- a sheep in the novella "The Spring of The Lamb" and a bird in a longish short story that's in the "Hypocritc Days" collection. Both of these are amazing; the creatures are sentient individuals but not at all cute or sentimentalized. The man had so much heart and at least as much art.

The marvelously named Pink Cottage, on the Chicago-Evanston border (off of Howard St.). I'm sure it's long gone, but it was great in the late '50s, early '60s -- nothing fancy, just great thin-crust cheese and sausage pizza. Open late, too.

Listened to "Setting The Pace" again. Damn! Dexter's solo on "Dexter's Deck" is an epic, and the battle on the title track sounds like a real one, especially during the exchanges. I think Booker, who cooled down quite deliberately at the end of his solo on "Dexter's Deck," was taken aback by Dexter's long, heated response and decided to go all out on the next piece.

Was there for that Dexter-Jug-Byas event, and an event it was. I remember, among other things, the excitement of actually seeing Byas play. Can't say for sure but believe this was one of the few times (maybe the only time) he came back to the States. Lots of electricity in the room.

Booker Ervin-Dexter Gordon on the album "Setting The Pace," in part for the liner notes.

Mark -- Fair questions/points about Ross, and I think I can answer them, or at least respond in a reasonable manner, but not in full right now -- too tired to do the necessary chapter-and-verse research. I do recall, though, a fairly frequent air of touting in Ross's work that struck me as dubious, as in these responses from Ross to the music of Osvaldo Golijov: 1) “When Osvaldo Golijov’s "La Pasión Según San Marcos," a setting of the Passion of Jesus Christ according to St. Mark, was presented by the Boston Symphony two weeks ago, the crowd made a sound that will echo in the musical world for some time. It was a roar of satisfaction, rising up from all corners of Symphony Hall. At first, the ovation seemed to be directed mostly at the performers—a throng of Venezuelans, Brazilians, and Cubans, augmented by Boston Symphony musicians, and conducted by Robert Spano—but the noise turned to thunder when the composer walked onstage. This level of euphoria is sometimes encountered at the Met, when a favorite singer has an exceptional night. It is not found at concerts of new music.” 2) “Golijov is a forty-two-year-old Argentine-American composer who has an uncanny ability to don the masks of age-old musical traditions. Born in La Plata, he is descended from Eastern European Jews, and he first made his name with works derived from klezmer and other Yiddish styles. Three years ago, he unveiled the “St. Mark Passion,” a singing, dancing Crucifixion drama, which revels in Latin-American and Afro-Caribbean sounds. His works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music’s elemental powers: they have rhythms that rock the body into motion and melodies that linger in the mind. Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures. Instead, he lets his melodies wing their way into the open air…. “Golijov won a shouting, stomping ovation. No doubt a few old-school Tanglewood cerebralists went away complaining that Golijov had pandered to the audience. If so, they were pandering to their teaching assistants. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language—anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords—but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.” Now I’ve heard some of all these works myself and was not outright put off by what I heard, but while I wouldn’t call it a music of outright pandering -- Golijov’s ear is too hip and tasteful for that -- it did seem to me to be a music that was too determinedly concerned with being attractive and decorative/dramatic in its language to be of consistent musical interest. Lots of spice, décor, and an almost film score-like cuing into/underlining of mood – again, almost always very hip and tastefully done – but little or no sense of what, for want of a better term, I’d call language invention or even that much language involvement on Golijov’s part. Of course, I could be dead wrong about Golijov’s music, but I see a fair number of cues in what I’ve quoted from Ross above that he’s primarily focused on the “how to woo back the audience” problem: e.g. “His works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music’s elemental powers…. [H]e lets his melodies wing their way into the open air…. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language—anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords—but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.” The bits of fairly cheesy (IMO) writing in what I’ve just quoted from Ross -- "...[H]e speaks it with dire conviction." Aieee! -- coupled with my own response to Golijov’s music, is enough of a give-away for me; it’s as though Ross’s accounts of the enthusiasm these works no doubt actually stirred in those audiences is meant to itself be sufficiently, even irresistibly infectious, a version of “Hey, come on in; the water’s (finally) fine!” Ross seems to me to be heavily into nudging and wooing of this sort, and while I can understand how those might be concerns, the sort of writing about music that has interested and informed me down through the years has been writing that is primarily and specifically a response to the music per se (not to mention a response that treats me like a grown-up) rather than an attempt to convince me that I ought to be pleased by certain sounds because they already have been found attractive by others.

Joe -- You gotta remember, Clem (I'm pretty sure) and I (for certain, at least on bad days) are cranky S.O.B.s, and both us are especially cranky when it comes to journalists who write about the arts -- in my case because I became one myself and think I'm aware of many of the pitfalls, temptations, tricks, and self-deceptions that litter that landscape.

Memory lapse Larry. The Hannikainen/Sargent set you mention contains H's recordings of the 2nd and 5th symphonies, not Tapiola. That recording of the 2nd is a favorite. I feel the Sargent recordings on the other disc are unfortunate. Been having more of those lapses lately. I do love H's 2nd, as erotic a piece of music as "Tristan und Isolde," if not more so. As for Alex Ross, his New Yorker articles and his blog are all I know of him too. They often leave me with the feeling that other people's ideas are being warmed over, and usually I don't much like the ideas he's lifting anyhow. Also, not that it necessarily would make a difference, but I don't think he's sincere -- in the sense that his underlying anti-modernism is left unexplicit for the most part, for journalistic-political reasons, and/or in his case it's really a half-lazy "solution" to that lurking chimera What are we going to do about the fading classical music biz? rather than being the result of any personal thought or even a matter of deep personal taste on his part. To put it a a bit differently, either Ross really is too naive by half or he's pretending to be that way -- the latter I suspect, which arguably is worse and is, now that I think of it, a move that many New Yorker writers have indulged in over the years. It fits the tone of the magazine for its writers to pretend that they have no more expertise than that of their supposed readers -- that way one fosters the illusion that writer and reader are discovering things "together" and are thus part of the same moral, cultural, and economic community.

For Tapiola, Rosbaud is superb: http://www.amazon.com/Sibelius-Finlandia-K...682&sr=1-53 I also love Hannikainen's incredibly elemental Tapiola, originally on Everest with Spivakovsky doing the Violin Concerto, later on a cheap EMI twofer with more Sibelius cond. by Malcom Sargent, but both those seem to be OOP. Glad to find someone else who thinks that Alex Ross is a bottom-feeding turd.

You should check out the six or so westerns that Randolph Scott made with director Andre De Toth in the 1950s, all of which preceded the Boetticher-Scott westerns. The flavor is somewhat related to the Boettichers, as are the budegetary constraints, but the De Toth's are fine in their own right. IIRC, I particularly liked Riding Shotgun and The Stranger Wore a Gun, the latter (again IIRC) incredibly baroque and intense in its restriction in the climactic scenes to a small segment of the typical western movie town.

Some Leon Golub works, FWIW: http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424960601/53...rnt-man-iv.html http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424470637/14...-figure-ii.html http://www.artnet.com/artwork/423873622/37...-ii-detail.html http://www.artnet.com/usernet/awc/awc_thum...;works_of_art=1

I had a fair amount of Rochberg of all periods at one time but dumped almost all of it after a bout of concentrated listening led me to think that his typical muscle-bound, "gestural" thinking was mostly empty and crude. He's the musical equivalent of painter Leon Golub, whose writhing, smeary, agonized male figures were once aptly described by Frank O'Hara as "humanity hash." As for the supposed post-modern aspect of Rochberg's work, while there are potential problems there IMO, I don't hear Rochberg's musicality as rising to a level where questions of style and/or historical stance are crucial factors. Among so-called or possible post-modernists, I much prefer the luscious/ecstatic looniness of David Del Tredici or the fractured surfaces of Robin Holloway.

Yes, Joe Vito.

Johnny Frigo story from another site. The poster is former Down Beat editor/record producer Jack Tracy: Johnny was not only a fine, creative musician, a talented painter, poet and songwriter, but as my friend Don Gold so nicely put it, "great company between sets." One of my favorite Frigo moments came one day when he and I stood chatting at Universal recording studios in Chicago and an auto driver who was editing some racing tapes excitedly asked us to come into the editing room to hear what he had recorded. "Hear that?" he said, "Hear that? ...... That was my car coming down the stretch." Johnny looked over and remarked dryly, "Sounded like you were rushing."

I have no sense that Monk's technique notably faltered or improved over the course of his career. As for "idea" playing, I think the high points were during his Prestige days -- e.g. "Little Rootie Tootie," "Blue Monk," "Bag's Groove" with Miles, etc. IMO the "idea" playing got more formulaic during the Riverside and then the Columbia years, in part because there were voluble saxophonists to lean on in his working groups (Coltrane for a while, then Griffin, then Rouse); it seemed as though most performances by those working groups were set up so that Monk's solo would not be expected to be novel or climactic but rather a restatement of thematic material with trimmings/variations. The obvious exceptions would be the rediscovered '57 concert with Coltrane, where Monk is on fire, and the Columbia solo recordings, where Monk often finds the material inspiring and is also the whole show. Also, IIRC, he's at a higher than normal level for the period on the It Club recordings. Otherwise, though, I think a lot of Monk's solos during the Columbia era sound like he's filling in semi-predetermined patterns, at least by the standards of his varied and adventurous Prestige era work.

Thanks.