Larry Kart

Back in the seventh grade (1955), I had a friend who had gotten into jazz a bit, thought it was cool, and had a few records. I caught the bug and got some things of my own -- a Lew Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band 45, one of the Norman Granz Jam Session albums, a Jazztone Society sampler with the Parker-Gillespie-Norvo "Congo Blues" and a hoarse, scary Pee Wee Russell solo on Max Kaminsky's "Stuyvesant Blues" ("scary" because I had no idea a clarinet could sound like that), and, perhaps most important, a ten-inch reissue of 1940-'42 Ellington material, with "Jack the Bear," "Ko Ko," and "Concerto for Cootie." What still kind of tickles was how immediately and spontaneously my friend and I recognized how great the music on that Ellington album was -- whatever was going on there, it was an education in itself. Our home-room teacher in eighth grade was a jazz fan, found out we were interested, and offered to take us to a JATP concert at the Chicago Opera House in early fall '56. Seeing and hearing Eldridge, Gillespie, Jacquet, F. Phillips. L. Young, et al. in person was overwhelming. Likewise a bit later on when I heard the Basie Band when the Birdland All-Stars tour came to town.

Mentioned this elsewhere a while ago, but Nistico admirers should try to track down his latish (1988) album "Empty Room" (Red), made in Rome with a fine Italian rhythm section -- pianist Rita Marcotulli, bassist Marco Fratini, and drummer Roberto Gatto. The title piece, Sal's own, is a lovely tune, and he's in soulful and at times very heated form throughout.

As is well known in the business, after a certain point in his career (I believe it preceded the formation of this band) most of the charts that were recorded under Jones's name were not written by him. Instead they were farmed out to "ghosts" -- Billy Byers, for one. This is fairly easy to hear. Jones's writing for the various EmArcy albums dates he did charts for in the '50s (e.g. Jimmy Cleveland's debut comes to mind) and for his own excellent ABC-Paramount album "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" were quite distinctive -- he had a definite (if at times arguably too cute) "touch," and then it vanished. Of course, it might have been that Jones began to hear things differently and write in a different ways, but in fact he just decided to pay other guys to do the work and take the credit himself.

Last time I saw him live was last year, I think. He was in fine form. You really need to hear him live and close up at least once because his sound is so rich and complex and such a big part of his overall concept -- hearing Golson in the flesh probably would add a good deal to your sense of him, even if you know a lot of his recordings.

That's my impression, too, but then I haven't listened to a whole lot of Carter records -- his own or ones on which he's been a sideman -- since maybe the CTIs he was on that seemed to call for attention. When did the fall off occur and what were its manifestations? About the latter, IIRC his sound got kind of semi-artificially gross (thanks in part to new ways/styles of recording the instrument that were horrendous IMO -- I have nightmares about listening to Eddie Gomez), he developed self-indulgent habits of accentuation (perhaps in response in part to how he was being recorded), and didn't his intonation begin to wobble as well?

Do you know if they also copped my liner notes from the Mosaic set?

Warne Marsh (in glorious late-period form -- 1980) with Sal Mosca, Eddie Gomez, and Kenny Clarke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBwamkEGSQ4...=related&se

Sorry, the sentence above isn't a sentence. What I meant was something like "The difference between Hamilton's note-card shuffling and the disciple-shop of such players was that their disciple-ship was IMO organic.... etc."

Well, yes, but "down cold" as though he were shuffling through a pile of note cards. Listeners of a certain age will have come across lots of not-that-well-known players who were heavily influenced by Getz/Sims/Cohn et al. but were nonetheless individual and interesting -- Sandy Mosse, Bob Graf, Angelo Tompros, Al Siebert (Tompros and Siebert both from the D.C. area), Dick Hafer, etc. The difference between the IMO organic disciple-ship of such players ("organic" both in the sense that -- as was the case with Pres and these guys' own models -- something in their models spoke to something that was deep in them, and "organic" also in that their solo work at its best was a kind of story-telling, not a buffet table of licks). On the other hand, I dimly recall that one at least one Hamilton recording, his playing struck me as though it were getting to be real -- the one he made with Gerry Mulligan, "Soft Lights and Sweet Music."

Don't know if this has been posted before, but Tristano at the Half Note in 1964 with Lee, Warne, Sonny Dallas, and Nick Stabulus, from the "Look Up and Live" broadcast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByCF2IQQWU...ted&search= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZWumSW3O7A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DMwwsJhF7I...ted&search=

Feh.

A Maini website that includes the famous photo: http://www.hollywoodmuse.com/joe_maini_website/

I think you can get it from Jamey Aebersold.

Rich plays on Lampert's own SteepleChase recording,Venus Perplexed. Larry you should check this out. Steve is also going to have a release later this year on Bridge Records. I will.

This may have come up before, so perhaps I'm repeating myself and apologize if I am, but "Creativity and Change" was (or began as) an interview I did with Wayne when I was the newish assistant editor at Down Beat under Dan Morgenstern. We printed it under his name because what Wayne had to say was, as I recall, very close to a non-stop monologue. The circumstances of this are perhaps interesting/amusing. I'd gone with Dan to the Plugged Nickel the night before the interview took place, in Sept. or Oct. '68 I think, and approached Wayne between sets with the interview request at Dan's urging -- as I recall, Wayne had turned down the magazine before, and Dan probably thought that an approach by the new young kid might be disarming. But, no, Wayne politely said that he didn't want to do an interview because he really had nothing to say. At this point, Miles -- knowing what my role probably was because I was there with Dan, whom he of course knew -- said from other side of the room (actually yelled hoarsely, to the degree that he could yell any more), "Don't tell him any-thing, Wayne." Wayne took this in, looked at me (no doubt I seemed a bit stunned by what Miles had said, because I certainly was -- brand-new on the job and nervous) and said (perhaps out of simple kindness but also I think because Miles had said "Don't..." to Wayne the contrarian, especially so I think when it came to being told what to do by Miles), "Come by the motel tomorrow afternoon, and we'll do it." When I got there, I'm sure I must have asked some questions, but essentially Wayne just picked up the mike of the tape recorder and spoke into it at length. With his agreement, we printed what he said, slightly edited if at all, not as an interview but as a piece by him, and he was paid accordingly.

Here's my thought -- and because it came to me out of the blue, I guess I'm serious about it. Whatever else goes down, A.J. will save Tony's life, either by semi-accidentally getting in the way of the killer(s) and perhaps getting killed himself or by killing or deflecting them in some fit of rage/petulance or even chaotic farce while they and everyone else are ignoring his pathetic existence. (Remember his attempt to kill his uncle?) In any case, I'm fairly sure that Tony will survive, but in such a way that he and we might think he'd have been better off dead.

Rich Perry's "Hearsay," featuring the compositions and trumpet work of Steve Lampert: http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?...26061&BAB=E Some of the best Perry I've heard, and Lampert is a fascinating one-off -- his writing is somewhat reminiscent of RCA Jazz Workshop-vintage George Russell, but he is definitely own man, a deep cat.

Had the same feeling, but then I thought no. Not sure if they meant to suggest it, or it was just an accident. For instance, I had a feeling, based on the way at one point they shot the entrance to the restaurant where Carmella and Tony were dining, that would-be killers were going to burst in, but either that was an accident (these people aren't every-shot-counts cinematic geniuses, a la Hitchcock) or it was just me. In any case, I don't think it's in Tony's nature to off himself -- unless he were overcome by visions of Nancy Marchand. If Sil went down shooting, so will Tony. On the other hand, his being dumped by Dr. Melfi (a nicely written and performed scene, for the most part) was quite a land mine and might reverberate.

Live in Bologna, 1974. I was there! My first jazz concert (I was 12 then). That's where it all started for me. I'll never forget that evening. luca Love those kind of stories. And I've got that album too.

There are three excellent Baker Steeplechase CDs -- This Is Always, Someday My Prince Will Come, and Daybreak -- recorded at one (!) concert in 1979 with Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson and Doug Raney, and another Steeplechase album by the same band in 1979 in the studio, The Touch of Your Lips. There are also several trio albums with Philip Catherine and Jean-Louis-Rasinfosse, one on Igloo, one on Dreyfus, and two others with Catherine and a bassist (not sure who), one on Criss Cross, the other on Enja. You probably can find samples of Catherine and Raney on the 'Net to see which one it is -- they sound very different. My guess, from what you say, is that it's Raney.

Excellent letter, hope they print it. In the same vein, after someone posted Rafferty's article on another board yesterday, I posted this: Mr. Rafferty says some inaccurate, foolish things in his piece about Chet Baker and the film "Let's Get Lost." 1) "Chet Baker hadn't mattered for a while when Mr. Weber was filming him [in the late 1980s].... He's practically forgotten now." Mattered to whom? Messed up though he was, Baker remained a significant draw in Europe until the end and arguably was a better trumpet player in his later years (when he was in decent physical shape, and sometimes when he was not -- the recorded evidence is considerable). As for "practically forgotten now," that is absurd. Baker recordings proliferate, and how could a "practically forgotten" figure be the subject of a fairly recent and successful (though IMO mostly in terms of favorable reviews) biography, to which Rafferty himself refers, James Gavin's "Deep In A Dream"? 2) "Jazz history hasn't been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin. Unlike his rival Miles Davis, he persisted, with a stubbornness that suggests a fairly serious failure of imagination, in playing the cool style long past the point at which it had begun to sound mannered and even a little silly." Where does one begin? Leaving aside the dubious/snotty opinions here, most jazz writers regard Baker's music more positively now than at any point in his life -- in part because some of them, as mentioned above, find the best of his later work to be more mature than his early work, in part because the notion of Baker as a necessarily inferior "rival" to Miles Davis is now seen as a relic both of a somewhat understandable but thoughtless Crow Jim-ism and of the assumption that Baker was little more than a pretty-boy jazz matinee idol. Musicians knew better. Miles was Miles, and Chet was Chet -- both quite individual figures, nor does the evidence suggests that Baker was heavily influenced by Davis. 3) "Mr. Baker isn't so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He's the front man for Mr. Weber's meditations on image making and its discontents. If you want the true story of Chet Baker, you'd do better to look up James Gavin's superb, harrowing 2002 biography, 'Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,' where you can also find, in the words of a pianist named Hal Galper, perhaps the most perceptive review of Mr. Weber's slippery movie. 'I thought it was great,' Mr. Galper says, 'because it was so jive. Everybody's lying, including Chet. You couldn't have wanted a more honest reflection of him.' That's 'Let's Get Lost,' to the life: the greatest jive movie, or maybe the jivest great movie, ever made." I agree that "Let's Get Lost" is a jive movie, and that Baker serves as a pretext for Bruce Weber's... I would say "manipulations" rather than "meditations." In fact, the best part of James Gavin's otherwise rather ill-informed "Deep In A Dream" is his takedown of Weber, whose character and milieu he seems to know and care (albeit in a hostile way) far more about than he does about the life, art, and times of Chet Baker. Rather than "Deep In A Dream," you'd do better to read Jeroen de Valk's "Chet Baker: His Life and Music" (Berkeley Hills Books). BTW, the by no means uncritical de Valk writes that the 2-CD set "Chet Baker in Tokyo" (Evidence), recorded in 1987, one year before Baker's death, is "his best recording ever." Baker also is in remarkable form on 2-CD set "The Last Concert" (Enja), which was recorded less than a month (!) before his death.

EDC --The Archduke Trio doesn't excite you? In that work BTW I have fond memories of Cortot, Thibaud, Casals, coupled with Schubert's Trio No. 1.

I think I know what you're saying, but the past is never over -- parts of it linger around on a semi-wayward, semi-selective basis (as memory, habits, myth, what have you) and usually you yourself don't get to select what's lingering and what it means to others (maybe even to you) that it's doing so. Likewise, though you and I and many others here would agree about the insidiousness or even the sheer stupidity of the jazz "Neo-Con" game, and while "get on with today's business" sounds good, and "there's a present that can be used to build a tomorrow where it's always going to be today" sounds even better, those phrases suggest to me that you've missed your calling (financially at least) and could make a small fortune as an ad man or a political speech writer; in particular, "there's a present" etc. sounds like it was handmade for Obama or John Edwards. Seriously -- I don't think we live anymore in a world where it could ever "always ... be today." See that Borges story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," that I posted a link to a few days ago: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html Finally, some uncharacteristically less than dogmatic (and I think at least obliquely relevant) words from professional nasty-man Theodor Adorno (circa 1961): "Anyone of my age and experience who is both a musician and who thinks about music finds himself in a difficult quandry. One side of it consists in the attitude 'So far and no farther.' In other words, it consists of clinging to one's youth as if modernity were one's own private monopoly. This means resisting at all costs everything which remains inaccessible to one's own experience or at least one's primary basic reactions. This had once been the attitude of confirmed Wagnerians when confronted by Strauss, and the Straussians adopted it in their turn as a defence against the new music of the Schoenberg persuasion. We are perfectly modern ourselves; who are they to offer us tuition? Sometimes, of course, my narcissism, which asserts itself even though I can see through it, has a hard a task persuading itself that the countless composers of music that can only be understood with the aid of diagrams and whose musical inspiration remnains wholly invisible to me can really be all that much more more musical, intelligent, and progressive than myself." Etc. Well maybe not that undogmatic, but there's a smidgen of objectivity and humor there. And I intend to tape to the bathroom mirror "Sometimes ... my narcissism, which asserts itself even though I can see through it..." P.S. That "thumb up" sign is mine.

Yes -- Lodi Carr was there at The Tin Palace, too.

Sorry -- here's where the complete Borges story can be found: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html The other link seems to be only to its opening paragraphs. Also, if you do read the whole story, the so-called "Postscript" is an essential part of it.