Larry Kart

A few corrections to that fine Totah memoir: Hall Overton, not Hal Overton;Teddy Kotick, not Teddy Kotik; Jerry Hurwitz, not Jerry Horowitz. Also, Hurwitz, better known as Jerry Lloyd, may have been pretty much off the scene at the time the "Jazzville" album was made, but he had been fairly active in the late '40s and early '50s, recording with Mulligan among others.

Considering how much his first quintet sounded like Miles' second quintet, I think you're off by at least five years. Yes, but he eventually turned the clock back. Marsalis Saving Time.

Listened to "Jazz Contrasts" again. Rollins sounds very fragmentary and distracted IMO; my guess is that Hank Jones' rather busy comping was not at all to his taste, nor to KD's either. Also, none of the soloists is really making the tempo that Max sets on "La Villa." By chance, the Milestone LP two-fer on which I have the "Jazz Contrasts" tracks also includes three tracks from a terrific KD album of that time -- "Two Horns/Two Rhythm," with Ernie Henry, bassist Eddie Mathias (or Wilbur Ware), and drummer G.T. Hogan. Turning to "Lotus Blossom" from that date after the "Jazz Contrasts" stuff was a revelation; KD sounds so relaxed, rhythmically locked-in, and fluid. And Ernie Henry! His solo on "Lotus Blossom" comes close to forecasting Ornette at times.

Monterose isn't on "Jazz Contrasts," Rollins is. JR was a member of Dorham's Jazz Prophets group, which recorded for ABC-Paramount; he also appears on that live Blue Note KD Bohemia date.

I love KD but recall "Jazz Contrasts" as being a virtually lifeless album, depsite the very promising line-up. I think that was a date where things were Keepnews-ized.

"Camus readers" -- I love it; should have rhymed with "'Moby-Dick' eaters," though. Also, for some odd reason, the background chorus on "Where Y'all At?" sounds to me like a gathering of the younger members of the cast of "The Sopranos."

That's probably the best, maybe the only, way to show up Wynton's stuff for what it is.

Based on what I heard of Manny Albam way back when (mostly big band stuff -- "Drum Suite," yech!) I would agree, but having encountered in recent weeks for the first time a bunch of stuff that Albam wrote for the Hal McKusick Quartet (Hal, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson), I think he had a subtler and more individual mind than I used to think. No George Russell of course, just a craftsman as Chuck says, but at best he had his own imprint.

Who's on that one? I heard Bud in London in the early '70s at a Sunday jazz brunch at some hotel, with saxophonist Johnny Barnes and trombonist Roy Williams (both very good players) alongside Bud in the front line. It was fine mainstream Swing -- less programmed that the later World's Greatest Jazz Band things.

I sold my deceased father's house last year without a real estate agent (because it looked like there might be good offers for it before we got into the showing it off phase, which proved to be the case). But the more-than-solid real estate lawyer we had proved to be essential. We found him through friends who had used him when they'd sold their own house, a place of business, and a parent's house; he was just who they'd told us he'd be -- unflappable and very smart too. Another thing that mattered to us and might matter to you; his office was in a nearby suburb, which meant at least two things -- when we had to get something to him or from him on short notice, which happened a lot, he was 10 minutes away, not in downtown Chicago; also, when we settled on a prospective buyer, our lawyer turned out to know his lawyer (both from the same area) from previous transactions, which seemed to make things go much smoother (i.e. free from arm-twisting bullshit).

Hodeir loathed "free jazz" in any and all of its manifestations, at least at the time -- and I'd bet he still does. See his book "The World of Jazz" (though his use of multiple personae there can make it tricky to sort things out). Even more so, there was an issue of Les Cahiers du Jazz that I no longer have in which there was a long roundtable discussion about the jazz avant-garde that involved Hodeir and a bunch of other French jazz critic-intellectual types. The others were basically sympathetic to Ornette, Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil, et al. Though my French is virtually non-existent, it was clear that Hodier's stance was adamantly, even mockingly, in opposition to all this.

GUNTER HAMPEL GROUP + JEANNE LEE Gunter Hampel (bcl,vib,fl), Willem Breuker (cl,bcl,ss,as,ts), Arjen Gorter (b,harmonium on 1), Pierre Courbois (dm,perc), Jeanne Lee (voc) Soest, April 2, 1968 Leoni Antoinette - 1 Wergo WER 80001 O, Western wind (J. Lee) - The capacity of this room (collect.- Robert Lax) - The four elements: water/air/fire/earth(G. Hampel - R. Lax)- Lazy Afternoon (collect - John LaTouche) GUNTER HAMPEL: The 8th of July 1969 Anthony Braxton (as,ss,cbcl), Willem Breuker (ss,as,ts,bcl), Gunter Hampel (bcl,vib,p), Arjen Gorter (b,elb on 1), Steve McCall (dm), Jeanne Lee (voc). Nederhorst, July 8, 1969 We move (G. Hampel) -1 Birth NJ 001, CD 001 We move (take 1)-1 - - We move (take 2)-2 - - Morning song - - Crepuscule (GH) - - The 8th of July 1969 (GH)-vib solo - - The 8th of July 1969 (take 1)-vib solo - Gib mir noch ein Spiegelei mit Schinken (WB - Evan Parker) ICP 008 Breuker as Breuker probably can be heard on this date (which I don't know): GUNTER HAMPEL: Assemblage Gunter Hampel (bcl,vib,ss,fl), Willem Breuker (ss,as,ts,bs,cl,bcl), Piet-Hein Veening (b), Pierre Courbois (dm). Baarn, Dec. 21, 1966 Assemblage (G.Hampel) ESP 1042 CD 1042-2 Heroicredolphysiognomystery (GH) - Make love not war to everybody (GH) - Love that title BTW -- "Make love not war to everybody." Wonder if it was meant to be ironic?

No, it wasn't Breuker's recorded debut: http://www.xs4all.nl/~wbk/disco59-69_WB.html And it's Arjen Gortner, not Argen Gortner.

Just off the top of my head, Gunter Hampel's albums "The Eighth of July, 1969" and "Wergo Jazz" -- with Willem Breuker, Braxton, Argen Gortner, Steve McCall, Jeanne Lee and others -- struck me at the time (1969, natch) as pretty significant. It seemed clear to me for one thing that Breuker (was one of these his recorded debut?) had something new, valid, and "European" to say.

Funny -- when I was in sixth grade or so I tried to check out a Philip Wylie book from the public library -- maybe that one, maybe a novel of his that seemed to have a science fiction flavor (I dug SF then, or what SF was then) -- and the kind librarian, whom I knew quite well, didn't let me do it, saying that it was an "adult" book, with a special and new-to-me emphasis. So instead I looked on the new books shelf and checked out Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which I liked a lot (though no doubt I didn't fully understand it then). I think I came out ahead in that exchange. BTW, Ellison was a visiting professer when I was a second-year college student and lived in our dorm. At a casual roundtable one night, he was talking about/being quizzed about "Invisible Man" and made a point that he'd made or would make elsewhere -- that whatever else the book was, he intended that much of it be very funny. I was able to then truthfully say that that's the way many scenes (e.g. the paint factory scene) hit me at age 12 or 13, which I think he beleived and was glad to hear. Also, a friend of mine during that time was walking to class one day with Ellison, discussing something or other, when my friend, suddenly realizing he was late, said goodbye and left the sidewalk to head diagonally for his destination. Ellison grabbed his arm and said quite firmly, "Don't walk on the grass." My friend was kind of astonished at the time -- thinking, he said to me when he told what had happened, that Ellison had to be a rebel at heart who certainly wouldn't care about whether someone stayed on the sidewalk and similar "minor" social rules -- but when he thought about it a bit, he realized that Ellison was, in this regard at least, not at all who my friend thought he was. Hugh Kenner? A smart guy for sure, and a great source of enlightenment up to a point, but talk about gaping partialities and limitations!

There's some fascinating information about Williams, which pretty much dovetails with what I knew and felt about the the man, in John Gennari's "Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz And Its Critics" (U. of Chicago Press), an otherwise deeply flawed, if not flat-out reprehenensible book IMO (I've gone into that at length on other threads). In any case, almost all of Gennari's information about Williams is taken (with acknowledgement) from unpublished interviews done with Williams by a scholar named Bryant Dupre. About Martin "not being that bright," I wouldn't say that at all. He certainly was no middlebrow -- Whitney Balliett among jazz writers of note might define the top end of the middlebrow crowd, with Leonard Feather and maybe Gene Lees resting at or near the bottom -- although you could fairly say that Martin's highbrowness was more or less willed. That is, he had a more or less positive and somewhat acquired vision of what highbrow behavior was and what highbrow attititudes were (though this vision also was quite personal, shrewd, and critical for the most part), and he tried to bring that behavior and those attitudes to bear on jazz criticism. You could argue that there was some status-mongering involved here, but nobody's perfect. Also, while Chuck is right about Martin's blindspot about humor in jazz, and almost any trace of showbiz as well, the breadth and accuracy of his taste (positive and negative) was almost with parallel among jazz writers during what might be called his on-the-firing-line years. Without doubt Martin was not that "hip," but 1) he certainly didn't want to be in a good many (though perhaps not all) of the interlocking senses of that term 2) I'm not aware that he presumed to be hip, in part because 3), as I'm sure he knew, given the rest of who he was, a would-be hip Martin W. would have been absurd. One more thing about the height of Martin's brow: He wrote a whole lot of things about American popular art and its place and value in the scheme of things that were sound and novel and still are important. He had a strain of willed elitisim in him, but other deep, wise, even loving strains as well. I wish he were still around to argue with.

That Louise Brooks is terrific.

Some of the accompaniments are Hal Mooney-icky, but I've never heard better Vaughan than the best stuff on the 2-LP (later 2-CD) set "Great Songs From Hit Shows." (Disclaimer: I wrote the notes for the CD reissue.)

Maybe I haven't followed it closely enough. Is every critic who gave Hatto a favorable review now behaving this way? Or is the anger against a particular set of critics who are refusing to eat humble pie? Or were there only those few to begin with? The Gramophone put out Barrington-Coupe's version which significantly softens the reality. They were pushing Hatto even when the doubts were in full flow, and one of their reviewers Jeremy Nicholas published a letter saying that anyone with doubts must supply evidence that would 'stand up in a court of law' that the recordings were not genuine, or keep quiet. To me that is fatuous bluster, where the intelligent and honest thing to do would have been to take the reservations seriously. Personally I never for one moment believed in the things that Nicholas and his ilk were saying (greatest recorded legacy since Richter etc) and found it bizarre that inconsistencies noticeable to the naked ear (as reported by others - I never got pulled in) were just brushed off by 'experts' (Nicholas, Jed Distler, Bryce Morrison). The Gramophone's ringing endorsement of Hatto supplied the copy text for all the obituaries (Nicholas spewed it all out again in The Guardian, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ). These guys should fall on their swords but are out in force defending their gullibility. IMO they should apologise and then vanish. I'll add that the claim that these records are great has been often repeated to defend the offending critics, but in fact few have heard them (except for the famous concerto recordings by Ashkenazy, Bronfman et al) so it is not at all clear that these really are great recordings. In any case the critics defence has been that they were picked for their anonymity - hardly a sign of greatness. I also wonder how many of these recordings the admiring critics ever actually heard, and ever possessed in other than CD-R or white label form. They have repeated that there are 120 CDs in this 'great legacy' but have they actually worked through them all? I suggest not. I'll stop now, except to say that my attempt to add a very mildly worded query about the role of critics in the Hatto fiasco to the Gramophone website was censored. That is why I am not impressed by their continued manipulation of the news. What David said.

You don't want to know.

One toke over the line. Howard has that effect on me.

She had better time than a whole lot of jazz instrumentalists. Sounds like it might be Stan Levey on drums. Met Lee backstage once, after a top-notch performance in the early 1980s. Seemed like the closer you got to her, the more indistinct her features became.

Some fresh stupidity on the subject from The Third Reich (comments follow): Reviewers not to blame for Hatto fraud By Howard Reich Tribune arts critic Published March 4, 2007 So the critics allegedly blew it. They raved about classical recordings released under the name of pianist Joyce Hatto, and it turns out the CDs weren't by Hatto at all: Her husband had borrowed recordings by some truly celebrated artists -- such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yefim Bronfman and Minoru Nojima -- and passed them off as Hatto's. The reviewers, it seems, were stunned by the prowess of these releases. "Even in the most daunting repertoire, her poise in the face of one pianistic storm after another is a source of astonishment," wrote Bryce Morrison in Gramophone. "Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of," enthused critic Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. "Her legacy is a discography that in quantity, musical range and consistent quality has been equaled by few pianists in history," observed critic Jeremy Nicholas in an obituary of Hatto last July, in London's Guardian. Last month, when recording engineer Andrew Rose proved -- by comparing sound wave patterns -- that Hatto's releases actually had been pilfered from the work of many other pianists, some observers began chortling. "Quite a few critics fell for the discography of the late British pianist Joyce Hatto," wrote Tim Smith, in the Baltimore Sun. "They have probably been trying to wipe the egg from their faces since the news broke a couple of weeks ago that the recordings are a giant fraud." How absurd. The critics who applauded Hatto's alleged recordings indeed were recognizing great performances by estimable artists. They were doing, in fact, precisely what critics are supposed to do: discern artistic excellence. That Hatto's husband and record producer, William Barrington-Coupe, committed fraud by proffering the artistic achievements of other pianists as his wife's work does nothing to diminish the value of the original recordings themselves, nor the critics' assessments of them. Furthermore, no human pair of ears -- no matter how adept -- possibly could be expected to identify in Hatto's 100-plus releases the plagiarized and often technologically manipulated recordings of uncounted other pianists (to date, no one but Barrington-Coupe himself knows how many sources he raided to bolster his wife's reputation). The egg lies not on the faces of the critics but, rather, on the character of Barrington-Coupe. That's not to say, however, that critics are beyond reproach. If any writers reviewed the same recordings differently, depending on whether Hatto's name or someone else's was on the label, they clearly have some explaining to do. Certainly such errors of analysis, and worse, have been committed in the name of music criticism. Consider a case that unfolded locally in 1990, when a Chicago critic went to review a performance by Andre Watts at the Ravinia Festival, in Highland Park. The critic wrote that the concert proved Watts was "beyond the shadow of a doubt, the greatest living pianist in the concert arena." Alas, Watts never took the stage -- he canceled, with pianist Ju Hee Suh taking his place. "I arrived late and had not been informed of the change," he told the Tribune at the time. "I couldn't see the stage." Nor hear it, apparently. That has not happened in Hatto's case -- at least not yet. Comments: The critics are responsible, in most cases, for being strongly influenced in their judgments by Barrington-Coupe's (the husband's) carefully crafted, multi-faceted, and mostly or entirely faked-up human interest story, whose components were 1) forgotten and/or little-known, unfairly neglected genius 2) terribly-ill-for-many-years genius 3) and, in the case of the Brit crits who fell earliest and hardest for the fraud, forgotten and/or little-known, unfairly neglected, terribly-ill-for-many-years Brit genius. The critics, in most cases, are also responsible for not questioning the obvious anomalies in the Hatto story (more than a 100 recordings, of virtuoso repertory in many cases, allegedly recorded in a short span of time by a woman who was that ill; the pseudonymous, previously unheard of even in the realm of pseudonyms, orchestras; the conducter no one had ever heard of, etc.). Also most/many of the critics (certainly any who listened to more than a few "Hatto" recordings) are responsible for not detecting, however good any of the pirated and manipulated recordings might be, how wildly different in style the body of "Hatto's" recorded work was -- well beyond the boundaries of any previously known stylistically flexible pianist of any talent. And then there is the special category of critics who praised "Hatto's" recording of Work X after dismissing in a previous review the recording of that work that "Hatto's" recording was pirated from. No responsibility there.

I think he was referring to Monica Crowley. Crowley was who I was thinking of.