Larry Kart

Louis = Armstrong Also, maybe Ornette should be there. Tatum in part not only because there's so much there but also because what's there is so rich. Lots of time on that desert island.

I got few classical pals, none who lives closer than Whitehall, Michigan (I live in the Chicago area), and I don't think Mr. Nessa is an HIP fan. I do, however, like Harnoncourt's "Poppea" and think that an HIP approach to Charpentier, Rameau, DeLalande et al. is close to essential, not that it's any guarantee. For the big Bach works, I like E. Jochum -- so shoot me.

And K. Bohm's "Zauberflote."

About the operas, as with many other standard rep works, I have older LP versions that satisfy or interest me sufficiently: E. Kleiber, Leinsdorf, and C. Davis in "Figaro," C. Davis and Klemperer in "Don Giovanni," Jochum and Leinsdorf in "Cosi," though I do have Gardiner's "Clemenza" (on CD). It feels funny BTW to identify two of those as Leinsdorf's; it's the singers more than the conductor that make those sets work, while the conductors' contributions are at least as vital on the other sets. My only Requiem is C. Davis'.

I think I know what you mean, but that's not his fault --it's the performers' and the listeners' (some of them, in both cases). And "Don Giovanni," Der Zauberflute," and Cosi Fan Tutti" are cute? The mature string quintets? The K. 361 Wind Serenade? The K. 526 Piano-Violin Sonata? Etc, etc. Come on.

Ellington Pres Tatum Bird Monk Second five: Jelly Roll Morton Louis Coleman Hawkins Miles Roscoe Mitchell

"These are days when no one should rely unduly on his 'competence.' Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed." -- Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street"

And it can be listened to here: http://www.rhapsody.com/stangetz/thesoftswing

I see it's a Verve "e album."

A somewhat little-known (I believe) but superb Getz album from the '50s (AFAIK never out on CD, at least in the US) is "The Soft Swing" from 1957, with Mose Allison, Addison Farmer, and Jerry Segal. It's maybe the most rhythmically relaxed Getz on record.

Hal McKusick George Russell Juanita Odejnar

And it's Art Mardigan, not Isola, on most of the tracks. In addition to the feel of the tune, I think I had Mandel in mind because of the title's play on words ("Hasty Pudding/Tasty Pudding"), a la Mandel"s "Keester Parade" and "Groover Wailin'" ( off of NYC's one-time celebrated civic greeter, Grover Whalen).

Interesting, slightly different feel on that record, and I believe it was bit more apparent there than on any studio album made by that group -- a kind of Mulligan-esque, noodling groove. I know that Brookmeyer's time with Mulligan followed his stint with Getz, but much of it stems from Brookmeyer, I think, and the rest from John Williams and Frank Isola. It's like the time feel is a walking/talking/kicking-a-can-down-the-road thing, with a good deal less of the mercurial, bop-like fluidity that was typical at any tempo of Getz's quintet with Jimmy Raney. I like both, but this approach, again, seemed a bit different. The difference is epitomized, as I recall, by "Tasty Pudding" (Johnny Mandel's piece I think) -- both the piece itself and the groove they get on it. I guess you could say neo-Basie as well as Mulligan-esque, but something definitely was in the air along those lines at that time.

Jim Hall Jimmy Giuffre Juanita Odejnar

Adrian Lyne George Strait Jake Gyllenhaal

I saw Neal Cassady from across a moderately crowded room.

You know about the cat that ate some cheese and then waited at the mouse hole with baited breath. For future reference, it's "bated breath" (i.e. "restrain one's breathing through anxiety or suspense"). Also see the word "abate" -- "lessen or diminish."

Not "well done" according to a number of people who have extensive prior knowwledge of the subject -- Dan Morgenstern of The Institute of Jazz Studies, for one, John Litweiler, for another. A very good recent book on Morton is Phil Pastras's "Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West" (U. of California Press, 2001), which focuses on the two periods (1917-22 and 1940-1) that Morton spent on the West Coast.

My intro to JB was "The T.A.M.I. Show," which I saw when it came out in a funky NYC theater where the audience was split -- both in terms of numbers and where people sat -- right down the middle. As I recall, JB in great form was the film's penultimate act, followed by The Rolling Stones. The perceived indignity of this on the part of one half of the crowd was such that bottles were hurled at and punctured the screen, and the film, I think, was halted before the Stones' portion was over. Don't know whether further uproar followed; I left at that point.

Wow -- you do have your sources.

Clem -- I know what you mean about Clark Terry, but there are exceptions: "Swahili" (EmArcy), from 1955, with Quincy Jones charts (they can be cute, I know), Jimmy Cleveland, Cecil Payne, Horace Silver, Oscar Pettiford, and Art Blakey (that rhythm section makes a big difference); and "In Orbit" with Monk. Terry used to come through town pretty often at the Jazz Showcase, and I'd usually express some annoyance in print at what seemed to me to be his complacent cliche-mongering (one time, later in the week, he went on the air with a local DJ-Black activist and agreed with him that I had to be racist). Then the next year he was paired at the Showcase with Al Cohn, who was in the take-no-prisoners mode of his later years, and Clark got the message right off and really played.

I reviewed "Miles In the Sky" for Down Beat when it came out (****1/2, as I recall).

OK, but why should I let the bad behavior of the (too) many make me not look for or feel strains of genuine familial life? If I can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, isn't shunning all familial coherence because some of what's on the market under that name is fake, even nasty fake, like letting the bastards win far more comprehensively than they ever dreamed of?

I know (or think I know) what you're saying here, but let's not forget (per FWIW the argument/account I strung together in the introductory chapter of my book) that fairly early on jazz did develop a collective sense of "self" -- that is, "an identity of which it was conscious and that shaped its sense of what it could and should do next" -- and that this sense of identity, while neither unthreatened nor perhap an unmixed blessing, did for the most part have a very stimulating effect on the music. Lord knows I don't have anything Marsalis-ian mind here -- some status-mongering, "Jazz is America's classical music, so where's my damn subsidy/concert hall" kind of thing -- but that sense of jazz's identity, however loose-woven it might have been at times, was not just some cockamamie "construct," let alone an ideology, but the recognition of a spontaneously arising social-aesthetic fact that was quite evident to a whole lot of people. That identity may or may not have crumbled or be crumbling, but while there's certainly nothing wrong in liking any music that pleases you, I wouldn't be so quick to sing the praises of sheer porousness -- as though the presence of stupid, or self-serving, or self-righteousness stylistic rule-makers meant in turn that in no music of definite strength and integrity could that strength and integrity be to some significant degree the result of a semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is. There's both life and logic in that, I think.