Larry Kart

"Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" from "Ellington at Newport." I love Paul Gonsalves in other settings, and I admire the piece itself, but IMO those fabled 27 (or whatever) choruses are mostly a lot of huffing and puffing. Maybe if the album came with an inflatable version of the blonde who got up and started dancing.

And it represents (beautifully) a period in the music in general and Horace's music in particular that was to be fairly short-lived. Not that I don't like Silver in all phases through the years (the vocals, though, not so much), but there's some handsomely complex writing here, and Mobley and Farmer are all over it.

Historically, yes. Not sure if the writers will stick to that in the series. Guy Don't recall it exactly, but I believe there was a brief bit of dialogue in the last episode that foreshadowed an eventual Octavia/Antony union.

You know that Octavia is going to marry Marc Antony, right? About the British accents, this time for once I think that works nicely because they're not all upper crust British accents; rather, the accents high and low are carefully parcelled out on that basis. Given that kind of care, the parallel between Roman Empire/British Empire seems just right to me. I particularly like the Kipling-esque bond that unites Pullo to Verenus. Or would you prefer they speak Latin?

I think it might have been more of a "cutting" session if it had taken place a year or so later. In May 1956 Sonny could have had little doubt that he was the superior player.

About jellybeans and the like, we should ask Von Freeman, who as I recall dotes on hard candy.

Just to be specific about the relationship between Coltrane's struggle to stop using narcotics and the advent of his new style/new level of mastery (you can put the first "new" in quotes if you feel that the newish ideas were mostly there beforehand but the ability to execute them was, for the most part, not), Lewis Porter's Coltrane bio quotes Jackie McLean, who was working with Art Blakey at the Cafe Bohemia in April 1957, opposite Miles, that Trane "stopped using drugs at the beginning of that job ... but he came to work every night being sick. Of course he was drinking quite a bit and trying to fight it [withdrawal symptoms] off. [Eventually] he was feeling better and from that moment on, he played really awesome." I would say that if you listen to the seven recording dates (five for Prestige, one each for Blue Note and Riverside) that Trane did from March 22, 1957 to May 31, 1957 (the "Straight Street" album, first one under his name), it's clear that on the first of these, "Interplay," he's not the same man, idea-wise, who recorded with Dameron on Nov. 30, 1956 (his last previous date before the "Interplay" session) and that the firming up of ideas and execution ascends fairly steeply to the May 31, 1957 date. I would say that the Trane of the latter part of '57 can be heard close to fully formed on the date just before that, "Cattin' with Coltrane and Quinichette" (May 17, 1957). How Trane sounds on the other date recorded that day -- with Idrees Sulieman and Sahib Shihab -- I can't say for sure; I used to have that one but don't seem to anymore.

Two things about '57-61 Trane in the context (musical and social-commercial) of those times as I recall them 1) He was the first widely known/highly respected player whose music virtually proclaimed (in the nature and emotional tone of his specific peak performances and in its rapid and often surprising evolution) that some sort of major upheaval was in the works -- this being evident at least from the time of "Blue Train." 2) He more or less laid the ground work, in that regard, for the already evolving/existing music of Cecil and Ornette to be accepted, to the degree that it eventually would be. Note, for instance, the way Trane's presence was used by the producer of Cecil's "Love for Sale" album (Tom Wilson?) in attempt to place Cecil inside the circle of the extreme but legitimate/acceptable. All I'm saying is that if Trane's music hadn't been telling us that underneath the soil of Hard Bop etc. there were deep pools of superheated magma at work, those like Cecil, Ornette, and Ayler who had different but related things to tell us might have had an even harder time being heard. In fact, it's not hard for me to imagine that in a Traneless-after-1956 world, the music of Ornette and Ayler might never have been heard outside of L.A. and Cleveland. It's not like either of those guys had a self-generated publicity machine inside them, and I think the history of how they emerged into the national limelight (in Ornette's case via Lester Koenig, the Lenox School of Jazz-John Lewis-Martin Williams-Nesuhi Ertegun et al.) suggests that those key early steps on the road to exposure took place in a world that was conditioned to some significant degree by Trane's music to think that, again, upheaval was on the come.

That no Trane after '56 "What if?" question is one of the few of that sort that really leaves me scratching my head. At this point, I'd say that things would have been VERY different if that had been so -- and I'm old enough to have been listening to '55-'56 Trane at the time and in the context of what else was and was not going on then. Further thoughts in a few hours. About McCoy, I think he did go on for a good while after '67 to do strong important stuff, but eventually IMO the vein got played out.

On the Tyondai Braxton link above, there's an MP3 file that can be listened to. Didn't get through all of it, but on first encounter it sounds like some seriously hairy stuff. Good for him.

Have two nagilas, have three or four.

Braxton's son is Tyondai Braxton, known to his friends as Ty. Google him under Tyondai Braxton and there are lots of hits. Here's one article about him: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feat...Tyondai_Braxton And here's a picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kittenclaw/54.../in/set-394835/

The same goes for Anthony Braxton's son. I haven't heard Braxton's son's music myself, but my son -- a member of the Chicago-based rock band Crush Kill Destroy http://www.crushkilldestroy.net/rock/ckd/ -- has and says that his stuff is excellent.

I know that "After Hours" isn't a blues-ballad in form, but its hook is very blues-ballad in feel, no? -- noodling boogie figures devolving into a song-like sense of release.

Erskine Hawkins, perhaps? There's "After Hours," after all.

Way back when it first came out in 1957, Mingus' "East Coasting." I'm not sure of the actual release dates of the material that Mingus recorded around that time for Atlantic ("Pithecanthropus Erectus," "The Clown") and RCA ("Tijuana Moods"), but I'm pretty sure that all (or almost all) the Mingus I'd heard by that point was the more "progressive" material he'd previously recorded for Debut and Period. The writing on "East Coasting" and the playing by Clarence Shaw, Jimmy Knepper, Shafi Hadi, and (yes) Bill Evans was a revelation, and it still hits me the way it did the first time.

The factual background to Non Skeddo": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Gilbert_Graham

Michael: It was on Lennie's first full album, "The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce" (Fantasy), rec. 1958. The title of the bit is "Non Skeddo Flies Again" -- that's "Non Skeddo" as in "Non Skeddo Airlines." It can be found on at least one Bruce CD compiliation and probably can be listened to somewhere on the 'Net as well. As I recall, you can hear in places on "Non Skeddo" the mixture of shock/delight/relief/release that Lennie could inspire in an actual audience and that is such a crucial aspect of who he was and was up to IMO. Having once been in a member of one his audiences when he was in his prime, I can tell you that the feeling was unique -- and I've seen and written about a lot of comedians over the years.

what do you mean? I mean that her playing, while aware of those aspects of the jazz past that strike her as attractive, is rooted in the musical present as she sees it and also seems to me to have a basic newness to it language-wise. In particular, she's never struck me as one of those players who makes a gesture in the direction of "the tradition" as though that ought to earn her some extra credit.

Really? I thought it was pretty feeble compared to the version of the routine on the original recording -- in part because there he was performing in front of a responsive audience, in part because it was still fairly fresh to him. Here he seems tired of the material and also perhaps distracted by the whole idea of how to present himself on TV in a way that would get the thing aired. As I recall, he was much more at ease on his "Playboy Show" TV appearance with Hefner, where he could play off being the potentially disruptive guest.

Frankie -- Based on what I've heard, I don't think of Roberts as a big "harkener back."

Thanks, Randy -- I thought you might be able to find it. Some of the writing seems a bit moist to me now, but Willie sure was in great form that night.

Leaving it at Mitchell for the moment, I'd say that both "Solo 3" (Mutable) and "The Bad Guys" (Around Jazz) -- with Smith as a sideman -- are top notch, and "Song For My Sister" (PI) isn't far behind. I've also heard Mitchell live on more than a few occasions since 2000 and have always been impressed, to say the least.

Roberts' tone, as I recall it from live performance, was exactly as you describe it, Red, and that's what wasn't captured on the two recordings I've heard. I think I tried to to buy a copy of the Utech record but wasn't able to, for reasons I no longer recall. Roberts has a blog: http://blog.myspace.com/matanaroberts

I heard Roberts several times about 12 years or more years ago (when I believe she was a student at DePaul U.) at a regular Hyde Park area Sunday night jam session hosted by an old friend of mine, drummer Doug Mitchell, at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap. Roberts already was very impressive in a more or less Steve Coleman bag, and it seemed likely she would become a special player. Caught her several times in recent years on visits she's made to Chicago with her trio Sticks and Stones (drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Josh Abrams), and she was in very good to superb form each time -- definitely a major young player IMO and more interesting than a whole lot of players of any age. On the other hand, the two albums of hers that I'm aware of (one on 482 Music, the other on Thrill Jockey) don't come close to capturing what I heard from Roberts "live," again IMO -- in part because of less than ideal sound, in part perhaps because making a record that captures what one can really do is often not easy.