Larry Kart

It's the ones whose wives look like Elvis Costello that you need to watch out for.

I'll certainly be looking at DeVeaux again, but as I said or implied before, his intelligence and relatively jargon-free prose IMO make his work all the more troublesome in the end because the underlying hardcore interest-mongering, while near omnipresent, is nicely disguised as disinterested inquiry. The books are still being cooked but discreetly so. You might say that DeVeaux is the John McCain of the New Jazz Studies movement.

Good work, Nate. Apparently that film, which I vaguely recall seeing, is based either on a true incident or an urban legend. Perhaps this is the factual germ, so to speak, of the matter: "Vienna's reputation [not Paris's, note] also did not improve as a result of the [1873 World's] fair. The site itself wasn't even ready when the exposition was officially opened, adding to the view of Austria as a perpetually unprepared country. Days after the opening ceremony, the Viennese stock market crashed, causing a depression and severe unemployment. There was also an outbreak of CHOLERA [my emphasis] during the summer of the fair, and a flood that damaged buildings towards the end. This, and the fact that vendors were charging high prices for their goods and services, discouraged visitors from coming to the exposition. Vienna never held another world fair after 1873."

Whitney Balliett sure is fallible. For example, in the liner notes he wrote in 1956 for the Pacific Jazz album "Grand Encounter -- 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West," with John Lewis, Bill Perkins, Jim Hall, Percy Heath, and Chico Hamilton, after praising the certainly praiseworthy Perkins for his gentle lyricism, Balliett went on to say this: "There is [in Perkins' playing] none of the hair-pulling, the bad tone, or the ugliness that is now a growing mode, largely in New York, among the work of the hard-bopsters like Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, and JR Monterose."

Rather than, or as much as, "prior forms having exhausted - or at least seeming to have exhausted - their creative possibilities," I think it's a matter of prior forms stimulating/suggesting new creative possibilities to the right receptive/talented people. Ornette might be the classic example -- "Ancient To the Future" as the Art Ensemble put it. And the line between Armstrong and Parker, especially rhythmically, seems fairly direct after the fact, though probably much less beforehand. About the academic need to restate the obvious, and above all cite it from "sources," there's a minor comic (at least to me) example of this on p. 81 of Gennari's book, when he's talking about the earnest Columbia U. undergrad jazz fans of the late 1930s who were on their way to become critics of some note -- Barry Ulanov, Ralph De Toledano et al. Gennari includes an innocuous fairly cheesy, in a light features-story manner, potted account of their activities -- info that Gennari could simply state himself because it's so obvious -- but instead he presents it in the form of a quote from a 2001 article in a Columbia U. alumni magazine! This when it's crystal clear that the author of the article has no special knowledge to impart but is simply a features writer recycling stuff from an old clip file and pouring a little human interest sauce on top, if in fact the sauce wasn't already there in the clips. But it's a citation.

Allen: I'll be able to a better job of defining NJS later on, but the gist of it so far seems to be so-called "contextualization" -- (placing and leaving jazz within a framework of social, political, economic, etc. interests), with the flux of these interests, rather than aesthetic matters (or what some might call "the music itself"), essentially determining the course of the music over time. In other words, as I see it, jazz becomes a symptom, and/or evidence of larger and (by implication) more important forces at work. Thus, to pick one key example, in Scott DeVeaux's "The Birth of Bebop" IIRC the driving force behind that music is said to be the desire of black musicians who were oppressed or disadvantaged by the white social hegemony of the Swing Era and its big bands to create a new music that would give them more control over the means of production, etc. It's fairly clear what acts, and what ex post facto statements about what was going on at Mintons and elsewhere, DeVeaux is bouncing off of here, but IMO there are really big gaps in this kind of thinking. For one, supposing it's true that Gillespie, Parker et al. were determined, up front and primarily, to make a music that was theirs alone and couldn't be "stolen." Why then did they come up with this specific music, with its quite specific and quite potent and striking MUSICAL traits? Where are the (IMO necessary, no matter which direction you want to take it) links between the supposedly originating socio-political-economic impulses of bebop and the actual sound of "Night in Tunisia" or "Scrapple from the Apple"? DeVeaux is a very smart guy, and perhaps my account irons out the subtleties of his argument, but that's how I remember the gist what he says. If it's an ass-backwards approach to the music, I don't think, given DeVeaux's intelligence, that it's that way by accident.

I posted this back in May, and it's what I still feel as I re-read the book. What I plan to do now is immerse myself after re-reading Gennari in a big stewpot of New Jazz Studies stuff (BTW, that is what the NJS folks call themselves) to make sure that I'm right in thinking that Gennari is, as I think he is, reading the history of jazz criticism so that the NJS approach is both the cure and the culmination. Another aspect of the book that drives me crazy and that is connected to what I've already said is the way it blithely (or so it seems, but it isn't really blithe at all) takes chunks of the past that you have direct experience of and transforms them into things that are quite distant from and alien to what you and others actually experienced. And this is not just a matter of the difference between what one experiences (or thinks one has experienced) directly versus the cooler, wiser, necessarily less-direct scholarly approach. Instead, it's mostly a matter of covert power interests at work, as in that old creepy story about the family (husband, wife, young daughter) who go to visit the Paris World's Fair in the 1880s, I think. They arrive at their hotel, check in, the daughter is feeling a bit under the wather, the mother stays with her while dad goes out for a long walk. When he gets back to the hotel several hours later, the room they checked in to isn't there, there's no door for it, the wife and daughter have vanished, the people at the hotel say they've never seen the man or his wife and daughter before, and the page in the hotel register where the man signed his name doesn't exist. "It Was. But It Ain't." -- to borrow the title of the Charles Olson essay that zeroes on on this evil semi-intellectual con game. (BTW, what happens in the story, most of which focuses of the man's mounting sense of panic and unreality, is that the daughter became quite sick while the father was out for his walk, a doctor was called in, discovered that the girl had cholera -- news that would have emptied Paris during the World's Fair if it were allowed to get out -- so mother and daughter were whisked away by the arthorities to a suburban clinic, and all evidence that there had been a room there was erased. Also, does anyone know who wrote that story? I may want to refer to it, and Olson simply says it's a "Bulldog Drummond mystery," which may be the case but maybe not.)

As for what Stanley could have been thinking there, I know that he very much disliked what he thought Goodman's music was and what he thought it represented -- slick white commercial swing unfairly edging out/feeding on the superior, genuine black music of Ellington, Basie et al. -- and then this was 1940, at the end of decade in which it was not uncommon at various times, both on the Left and on the Right, to link Jews and rampant commercialism. (I'd assume that Stanley was on the Left in the '30s; maybe Chris can enlighten me there.)

That should be "...seeking recreation in the music."

That's how I took it, because while Benny the bandleader could be said to be literally a business man, his being a "usurer" (and the rest of the band, too?) as well as a musician can only be figurative, and usury (lending money at exorbitant rates) was perhaps the chief crime or sin, actual and symbolic, with which Jews traditionally were tagged in anti-Semitic lore. Stanley certainly was angry there; the full quote is: "I find Goodman's actions [in hiring Cootie Williams away from Ellington] as contemptible as his clarinet playing. Evidently the 'King of Swing' has no artistic conscience whatsoever. However, I have no doubt that in comparison with the Duke, Mr. Goodman's band will continue to sound like a bunch of tired business men and usurers seeking recreation the the music. The trouble with jazz today is that there are more business men than musicians engaged in it."

Speaking of Dance, who contributed a great deal to the music and also was in my experience a very nice man, I just ran across a rather startling quote from him in a letter he wrote to Down Beat in 1940, about Benny Goodman's "contemptible" hiring of Cootie Williams away from Ellington: "...I have no doubt that in comparison with the Duke, Mr. Goodman's band will continue to sound like a bunch of tired businessmen and usurers seeking recreation the the music." Usurers?

Apparently I'm missing something obvious here. Help me out.

I would guess the "undisguised" was decided by the label, not Mulligan. I don't see why. They play the melody of "Love Me or Leave Me" straight out, not the "Apple Core"/"So What" line.

Always wondered what would have happened with it if we hadn't had the Hawk's classic one. Was the Eldridge-Berry the first one with one chorus (or was it just the bridge?) played uptempo? F That's the one. Lee Konitz adapted and played Roy's solo on his 1969 Milestone album "Peacemeal," having first asked Roy for permission. I'm pretty sure that Eldridge solo was one that the Tristano-ites pored over.

Yes, that's it -- "So What" is "Apple Core," on "Love Me or Leave Me" changes. Mulligan clearly liked them; he recorded "Love Me" undisguised with Brookmeyer in concert in Paris in June '54. That affinity reminds me that some of Mulligan's musical instincts, rhythmic ones especially, were rooted in the '20s.

Can't put my hands on the LP right now, but IIRC "So What" is a typically catchy Mulligan line on "Love Me or Love Me" changes.

Never really a stoner, Clem, and haven't indulged at all that way in maybe 35 years. Occured to me that it had stopped being fun, for me. At one time I read all the Dahlberg I could find, and I still have those books. Was recently reading a selection of C. Olson's letters, and there's one where he and Dahlberg, a onetime mentor, get crosswise that's very intense and moving -- in part because Olson is in the role he's in (and trying to break away from it).

That's OK. I could be misinformed or be mis-remembering.

Great story, Randy. Cuts several ways at once.

Clem -- I'm not interested in his music either. As for the rest, wasn't Mezz's "cross-cultural empathy" (based on my memories of "Really The Blues" and what I've heard otherwise about his behavior in this realm) kind of creepy, even abject? For instance, I believe that his closeness to the celebrated jazz people he was close to rested heavily on his role as a reliable, generous source for top-quality marijuana, and that this in fact was why Mezz adopted that role. If that is at all true, and you were the one being empathized with in this manner, how would you regard the would-be empathizer?

"Really the Blues" came out in 1946. What would Mezzrow's other way be -- play the clarinet badly but convince Panassie that you are an excellent jazz musician, be a great "weed" connection, and identify with blackness to the extent that you believe your own skin gets darker the longer you live in Harlem? Don't think it's at all likely that Kazin would have known who Max Roach was in 1949, maybe ever. He lived in a different world. Haven't looked at "Walker in the City" in some time, but I'd guess that Kazin's failure of imagination/observation when he returned to the Brooklyn of his boyhood was because the loss of HIS Brooklyn was looming so large in his mind.

Yes indeed.

The definition of "trollish-ness" is in large part saying something in an attempt to wound and thus provoke to anger someone else. As for the intent to provoke -- Do you think that Yanow would have sent the same "private," supposedly "in jest" message to Allen if he didn't know that we all participate in this public forum? That e-mail is private in the same way that someone kicking you under the table so no one else at the table can see it is private.

IMO the private e-mail thing is a crock. The point of this little note can only have been to stick a finger up Allen's nose in an attempt to provoke him. Pure trollish-ness. Witness the utter disingenuousness of this: "I just wanted to thank you for all of the kind words that you've said about me on the Organissimo threads. It's greatly appreciated." And of this: "I'm just curious as to the strategy."

Eaton was at Indiana Universitry from 1971 to 1991 or thereabouts. He's written a lot, but I don't know how much is microtonal. He did make use of synthesizer called the Syn-Ket that has microtonal capacities.