Larry Kart

She'll meet you in the manger.

Uncle Chris ... I love it. And they let you use Fred Nurdley?

Me too.

I wrote an article about numerology for a high school literature textbook I was editing, using the name Conrad King (chosen by me). It seemed just right.

Everyone knows about Von Freeman now, but he was under the radar for a LONG time. Nessa's two superb Freeman recordings from 1975 (when Von was already 53 years old) were a big step in changing that -- all that preceded them, I believe, was the Atlantic Freeman LP from about five years before.

Bad typing. The bassist on Schweizer's "Pure Reason" is Hans Glawischnig, admittedly not the easiest thing to type.

King Ubu -- I knew Schweizer from his American released or distributed stuff; the first one was "Normal Garden" on Mons, rec. 1994. At one point I wrote a lengthy, detailed e-mail to Schweizer about how much I dug his work, and he responded at length himself. At one point, I recall, he was going to ask me to modify what I'd said so he could use it as a recommendation for an academic musical position he was going to apply for, but then I didn't hear from him again. It was in the course of that e-mail exchange that he sent me a copy of "Pure Reason," that fantastic disc with Dave Binney et al. It's similar in feel to "Portas" (MGB), with Eric Rasmussen on alto, and both discs include the excellent pianist Jacob Sacks, but the bass-drum team on "Pure Reason" is remarkably locked in and inventive.

The trumpet player was Henry Boozier, I think.

I'm a big fan of Schweizer. He's really on to something -- as a player, composer, and bandleader. He's got one still in the can I believe -- "Pure Reason," with Dave Binney, Jacob Sacks, Hans Glawishnig, and Dan Weiss -- that's a killer. Of his available work, I'd suggest "Physique" (Omnitone) over the Full Circle Rainbow disc.

Oh my god, Paul Gonsalves is sleeping throughout the entire tune!! "Sleeping" is one word for it.

The "WTF" moment is Lee is in the midst of his familar "Everybody hum this note and I'll play something on top it" routine. He's listening for us to sing the note he just gave us. The routine went quite well this time because Preston Bradley Hall in the Cultural Center is a very echo-y, domed ceiling room; also, there were a fair number of musicians and otherwise musically alert people in the audience. Thus Lee's note was reproduced accurately and proceeded to hang in the air with little further effort from us, while Lee played on "Alone Together." In fact, Lee seemed a bit taken aback at first by the cloud of sound we'd created for him. It not unlike Morton Feldman's "Rothko Chapel." Thanks for the pictures, Mark. My wife couldn't be there and got a kick out of them.

Ernie Henry is in good form too. He's on the quintet tracks. It's Frank Foster on tenor, not Griffin, on the septet tracks. Only slight drawback is pianist Joe Knight, who can be a bit obvious as a comper, but again that's slight. The lively rawness of this date is rather un-Riverside-ish, but I see that it was produced by Keepnews AND Bill Grauer, which may account for that. Also, there's a nice, of the period, chart on Gee's original "Gee!" -- airy voicings reminisicent of Quincy Jones when he was still alert and relatively honest musically.

Trobonist Matthew Gee's "Jazz By Gee" turns out to be a very earthy, groovy album, though the leader is not the most subtle or creative soloist imaginable. One of the septet tracks, "Kingston Lounge," has a genuine club session feel to it (listening to it, you begin to feel a bit loaded), and this is among the better early Art Taylor dates I know (when he was still deep into a neo-Blakey bag). To clinch the deal, Wilbur Ware is in fine form on the quintet tracks (John Simmons is on the rest), taking a gorgeous two-chorus solo on "Lover Man."

Think about Stanley or about Duke? And whichever it is (or both), how so?

One of his best, which made good use of his equivocal nature. was the very noir Western "The Violent Men" (1955), with Barbara Stanwyck at her most terrifying (a virtual Lady MacBeth), Edward G. Robinson as her crippled cattle-baron husband (you won't believe what Babs has in store for him), and Brian Keith as Babs' covert sweetie, though he really prefers the younger (and understandably pissed off at Babs) Lita Milan. Dark complex doings here, directed in a masterly manner by Rudolph Mate.

Isn't one of these the same as the Pettiford Vogue release? I only have the other of the Birdlanders discs, but I'm not quite sure if the Vogue covers the second one. These are all Henri Renaud produced NY 1954 sessions, right? Don't know the details about other releases of this material, though I think there have been a few over the years. These are the Renaud produced '54 sessions.

A wonderful homegrown player. Don't know the two newer discs. I agree about the alleged Ornette resemblance being deceiving -- I think McGann esssentially made himself, though bits of Rollins and Jackie McLean must have been present at or near the conception. He feels his way note to note, a la latter-day Konitz.

He sure is.

I like what I've listened from "The Birdlanders Vol 1 and 2." What a joy it is to heard a rhythm section with Oscar Pettiford in it. Jay and Kai both in good form, as are Al Cohn and Tal Farlow. I believe someone already has mentioned Taft Jordan's lovely "Mood Indigo." What a sound he had, not unlike Joe Wilder's but definitely his own. I like the part in the notes where he mentions that Charlie Shaver's nickname for him is "Slick."

Jim -- I only know Riddle's arrangments for Sinatra et al. Is that what you have in mind, or are there albums of his own that you're thinking of? BTW, I listened to "Jazz for Moderns" on my way in to the Chicago Jazz Fest yesterday. Fascinates/delights me as much as ever.

I don't follow you here, Jim. Many jazz performances/compositions are templates for other, possible versions/variations, and some (not a whole lot, perhaps, but some) are not. Is that necessarily to the detriment of the latter music? I don't see why. Does that say something about the nature of that music? Sure. That's one of the things we've been talking about. You ask (you haven't, but you might) whether I can think of other examples in jazz of this. Well, I've already brought up Monk in relation to Tatro, and I'd say that while some of the small ensemble pieces from the Blue Note era obviously have a life as templates, there are others (e.g. "Criss Cross," "Skippy," "Hornin' In," "Carolina Moon") whose virtues are pretty closely tied to their original interpretations. I'd say that Dameron's "Fontainbleu" is another example. The original Prestige version is crucially dependent on the timbres. spirit, etc. of the men Dameron chose to play it (Dorham and Shihab in particular), and the later Riverside recording for a larger ensemble of early '60s NYC studio mainstays is not even close. And how about Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers masterpieces? As it happens, there have been a few living variations on/recreations of Morton and similar primarily ensemble jazz material from the '20s -- in particular by France's Le Petit Jazz Band, founded by cornetist/arranger Jean-Pierre Morel -- but the principles that underlie Le Petit's success suggest why so many others have failed or have been contented to cop surface aspects only. You say (rather dismissively or just sadly?) "Guess you had to be there." Well, not literally, no. But you do have to divine the spirit in which the stuff was made and that still animates the way it works, if in fact it does work. But that may be the real problem here, that Tatro's stuff just doesn't work for/speak to you. And I think I can understand your feelings about "foo foo" -- at one point in the '50s, after I'd been turned on to Silver, Rollins, Blakey, et al., I literally threw into the trash almost every West Coast LP I had (including my copy of the Previn-Rogers "Collaboration," with its Jim Flora cover), as though the mere presence of those recordings in the house were a sign of moral/aesthetic weakness on my part.

Exactly. In a similar vein -- except that the music there fits what Jim calls "foo foo" -- I think of the most West Coast album there is IMO, the Andre Previn-Shorty Rogers "Collaboration," originally RCA, probably now on Fresh Sound. The charts (by Previn and Rogers, detectably different in flavor but from the same menu) are like needle-point practical jokes and are played just that way by the co-leaders, Milt Bernhart, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper (Shank and Cooper doubling a lot on flute and oboe) Jimmy Giuffre, Curtis Counce, a guitarist, and Shelly Manne. The precision and (within the bounds you'd expect) zest of these players in this context is pretty amazing, and I don't believe that there are musicians alive who could play this music anywhere near this well, maybe even play it at all. Those who might have the virtuosity to do it couldn't get within miles of the right spirit -- a blend of game-playing and necessity. Too much of the wrong kind of self-consciousness and it's impossible; you need to have just enough. It's the same reason perhaps that no one, to my mind at least, has written a science fiction story that really works since the late 1950s: The world changed. OK, some post-1959 science fiction stories kind of work, but they're written between quotation marks, and their progeny are still-born.

I've also been impressed by Scott Tinkler, and I'm not an Australian.

Anyone who will be at the Konitz thing at the Cultural Center and that I don't already know, please say hello afterwards if you want to.

Well, I have. Not sure that I do now, though. I've survived, let me put it that way. What I mean is that Graettinger's "objectivity" resulted in a music that effectively captured the essence of what the Kenton band was really "trying to do" in a way that the more self-consciously "progressive" writers for the band were unable to accomplish. To me, his was the truest portrait of the Kenton World, capturing what it really was (or wanted to be) rather than what it thought it was. And like most unvarnished truths, it proved to be a bit more than the objects of it were ready to handle. Very interesting and pretty damn convincing. Thanks.