Larry Kart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ijwIaH6bM&search=jazz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BOoP7U1jAA&search=jazz STRONG Pres!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yYud187MY&search=jazz

I think a great story could be quarried from Kenton's life -- the tale of a charismatic semi-megalomanic a la Howard Hughes who made a music in his own image. And that last part could be translated into cinematic-musical terms that I think anyone could grasp. (In that vein, one oft he problems of "'Round Midnight" was that the plot required Dale Turner's musical resurrection to take place before his musical and literal demise, but Dexter himself was so far gone at the time that no such musical resurrection could be heard -- and even if it had been possible for him to significantly increase the strength of his playing, would the majority of the audience been able to hear the difference?) BTW, I see Eastwood's old friend and fellow onetime Kenton devotee Mort Sahl working on the script of ... what else, "Artistry in Rhythm."

I agree with Chris on the excessive Chan slant in "Bird," though I think Dianne Venora did a much better job in that role than Forrest Whittaker (an actor I usually admire) did as Bird -- admittedly a difficult bordering on impossible role to play. As many have said before, Whittaker's exaggerated physical motions when he's pretending to play are particularly annoying, given that we know that Bird aalmost always stood stock still when playing. My choice for Bird would have been the young James Earl Jones. In the same vein, at a certain age, Eastwood would have made a great Stan Kenton in a biopic.

There's a very good album on Concord, led by Tompkins, with Al Cohn in fine form. Don't know if it made it to CD. That Carson anecdote is choice.

Beginning to move through the set, I was struck by how much better Ron McMaster did with the Russ Freeman material than he did the first time, back in 1989. Freeman sure was a unique, swinging player. I particularly like the way he can strongly recast a standard in his own gnarly terms and still leave the tune-as-tune there (e.g. "You Stepped Out of a Dream," "East of the Sun," "The Party's Over"). Also, Harry Warren's "At Last" is a damn fine piece of music.

"Lydian M-1"! Still sounds great and different-logical today, and it sounded even more so at the time. I think I liked George Russell best around the time of this and the Jazz Workshop album (and, a bit later on, "Jazz in the Space Age"), when he was trying to tighten the nuts and bolts of his system to the maximum rather than loosening things up.

I see that Lonehill (yuck) has got their clammy little hands on "Clifford and Max -- Live at the Beehive," originally on Columbia LPs Sound ain't great on the LPs, and I don't imagine that Lonehill could do anything with it, but this is the hottest Clifford in every sense -- quality, inspiration, and sheer heat. Also, and inseparable from this, Max plays out of his ******* mind. Rollins and Nicky Hill, Billy Wallace on piano.

I'd turned 14 that May and had asked my parents if, as a belated birthday present, they would take me to the Brown-Roach Quintet's late-June Chicago engagement at the Modern Jazz Room on Dearborn St. (The only way a 14-year-old could get in to a club where drinks were served was to be accompanied by an adult -- at least it worked that way at the Blue Note.) As I recall, the issue of Down Beat that printed reactions from the community to Brown's death included a particularly anguished one from Dizzy.

Sheldon M. writes: "..Im sure this doesn't justify calling him "fag"???? At least do it to the guy's face, up close and personal with no cameras/mics around~" But Mariotti makes sure that he is never around where Guillen or anyone else he attacks is. GA Russell writes: "Guillen is not being held to account by Management for suggesting that a sportswriter is a homosexual. He is being reprimanded for offending homosexuals by using the word "fag". Do I have that right?" Yes. But Guillen -- himself a professional hothead, of course -- didn't mean by calling Mariotti a "******* fag" that Mariotti actually was a homosexual; he meant that he was not "a manly man." Bad enough, perhaps, but on that point see my response to Sheldon M. above.

It needs to be said that the columnist Guillen went off on, Jay Mariotti, is about on the level of Ann Coulter -- a professional weasel. Moreover, one of Mariotti's "greatest hits" so to speak, was his dubbing Frank Thomas "The Big Skirt," after Thomas ("The Big Hurt") was tagged out at the plate when he slid in to a Cleveland Indians catcher rather than trying to bowl him over. Having come up with this nickname for Thomas, Mariotti repeated it in print over and over, with great relish. Also, as Rick Morrisey's column in the Chicago Tribune today suggests, Mariotti is pretty much regarded with contempt by his sports columnist colleagues because, while he does attend games, he makes it a policy never to venture into a clubhouse or a dugout where anyone he's slammed might be present and be prepared to complain about or contest what he has written.

My first car was a used 1962 or '63 Peugot (sp?) sedan, whose soft, comfortable front seats reclined 180 degrees, which came in handy in certain circumstances. Then, in early summer, it developed some significant mechanical problem, and I discovered that 1) a part needed to fix it had to be ordered from the factory in France and 2) the factory, like much of France, was essentially closed down until autumn. Also, it turned out that the reason the significant mechanical problem cropped up was that the car had been in accident that badly damaged its frame. So I traded it in on an used MG 1100, which I literally lost in Chicago's fabled 1967 snow storm. But those reclining seats were nice.

Just picked up this delightful record (originally Riverside, now OJC), which Chris produced back in 1960 and which almost certainly never would have been made otherwise. As the notes explain, Chris played some vintage Snowden sideman recordings on his Philadelphia radio show, Snowden (then a parking lot attendant) wrote him a friendly note, Chris arranged to hear him play, etc. Snowden (b. 1900) went way back -- it was in his band that the young Ellington came to NYC from D.C . -- and his banjo playing is something else: lucid, unique, joyfully swinging. Fine band too: Cliff Jackson, piano; Tommy Bryant, bass; Jimmy Crawford, drums.

Hmm. It's "My Old Flame" on the LP of "Consequence," "I Hear a Rhapsody" on the LP of "Action," and the Jackie McLean discography http://www.jazzdisco.org/mclean/dis/c/ shows no sign that he ever recorded "Don't Blame Me."

Don't know if it's available at present, but a prime KD album from about the same period as "Quiet Kenny" (maybe a year later) is his first (of two, the other of tunes from "Showboat") on the Time label, "Jazz Contemporary," with Charles Davis, Steve Kuhn, Butch Warren or Jimmy Garrison on bass, and drummer Buddy Enlow. A nice recording too, Earle Brown at the controls.

What about Sunday night? Strange that that's been left off -- and that's not Jazzshrink's doing; that's what I find online so far. I assume/hope that Konitz will be on the Sunday night bill.

I'm not a big Swallow fan (liked him more in his ancient days as a acoustic bassist), but I enjoyed that Talmor-Swallow album quite a bit. Maybe that makes me a Talmor fan; the references in his writing to Stravinsky's "L' Histoire du Soldat" (the album is balanced more toward writing than blowing) don't come across as the post-modern trickery you might expect but as acts of genuine affinity. Also, one of the semi-incidental reasons I like the album is that Swallow's bass is recorded more clearly than is usually the case in my non-comprehensive experience of his work.

Blue Note jumbled up the typewritten pages of the notes I wrote for the LP issue of this back in 1979, and apparently the CD retains the original incoherent jumble. This came up here a ways back, and I explained how to un-jumble things; if that post can't be found and anyone cares, I'll try again.

"I wonder why he continued to play in the Octet for so long?" Because it was a semi-regular gig, I would guess. We don't always have that much choice about how we put bread on the table. Also, he did have some room there to do his own thing.

After I introduced myself, he quoted, word for word from memory, a paragraph I'd written in praise of him almost 20 years before in a review for Down Beat of a Chicago performance by the Freddie Hubbard Quintet. This was quite surprising and pleasing to me, but it also made me feel a bit blue, as though he'd kept those words pressed in his memory book, so to speak, because in the intervening years he hadn't received that many other words of the same kind.

One thing I do remember saying in that review was that rhythmically Murray was "like Charlie Ventura on roller skates."

Yes, Relyles, I remember that performance and that review. I didn't use the word "crap," though -- couldn't in a newspaper, at least not back then -- but I might have if I could. Heard him again a few years later in NYC at Sweet Basil with his Octet and had the same reaction. Interestingly, perhaps, I spoke after the last set to a member of the band, an older veteran saxophonist whose work I like, and he made it pretty clear (he brought this up himself) that his opinion of the leader, musically, was not favorable.

"in general i don't like liner notes that sound like they were writting by a jewish guy on acid." OK, I'll stay away from the stuff. And now that I think of it -- "in general"? How many can there be? BTW, I'm pretty sure that acid was not the substance of choice for David A. Himmelstein, author of those "Settin' the Pace" notes.

All I'll say is that Chewy etc. is the most annoying fake name in the history of Western man.