Larry Kart

Not normally my kind of thing, but, if true, there's a rough justice at work here: http://www.tmz.com/2006/07/28/gibsons-anti...leged-cover-up/

Buck Hill is a terrific player. If I had to describe him -- which seems to be surprisingly diffcult for me to do -- I 'd say he's halfway between Dexter Gordon and Von Freeman, though the problem is that a reasonable person could argue that there is no such place. Perhaps what I mean is that Hill would be halfway between them if Von were as endlessly inventive as he is but a fair bit less quirky. BTW, I recall another Hill disc I used to have with Ozment (on piano or maybe electric piano) and I think some of those other guys, recorded outdoors at a jazz festival, where each track began at the tail end of the head and faded out just before the head returned -- I assume in order to avoid paying licensing fees, because on each track Hill was clearly was improvising on the changes of a standard or a familiar jazz original (which ones exactly I no longer recall -- though Hill was in good form, I got rid of the disc because the fade outs were so annoying; Hill is as likely to play something fine there as anywhere else).

Timings on Progressive 7001 are: Snakes (6:40) Minor March (7:37) Jay Mac's Crib (6:40) The Peck (:21) Bohemia After Dark (9:00) Johnny One Note (8:00) Sweet Blanche (7:30) The Peck (:21)

Sorry. I see that Chuck beat me to it.

How soon they forget. Gary Burton.

Bertrand -- I don't get what Wayne is saying about "Snakes" either, and I just listened to the track. But perhaps you can enlighten me about something else. The McLean discography http://www.jazzdisco.org/mclean/dis/c/ mentions only two alternates of "Sweet Blanche" for this date. But in the liner notes for the Progressive 7001 issue (from 1985) of At the Bohemia (the only version I have), Gus Striatis, who produced the original recording, says that everything on Progressive 7001 is an unissued take. Any thoughts?

The Prestidigitator -- Wow, I vaguely recall having heard of that one, but that probably was in an alternate universe. I wonder where East-West stuff ended up. The presence of JR certainly whets my appetite. Looks like it might all or mostly Wallington originals too, which also whets my appetite. I know that "In Salah" is his.

In the days when I reviewed a lot of mainstream (i.e. non-rock) pop singers in concerts and clubs, I always looked forward to a Mathis performance. His brand of timbral variation might not be to your taste (I had no problem there), but his ear and technical expertise were remarkable, especially when it came to using the microphone as an extension of his vocal means and intentions. Also, again with the boundaries of the chosen style, Mathis probably had the best charts in the business. As for emotion, "Piece of Dreams" (among others) never failed.

Will do.

Bertrand --- You're right. I was thinking of At the Cafe Bohemia, recorded 9/9/55 at the club by RVG, and adding to it Dance of the Infidels, rec. 11/14/57 in Rudy's studio, which has Woods instead of McClean and a new bass-drum team (Knobby Totah and Nick Stabulus). A senior moment. On the other hand, there's enough intensity on At the Cafe Bohemia for two albums. The title of the first track, Jackie's "Snakes," says it all.

God help me -- my second order of 20. Also, a recommendation or two from the sale titles for those who might not know of these: George Wallington's Jazz for the Carriage Trade, with Donald Byrd, Phil Woods, Teddy Kotick (I think) and Art Taylor. This from that early vintage period, 1956, when (IMO) Phil Woods was still an excellent jazz musician, not a jazzy musician; he and the young agile Byrd make a fine team. This was BTW the successor group (both of them working bands, at the Cafe Bohemia in NYC as I recall) to the one Wallington had with the young raw Jackie McLean, which itself made a couple of urgent LPs. Which reminds me, the Bobby Jaspar on which Wallington is a sideman is interesting -- in part because it includes the young Elvin Jones (Jaspar's fellow sideman with J.J. Johnson at the time). Maybe I'm just perverse, but I'm intrigued by the contrast (even the clash) in time feel between Wallington's linear, more or less pure bop conception and Elvin's (still in its early stages) elliptical patterns.

Haven't been following Weiss as assiduously as I probably should have -- though I own and have always enjoyed his 1986 Criss Cross debut and also dug and (I think) wrote a bit about him most times he came to Chicago with Johnny Griffin in the '80s -- but the other day I picked up Weiss's 1998 SteepleChase trio album "Milestones" (with Paul Gill and Joe Farnsworth) and am delighted by it. Piano playing that's more or less boppish never wears out its welcome with me, though on the other hand I want it to be as wholly alive and risky as it was with Bud, Duke Jordan, Al Haig, George Wallington, and others of that ilk -- freeze-dried, more or less retro, "Notice how I only color between the lines -- don't I get extra credit for that?"" boppish piano drives me crazy. In any case, while Weiss's playing often has an air of elegance and reserve to it (a la Haig and, if it comes to that, Teddy Wilson -- especially in his delicate sense of touch), within this at times one can detect a digital/intellectual near-frenzy at work, which brings Wallington to mind (at least to my mind) and that seems to me to be in touch with bop's true spirit. To put it another way, Weiss isn't just playing, or so it seems to me -- he is in pursuit. In any case, this is one fine album. The title track BTW is the John Lewis piece that Miles recorded with Bird on tenor, not the later Miles piece of the same name. And dig how Weiss's recasting of "Like Someone in Love" in the key of B almost turns it into another tune altogether (and in a way that seems organic rather than tricky). Jeez, he even makes "Wave" sound fresh.

Let me add that IMO the Kenny Drew Trio album, with Chambers and Philly Joe, which is part of the sale, is superb. It may be my favorite Drew album.

UBU -- Earthy IS part of the sale, which is why I mentioned it. It's McKusick's own Prestige album that is not of the sale. Sorry for any confusion.

A warning and a recommendation: Don't get that Kenny Drew Plays Harry Warren and Harold Arlen disc (I say this as someone who bought it months ago). While the idea of a Drew-Wilbur Ware duo is irresistible (at least it was to me), the idea here was for Drew to deliver almost Carmen Cavallaro-like dinner music readings of these standards, which he does without a trace of irony. No improvisation, and Ware is nearly inaudible. An interesting one that might sneak beneath the radar is the jam session titled Earthy, with Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Al Cohn, Kenny Burrell, Mal Waldron, Teddy Kotick, and Ed Thigpen. McKusick gets more space to blow here than he ever did, except for his own very good Prestige album of this time (with the choice rhyhthm team of Paul Chambers [very clearly recorded] and Charlie Persip -- it's not in the sale), and everyone else is in fine form (especially Farmer), though there is one very fast track that's a fair bit unsettled rhythmically for a while until one of the soloists finally gets everyone to agree where "one" is. (BTW, of the players listed above, who do you think that might have been?) Even so, it's an intriguing date with a flavor of its own -- "blowing" in that solos are lengthy, but Farmer and McKusick especially bring their organizational temperaments to the party.

IIRC, that Playboy After Dark video is worth the price for Lenny Bruce. Not that Lenny is that funny on it, again IIRC (I'm going on late-teenage memories of the original broadcast), but it conveys quite potently the ticking- time-bomb nature of Lenny's presence, the sense (which pretty much was, as they say, no joke) that he might in the next instant say or do ANYTHING. I believe it was the debut show that Lenny was on, and he eagerly zeroes in on and ratchets up Hefner's understandable extreme nervousness.

Four tunes ("All the Things You Are," "Centrepiece," "Body and Soul," and "Just You, Just Me") from Hawkins' Playboy Fest performance (probably the entire set) were issued in 1976 on a Spotlight LP (SPJ137 -- "Blowin' Up a Breeze"). Haven't listened in a while, but my memory is that it's among the best Hawkins from that period -- almost frighteningly intense and creative. Higgins' rhythm section partners were Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins.

I may have mentioned this before, but my only in-person encounter with Stanley, aside from a weird phone call from him in which he tried to get me to agree that Lester Bowie was a charlatan, then rang off abruptly when I said that I didn't think so at all, was at the Village Vanguard back in the mid-1980s, on the night Thad Jones the then-new director of the Basie band had made his debut in that role. (I was in town to interview Jones on that occasion, and it proved to be one heck of a long strange funny evening, but that's a story I eventually hope to tell in full, along with other similar ones, within the pages of a book.) In any case, Kenny Burrell was at the Vanguard, Thad wanted to see his old Detroit buddy, so we went. Between sets, Burrell spotted Thad, his face lit up and he began to make his way to Thad's table, but he was intercepted by Stanley, who avidly embraced Burrell and began to shower him with loud, grandiloquent praise while he continued to held Kenny in a vise-like hug -- all of this, it seemed clear to me, designed to proclaim to all present, as though his goal were to assemble a living billboard, that Stanley was on the most of intimate terms with the likes of Burrell. Certainly, Stanley's words of praise were pitched at a level that brought the ears of just about everyone in the room into play. Kenny, I believe, found this scene annoying and embarrassing; I know for sure that Thad and some others at our table (among them Tommy Flanagan) did.

Relyles -- It's been up and down since then for me with Stewart, but I'm still on board. I found a recent Criss Cross from him with Joe Cohn to be almost unlistenable because it was suddenly full of overt Rollins-isms -- I can't take much of that. Not because I don't like Rollins but because certain of Sonny's magniloquent burps and chortles are so totally his that you'd think it would be obvious that they can't be borrowed. On the other hand, Stewart is in very good form on two Ryan Kisor CDs -- "Awakening" (Criss Cross), rec. 2002, and "This Is Ryan" (Video Arts), rec. 2005. I also like Stewart's own "Tenor and Soul" (Video Arts), rec. 2005, though here Joe Cohn sounds rather blatant-obvious to me. Stewart also is in a good groove on the group Planet Jazz's "In Orbit" (Sharp Nine), rec. 2005, with Joe Magnarelli, Peter Bernstein, et al. playing music written by the late drummer Johnny Ellis, but there's an alternate world/retro feel to Ellis's writing and to the playing of pianist Spike Wilner and bassist Neil Miner (like "It's 1958 again, but we've got more chops than the guys who were playing this back then, so should we flaunt that or disguise it") that kind of creeps me out. As I said before, it's the more Mobley-esque side of Stewart that attracts me, because that seems to lead him in more personal directions that his Sonny-ish side. The main thing is that he's a relaxed/vigorous maker of real, swinging melodies -- one feeding into the next and building, and with little or no sense that he drawing from a bag of licks.

And what's a "jazz canon"? Does he mean anything canonic (i.e. music in which one part imitates note for note and overlaps another part at a particular pitch e.g. canon at a fourth) that happens to occur in a setting that's more or less jazz-like (which would be a possible but fairly useless and/or really sloppy thing to say). Or does he mean that there is a particular way to play canonically in jazz that's different from the ways one might play canonically elsewhere? What a maroon.

"Ben Watson, music journalist and longstanding contributor to The Wire, Hi-Fi News and Signal To Noise, is well known for his deviant and polemical music criticism." That would seem to explain it.

20 -- for the usual reason. It is fun when you go from 19 to 20, and the price of your order drops. I enjoyed that so much when I went from 9 to 10 that I had to see if I could legitimately (hah!) get to 20. No problem as it turned out, though 30 might have been.

To complicate things further, Richmond also was known as Richman (his given name, I suspect).

A Richmond solo with Dorsey can be found here, on "Puddle Wump": http://www.rhapsody.com/tommydorsey/thecom...dtranscriptions

Yes, but Taylor's ballad mode was big-toned, out of Hawkins-Webster. This solo is, as Alexander said up top, rather Getz-like in its lightness of tone and somewhat wispy agility. And if you've heard Boomie Richmond, it sounds exactly like him. He was, again, a very distinctive player -- that neo-Bud Freeman/Eddie Miller "gargle" of his is the giveaway.