Larry Kart

"Hip Strut" from "New Soil." The first time I heard it (when it came out), it felt like his life had been at stake there and this was a record of how he had prevailed. Also two earlier tracks, "Help" and "Beau Jack" from "Jackie McLean and Co.," that have a similar "at stake" feeling, though the outcome then seemed likely to be dire.

Hope's stature and individuality ought to be no secret here, but I've been knocked out recently reacquainting myself with this -- especially his 1953 debut under his own name, a trio date with Percy Heath and Philly Joe Jones. I was struck in particular by Hope's magical recasting of "Sweet and Lovely," which bears some resemblance to Monk's version but is more lyrical though just as quirky (and to different and IMO more subtle ends). Am I wrong, or is there some Teddy Wilson peeking through Hope's conception here? Also, don't miss Hope's two fierce, hypnotic chourses at the end of "Hot Sauce" and the brilliance with which he works his through the tricky bridge in his choruses on "Abdullah" (from the album's second date, with trumpeter Freeman Lee and Frank Foster, and Blakey taking the place of Philly Joe). I can't say that I prefer the playing of the early Hope to his more oblique, spidery-in-touch later work. He's in or is entering that later phase on the album's last date, from 1957 and L.A., with Stu Williamson, Harold Land, Leroy Vinnegar, and Frank Butler, but the early Hope here is superb and not really that close to anything else AFAIK -- before, then or since. Finally, though it's pretty obvious, there's the sheer, relaxed melodic coherence of his lines (but with some rumbles of bop-shading-into-hard-bop angst underneath); while the hellhound may be on his trail, it sounds like Elmo's got all the time in the world.

That's why my mind reels.

I believe that Helen and Martin Williams were once an item. The mind reels. My Keane encounter kind of dovetails with Chuck's. I'd written the liner notes for a Chris Connor Fantasy LP at the request of Connor (I'd written several enthusiastic reviews of her recent Chicago performances), as relayed to me by the person at Fantasy who was in charge of such things, and it was with Fantasy that I'd signed a contract to write the notes for such and such a fee. Keane, who was the album's producer, hit the roof when she saw the notes because I didn't say something about every track on the album. It was her belief (IMO utterly insane) that if a track wasn't mentioned in the notes, the reader would assume that the writer meant that that track was no good. I told her that this was ridiculous, that I wrote the notes for Fantasy and for Connor, not for her, and that she was free to find someone to write a new set of notes, as long as I was paid for my work. That was the end of it.

Alone Together is a gem and made me think of its virtual companion tune, By Myself. Both are Dietz-Schwartz collaborations, the lyricist playing a very important role in both cases I believe -- e.g. "No one knows better/than I/myself I'm/by myself/ alone." I started to list some more, but after What Is This Thing Called Love, The Song Is You, My Shining Hour, Out of This World, and Old Devil Moon, things began to seem ridiculous; there was no end in view.

Brownie -- I didn't have much (or maybe any) Miller either until I ran across a used copy a while back of the 3-CD "Secret Broadcasts" set (RCA) -- stuff the Miller AAF Band recorded in the U.S. in 1944 for broadcasts to the services. This was a remarkable band within the given Miller style (though rhythmically more relaxed than the earlier Miller band), with Mel Powell on piano, nice trumpet solos from Zeke Zarchy, Bobby Nichols, and Bernie Privin, Peanuts Hucko on clarinet, the best string section any big band with strings ever had AFAIK, Junior Collins (later of the Birth of the Cool band) on French horn (what a player he was), Ray McKinley, etc. And the young Johnny Desmond was a very good singer. Also, the sound here is pretty astonishing; the broadcasts were recorded on 16-inch 33 1/3 rpm discs in good studios and have a wide dynamic range. I wouldn't say that this set is worth seeking out for everyone here, but I'll bet it will surprise some who have filed Miller away as mere nostalgia. On the other hand, it is kind of eerie to hear each broadcast begin with the AAF theme song that Chummy MacGregor (he of "Moon Dreams"), Miller, and some guy named Meyer wrote -- "I Sustain the Wings" -- and think that some of the guys who were listening to it were soon going to be climbing into B-17s.

But Blakey and Co. would engage in a fair amount of "hair-pulling."

BTW, Jim, I said I wasn't happy with saying tonal "distortions." What I meant was that Rollins liked to lean way in to certain rhythmic/timbral gestures -- summoning up an air of the blatant that went far beyond what anyone else who wasn't kidding or the like would have done at that time (as on "Wagon Wheels" from "Way Out West"). But Sonny, as we know, wasn't kidding; he was playing.

Jim -- Didn't know that Stanley said that about Lees. Interesting and pretty accurate IMO, though Lees and Balliett are also different sorts of "cats" (as Lees might put it). Balliett certainly has a higher brow (for what that's worth -- your call), while Lees loves to snuggle up to the musicians who will let him he do so (or leave him with the impression they have let him), which is not something that I can see Balliett going in for very much, if at all. On the other hand, at least one salt-of-the-earth guy, the late Don DeMichael, Lees' successor as editor of Down Beat, swore by Lees (in the good sense), so Lees can't be all bad. Marcello -- Don't mean to backtrack on or unfairly modify what I said before, but though I know it can't be proved (barring the advent of evidence I don't have), I'd still bet that Balliett didn't particularly care for bebop when it was happening. These views of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk are retrospective, which again doesn't in itself prove anything, but we do know that once he became a Grand Old Man of Jazz, Balliett's Rollins was no longer a purveyor of ugliness or "bad tone" but a GOMOJ. About Balliett and his likely emotional and social distance from bop, I'm reminded of this passage from Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle": "The purest manifestation of bop -- the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell -- was a music of extremes. There were the extreme's of bop's harmony, its mixtures of consonance and disssonance, its substitued harmonic structures. More extreme were bop's rhythms: the slippery accents among even tiny note values, the broken lines of eighth notes; the shock of sudden doubletime runs. The fast tempos, the speed of the lines, the electrocuted leaping in the high, middle, and low ranges of the instruments required a coordination of nerve, muscle, and intellect that pressed human agility and creativity toward their outer limits. Bop was an exhilarating adventure; in Gillespie's dizzying trumpet heights, in Powell's hallucinated piano excitement, a deadly fall to earth is ever possible. The vividness of Parker's alto saxophone lyricism made him bop's central figure, and his rhythmic tumult is the tumult of complex fleeting emotions. The brokenness of his phrasing, the swiftness of his passing emotions, from cruelty to tenderness, suggest a consciousness that was itself disrupted.... His desparation was shared by much of his generation." Etc. For better or for worse, I'd guess that this was not Balliett's world, nor a worldview that he would have wanted to give much room to.

What Balliett's remarks here, and much of the rest of his work (though usually more covertly), reveal to me is that he thinks of jazz as a source of certain kinds of "let's warm our toes in front of a nice fire" pleasure and comfort but not as a source of necessary, inescapable information about the state of reality as filtered through the hearts, minds and music of people who couldn't evade or escape it. I know -- I exaggerate; and there's also the fact that Balliett has been in Cecil Taylor's corner almost from the first. But Jim's shrewd point about Sonny's being "abrupt" and the likelihood that (IMO now) this feeds into what Balliett meant by "hair-pulling" -- well, if Sonny or JR were abruptly pulling your hair with their accenting, tonal distortions ("distortions," for want of a better term), etc., such toyings with/variations on the then prevailing norms of musical elegance and comfort were damn close to (and in no way separable from) the essence of the stories their music was telling. (Lord knows what Balliett thought of vintage Jackie McLean! And isn't his Pee Wee Russell a New Yorker -- i.e. the magazine Balliett wrote for -- eccentric, not a man whose music's could implicity threaten your sanity? ) Now who doesn't want to be comforted some of time, maybe even whenever possible? But if my desire to be comforted leads me to take, say, Bobby Hackett or Ben Webster primarily as purveyors of good old days/ good old feelings social and emotional comfort (as I think Balliett comes dangerously close to doing -- in this he's a precursor of the way Woody Allen has often used jazz on his soundtracks), then the reality of Hackett and Webster's music is to some degree being denied and/or screwed around with. And I don't want to be comforted if and when the nature of reality is not in fact comfortable. Don't have Balliett's collected works in front me, but I'd be curious about how often in what ways he refers to Charlie Parker or Bud Powell. In fact, I'd bet just about anything that the young Balliett had little or no sympathy for bebop. Not a crime, I know, but interesting if so.

This came up a while ago, when someone referred to Whitney Balliett's being "broad-minded" in his tastes, but I wasn't able to chapter and verse. Back in 1956 or '57, Balliett wrote the liner notes 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. In the course of 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." Actually, I kind of like "the hair-pulling" -- in one way, it's completely out of left field; in another way, it reveals exactly where Whitney was coming from.

Well, at least on video it would work.

I was at a private party once where Don Patterson (the rest of the band was Von Freeman, Wilbur Campbell, and guitarist Sam Thomas) dipped his head down to keyboard level and played a rather minimal chorus or two with his tongue -- the clear intent being (for purposes of bawdy humor, one hopes) to simulate cunnilingus. No doubt this was a regular routine of Patterson's but probably one that was not preserved on record.

There's a very nice Flip Phillips with strings album from the 1990s on Chiaroscuro, "Try a Little Tenderness," with tasty string writing from Dick Hyman. The notes explain that Flip and Hyman got together well before the date, picked the tunes, and rehearsed and taped them as a duo; then Hyman based his string writing on what the two of them had done. The results do sound unusually of a piece for a horn with strings date.

As I recall, "Alice," like everything recorded 6/25/61 at the Vanguard (including two "Debbys"), is pretty magical. I don't have another "Alice" in my memory bank to compare with it, but my response to it as a tune is so conditioned by the shadings of that performance that I guess I hardly think of it as tune -- just as something that Evans touched during an in excelsis afternoon-evening of music making. But I know "Debby" from other versions than these two, and I don't like any of them, including Evans' original one. "Someday My Prince Will Come" -- didn't Paul Desmond do a nice job with that somewhere? "Put Your Little Right Foot"/"Fran Dance" got old very quickly, I thought.

"Waltz for Debby" -- a doll-sized merry-go-round made from spun sugar. Seriously, Jim, don't both "Debby" and "Child" circle back on themselves too much? All you can do with the things is decorate what's already decorative. On the other hand, I can imagine that draped in boldly solo piano figuration, "Child" (as originally conceived by Sir Ronald H.) might have been something different.

OK, I'll go all the way -- I never much liked the tune, and I'm sick of it too. It's like a teenage girl who's not as cute as she thinks who keeps looking at herself admiringly in the mirror from different angles. And don't get me started on "Waltz for Debby."

Does anyone know if a Times reviewer ever referred to Sun Ra, the second time around, as "Mr. Ra"? Also -- and I think this come up elsewhere long ago -- what did they/do you do with Meatloaf?

I guess not that many people have seen Todd Soldonz's "Storytelling," but in the light of the way that movie ends, the conclusion of the Sandra Bullock portion of "Crash" (where she discovers that the Latino maid she's habitually abused is her only "real friend") just cracked me up. In fact, "Crash" is the most unintentionally amusing movie I've seen in a long time.

In case someone's curious, here are two Jan Allan links: http://www.stim.se/avd/mic/prod/jazzfacts....33;OpenDocument http://www.jam.just.nu/ The latter site, in Swedish only, displays a whole lot of albums. Those I've heard/have are very nice, particularly "Sweet and Lovely" and the one with guitarist Rune Gustaffson, bassist George Reidel (and a vocalist on some tracks--you can't win 'em all) doing all Lars Gullin tunes.

Sorry for being redundant. I see now that Clunky is on top of "Very Cool."

That's Don Joseph, not Don Ferrara, on Mulligan's "All the Things You Are." There's a lovely latter-day Joseph album on Uptown with Al Cohn. Joseph, Ferrara, Tony Fruscella, and Phil Sunkel (maybe a few others) were a kind of school of like-minded players -- very lyrical/linear, soft-cloudy in tone (like bebop Bobby Hacketts), rhythmically graceful, and with lots of harmonic imagination. I believe that Ferrara's best and most extended outing as a player is on Lee Konitz's OOP Verve album "Very Cool" (which may have been reissued in Japan). Playing Tristano-ish ideas on the trumpet is not an easy thing to do, but Ferrara did it. Another who did/does a nice job of that IMO is the Swedish veteran Jan Allan.

Earlier today I read the liner notes to Stephen Riley's recent Steeplechase album while it played in the background at the Jazz Record Mart. Turns out Paul Gonsalves was the tenorman who first caught Riley's ear.

Am enjoying Neal Caine's "Backstabber's Ball." Maybe the best I've heard from our friend Ned Goold, and Stephen Riley is interesting -- a kind of soberly intellectualized take on Paul Gonsalves? Interesting. Got the Frank Hewitt "Four Hundred Saturdays" too (my second Hewitt) and was impressed, but reactions haven't quite colaseced into words yet. Keep 'em coming, Luke!

Nice post on Doug Ramsey's Rifftides about the new Newman: http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/