Larry Kart

"The Lester Young Memorial Album" is one of the LPs I have of this material. In fact, all the Columbia Old Testament Basie I have is on LPs of roughly this vintage. The sound on them has always seemed just fine to me.

I like Most quite a bit -- those Xanadu albums in particular all have fine rhythm sections that Most really locks into -- but at times there's a little voice in my head that somewhat inarticulately has doubts about one aspect of how he plays. The nearest I can come to explaining it is that unlike most flute players, not to mention players of other wind instruments, Sam gives me the feeling that -- conceptually at least, though perhaps not in terms of actual execution -- he isn't "blowing" but is instead almost whistling.

Catesta writes: "April In Paris" is for me the definition of Basie. Right -- and the definition of Armstrong is "Hello, Dolly," and the definition of Ellington is "Satin Doll." (Actually, that's not being fair to "Satin Doll.")

The nutty thing about Pres's allusions to "Ol Man River" and "Tea for Two" on the two takes of "Taxi War Dance" is that piece itself is based on "Willow Weep For Me."

I can't stress enough that you first should get your hands on a good deal of Old Testament Basie -- in particular, an album that includes the 1938 recording of "Taxi War Dance" (with solos by Lester Young and Dicky Wells). That should change your life. Don't know what's available in what form now, though (I still have my old LPs). The Old Testament rhythm section -- Basie, Walter Page, Freddie Green, Jo Jones -- is another potentially life-changing experience. Also, of course, both Pres with Basie and that Basie rhythm section significantly altered the shape of jazz, and one needs to go back and experience that event as best one can. Actually, it's not hard to do; the music itself still tells the story.

BEST ALBUM NOTES "The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax," John Szwed, album notes writer (Jelly Roll Morton) (Winner) BEST HISTORICAL ALBUM "The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax," Jeffrey Greenberg & Anna Lomax Wood, compilation producers; Adam Ayan & Steve Rosenthal, mastering engineers (Jelly Roll Morton) (Winner) 1) Could have been worse, but no 2) For screwing up the sound quality, emphatically no

This may have come up here before, but one of the funniest and most accurate parodies I've ever read is Joe Goldberg's of Whitney in a piece Goldberg wrote for The Jazz Review back '59 or '60, reprinted in the book "Jazz Panorama." The setup is that two previously unknown musicians (read Ornette and Don Cherry) have just cropped in NYC, trumpeter Ansel Jones and pianist Porter Smith. The Jones-Smith Duo, get it? "Much of Ansel's life in music," Goldberg writes,"is explained by his instrument, a strange, ungainly copper trumpet. All his life, Ansel had wanted to become a serious composer, and had saved his pennies so some day he might attend to Juilliard School of Music. The day after his application to Juilliard had been refused, Ansel walked calmly into the metal working shop at high school, carrying the pennies he had been saving. Without a word, he tossed them into one of the huge cauldrons there. By night he had melted them down and had forged from the molten copper a trumpet. "He and pianist Porter Smith form the entire group. Naturally, their exclusion of the conventional rhythm section raised several questions, and for the answer to those, we turned to Porter Smith, who can be more articulate about his music than can Ansel. 'We don't need no rhythm,' he said." There follows imaginary responses to the duo's music on the part on such critics as Ralph J. Gleason (it begins: "I like this group, and anybody who doesn't had just better not ever talk to me again, that's all"), Gene Lees ("I'm not as friendly with Ansel Jones as I am with Quincy and some of the other guys..."), Martin Williams ("It is impossible to write about the music of Ansel Jones without using the word 'artist'....), etc. Here is the Balliett parody in full: "Ansel Jones, a thin, diffident young man who resembles a twelve-stringed lute placed on its end at an angle of seventy-three degrees, is getting music from his self-smelted horn that may radically change the shape of jazz. In a typical solo, he will start with a sort of agonized laziness, as if he were awakening from a dream caused by eating too much welsh rarebit the night before, and then, in the third chorus, he will, in a series of short, splatting notes that give the effect of a catsup bottle hit once too often on its end, abruptly switch into a fast tempo that belies the furry bumbling that preceded it. All this time, his pianist, Porter Smith, lays down a firm, inky foundation that anticipates the leader's meanderings with the precision of a seeing eye dog weaving its way through a Coney Island beach crowd on the Fourth of July. In one composition, 'Duplicity,' the two men hit the same note simultaneously midway through the second bridge, and it had the shattering emotional impact of two old friends meeting by chance after years of aimless wandering."

OK, John T. -- John L. stubbed his toe that time IMO, apparently provoked by the stage band movement, which certainly had its downside, socially and aesthetically (again IMO). But to describe Herman as a "mediocre eclectic" comes close to being just plain wrong. The First Herd was a great and unique jazz band; the Second Herd likewise (though I prefer its predecessor); the Third Herd had its share of fine moments; and none of those bands happened around Herman by accident. Like John L., I felt that a corner was turned toward re-creation/stasis by the Phillips band, but that option was lying in wait for Woody eventually and probably no matter what, just as it was for Basie; their audiences were more and more made up of people of a certain age who wanted to hear the old stuff, and keeping a band on the road is a costly business. Only Ellington, of bandleaders of that general vintage, could afford to proceed otherwise (i.e. work in new, novel music) to any great extent -- in large part because his band was subsidised by the flow of royalties from his famous compositions, a revenue stream that Herman and Basie didn't have anywhere near as much of as Duke did). Yes, I know that some new music was written for and played by later Herman bands, but my memory is that most of it was fairly cheesy -- yet again IMO. P.S. I like Woody as a player and (in First Herd days especially) as a singer too. Anyway, I don't think that John L.'s moment of distracted testiness there (I think that's what it was) defines him at all. He's just not that kind of person or writer, and "The Freedom Principle" is not that kind of book.

I vaguely recall some years back asking John about that Woody Herman remark, mostly from the point of view of "What the heck did you have in mind?" Again, as I vaguely recall, he felt that the Herman band had become a semi-recreative "act" during the Phillips label, Phil Wilson-Jake Hanna-Sal Nistico-Bill Chase era. John's tastes are remarkably and genuinely broad, though, and in no way that I've ever seen are they tinged by political or racial ideologies. As for the broad-minded Whitney Balliett, you are aware that Whitney has little or no taste for bop or hard-bop --e.g. he expressed in the liner notes for John Lewis's "Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West" (in the course of praising Bill Perkins) a deep dislike for Sonny Rollins (I think he called Sonny's tone "ugly," Jim Sangrey will know the exact quote), and he's also on record as saying that Max Roach doesn't swing.

Here's a brief review I wrote of Cobb in 1980. It's reprinted in my book: There could be no better proof of the importance of sound in jazz, the tone or timbre one gets out of an instrument, than the music of tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb. A native of Houston and one of the great Southwestern tenormen, along with Buddy Tate, Ben Webster, the late Herschel Evans, and Illinois Jacquet (who preceded Cobb in the Lionel Hampton band), this sixty-two-year-old master has a sound that no recording studio is equipped to reproduce. It is, to begin with, simply huge, perhaps the darkest, most imposingly rich tenor saxophone tone of all. And what Cobb does with it--the range of chortles, whoops, cries, trills, swells, slurs, shouts, and just plain honks that he has at his command is such that he could say, with Walt Whitman, “I am vast, I contain multitudes.” Not that Cobb is limited merely to purveying that sound. He is, by any standards, a rhythmically agile, harmonically sophisticated player who shapes his melodic lines with surprising delicacy. But because the significance of sound per se is so often overlooked in jazz, as though it were a seasoning rather than an essential ingredient, it is his sound that I want to concentrate on for the time being. When a man has a tone like Cobb’s and can manipulate it so freely, he has at hand an almost literal musical language, a collection of timbres that each take on a specific emotional meaning. And that specificity of emotional tone-color--which any listener can hear, even if one doesn’t wish to analyze it--also ranges outward to affect every other aspect of the music: rhythm, harmony, melody, etc. For example during Cobb’s solo on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” he began a chorus with a seemingly simple two-note phrase, which might be rendered onomatopoetically as “YAH-duh.” Now I suppose you had to be there to hear what that “YAH-duh” did, but let me assure you that within its apparent simplicity there was more musical meaning than words could exhaust. Aside from the way he attacked the first note, creating a catapulting sense of swing, there was the way its relative density--its heavy, centered sound--contrasted with the grainier, more oblique tonal texture of the second note. The effect of this might be compared to a gymnast’s second, more easeful bounce on a trampoline. And listening to it one could feel a literal loosening in the knees, an invitation to enter a realm of sensuous physicality. The creation and control of such effects, in which the abstract and the emotional aspects of jazz become one thing, is what Cobb’s music is all about. And if the principles at work in that “YAH-duh,” which must have lasted no more than a second, are expanded to cover an entire performance, it is easy to imagine just how richly varied this master’s language can be.

Jim Sangrey wrote: "...and the genius of jazz lies in its power of self-definition...." I like that way of thinking and putting it a lot. Sounds simple perhaps, but not so in practice.

No, I don't think she did the right thing for the right reasons. I think her reasons at virtually all points along this line were about the same: Endorse "right feeling," or perhaps better "feeling right," as the highest value. Thus her defense of Frey during the Larry King broadcast was along the lines of "it feels right to me and to most of my audience" (actually, that probably should be "it feels right to me in large part, if not wholly, because I believe it feels right to most of my audience, therefore the 'factual' objections being raised are mean-spirited and niggling" (it being the essence of Oprah's pact with her audience that the fact or the illusion of mutual "feeling right" trumps just about anything). Then, when she became aware (or became fearful) that the story was being framed along the lines of "Oprah says the Truth doesn't matter" and that a fair portion of the audience was thinking along those lines (Oprah over here, Truth over there), this was a big "feeling wrong" development that had to be turned around if possible. Thus the dramatized Oprah-Frey broadcast the other day. I didn't see it live, but watching clips of this hang-dog humiliation ritual, I kind of wished that Frey had said it screw it all and mooned her or something of the sort.

Something that I think accounted for a good deal of Miles' broad popularity (more so at some times than others, but once he got over the hump...) was the implicit romanticism of much of his music -- both in terms of the music itself and the arguably inseparable aura of Miles the personality/public figure. I know that "romanticism" is a term that cries out for precise definition, but rather than make the attempt right now, I'll throw out a few examples and analogies: 1) Sinatra in his hey-day "in terms of the music itself and the arguably inseparable aura of the personality/public figure," the way one at once felt and identified with Sinatra's romantic message and felt the sway of his persona; 2) any number of Miles' Harmon-muted ballads from the '50s, the later, bolder open-horn performances of the same or similar tunes that played off this aura of whispered tough-tender intimacy, plus the Miles-Gil Evans projects that arguably were in this vein ("Miles Ahead," "Porgy and Bess," "Sketches of Spain"); 3) the whole image (at once self-cultivated and echoed by lots of fans and musical colleagues) of Miles as "an endlessly fruitful creator of new styles" (to quote from something I once wrote) and/or even the dominant shape-shifting musical intellect of his times. The first part of (3) certainly came to the fore with the Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams quintet and extended to or close to the very end (though we can argue about when, where, and if [ever] the image and the quality of the music itself began to diverge), but remember too that going back to the eventually broadly influential "Birth of the Cool" band, Miles had a way of gathering up and giving focus to the efforts of others, with the whole then adding to or being filtered through his own burgeoning aura as a style-shaper/tastemaker (also see here, in relation to the Coltrane-Garland quintet, Miles' use/benediction of Ahmad Jamal).

Because I like Bill Carrothers a lot (both as a soloist and as a pianist who contributes subtly to the group) and because Phil keeps growing, I slightly prefer the second CD, rec. 2002, ("Playful Intentions") to the first ("Sweet Transients"), rec. 2000, but they're both excellent. Great news that a third album in in the works.

Interesting adventurous player (especially in his associations), though he did have some twiddly figures that at times fell under his fingers too often for my tastes. I've known his RCA, Decca, and Bethlehem work since the time it came out but only came across a few years ago the things he did later for Prestige as a leader and sideman -- "Triple Exposure" (with trombonist Billy Byers and quite a rhythm section -- Eddie Costa, Paul Chambers, and Charlie Persip), "Earthy" (with Art Farmer, Al Cohn, Kenny Burrell et al.), and as one of the guests on Gil Melle's "Gil's Guests." These are all worth definitely a listen.

Yes, Shorter recorded "Serenata" on "Alegria." I'll have to listen again, but as I recall, Shorter handled it in a rather arms-length, exquisite-tasteful manner, while Cannonball engaged its implicit vulgarity pretty much head-on. If I had to choose, I'd take Cannonball's approach this time, but, again as I recall, I liked "Alegria" a fair bit more than I thought I would (or even should) -- I think because in the end it seemed more exquisite than tasteful.

Maybe mine, too. Interesting in the light of what Chuck said about Cannonball usually giving him the heebie-jeebies (though as I've said at least once before, I don't presume to read Chuck's mind) that one of the standout performances here is of Leroy Anderson's "Serenata." That is, without doubt the music of Anderson (he of "The Syncopated Clock" et al.) was deeply prefab/streamlined-corny, and Cannonball had some affinity with that kind of thing -- though on a very good good day like this one he could take a tune like "Serenata" and transform its manufactured swoony dreaminess into genuine lyricism IMO. BTW, I'm not saying that I am (or that anyone can or should be) wholly immune to manufactured swoony dreaminess and all its various offshoots -- not possible if you were born in the U.S.A. in the 20th Century. In fact, one of the things that a fair amount of jazz does is show us how to deal with those more or less inescapable things. Anyhow, Cannonball on "Serenata" is one of my favorite examples, in part because it's fairly extreme and/or close to going over the line.

Jim, your account of what Roy McCurdy is doing on "Mercy Mercy Mercy" sounds to me like you're making the same point I was trying to make -- that however conditioned things might be by the communal setup in a "social" music scene, it finally comes down to acts and judgments of how to act that are as much aesthetic as they are anything else -- e.g. "But [McCurdy] ... drops in little things here and there that, while they don't make the simple complex, definitely keep it alive and breathing." Likewise, I think it's safe to assume (at least up to a point), that those in the audience who dug that tune were picking up on, or at least feeling on some pretty significant level, those "little things here and there" that McCurdy was dropping in. That is, your "dialogue of communication, exchange of energy, whatever, is established and sustained" primarily by musical means, though non-musical gestures and assumptions can frame and amplify them. For example, James Brown's cape thing is cool, but would we care about it if he and his band weren't together musically? Now I could see someone arguing that the cape thing and Brown's music are really one thing, that they're two sides of a single ritual (or "ritual"), but I'm just a boy from the suburbs, what do I know? Time for the Bear game pretty soon. See you on the other side.

Thanks, Allen. I've been holding off in part because I don't know except in passing any Capitol-era Adderley, in part because I couldn't quite see where Jim was going with this. That is, I could see pretty clearly what he was defending and why he liked it (almost everyone with blood in his veins who hasn't been living under a glass bell likes, even loves, some or even a lot of the sorts of music that Jim is talking about), but I couldn't quite make out the rationale that was running alongside or underneath what he was saying, especially when he brought Kenny G and his audiences into the picture. About Jim's "them" and "us" thing a ways back -- "Cannonball, Lou Donaldson, Gene Ammons, the Crusaders, none of these people were as popular as they were because they 'dumbed down" their music. There's more to it than that. That music had a flavor, and it was the flavor of everyday life for the people who dug it. And out of that flavor came the more 'refined' (in the eyes of the 'outside world') flavors. It's not the other way 'round! It was made for 'them,' not for 'us' -- my experience has been that in addition to Jim's "them" (this music's ["natural"?] social audience) and Jim's "us" (i.e. "jazz fans") there's a significant and often crucial second "them": the musicians themselves and their desire to play music that they find sufficiently interesting and rewarding so that their work is something more than bricklaying with horns. "Interesting" and "rewarding" are loose terms, of course, but we all pretty much know what we're talking about here, right? In all music there are formulas that lie close to hand and that more or less work in terms of reaching an audience, and some of these formulas -- on the right night with the right crowd and the right band -- can genuinely fill up a musician's soul. But some types of music, maybe most or even all types of music, tend to generate (virtually internally to the music, perhaps) musical events that appeal (or may appeal) to the previously mentioned standard and to another one too -- one that piques the interest of music-makers of the highest skill and subtlety, music that they will go out of their way to play of their own free will, if only because they find it so damned INTERESTING. Some quotes: Ralph Ellison on the adolescent Charlie Christian in Oklahoma City: "He had heard the voice of jazz and would hear no other." Charles Rosen on the fact that Mozart's music was "a dogged presence" on concert programs in Paris in the early 19th Century, even though, according to the author of the authoritative book "Listening in Paris, " "Mozart's symphonies and operas were roundly denounced in the first decade of the century." To which Rosen says: "If Mozart was disliked by the public and roundly denounced by critics, how can we explain his 'dogged presence' on musical programs? The answer is that the music which is performed is not so much the works that the public wants to hear as as those that musicians insist in playing. Public demand counts for something, of course, but a musician's life is often enough hard, disagreeable, and monotonous, and it would be intolerable unless he could play the music he loved. This not a question of elite preferences, but of professional ideals, a subject that the history of reception deals with very badly." And the sociology of reception doesn't deal with it very well either. Finally, and for the time being, in light of this from Jim -- "I'm simply saying that the criteria for critical evaluation, including relative 'worth' of the music, are different for 'social' music than they are for 'art' music. Different means, different intents, but absolutely, you can get shit or gold either way -- I'd ask: OK, you're in a musical situation that you think of as "social." How in fact do you tell the difference between "shit or gold" there versus how you tell the difference in an "art" music situation? I'm not being perverse in asking this, I hope. Instead, I'm thinking that in practice, especially from the point of view of the men and women who actually are making the music, the "means" and "intents" involved tend not to be as different as Jim seems to suggest, that in both realms it pretty much boils down to issues that are more or less aesthetic. I'm thinking in particular of Jim's account of how good it can feel, sometimes, to play "Mr. Magic" and guessing that while there had to be a good vibe coming from the crowd on those occasions, there also was good contact being made with the music by the band and some sense that in the good vibe coming from the crowd there was an implicit recognition of what was happening on the stand. So, yes, it was in some sense close to a uniformly communal experience, but a key component of that communal feeling had an aesthetic basis. One more thing that may underlie much of the above: As sociologist-jazz pianist Howard Becker has pointed out, while professional musicians of any and all stripes may want to think of themselves as artists, they belong functionally to "a service occupation" -- that is, one in which "the worker comes into more or less direct contact with the client for whom he performs the service and one in which the client is able to direct or attempt to direct the worker at his task and to apply sanctions of various kinds, ranging from informal pressure to the withdrawal of his patronage."

Sorry I couldn't make it. Unavoidable family stuff, but I was there in spirit.

Sorry. That first sentence should have been: "What Morganized said about what Jim said."

What Morganized said and what Jim said. My preference for Cannonball where he's not trying to assimilate Trane's influence (or at least not trying in ways that I can detect) is admittedly based on incomplete evidence. I wasn't listening to him much after the early Riversides, don't think I've heard any of the Capitols except in passing. Again, BTW, it's probably a project so vast as to seem impossible to execute, but a "Best of Sangrey" collection would be something else. I hereby volunteer to pitch in, if Jim is willing. Seriously.

I think that the Trane-ish things that Cannonball picked up when they were working side-by-side usually didn't sit that well with rest of/the core (IMO) Cannonball's style, though I admit that it does come together for him by and large on "In Chicago." Cannonball at his best -- again IMO -- was primarily a soulful, melodic player (at his best on albums like "Cannonball Takes Charge" and "Something Else" (esp. "Autumn Leaves"). When he leaned heavily on Trane-ish upper extensions of the chords, the results sounded to me like dill pickles with chocolate sauce.

Sorry to admit that I missed this one when it first came out (though I used to own a copy of "Groove, Funk and Soul"), delighted to make its acquaintance now. Though I'll jhave to go back and check, this probably is the best Edwards I've heard -- in large part, as Allen Songer said, because this was a marvelous WORKING group; the relaxed, deep interaction among all parties here usually doesn't come about otherwise. Terrific listening rhythm section. Joe Castro had his own thing, especiually in terms of time and touch; Vinnegar is in top form; and Higgins at that age ... well he was always a joy, but when he was this young there's a special freshness to him, in part because he's more snare oriented than he'd become. Not better than the later Higgins, just a little different. An excellent recording too, even by Contemporary's standards; everything sounds knitted together spatially yet properly distinct. Interesting how much Teddy sounds like Von Freeman here at odd moments e.g. "Scrapple" and "What's New." While it's a blowing date, every piece has the no-waste wholeness of a fully worked-out composition. Thanks again for picking this; I might never have heard it otherwise.

Two posts about "Bluebeard's" that I made a few years ago on Rec Music Classical Recordings: FWIW, the volume of "Opera on Record" in which there was a detailed survey of "Bluebeard's Castle" performances came down firmly on the side of the second Janos Ferencsik with Katalin Kasza and Gyorgy Melis (c. 1970, Hungaroton). I have it on LP and see it's available on CD. Tatiania Troyanos (with Boulez) must be heard, but Kasza is excellent, too, and singing in her native language, and again, whoever did that "Opera on Record" survey found Ferencsik's grasp of the score to be superior to that of all other interpreters. (Subjectively, he strikes me as a good deal more intense than Boulez.) More on the "Bluebeard's Castle" survey from "Opera on Record 3." The author of the chapter, David Murray, says that Ferencsik II's Gyorgy Melies, "makes an uncommonly youthful Bluebeard, [but] he has the advantage that the role lies perfectly for his voice," while Katalin Kasza "is Judith to the life, nervily eager, selflessly intense. She is as precise with her music as any Judith (more than most) and commands an astringent lower register, without any throaty bark or adipose richness. By comparison, Christa Ludwig's Judith sounds almost maternal, too sympathetic and cuddlesome: how could she prosecute such a dangerous enterprise? The immediate pathos of the Kertesz reduces the objective dimension; Solti and Boulez, in their different ways, are hieratic at the expense of dramatic urgency and contrast. Theirs are distinguished performances, but Ferencsik strikes a true balance." Also, Murray comes up with this line: "[While] the opera does not lend itself to excerpts, someone did exclaim excitedly after a Boulez concert performance, 'They ought to release the Fifth Door as a single!'