Larry Kart

Thanks, Ghost and Jazzbo. I have JUMP, GEORGIE, JUMP, Goodman PLAYS EDDIE SAUTER and PLAYS MEL POWELL Jack Jenny's STARDUST, and a previous LP issue of most of the Wilson big band stuff. The rest I'll look into; the Thornhill sounds intriguing, as does the Basie Jubilee (which I think I may have).

Thanks, Garth -- I'm on it. Any other Hep discs you particularly want to recommend while the Allegro sale is on? I have a fair bunch already and to fill out this order I added Mary Ann McCall's "You're Mine You," "The Artistry of Artie Shaw," Harry James' "Big John Special," and (from another label and realm) Bruno Maderna's Violin Concerto on Stradivarius.

Anyone familiar with the complete Beethoven set rec. 1969-72 by the Bartok String Quartet? I've had their middle quartets on Hungaroton LPs for years and remain impressed. For the late quartets, he said -- preparing to be hit very hard with a big stick -- I kind of like the Fine Arts. For some strange reason my LP set of the early quartets (also the Bartoks? I'm not sure) seems to have vanished, so I'm in the market for a complete set if a really satisfying one exists. Over the years I've had and dumped the Guarnieri (middle) and the Hollywood (late), probably several others that I don't recall now.

Some excerpts from bassist Bill Crow’s piece about Ware from The Jazz Review, circa 1959-60, reprinted in the OOP book "Jazz Panorama," an anthology of Jazz Review material. The phrase of mine that Kalo likes is pretty much a summation of what Crow says here. Crow's description of what Ware does on "Decidedly" is particularly important, I think. There are parallels here to Lester Young in Ware's ability to be at once in and ahead of a whole series of changes -- with the effect of that "at once-ness" being tremendously potent, not only harmonically but rhythmically as well, given the simulataneous deep-rootedness and horizontal drive these ambiguities create. "…an unusually original artist…. One of our truly great jazz musicians.… He has chosen an approach that does not follow the general evolution of bass style from Blanton through Pettiford, Brown, Heath, Chambers, Mingus, etc. Wilbur uses the same tools that other bassists use, but his concentration is more on percussion, syncopation, and bare harmonic roots than on the achievment of a wind instrument quaaity in phrasing and melodic invention. His solos are extremely melodic in their own way, logically developed and well balanced, but they are permutations of the primary triad or reshuffling of the root line rather than melodies built from the higher notes of the chord…. On ‘Decidedly’ from "Mulligan Meets Monk" there are a number of good examples of Wilbur’s approach to the bass line…. After Gerry’s breaks [Wilbur] has the harmonic control, since Monk lays out, but rather than immediately walking chords he plays a counterrhythm on a G harmonic through the first three changes, where G is the fifth of the first chord, the ninth of the second chord and an anticpation of the root that the third chord resolves toward (D7 to G7)…. He was an ideal bassist for Monk, since he seems to share Monk’s conception of the value of open space, repeated figures, cycles of intervals, rhythmic tension and relaxation…. Besides the variety and color that Wilbur creates in his lines, there is the most obvious feature of his playing, a tremendous 4/4 swing that has the same loose, imprecise but very alive feeling of carefree forward motion that you hear in Kenny Clarke’s drumming…. The best image I can think of to suggest it is Cannonball Adderley doing the Lindy. There is flowing movement all through the measure and not just where the notes are….Wilbir is for me a reaffirmation of the idea that deep expression can be reached through simplification of form -- each new discovery need not always be a more complex one. The difference between the extremely sophisticated simplicity of Wilbur Ware and the primitive simplicity of a beginner is as wide as that between simple drawings of Klee or Miro and those of a child…. Wilbur’s terms are simple and his artistic expression most profound."

Thanks, Sidewinder. I did a search to see if there had been much said about "Oblique" before, but for some reason (no doubt a goof on my part) that thread didn't come up. And thanks, Steve. Reminds me of a thought that I and others I'm sure have had -- that someone should sift through Jim Sangrey's vast bag of posts and somehow assemble it into a manuscript. I did that with my previously published stuff that seemed worth preserving, and it worked out well, but Jim is an absolute one-off -- perhaps the shrewdest, most curious, actual player who is willing and able to capture his insights in words at a very high level ... and at length, too, of course!

I've had this on LP since it came out in Japan in 1980, and it's a gem. Hutcherson and Hancock are in great form; there are two fascinating Joe Chambers pieces (that his playing is superb throughout goes without saying); but I think I'm most taken by the late Albert Stinson's bass solo on "My Joy" -- perhaps the scariest 60 seconds of music I know. Brilliantly conceived and executed -- IMO Stinson, Russell Thorne, and Gary Peacock were the three most gifted post-LaFaro bassists -- it's scary because it's at once so damn logical and so damn strange (a la haunted or tormented). Every time I hear it, I tell myself that's it's silly to think that this turbulent swatch of music more or less predicts Stinson's death two years later at age 25 of a drug overdose, but it feels that way every time.

The one album I think I've played the most this year is tenor saxophonist Ted Brown's "Preservation" (Steeplechase), with Harold Danko, Dennis Irwin, and Jeff Hirschfield. Tremendously fresh, soulful, melodic, swinging improvisation -- not unrelated to Ted's one-time model and former colleague Warne Marsh, but Ted has been his own man for decades.

Good detective work, Couw. That must have been what happened.

Anyone else notice an odd glitch in Cuscuna's portion of the liner notes? He writes (or rather Blue Note today has him writing:) "'Sonic Boom' [i.e. the piece itself, not the whole album] ... was recorded on April 28, exactly two weeks later [than the other tunes on the date]. For some reason this seems to have been a pattern with a number of Lee Morgan dates. The band comes in, gets one tune and suddenly the session dissipates. The same personnel comes back a week or two later and runs through all the tunes effortlessly." Which, given what they have Cuscuna saying in the first sentence, makes no sense. But on the original LP issue of "Sonic Boom," that portion of Cuscuna's notes begins: "'Sonic Boom' ... was recorded on April 14, 1967, while all the other tunes were recorded exactly two weeks later" -- which makes the next two sentences about the "pattern with a number of Lee Morgan dates" perfectly reasonable. Weird -- because while I'm used to Blue Note of the 1979 era (when "Sonic Boom" was first issued) screwing up liner notes (they jumbled up the ones I wrote for Morgan's "Consequence" back then and have now reprinted them that way), why would they introduce an error into notes that made sense the first time around?

Haven't seen it myself yet, but here's a review from IMO the best film critic there is, Dave Kehr -- formerly of the the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News, and now the DVD reviewwer for the New York Times. This is from his new web site, Dave Kehr.com. (I'll add that, based on the clips I've seen on TV and in theaters, there's something off-kilter, again IMO, about the way Kong moves, especially in NYC -- there's a rubbery-reboundish feel to him whenever he or any part of him that's attached to a surface changes directions; it's like he's a creature in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.) Kehr: There are few if any surprises in “King Kong,” Peter Jackson’s affectionate but reductive remake of the 1933 film that has long since taken up residence in the nation’s subconscious. Like far too many recent remakes of older horror films, like the Michael Bay-produced, music-video remounting of Tobe Hooper’s down-and-dirty “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (not to mention Bay’s own “The Island,” with its purely coincidental resemblances to Robert S. Fiveson’s 1979 “The Clonus Horror”), Jackson’s film invests wads of money and expends vast technical expertise in trying to be more “polished” and “professional” than the original films, and in so doing extinguishes the uncontrolled, unpolished and sometimes suicidally unprofessional impulses that motivated their making in the first place. Rather than the fecund, poetically messy metaphor that was King Kong in his first screen incarnation, Jackson’s giant ape is a tidy, compartmentalized creature, stripped of the sexuality and rage that he displayed in the Cooper-Schoedsack film and reduced to an ultimately pathetic figure, a lovable plush toy who no longer chomps his human victims in his mighty jaws or grinds them beneath his massive feet but, at worst, tosses them aside rather carelessly when he’s done playing with them (Jackson doesn’t even show these hurled bodies hitting the ground, allowing the viewer to assume that they bounce back to life like so many Yosemite Sam’s in a Warner Brothers cartoon). He’s allowed to do very little that might jeopardize the audience’s sympathy for him – which, of course, renders him as bland and placid as Barney the Dinosaur. The rich ambivalence of the Kong character – at once childlike and savage, innocent and blindly destructive, as ultimately inexplicable and pre-moral in his actions as nature itself – has been replaced by the sentimentality of a PETA brochure, in which Kong becomes the latest baby seal to be clubbed to death by greedy capitalists (now incarnated by Jack Black’s Carl Denham, a purely cynical showman rather than the far richer blend of Hollywood showman and dedicated adventurer played by Robert Armstrong in the original, as producer-director Merian C. Cooper’s engagingly candid caricature of himself). In a gesture of outright classism, the first mate (Bruce Cabot) who was the love interest of Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow has now been replaced by a successful Broadway playwright (played by Adrian Brody as a very slight variation on John Turturro’s Barton Fink). These days, we cannot have our heroines falling for unassuming blue collar types: nothing more than the toast of the town will do (although the character, Jack Driscoll, is allowed to keep his original name). Jackson has accomplished the seemingly impossible – he’s made a de-Freudianized “King Kong,” in which the mighty rivers of sexual desire (equated by Hollywood, then as now, with the “primitivism” of invented native cultures) have been diverted into tiny rivulets. Kong is no longer linked to Ann (and she by him) by the erotic tensions that run unspeakably but unmistakably between them, but because he finds her an amusing novelty. An unemployed dancer in this version, Ann executes a few soft-shoe routines for her new jungle companion, who finds them eye-rolllingly corny (has he been hanging out in Skull Island’s vaudeville houses?) but diverting enough to keep her around. The brilliant character touches of the original Kong’s stop-motion animator, Willis O’Brien, have been largely eliminated: no longer does Kong delicately peel off Ann’s peignoir and explore her body – and certainly, no longer does he sniff his fingers afterward. This is a PG Kong, ready for the merchandizing racks. Yet, for all of Kong’s boosted lovability factor, he arouses less sympathy in the audience than the rip-snorting original. About the only genuinely engaging character moment – when Kong works the broken-jaws of a dinosaur he has just dispatched, wondering why they don’t work anymore – is a direct lift from Willis O’Brien. And while the motion capture technology used to transform the actor Andy Serkis into a 25-foot-tall primate is impressively smooth and realistic, it can’t beat O’Brien’s consistently inventive and expressive gestures. Serkis provides a depressive, Prozac-ready Kong, content to sit on ledges of mountaintops or skyscrapers and brood over the injustices of fate. Back in New York, Kong’s martyrdom at the hands of the civilized world is played out with a length and attention to grisly detail that finds its only rival in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” Pathos seems Jackson’s only end in these scenes, as the giant ape is reduced to a tiny speck clambering up the Empire State Building, and taking a futile last stand at its top (again, a couple of pedestrians are flicked away as Kong rampages through Times Square, but there is nothing like the horror of Kong plucking a likely-looking blonde from a hotel room, realizing that she is not his lady love, and pitching her off into the darkness – as the camera follows her screaming descent to the pavement). The CGI evocation of 1933 Manhattan is, on the other hand, quite stunning, perhaps even too much so – it is hard to pay attention to the foreground mayhem when the background is filled with such detailed recreations of lost architectural treasures and art deco signage. As the old saying runs, everyone kills the thing he loves. And while Peter Jackson hasn’t quite snuffed out the life in “King Kong” – the movie, he says, that inspired him to become a filmmaker – he’s definitely reduced its oxygen supply.

Just got around to reading Crouch's Pryor piece. "The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a 'real' black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence." Please! Pryor's greatest influence, or greatest impact, was that he said/performed things that were at best tremendously funny because they were also tremendously, touchingly real. I think it was our host, Jim A., who mentioned one of the classic and most typical moments: The dog who pensively says of Pryor's (deceased, right?) pet monkey, "And I was gonna eat him too." I wonder how many of Pryor's great moments involved something like that -- the intervention of literal or figurative other voices -- human, animal, demonic, etc. who engage in sly dialgoue with our beleaguered comic hero. And the literal voice that Pryor came up with for that dog, or for Mudbone, or Lord knows how many other beings!

Just got around to reading Crouch's Pryor piece. "The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a 'real' black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence." Please! Pryor's greatest influence, or greatest impact, was that he said/performed things that were at best tremendously funny because they were also tremendously, touchingly real. I think it was our host, Jim A., who mentioned one of the classic and most typical moments: The dog who pensively says of Pryor's (deceased, right?) pet monkey, "And I was gonna eat him too." I wonder how many of Pryor's great moments involved something like that -- the intervention of literal or figurative other voices -- human, animal, demonic, etc. who engage in sly dialgoue with our beleaguered comic hero. And the literal voice that Pryor came up with for that dog, or for Mudbone, or Lord knows how many other beings!

So who is this Rev. Katz? About "Expression" (the piece itself), I believe that it and "Ogunde" (both rec. 3/17/67) and "Number One" (rec. 3/7/67) are the only pieces recorded after the "Interstellar Space" date (2/22/67). Assuming, as Jim does (and I do too), that the "Interstellar Space" date was a watershed or a moment on the mountain top for Trane, that leaves AKAIK only the three pieces mentioned above as evidence of how he might have moved on from there. I haven't re-listened to "Ogunde" yet, but both "Expression" and "Number One" seem to combine some "Intersteller Space"-like playing with the way Coltrane, Alice C., J. Garrison, and R. Ali played on most of the 2/15/67 date that's been issued as "Stellar Regions" -- many of those pieces showing, or beginning with, what annotator David Wild calls "a dirge-like quality." Over this (or after this) "Stellar Regions"-date feel, in his second solo on "Expression," Coltrane gets into "Interstellar Space"-like playing with a good deal of intensity -- there's less of this (and at a lower level of intensity IMO) on "Number One." Also IMO, Alice C.'s slow-cycling washes of piano are no help at all on these pieces, especially at these moments; she's more in tune with what's going on during the "Stellar Regions" date. Possibly important footnotes: I think a preview of what happens on "Interstellar Space" (see Jim S.'s descriptions above, particularly his account of how Trane might have responded to Ayler) can be heard on the last piece recorded during the "Stellar Regions" date, "Tranesonic." Also, though the liner notes don't mention this, Lewis Porter's excellent Coltrane biography says (and one's ears confirm it) that Coltrane plays alto on both takes of "Tranesonic." Listening to the results, and with "Interstellar Space" in mind, I think switching from tenor to alto here might have been liberating in a fairly specific way -- removing some familar patterns from the drawing board and/or making it a bit harder to summon them up.

I drop by the JRM about once a week, and you're not overglorifying it. Maybe there's a store somewhere else in the world today that's its equal or superior, but if so I'd be surprised.

As did the Arsenio Hall Singers.

Well, they could have reproduced the notes from the 1989 LP reissue ... by Stanley Crouch. Mr. C's ringing first sentence is: "Though no musician since 1945 has dominated the jazz scene with quite the overwhelming impact of Charlie Parker, it also is true that no single artist after the great alto saxophonist has been more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal." We later learn that "The cues that Wynton Marsalis applies are rooted in Jamal..." And while it may or may not have been Mr. C's goof, this is nice: "Jamal rarely missed an opportunity to make the most of what each of his players could do, and the results brought qualities of group sound that were as impressive as those achieved by George Kirby's classic sextet." The Godfrey Cambridge Trio had a good sound too.

We're lucky you're here.

Yes. A lot. About Messiaen, here's a passage about what I had in mind from a book, "Finding the Key," by British composer (a good one) Alexander Goehr, a former student of his (and son of conductor Walter Goehr): "Probably the aspect of Messiaen's teaching that made the strongest impression on me was his concern with time and duration.... Being a realist, and concerned with the real world, he perceived real time: clock time. We spent a long time doing tests to develop our consciousness of time. He would bang on a table and, after a longish silence -- possibly twenty seconds -- bang again. We were expected to identify the duration between the two bangs and compare it with others only minutely shorter or longer than the first. This was done by counting, but I think he himself supposed that he could, and we might learn to, recognise durations of silence as if they had specific chracteristics.... In analysing a piece of music, he implied that a sequence of absolute duration could be in its way as expressive as could be a melody of pitch levels.... In conventional, 'metrical' music, he observed duration without regard for metre or accent, or regarded accent as the beginning of a duration and continuing silence as resonating sound, the whole all together comprising a single durational identity."

Great news, Jim. You guys should kill at that place. BTW, you did get those copies I sent you of the Tribune review, right?

Many thanks, Jim. I was hoping you'd respond because I knew in my bones that you knew, and from the inside, what I was muttering about. I agree with everything you say in your "Now, as to whether or not it 'moves'..." paragraph but wonder re: "A friend of mine once said that time was what keeps everything from happening all at once" whether it could be said that Trane came to WANT or NEED to feel in his music that everything was happening all at once or that "this overwhelming quality of all-at-onceness ... suggests," as you said, "that Trane has found a way to escape from linear and musical time into a realm of just-is-ness...." Yes, "experientiality is the name of the game here," and I don't hear Coltrane -- extrapolating from my own experience (so far) of what's going on here to what I'm of course just guessing his experience was in the making of this -- escaping into a realm of Moment of Satori just-is-ness as much as his drive to escape into such a realm in the face of particular musical circumstances and perceptions. For one thing, if you can make (or come close to making) everything happen at all at once -- and Coltrane I believe comes damn close to doing that on much of "Interstellar Space" -- then the whole rhythmic "problem" of post-Parker jazz virtually disappears or collapses in upon itself (that "problem" being [to quote from something I once wrote] that "the ability to make meaningful microsubdivisions of the beat [within relatively stable metrical frameworks]" -- the circumstances from which swing springs, though it may not wholly depend upon them -- "may have reached a kind of physical or perceptual barrier [in Parker's music]." To put it another way -- were the undeniable pleasures (to put it mildly) of swing (i.e. "swing feel," not the style labeled Swing) always a bit paradoxical or equivocal, in the sense that the music had to fully experience and expand upon those pleasures over a longish stretch of historical time in order to be the music that it was (and to have the effect on wave after wave of listeners around the world that it did), but that within the music (from the first?) were the seeds of a need to proceed otherwise -- in particular, to break or significantly alter the special pact with musical time that swing more or less invented and exemplifes. (BTW, I certainly don't mean to suggest that any post-swing jazz, if such there be, invalidates ANY worthwhile jazz of the past or present that does work with and within the pact of swing.)

I wonder if Coltrane dug Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," where the imprisoned narrator is momentarily freed (by rats that gnaw through his bonds) from the menace of the descending "sweep of the fearful scimitar," only to find that the walls of his chamber are made of heated iron and are closing in on him: "'Death,' I said, 'any death but that of the pit!' Fool! might I not have known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me? Could I resist its glow? or if even that, could I withstand its pressure? And now, flatter and flatter grew the lozenge, with a rapidity that left me no time for contemplation. Its centre, and of course, its greatest width, came just over the yawning gulf. I shrank back -- but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward...." Etc.

Oops -- that's "One Down, One Up" of course. Don't mean to hijack this thread (not that what I have in mind would amount to that), but my trip this evening back to late-late Trane ("Interstellar Space," in particular) thrust a thought into my head (and very suddenly and powerfully too) that's never been there before. Namely, that one principle (maybe the key principle) at work in late Trane (and nascent in his previous work) is ... well, let me take a step back and try to say it the way it came to me. Listening to "Jupiter," I suddenly had a sense of Trane's location: both in physical space, as a man holding a tenor saxophone in close proximity to a microphone in RVG's recording studio; and in musical space, as a man who is aware that it is common in our culture for sequentially occurring sounds to be heard sequentially, and that they then are felt to make patterns through time (both musical time, according to prevailing conventions of what musical time is and how it's parcelled out, and, of necessity, clock time as well -- though musical time doesn't equal clock time, nor does clock time necessarily determine what musical time is and how it's parcelled out -- see the researches, if that's the right word for them, in this realm of Messiaen). But what I heard on "Jupiter" was that Trane was tethered to/sticking to his basic location in musical space (i.e. in relation to musical time, he was essentially oscillating "in place" -- more about that in a bit -- rather than "moving forward" in any way whatsoever). And as I then moved on through the album, I heard the same thing more or less -- the nature of this being especially striking when, at the end of "Leo," Trane give his final figures a semi-walking feel , to which R. Ali responds in a semi-Elvin manner; the contrast between these figures, which do move "forward" through musical time for a short while, and all that has come before could hardly be greater. So what then is happening language-wise if Trane is tethered to/sticking to his basic location in musical space on these pieces? Well, another step back. The reason I get such a strong "he's tethered to/sticking to" etc. feeling here is twofold, I think -- that there is both no sense of a "progression" through or against either a linear harmonic framework or a steady rhythmic pulse (natch, in both cases) and that there is a near-constant sense of ... "balance" isn't the right term, but it's as though every gesture that initially might seem to have some horizontal/linear component to it is very swiftly curtailed (as though it had run into/butted up against a wall or barrier) and is then more or less hurled back in the opposite direction, across what one feels is Trane's basic central or nodal point and often in a shape that is felt to be more or less an inversion of the shape of the original gesture, until then it runs into/butts up against the wall or barrier on the other side -- the sense of there being "sides" flanking that central node arising after the first few times one has heard gestures whiz past in one direction and then be curtailed and return with similar force in the other. In any case, after a while one has to sense the consistent presence of those walls/barriers (thinking again of Trane's actual physical stance holding the horn, they seem to be no more than half-an-arm's-length from him, or even no further apart than the width of his horn) and the forcing-upwards effect they tend to have on the figures that so fiercely "run into" them. Typically, on these pieces there's an arch pattern -- a rise in pitch and in the number of semi-pitched "vocalized" tones that peaks at the midpoint of each piece and descends on the far side -- and now that I think of it, one of the things that Trane may have had in mind here would be to so alter or compress our sense of musical time that the shape of the piece as a whole and the shape of the basic language-unit within it is virtually the same -- a series of fierce oscillations/reverberations against tight barriers that leads to a fierce forcing upwards. I know that "fierce" is a loaded word, and one that raises a question that "tethered to/sticking to" may also have have raised: What is the emotional tone of this music, and what was the stance of the man who was making it? At the moment, ferocity is a word that is hard to put out of my mind, but hearing this music the way that I've just begun to, it feels more often than not like a ferocity of an immense necessary inventiveness -- as though Trane's discovered need to "stay" in one place (if indeed one agrees, or even wants to entertain the idea, that something of this sort is going on in this music) could be sustained only by climbing/forcing himself upwards. OK, those men with the net can come and get me now.

Probably shouldn't open my mouth until I've gone back to listen to a fair amount of later, more or less metre-less Trane for purposes of comparison, but I'm struck on "One Up, One Down" especially by the same thing that Ravi Coltrane mentions in his portion of the notes: "The attention to rhythm ... is as detailed as can be found on any John Coltrane recording." That may be one reason why, as John Tapscott pointed out, the 27 minutes of "One Up" seem to go by so quickly. Also, as with the Monk/Trane Carnegie Hall recording, thse performances seem to me to come from a specific wedge of historical/musical time -- different wedges of course, and the Monk/Trane wedge as it was captured onthat particular night is one that I for one didn't know existed, in part because there's no other recorded evidence of it ASFAIK (the other Monk/Trane recordings aren't like this). Back to the Half Note Trane -- while there's certainly continuity with what came before and after with this quartet, the feel of this band at these particular moments in time is at once so intense (nothing new there) and so damn CRYSTALLIZED. I heard Coltrane play at the length he does on "One Up" on several occasions in Chicago in '63-'64 especially, and I remember this level of intensity but not the other thing -- or at least not nearly as much of it.

Nice photo, Mark -- really captures the way Golson was into things. A joyfully serious musician, and it was a joy to hear him.

Thanks for the plug, Ghost; I like that chapter myself. I’m in the middle of Malcolm Lowry’s terrifying "Under the Volcano" (reading it for the first time, I’m embarrassed to say), and while Lowry (1909-57) wasn’t one of the Beats -- too old, for one thing -- he was out there in the best sense, and "Volcano" has a definite but subtle jazz feel to it at times, both in the sometimes overtly musical, syncopated way it’s written and in the kind of people Lowry is writing about (one of the book’s principal characters casually refers to a "day like a good Joe Venuti record"). I'll vote for "The Bear Comes Home" too.