Larry Kart

"I could have sworn that Williams once wrote something to the effect that a good deal of Eastern European "folk music" contained more of a jazz feel than most blues music." Don't recall Martin writing that, but I do recall Barry Ulanov writing -- in his history of jazz (the title is "Jazz," followed by a colon and some other words; Garth Jowett recently mentioned it on another thread I think) -- that there is more jazz in a gypsy fiddler than there is in a corps of African drummers.

Yes, I talk about the "Turn Out the Stars" and "The Last Waltz" box sets. I much prefer the more relaxed and lyrical "Last Waltz" to the (to my mind) rather harried Evans of much of "Turn Out the Stars," even though Evans understandably begins to wane toward the end of the "Last Waltz" engagement; he died eight days after it ended.

Medjuck: You seem to think of critics as would-be lawgivers, which would be annoying; I tend to think of them as thinker/talkers -- interesting, knowledgable ones at best -- and I couldn't live without them when they're good at it. As an inherently verbal person who tends to get VERY interested in the things that interest me, it always seemed completely natural to think and talk about the things I was interested in to others who shared my interests, and of course, to listen to what those others had to say. Is it really much more complicated than that? Yes, it can get nasty for a while if a fool or a jerk is hogging the stage, but don't such people tend to get found out sooner or later (see Leonard Feather)? I don't see anyone saying that it corrupts the nature of baseball to talk in detail about why you prefer Roger Clemens to Sandy Koufax or Willy Mays to Mickey Mantle. If you care about a thing at all, you want to make (or try to make) distinctions. As the late Clement Greenberg said: "I am willing to like anything, provided I enjoy it enough."

I can vouch for the Wallington Trios. A fascinating musician. Wallington had several incarnations: -- the electrifying bop virtuoso of those sides; the more sober bandleader-comper of the mid- 1950s (check out his "Jazz for the Carriage Trade on OJC for one, with some of the best Phil Woods there is; also the Cafe Bohemia band with scary early Jackie McLean); his coinciding or a bit later somewhat East Side lounge-ish trio thing, but Wallington was no sell-out, always had a strong vein of romanticism in him ("Knight Music" on Koch, often found as a cutout); and the final solo work of the mid-1980s ("Virtuoso," "Symphony of a Jazz Piano" -- which is darker, much more craggy, a bit Monkish in a personal way, and superb. Those solos albums (there may be more; I don't know) were recorded in the U.S. by Japanese producers and issued only in Japan I believe. They're worth searching for. Wallington left the music business for longish stretches to work in the family air-conditioning business.

For boogie woogie, you'll want to hear Jimmy Yancey. I'd try "The Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1" (Document). Yancey's no powerhouse, like Ammons, but he's deep. For stride, don't miss "Harlem Piano -- Luckey Roberts and Willie The Lion Smith" (OJC). It's good Lion but fantastic Roberts (with both men well-recorded in late '50s stereo). What a composer he was! Check out "Inner Space" for one. For Lion at his best, I'd seek out his Commodore solo performances, recorded in 1939 (I believe), which must be available somewhere on CD now. (I have them on LP.)

Garth (or anyone else) -- Any clues as to how I could listen to this? I have an IMac running OS9, and when I click on the "listen" button at BBC3, they give me lots of unspecified error messages and suggest that I downlead Real Player Basic, which I already have and have used before. So I tried to download Real Player Basic again from BBC3, per their instructions, thinking that there might be a difference between their version and the one I already have, but when I try to do so the only option that's alive (so it seems) for Mac users is for OSX; if you click on the OS8/OS9 button, nothing happens, i.e. it's not a working link.

Allen, Mike -- stop it, you guys. I've got tears running down my cheeks, and I've never even been to Japan!

It's organ-less in one sense, but I nominate Stanley Turrentine's "That's Where It's At," with Les McCann, Herbie Lewis, and Otis Finch.

Many thanks. Joe. About Litweiler -- to me he's John, but I don't think that friendship means I'm biased; besides, we became friends way back when because I already knew and admired his work (what there was of it at the time) and was surprised and delighted to discover that the guy who had written those pieces happened to live in the same neighborhood. Anyway, "The Freedom Principle," in addition to everything else it does very well, has so much hard to define "soul" going for it; while it's full of shrewd judgments, it also tells you between the lines why this music had to be made and why the people who responded to it at the time needed to hear it. This is a big part of the story of any evolving art, and once the moment when direct testimony is possible has passed, it's damn hard to get those things right or even to acknowledge their existence. John gets that right, and there's lots of acute analysis to boot. Now a "Collected Litweiler" would add much to this picture, because John has written beautifully about jazz of all eras. For example, his liner lines for the Nessa Ben Webster album "Did You Call?" probably is the best appreciation of Webster there is. Also, John has a unique prose voice -- wry and nutty-sweet. J.B. Figi (who also caught that moment in time on the wing in words) once referred to John as "the Herb Shriner of jazz criticism." John is from Indiana, as Shriner was, which no doubt is one reason the phrase arose in Figi's mind, but I'm sure the main thing he was thinking of was the deep Middle Western taste for "now you see it, now you don't" irony. Another reference point might be Paul Rhymer, the creator of the "Vic and Sade" radio show.

Unfortunately, the three latter-day Kamuca albums I know -- "Richie," "Drop Me Off In Harlem," and "Charlie" -- all from the mid-1970s, all originally on Concord LPs (never saw one on CD), are all OOP. I recall reading here that they were leased to Concord by Kamuca and that the rights reverted to his estate, so Concord couldn't reissue them in the unlikely event that they wanted to. On the other hand, I've seen some of these albums used from time to time in stores like the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, so it's not like they've disappeared from the face of the planet. Good hunting.

Michael Tippett's. Karol Rathaus' -- the most melancholy piece of music I know.

A perhaps useful rule of thumb -- which I owe to Terry Martin -- is this one (as far it goes or as far as you can or want to take it): Is it conceivable to you that the music of "avant-garde" musician X or Y could have arisen if there had been no such thing as jazz, either in his or her personal musical background or just on the planet period? To me it certainly works for, say, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and John Stevens. Offhand, I can't think of a single so-called avant-gardist who interests me (or who think ought to interest me) for whom it doesn't work. Can't, or haven't yet tried, to build a theory on this, but if others also feel this way, there may be an organic principle or two at work.

No it wasn't Dan's book but Ned Sublette's "Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo."

Just want to say that I'm with (or would prefer to be with) Nate and Allen here. The phrase in the introductory chapter that Montg might have been reacting to in part -- the one that refers to the sense of "language upheaval" in much avant garde art that curiously, so some feel (including me), does not go away with the passage of time -- doesn't mean that I buy into ... well, I agree completely with what Nate says about the differences between spoken or written language and music as a language. In any case, I pretty much borrowed the lasting sense of "language upheaval" notion (with attribution, and because it struck me out of the blue as novel and true) from the late German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus' essay "'New Music' as Historical Category," which can be found in his terrific book "Schoenberg and the New Music" (Cambridge U. Press). The passage I quoted from Dahlhaus appears on p. 13 of that book. He was something else. His "Nineteenth Century Music" (U. of California Press) is a particular treasure trove. What a smart guy.

As I tried to say in that part of the book -- and I mean tried, because I'm not bent that way -- cabaret is one bent universe. On the other hand, some performers who kind of belong there -- like Jeri Southern and Chicagoan Audrey Morris -- really get under my skin. Actually, one of the best litmus tests that separates cabaret singing from jazz singing is to compare Southern and Lee Wiley. Southern does a lot of really nice musical things, but every musical choice she makes seems to spring from her pre-existing response to the song's lyric -- either to its overall mood or some to word- or moment-specific dramatic point she wants to make. Wiley a is great interpreter of lyrics and not often overtly jazzy, if that's the right term, but she's always deep into the music first and foremost, riding on its flow.

Garth -- I agree about what happened to Bill Perkins (though it was often interesting and sometimes kind of moving to hear him struggle around in the hairshirt he'd chosen to don), but I feel he got the old lyrical groove going quite well on the album he did with the Metropole Orchestra. About the "hairshirt" thing BTW, it seemed to me that the problem there was that Perkins kept trying to transform dissonance (and roughed-up timbre) into a rhythmic principle -- this because his time feel essentially remained what it always had been -- but beyond a certain limited point this didn't work; instead you'd hear (or I'd hear) the strenuously worked over layers of dissonance and gnarled timbre separating themselves from the actual note-to-note rhythms of his solos, which just weren't that angular. I do have a weak spot though for his playing on the two latter-day albums he made with Lennie Niehaus --especially the second one, with Jack Nimitz added. Everyone is playing and thinking at a high level of intensity on that one, and Niehaus to me is just so strange -- as though, rhythmically, he was determined to play just about everything oh so smoothly backwards. Sometimes I feel as though Niehaus were channeling Frankie Trumbauer by way of Berg's "Lulu."

Another tough one for me -- and I'm not sure I've turned the corner yet -- is Gerry Mulligan as a soloist.

A tough one for me for a long time was Benny Goodman -- as a clarinetist, not a bandleader. I think now that it was because I'd heard so many neo-Goodman guys playing that repertoire, particularly in person, that I couldn't hear what those licks sounded like when they were fresh, real, and fully inhabited. Also, I probably was handicapped some because, of "star" clarinetists of that era, I preferred Artie Shaw if I had to choose. The RCA Goodman small groups box from a few years ago turned the light on.

I'm not anti-cabaret pure and simple but find both Short and Mabel Mercer pretty hard to take. It's not just that neither of them has much voice (neither does Blossom Dearie or lots of others who are more or less in that bag) but also, at least for me, that the voices they do have are so obtrusively hoarse and grating. It's like there's almost nothing musical going on, or that can go on, when they open their mouths -- most of the time I'm thinking that they should just talk and forget about hitting or sustaining any notes. Also, while I can see that part of Short is coming out of a mostly forgotten vaudeville/early Broadway bag, I can't believe that at any time in his adult life he was among the better representatives of that tradition. For instance, if you can, check out the way Jack Gilford sings the part of Alexander Throttlebottom on the mid-1980s CBS recording of the Gershwins "Of Thee I Sing." It's not quite the same thing as Short's world but close, and Gilford puts over that material with a zest that lets you know that he knows what it means to win over a real audience -- not the pre-sold crowd that Short typically faces.

Richie Kamuca's tribute to Charlie Parker album, "Charlie," reveals him (i.e. Kamuca) to be one fine alto player, very close to Bird in spirit but his own man too. Latter-day Kamuca (on either horn) is a joy -- not that I don't like early Kamuca, but a case can be made that he came fully into his own in about '60 or '61. There's an album of session material I think, from '58 or so (with Scott LaFaro? have heard it but don't own it) that finds Kamuca halfway between his early Pres manner and contemporary Rollins (with maybe a pinch of Trane), and boy does he sound hung up, as well he might have. Interesting that his running buddy Bill Perkins went though some of the same changes.

Maybe I don't get the joke, but neither is Frank Strozier. Bernie McGann of Australia is one hell of a player. An altoist for sure, he's so much his own man that it's hard to compare him with other players of the instrument -- a la Steve Lacy and other soprano saxophonists. If McGann comes from anyone, it might be Sonny Rollins. Ira Sullivan played some alto back when but not a whole lot as I recall. He was, as you might expect, damn good. I think Ira would have sounded damn good playing a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I think he's on alto on several tracks of the ABC-Paramount album he made with the Billy Taylor Trio -- a disc that sadly I haven't seen or listened to for at least 40 years.

That Martin Williams four-part series on the "state of affairs in jazz" I mentioned a while back -- the one that ends with a hymn of praise to the World Saxophone Quartet -- appeared under the title "How Long Has This Been Going On?" in Jazz Times (Feb.-March-April-May 1987). I'll try to scan it in some time, but I have doubts whether that will work -- I don't have the original magazines but a dark, dim, and blotchy Xerox -- and it would be a bear to type it in (maybe 6,000-8,000 words in all), My guess is, as I think I said before, that Martin was not in good health at the time (he died in 1992) -- he sounds tired and distracted, and some of what he says ignores or contradicts things that I know he knew to be the case, if only because he'd said that they were the case in pieces he'd written before.

I worked with/under Dan at Down Beat in 1968-9, and I don't recall any orchestrated campaign against the avant-garde. Ira Gitler sure didn't like that music, and he and Dan were and still are friends (I'd like to think I was a friend of Ira's too -- he's a terrific guy, great sense of humor -- but our paths haven't crossed that often), but no one who wrote for Down Beat when Dan was there was being operated by remote control. Who had time for that, anyway? The days of Coltrane's music being referred to as "anti-jazz" (by John Tynan, I recall) were under a previous editorial regime (maybe Gene Lees or Don DeMichael), but again I think that was a reflection of the views of the writer or writers involved rather than an orchestrated editorial campaign. There were several instances (under DeMichael, I think) of two reviews being run side by side of albums that were thought to be controversial, but on the whole, nothing like the bop versus moldy-fig wars of the forties. Certainly no one told me that I couldn't write enthusiastically about, say, Roscoe Mitchell. The only time when I was there that I recall Dan being tempted to intervene in what a writer had to say was when someone, in a jazz festival review, wrote that a Tal Farlow set was bad because Farlow's music was "out of date" (or words to that effect). I'm pretty sure we let it stand though, because I vaguely recall wincing all over again when I saw the phrase in print.

If my memory is working, that quote about Brooks was from a phone conversation I had with Oliver Beener. I think Cuscuna put me in touch with him. All I know (or remember) was in the liner notes. I did see some of that Charles footage when it was playing in the Jazz Record Mart one day, but I was in a hurry and couldn't linger.

Mmm-hmm -- what a linear singer. There is, or should be (if they used the ones I wrote for the Japanese LP issue in the mid-1980s), a fond Red Garland encomium to Watkins in the "Minor Move" liner notes.