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Everything posted by Larry Kart
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About "boston" I'll try to check, but I seem to recall Benny Carter or Coleman Hawkins or Rex Stewart saying that that's what they called a solo chorus in the Twenties. About Horsecollar, I've now listened to what may be the only two tracks of him there are -- backing Billie Holiday on a June 1941 live recording at Mintons ("I Cried for You," "Fine and Mellow"). It's on "Harlem Odyssey" (Onyx), a 1978 grab bag of Newman material. Dan Morgenstern's notes say: "Floyd 'Horsecollar' Williams, who plays the alto obligatti behind Billie worked and recorded (though not in a solo role) with Hot Lips Page and can be found on a number of later r&b recordings. A drummer named Chick Foster whom I used to know made a demo with Horsecollar in the mid-'50s on which he played his ass off on some blues, and he is one of those semi-legends other musicians always speak of." Horsecollar is very much in the background on the two Holiday Mintons tracks and does show some kinship to Rudy Williams. There are hints of some underlying looseness -- in relation to the beat and also in terms of letting whole phrases slip and slide a bit -- that I can imagine might have been wild in later years when he was in full flight. On the other hand, unless you were listening for hints here, you might not hear much beyond some pleasant behind-Billie noodling, which is what the situation called for.
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Sorry, "plat" should be "play." Also, if I'm right about the vintage of "boston," Nichols' use of it here may be consciously, wryly archaic/ironic. As I recall, in the liner notes to his Blue Note 12 incher, he uses the early '40s term "vonce" (i.e. "musically advanced") in a similiarly sly fashion -- fondling a piece of slang that by that time no one used anymore. Nichols was a deep soul.
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From the Chccago Report in the 1/26/40 issue of the magazine Jazz Information: "John Levy's band, at the Club 65, is a fair outfit. The pianist, Jimmy Wood, plays a lot of piano; Russ Gillam, trumpet, and John Hartzfield, tenor, play very well on occasion, and Hilliard Brown, Kolax's old drummer, is steady." In the 1970s, I heard Hilliard Brown (very tasty player), along with the mighty Truck Parham, in Art Hodes' rhythm section.
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From an online D. Jordan discography: Horsecollar Williams / Floyd Horsecollar Williams (Chicago 102) Jesse Drakes (tp) Joe Evans, Floyd Horsecollar Williams (as) Johnny Hartzfield (ts) Duke Jordan (p) Gene Ramey (b) J.C. Heard (d) Etta Jones (vo -2) Chicago, IL, February, 1945 1. How You Like That 2. You Ain't Nothing Daddy P.S. In the prior post, "though" should be "thought."
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On AAJ in 2003, our old friend Deep identified Hartzfield as a member of Floyd Horsecollar Williams's band: Jesse Drakes (tp) Joe Evans, Floyd Horsecollar Williams (as) Johnny Hartzfield (ts) Duke Jordan (p) Gene Ramey (b) J.C. Heard (d) Etta Jones He also seemed to suggest -- though with Deep it's hard to tell -- that he was familiar with Hartzfield's music to some extent and though well of it. Horsecollar Williams, BTW, was someone Nichols played with too.
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You're making me want to buy that damn set. I was imprinted by that "Blue Lou" back then too but had forgotten about it until you mentioned it. I think that's the one (if not it's whatever track was on the other side of the original album) where Jacquet play an incredibly guttural background figure -- like the sound a P-47 Thunderbolt might make as it heels over to strafe some enemy armor.
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Clem -- I haven't kept up with Harry Matthews the way I probably should have (got more of his books than I've read), but back in the days of Locus Solus, "The Conversions" left me bent me way out of shape -- with laughter, astonishment, and delight. And it holds up too. Fleshmetal! Looks like we're about the same age and and have had some similar literary experiences.
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That's one scary story, Allen -- given the power of a guy like that to semi-permanently mess up your reputation within your own community, so to speak -- but it doesn't surprise me. Based on his work itself (and the way it sometimes give off vibes of insecurity and petulance), and from some things I've heard about the way he's behaved towards other people in other situations, Giddins, while certainly not a fellow without value, is also not necessarily a person of good character.
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RE top-rank jazz critics, there are some brilliant Brits: Max Harrison (though he can be a professional crank, even a bit loony at times), Jack Cooke, and the late Michael James. Also, though there isn't much of his work around unless you have access to back issues of Jazz Monthly, the for many years U.S.-based Australian I've mentioned on the Art Pepper thread: Terry Martin. A collected TM would be something. Likewise with John Litweiler.
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Dan Morgenstern
Larry Kart replied to Brad's topic in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...
Dan's book is terrific, but Appel seems to me to be something of a riding-his-own-hobby-horse nitwit, as he was in spades in his book "Jazz Modernism" (though as I recall that's an opinion with which some here disagree). Also, I'm more than a little annoyed at the blandly high and mighty tone Appel adopts here -- given my feelings about the relative merit and knowledge of the field of these two men and my witness of/participation in an actual social encounter between them several years back, in which Appel's stance alternated between preening peacock and fawning abjectness. Yes, the reviewer's role tends to foster that high and mighty tone, but the Appel I witnessed that day is one of those guys who lives his life in order to adopt it whenever possible. And how could he miss the one thing that leaps out from this book as much as anything else does -- the loving character of the man who wrote it and the way he and the music have loved each other and, as the title says, lived together since he was a boy. That's Dan's story, or the one from which all his other stories spring, and it's all of our stories too. -
Clem -- My problem with later Sorrentino is twofold (I hate people who say "twofold"). First, I don't get why he threw aside the stilleto and the garrote of "Imaginative Qualities" and exchanged them in "Mulligan Stew" for a blunderbuss. That we at once (and to some degree) novelistically "cared" about Sheila and all of the other sad and ugly fools of "Imaginative Qualities" is for me a big part of why and how that book worked, in the sense we the readers were quite rightly made to suffer for our caring. That is, a key armature of the book was fear, contempt, and pity -- contempt mingled with pity for all or most of the art-pretense fools, and fear that we might in fact be numbered among them and thus be no less deserving of contempt. But Gil clearly had so much contempt himself for the more moist, emotionally illusionistic trappings of fiction, and a whole lot else as well, that he apparently decided he no longer wished to traffic in that material at all, even in order to subvert it. But his metafictional stuff usually just falls flat for me. I know "The Orangery" -- some fine stuff there but that was early '70s or mid '70s I think. I know "The Moon In Its Flight" too and think you can see the line betwen Gil One and Gil Two very clearly there, as the metafictional curtain comes down IMO like lead. I bought "Plum Poems" too and like it a lot. That's when Feld was one of Sorrentino's crowd. Remembering Ross' name led me to pick "Only Shorter" out of a book section slush pile in the mid '80s and review it enthusiastically after I realized what a terrific book it was, which led to a great friendship with Ross, who died way too young (age 55, of leukemia) in 2001.
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Clem -- That Sorrentino book is a darkly funny/painful masterwork (the only person I know [actually knew] who knew it was the late brilliant novelist Ross Feld, who was part of Sorrentino's circle for a while in the '60s), and I admire just about everything Sorrentino wrote that precedes "Imaginative Qualities," but I wonder if you agree that he went around the bend with "Mulligan Stew" and for the most part hasn't come back. P.S. I strongly recommend Feld's "Only Shorter" -- another masterwork. If you try and like it, there's more.
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Leeway -- I know what you mean about the "great white hope" business, which tends to be crude and stupid. But I think that Terry Martin, in first of his two pieces in that book, deals with the question of Pepper's "aesthetic position as an American white" with a great deal of sensitivity, subtlety, and insight -- though that phrase ("aesthetic position as an American white") and the judgmental stance it suggests, might make its author (then living in Great Britain and a young college student I believe) cringe a bit these days. Also, a good many things have changed since then. But if "Straight Life" the book is to be trusted, Art's status as a white man making what he himself regarded as a black music loomed very large in his mind at times. Remember the passage where the young Art asks an acquaintance whether he (i.e. Art) has the "right" to play jazz?
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Very interesting, Jim. If I get what you're saying (and I think I do), it makes a lot of sense to me and helps to explain why as much as I admire and have been moved by Pepper through the years, I'm not drawn much anymore to listening to him again. On the other hand, I wish you could read what Terry Martin says about him (in two essays actually, not one -- the first from 1964, when Terry was in his early 20s, the second from 1979) in "The Art Pepper Companion." Again, it's some of the best critical writing there is about any jazz musician IMO. One quote, about Art's solo on "Pepper Pot" from the Tampa Quartet album, that points to where Terry's coming from there: "'Pepper Pot' has the quintessential ambiguity of his artistry, a bounce tune beginning as a series of excellent swinging variations, say open to a Sims for example, but developing with startling logic to a totally new world of courage and pain; beautfully underpinned by the rhythm section, we are in Pepper's own organic world; it is coherent, there are laws we are no position to understand.... The timbral control and articulation are staggering, and the rhythmic development toward the close of his solo is worthy of Young or Monk.... Only Navarro I think equals Art Pepper on this ground of structured tragedy, the heart of Lester Young and the mind of Benny Carter." BTW, how do you feel about Benny Carter? Does his playing too seem to you "to be designed to intentionally extend outward just long enough to have been put on display and then immediately, if not sooner, snap right back inside from whence it came." No blame if that's how you feel, no claim of hypocrisy if you don't. I'm just curious -- if only because Terry's deep prediliction for Carter ("the master of construction," he writes elsewhere, but also a player whom lots of reasonable people don't warm up to) seems to have set him up to respond to Pepper as he did.
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Off the top of my head, I don't hear Stitt versus Ammons as analogous to Pepper versus McLean. (And by "versus" I don't mean to suggest it's a prize fight, even though Stitt and Ammons did go at it almost that way at times.) And Jim -- if I understand what you mean by " Which, again, is somehow what I think is the point of the whole thing -- the creation of a totally individual identity that defies 'possession' of anybody except its owner" -- then I think, a la what I tried to say at the end of one of the Art Pepper pieces in the book, that that was Art's deal in human terms: He created a totally individual identity that HE could not possess.
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This may be related to part of what Jim says above but coming at it from another direction. Art (Pepper i.e.) grabbed very hard emotionally way back when -- guess I was listening to his things from the time they came out from 1956 on -- but the union between the feelings that were aroused in the listener and that were (presumably, to some degree) being felt/expressed by the creator, and of course the union between all of that and the arguably (and perhaps paradoxically) exquisite craftsmanship with which the whole shebang was shaped and thenemerged in purely musical terms -- finally led to a kind of "I've had enough of that" sense of satiation. Everything of Art's that I loved back then, I still love, but I just don't listen to it that often anymore. I think I feel the same way about Mahler. Great music; I know it; I love it; but when I start to listen again to any of it, I feel like it's already been built into me and become part of me and to hear it again in real time would be redundant. Does that make any sense? I don't feel that way about a lot of other music that I know and love. I think, in both cases (Pepper and Mahler) it may have to do with the combination of pained, even tragic, opened-vein emotion and the typically perfect but highly personal formal/expressive means. Compare Jackie McLean to Pepper and it might become clear. No less potent emotionally, Jackie's playing typically has a shagginess or brokenness that asks you to try to complete your part of the puzzle along with him every time. Art, at his best, solves and resolves the whole thing. Or back to Mahler -- at the end of every one his symphonies, one of the feelings I get (and that I think you're supposed to get) is: Well, that's the LAST symphony anyone's going to write or need to write. Of course, there are in fact nine of them (or ten), plus Das Lied, but still...
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Everyone who cares about Art Pepper should get their hands on "The Art Pepper Companion" (Copper Square Press), ed. by Todd Selbert, published in 2000, and check out Terry Martin's 1964 essay "Art Pepper: Toward a New White Jazz," which is among the most brilliant pieces of writing there is about jazz musician. For sources for Art's sound, look to Benny Carter and Willie Smith (both acknowledged models), filtered through Pres to some extent. On the album they share, Warne sounds like Warne to me, though perhaps the warmth of Art's sound and the mutual emotional/musical warmth of the encounter did have some effect. I'd say that at one point Bud Shank was influenced by Art, but I can't think of many others. Herb Geller was a somewhat related figure but came by his style, I'm pretty sure, on his own hook, though drawing from similar sources. The problem with being influenced by Art, and perhaps why not many were (unless I'm mistaken), is that what made him so good were things that were so "inside" the music that they were essentially inimitable -- if you were going to sound like Art enough for anyone to notice the resemblance, you'd have to be as good a time-shaper/shape-maker (for want of better terms) as he was, and and who else was that good in those ways then or ever? (Sure, others were, but they were fellow giants, and they sounded like themselves.)
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Hey, I knew Bloomfield (in passing) when he was in seventh grade in Glencoe, Il. (I was a year ahead of him.) Went over with my folks to a Sunday dinner party at the house of Bob Greenspan (a greasy [very much by design] darkly handsome Bloomfield pal, later a singer with him) -- and Bloomfield was there too. Don't recall what Greenspan's father was into, but the level of wealth on display was kind of jaw-dropping, much higher than what I was used to. So after dinner, Greenspan, Bloomfield, and I retire awkwardly to the rec room, while the adults hang out upstairs and my sister and other youngsters mingle. At one point, Bloomfield or Greenspan says portentously, especially so given the house we were in: "Let's walk into town and see if we can find some ... 'action.'" This struck me as at once hilarious and insane -- at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday night in downtown Glencoe circa 1958, there was nothing but streetlights and empty sidewalks. I still have no idea what Greenspan or Bloomfield had in mind; perhaps they were living inside some personal mental motion picture.
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Both Art and Warne Marsh are in great form on "The Way It Was" (Think that's the U.S. title; I have it on a Japanese CD). Their solos and exchanges on "All The Things You Are" are to die for. Another great one from the end of Art's first Contemporary label period is "Smack Up." I much prefer Art's original version of "Winter Moon" with Hoagy Carmichael, an altogether wonderful album if you have a taste for Hoagy's singing (I do).