Larry Kart

I'm curious about the Binney album, in part because of the presence of pianist Jacob Sacks. I've heard him as a sideman on two albums by talented Swiss trombonist/composer Christophe Schweizer (one with Binney in the front line, the other with altoist Eric Rasmussen -- one of those two is still to be released, I think), and Sacks seemed to be special. Also, one of those albums included Dan Weiss, who struck me as special too.

Of jazz songs that anybody actually played, I've always been unable to take "Lullaby of Birdland." I know it's just a variant on "Love Me or Leave Me," but the line is so naggingly insistent and jingle-like that I can't imagine how hard it would be as a player to get it out of the way and keep it there.

Mickey Tucker is a marvelous player -- and a fine composer too. I believe he's been based in Australia for several years. I recall being told (but perhaps I've got my facts garbled and it was someone else, maybe bassist Red Mitchell) that he was banished from RVG's studio for life for fiddling with the placement of a microphone.

Gullin's "First Walk" is fascinating as it tracks his swift evolution from somewhat callow newcomer to major player. Hallberg, on Gullin's first date under his own name, is something else. Only one year removed (maybe less) from Horace Silver's first dates at a sideman, Hallberg seems to have picked up on Horace's whole thing and made something his own out of it. Great photo in the notes of an open-mouthed Hallberg in mid-solo. Great photo of the hip young Jack Noren too. I heard and wrote about Noren in Chicago in the early 1980s. He was much the worse for wear by then (as I recall his nickname was Fat Jack) but remained a very tasty, listening drummer who took care to play a bit differently (and fittingly) behind each soloist. Sounded a bit like a bebop George Wettling. Another Swede I like a lot is the late altoist Rolf Billberg. And don't miss out on pianist Per-Henrik Wallin.

I recall Robert Creeley's reading of his poems being exactly what I thought they should be, suitably intimate and especially spot on (as you'd expect or hope) rhythmically. T.S. Eliot was just about right, Marianne Moore, I dimly recall, was impossible (perhaps just petrified with fear). I know what Jim means about the pervasive drone, but the last thing you want instead is too ripe and fruity, a la our former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky. One of the best readings of anything I've ever heard (all these except Creeley and Pinsky were on recordings, though I've heard Creeley in person and on record too) was Allen Tate reading his long poem "The Swimmers." The reading may have been better than the poem, and it's a damn good poem.

Fine review, Nate.

Oops -- Matthews was Dutch, not Danish. But tasty nonetheless.

I've always had a soft spot for Danish accordian player Mat Matthews, who made two albums for Dawn in the mid-1950s. The better of them has some very tasty tracks with a sextet than includes Art Farmer and Gigi Gryce and benefits throughout from the bass-drum duo of Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. There's also one track with a Matthews-Pettiford (on cello) duo, "Now See How You Are," on which OP takes a near-heroic solo on his own groovy tune. As I recall, this piece later was arranged for and recorded by Pettiford's big band. Mathews swung, had a nice melodic imagination, one that sounded like it sprang from the instrument. On the other hand, he tended to downplay the squeeze-box side of the accordian without pretending that it didn't exist. Wonder what happened to him.

Ok, Joe -- what would you recommend in particular?

BTW -- who is Mr. Abbey?

To me what Allen says above amounts to another way of saying that, in any or every context, it all comes down talent, honesty, and overall alertness**, plus your place in the chain of historical circumstances and possibilities - -that is, are the things that you're drawn to do by your internal daemons things that the evolving art really needs people to do at the time you're able and willing to do? And your place, in this sense, is something you probably can't do much about. From what I can tell, the career of painter Arshile Gorky is an extreme example of this -- incredibly talented, he made himself into a seemingly artificially humble acolyte of Picasso in the '30s, and then further humbled himself before the younger and inferior-to-himself painter Matta in the '40s, all because Gorky's positional role in relation to "advanced" European art of the time (in his own mind and to some degree in fact) was so damn fraught. And then, as f***** up as all of this might have been or have seemed to be at the time, damned if it didn't lead to some great paintings that apparently Gorky could have come up only in the inside-out, upside-down way that he did. Probably not a typical case for any art or artist, but revealing in its complex weirdness, and sadness too. **Alertness BTW includes self-awareness; the willingness to work hard at what needs to be worked hard at goes without saying, but the hardness of hard work is not, contrary to what Wynton and others like him have said on many occasions, a virtue in itself. Wynton really likes the being smacked on the head with a ruler example, as I recall; rules imply punishment, and that's good for you -- oh boy.

" Your comment some months ago about Malaby playing nothing that resembles a melody (a paraphrase at best) where instead he jumps from harmonic node to harmonic node isn't born out by some of the encounters I've had with his music." Wasn't I talking about Rich Perry there? If so, I caught him live a while after that with Rufus Reid and revised my mixed but respectful feelings a good ways upward. A really nice guy, too. As for "What is the principle organizing element of a performance when song form, harmonic pathway, meter and dynamics are open to the myriad interpretations 'free' implies?" -- it can be, in the right talented, honest hands, any or all of those things, plus probably some others. I think "The Magic City" is a good place to start. It's certainly one of those pieces that feels free as its details unfold yet is experienced as a convincing, "it has to be just this way" whole. We could all (not sure how far that "we" extends in practice) assemble a lot of other examples, from Ornette's "Beauty is a Rare Thing" to many things of Roscoe's and right on to the better pieces (alli mprovised-from-scratch) on an album by some young Chicagoans that I'm about to write liner notes for. I'm afraid that in the course of doing that, I'm going to have to end up trying to answer your question, or at least poke and prod at it.

Hmm--would that one-trick-pony guitarist be Joe Morris, Allen? If so, count me among the duped. And by that I don't mean that I'm un-dupable. BTW, one kind of freeish playing that drives me nuts is the kind that crops up on several recent Steeplechase albums under Dave Ballou's name, with Tony Malaby in the front line, and that I've heard from other players in live settings. (BTW, I've liked Ballou elsewhere, when he's the only horn and/or is playing within given frameworks, and Malaby elsewhere seems at least OK to me, could prove to be much better than that if I knew more of his stuff.) Anyway, it's a version of the so-called "time, no changes" approach, where typically you get a kind of Alphonse and Gaston effect, as in "after you, Alphonse -- no, after you Gaston." That is, everyone is so concerned with the supposed decorum of in-the-moment collective creation, so concerned with not playing something (particularly from a harmonic point of view) that's going to get in the way of everyone else, that all you get are more or less apologetic, noodling adjustments and dial-twistings in the hope that some sort of collective being will eventually take shape. And it doesn't; it's just a collection of hems and haws. I keep wanting to scream, "Will SOMEBODY play something that they really think is interesting and really want to play and forget about not stepping on someone else's toes?"

Lazaro -- I don't like the phrase "anything was possible" because it so easily can be twisted by unfriendly folks into (but this isn't what you're thinking or saying) "they're just doing ANY damn thing" or "my five-year-old (or in some cases, a chimp) could do what (say) Jackson Pollock did there." The things that Ornette, Roscoe, Cecil et al. are/were doing are the things that make sense to them to do -- no less sense, and with no less thought and work behind them, than the things that Ellington, Armstrong, Parker, etc. decided to do. Litweiler's book, I think, distinguishes neatly between metaphorical freedom (i.e. Freedom as a bullshit label) and "genuine" freedom: "Genuine freedom occurs when the artist can communicate most intimately with the materials, the langauge of his or her medium; each innovation in jazz, from the beginnings to the present, appers so that jazz musicians can reveal what cannot be revealed in any other way.... f these innovations do not increaed the artist's capacity for communication, the only Freedom, with a capital 'F,' results." The problem I have with "holding the improvisations" is that to me it doesn't seem to have worked out that way in practice over time i.e. that there's this, I don't know, "hot" or "inspired" improvised solo thing that some compositional/framing/holding impulse is trying to catch up with and is failing to do so. Maybe all I'm saying here is that in the post-Ornette stuff that involves ensemble work and upfront compositional thinking, the improvisations by and large aren't "held"; rather the solo work, the ensemble and the overall strucure is fruitfully permeated by much the same thinking -- and in all directions. Isn't that what it sounds like is happening? Now there are of course still "problems," and Allen alludes to them. And some of them are really tough to solve and may not be "solvable"at all -- given the nature of this music (our music?) -- or perhaps they can be solved only in ways that leave too many listeners (and good musicians) on the outside looking in for the health of anyone. But I still hear enough good answers often enough to think that we're doing more than OK. Besides, while talent alone may not be enough, if you have any other amount of historical or moral or philosophical machinery at hand and you don't have enough talent around, you got nothing. Also, while I think, on a good day, I can recognize talent when I hear it, I sure can't will it into being, nor do I know anyone else who can.

I love Ernie Krivda. Have never met the man, but based on the music of his I've heard on disc, he's absolutely, gloriously nuts. Reminds me a bit of Carmen Leggio in the way he'll pursue a melodic/rhythmic idea to its logical conclusion (in his mind) no matter what, but Krivda is even wilder and shaggier.

Sorry, Jim R. But looking back I suddenly realize that the presence of any visual cue in the midst of printed material -- like your "thumbs up" sign in this case -- tends to blot out from my brain anything and everything that follows it. I'm told that the CIA is investigating this principle, so watch out.

Has anyone mentioned Billy Butler?

Another way to put what I don't like about Carrier, based on that disc with Bley, etc. He apparently can't hear himself (or anyone else either, but especially himself). That is, whatever's happening that sounds momentarily like it might be going somewhere, he stops the flow or smudges or smears things, and every one of these "interruptions" or "deviations" is IMO a bad idea or virtually no idea at all. It's as though, given his skills or lack of same and/or some quirk of ego, he keeps seizing the tiller from his betters and steering right toward the rocks. It seems he can play his instruments in some sense but just has no organic notion of what communal music making is like.

Based on the one Carrier disc I've heard -- the one with Bley, Peacock, and Lambert -- I agree completely with Nate. Remarkably aimless noodling on the leader's part, but I'm keeping at it as kind of litmus test -- living proof that it's not that hard in a free or freeish context to tell the difference between the lame and the purposeful.

The Hi-Los were a folk group? Ah, yes -- those field recordings they made at the Cafe Bon Soir.

There's a Chuck Wayne/Joe Puma LP, "Interactions" (Choice), where on "Body and Soul" Puma plays one of the best solos I've ever heard on that piece from any instrumentalist. Haven't heard enough Puma, though, to say whether he was consistently at that level; I recall other recordings where he seemed rather bland. Another guy who qualifies, though there's not that much available, is Skeeter Best. He had a unique sound -- kind of sophisticated low-key "skrontch," if that makes any sense -- and laid-back phrasing to match. He's great with that Lucky Thompson trio with Pettiford, almost entirely as an accompanist I think, but his contribution is felt, and can be heard some as a soloist on that Granz Modern Jazz Giants date with Dizzy, Stitt, and John Lewis. If there's more good Best available, I love to know about it.

That might be a Parker memorial event of some sort (mounted at a club) that also included Sahib Shihab and Duke Jordan (also Cecil Payne? or Payne instead of Shihab?) and was released originally on Signal perhaps. Don't have the record (if that's the one) but heard some of it back when it was first released and recall it was less than I expected -- the band sounded thrown together, and some tracks were too long for their own good.

Allen, I don't know for sure what the ethics and legalities of this are. It's a long -- about 5,000 words -- self-contained chapter in an under-copyright work, and I was paid by the publisher for writing it. My assumption is that, from the publisher's point of view, it would be wrong for me to post it. I know that when I felt I had to quote about a two-hundred word passage (about Cecil Taylor) from it in my book, I had to go Oxford U. Press' rights and permissions department and get their OK.

Agree on that Connor Atlantic, though it's also good to check out the earlier Bethlehem material, which pretty much made her name (e.g. "All About Ronnie") and often is very spooky along the lines I described. Of her later stuff -- and her later musical self is a big part of the story I think -- I particularly like the mid-1980s "Classic," and not only because I wrote the notes for it. But then there any number of reasonable people -- Martin Williams was one -- who couldn't stand Connor, though she just a hip supper club thing or worse, couldn't stand her intonation for one thing (but then, Martin thought very highly of Mel Torme -- talk about a respect for certain sorts of musicality leading you to miss the big picture). For what it's worth, Ran Blake was and is ga-ga over Connor. Lazaro -- I don't quite get what you mean by "Is it true that the challenge is, 'If anything is possible what will hold the improvisation?'" Did I say something like that? If not, and it's entirely your own question, the terms seem a bit too loose or to make too many assumptions (e.g. that word "anything" and about improvisations necessarily being "held") for me to grab onto right now. Also, FWIW, my extended take on the avant-garde and whatver the issues involved there are or may be is not in this book but in the chapter on that subject that I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz." Would love to have included it in this book, but Oxford U. Press quite rightly would have said "no."

And Phil didn't seem like a weird guy either, although his buddy Gene Quill reportedly was a trip.