Larry Kart

Can't make comparisons with that Columbia set, which I didn't buy because they screwed several things up there in ways I don't precisely recall anymore (put out some alternate takes as the originally issued performances, I believe -- wasn't Orrin Keepnews involved? that would explain everything) and also because I was holding out hope that there would be a Mosaic, sorely needed because this material cries out for completeness. For instance, wait till you hear Sonny Berman's brief but fairly astonishing solo on "Uncle Remus Said." That track, I'm almost certain, has never been reissued by Columbia or Sony in either the LP or CD era; I have it on a lousy sounding "Woody in Disco Order" bootleg LP.

Got mine today and have listened to disc one so far. I thought I knew this music inside out, but thanks to a great mastering job (fabulous job on the rhythm section in particular), revealing and intriguing alternates, and detailed, shrewd notes, it's like I'm hearing it all for the first time, and with a silly grin on my face. Everyone needs to hear this for Dave Tough at the least; you can hear what he's doing so much better than before, and what he's up to was/is so hip. And Bill Harris, and Flip, and Billy Bauer, and Sonny Berman, and Margie Hyams (much clearer and with more presence, thanks to Malcolm Addey -- who did likewise for Chubby Jackson), and Ralph Burns' charts, etc., etc. -- what a moment in time!

Not so, Shrdlu. Quoting from John Chilton's "Who's Who In Jazz," Freeman "was with Dorsey from April 1936 until joining Benny Goodman in March 1938" -- a month less than two years.

Echoing Dick Sudhalter's opinion in "Lost Chords," a set of six Sunbeam label LPs of the T. Dorsey's band's Raleigh-Kool radio broadcasts "show the band far looser, more powerfully swinging than on its commercial recordings" -- with great work by Dave Tough, clarinetist Johnny Mince, and Bud Freeman (a regular until he left to join Benny Goodman in 1938). Dont believe that material is on CD though (someone tell me if it is, because I don't have all the Sunbeams). A terrific band, with its own style, and there's nothing not to like about TD's trombone.

Thanks for the clarification, Chris. Otherwise, I'd have to --- sue you! About "Ventura on roller skates," believe it or not, that line first popped into my head years ago, in response to a David Murray performance. Don't think I used it in the review though.

Hey Chris -- Maybe I'm too sensitive, but it seems to me like someone (or several someones, I hope not you) was thinking along way too loose lines in the final sentence of this graf from your previous post: "There was another John Levy (also black) who came into Billie's life. This was an unsavory character and Billie came down hard on him in the original manuscript of Lady Sings the Blues. Bill Dufty (her co-author) told me that Doubleday edited all that out, thinking that Levy was Jewish and would sue." Jews are inherently more inclined to sue than Gentiles? Oy Gevalt!

I'm willing to bet that all this boiler plate is just a way to get you to fill out a form in which you give a scam artist your social security number or something of the sort. In fact, I vaguely recall another scam (if indeed this is one) that was directed at PayPal users.

I had one -- but only one -- of those phone calls, too. Stanley was in the Chicago area for a while in the mid-'80s I think it was, working on a book at a suburban writers retreat, the Ragdale Foundation, when he called me out of the blue at the Chicago Tribune to shmooze (or so it seemed). He rattled on a bit, then suddenly said something (in an expansive "guys like you and me who know what's what" manner) about Lester Bowie not being able to play the trumpet, then tried to zoom right on to something else. I said, "Wait a minute" (or words to that effect), "just want to make sure you understand that I don't agree with you about that." Maybe ten seconds later he rang off.

Why is it that so many seemingly critical pieces about Crouch, such as this new Village Voice piece, are compelled to give away the store? "[O]ne of the great essayists of his generation"? As Chris pointed out at the start of this thread, Crouch "is a terrible writer."

l p -- I too would call Joe a sometime grouch rather than a "bastard," especially when it comes to the problem of releasing tapes of performances he's taped. Chuck Nessa can correct me if I've got it wrong, but I'd guess that Joe's main stumbling block here is not that he's greedy but that he wouldn't put out any of that material without obtaining the proper releases from surviving performers, relatives/estates, etc. and that the upfront costs of doing that are beyond his personal means. Doing something of the sort in conjunction with interested parties who do have the dough -- which is something that Joe has done a few times over the years -- would then seem to be the answer, but such parties don't lie thick upon the ground these days, I would think, and besides, any such enterprise would require that Joe be sufficiently organized, somewhat adventurous, and in a mood to cooperate with someone else. Offhand, I wouldn't say being well-organized, cooperative, and adventurous are Joe's strong suits.

Given Dale Peck's "For me the beginning of a [Rick Moody] book is a bit like having a stranger walk up and smack me in the face, and then stand there waiting to see if I’m man enough to separate him from his balls,” it seems more and more like he and Stanley Crouch were made for each other. In fact, even though Stanley seems ready to take the face-smacking route (or worse) at most times, I wonder whether he was directly inspired by this passage. When Life imitates Criticism?

Lazaro -- Book is due in November, so they tell me. I'll post the whys and wherefores when I'm certain. There's a lot of stuff to think about in your two grafs that begin "While the romantic side of the jazz fan..." You're a wise man. About "So in some ways Coltrane was multi-faceted dramatically in his later period -- or at least able to capture the energy, ecstacy and simultaneous confusion of the time, a time that was not so much about reflection as it was going headlong into the future. By the mid-60's Sonny was sounding like that , too, don't you think?" I'd say that however necessary it may be to go "headlong into the future," a lot of heads got lost or badly mangled in the process. As for Sonny sounding like that, too -- what I've always wondered is why his great band with Cherry, Grimes, and Higgins was such a shortlived thing for him stylisticall, even if those particular players couldn't have remanind together. It's like Sonny went out on the edge and thrived there -- and then in the aftermath he became (or even decided to become) historical in relation to himself. A lot of fine music was still to come from him, of course, but it was like the Sonnyness of Sonny was now more or less fixed; the adventures would only be within the boundaries of (though it seems absurd to call it this) his "act" -- little or no significant interaction with players of similar stature or with what was happening in the music around him.

Lazaro -- I have some further thoughts, I think, but won't be able to post until this afternoon or evening.

Oops, that's "The Avant-Garde 1949-1967."

Lazaro -- What I meant at the time (not sure that I still believe it 100 percent) is that when Trane's music sounded excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent, that pretty much meant that the state/attitude/whatever of Trane himself could be pretty much identified with the excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent nature of the music (i.e. his relationship to his material was one to one). This had at least two possible effects: It seems to have drained/ate up Trane as a human being, and its implicit placement of him right inside the music's fiery furnace at all times didn't give him much room to step back and ponder whether somewhat different means (e.g. more rhythmic variety) might have given him more musical room to manuever. Guess I was thinking of the then (and still) vivid example of Roscoe Mitchell, who always gives me the feeling, even at his most explosive, that he's looking down or at himself exploding. Different strokes, I'd prefer to think of at as nowadays. Here's a passage that may apply from my "The Avant-Garde 1959-1967" chapter in "The Oxford Companion To Jazz": A father figure to much of the avant-garde, John Coltrane, like Moses, was not destined to enter the promised land. There were, in the latter portion of Coltrane’s career, at least two dramatic turning points: first, his shift from the dense "sheets of sound" harmonic patterning of "Giant Steps" (Atlantic, 1959) to the agonized, harmonically stripped down expressionism that would be exemplified by "Chasin’ the Trane" (Impulse, 1961); and second, his abandonment of meter, which began in 1965 and continued to his death in 1967. Both of those developments were startling, and both arose because the relationship between foreground and background in Coltrane’s music was an uncommonly uneasy one -- so much so that it seemed at times as though he wished to erase the line between foreground and background and fuse all elements into one. That’s certainly what happens on "Giant Steps": To negotiate at speed the harmonic obstacle course that Coltrane devised for himself is to find that many melodic and rhythmic choices have almost been predetermined -- which may be why, as Ekkehard Jost has pointed out, "some melodic patterns in the first chorus [of Coltrane’s "Giant Steps" solo] appear note for note later on." On "Chasin’ the Trane," the uneasy background/foreground turbulence yields a very different sounding yet finally similar result. On"Blue Train" (Blue Note, 1957), Coltrane had invented a corruscatingly brilliant, "foreground" solo against a spare blues backdrop; on "Chasin’ the Trane," against an even more stripped-down blues framework, he plays a long expressionistic solo of such narrow melodic scope that pitches seem to have become almost irrelevant -- the goal, in the face of Elvin Jones’ galvanic drums , again being to virtually merge with an extravagant background rather than to differentiate oneself from it. In 1961, Coltrane said, "I admit I don’t love the beat in the strict sense, but at this phase I feel I need the beat somewhere." By 1965, it had become clear, in the words of his biographer Lewis Porter, that Coltrane "no longer wanted to swing" but rather to play over "a general churning pulse of fast or slow." Here, too, the example of Charlie Parker may have been crucial. While Coltrane was regarded by his peers as perhaps the most forcefully swinging soloist of his time, he could not, within a metrical framework, approach Parker’s dauntingly transcendent rhythmic acuity.

Marshall really shines on Eddie Costa's "Guys and Dolls Like Vibes," with Bill Evans (at his early best), and Paul Motion.

Marty -- I don't have the set but I have the booklet; my friend Bill Kirchner, whocompiled the set and wrote the booklet sent me a copy a few years ago. Because it's 88-pages worth -- with complete personnel, discographical info, etc., plus valuable critical commentary on every track -- I think the best plan would be for me to mail the booklet to you, and then you could copy as many pages as you wish. Send me your address, and I'll send it along.

Jim -- Maybe "shift" isn't the right word, but what I meant is everything that follows that sentence in the notes about the way Rollins developed what might be called "a set of orchestral selves" or "an orchestral set of selves" (hey, why didn't I think of putting it that way?) -- and developed this both in the sense that people like you and me could take what he was doing that way but also in the sense that was really what he was up to: toying with a near-incredible humane gusto with ways of being "here," "there" and "elsewhere" at one and the same time, something that was open to an orchestral dramatist like Ellington, who had an orchestra of personalities/colors at his command, but not to many (if any) horn soloists before Rollins, with of course the pioneering exception of Hawkins. And then would come Wayne to do something similar yet different with the old soloistic "self."

Sal -- I agree that Rollins became Rollins with "Worktime" -- or that was the first recorded evidence of what he had become during his year of woodshedding in Chicago. On the other hand, pre-"Worktime" Rollins still sounds like Rollins to me, just not with the same gargantuan comand of every musical and emotional resource. FWIW, here are the notes I wrote for a 1972 reissue of "Worktime" (with a slightly different ending than the original): Most jazz fans, myself included, tend to view the process of jazz creation in a dramatic, even romantic light. If the artistic product is turbulent, passionate, noble, etc., we feel that the circumstances surrounding its creation must have been similar in tone. As one has more contact with musicians, though, one discovers that it is rarely that simple--musical events that to the listener seem immensely dramatic may have been created in a casual, "let’s get the job done" manner. I mention this as a mild corrective, for if ever there was a recording that deserved the term "dramatic," Worktime is it. The situation was this: Sonny Rollins, who by 1954 had established himself as the best young tenorman in jazz, moved to Chicago for most of 1955 and "woodshedded" (that apt jazz term for artistic self-examination). He emerged to join the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, and when he recorded Worktime on December 2, 1955, it was his first appearance on record since October 1954, when recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk. "Worktime" was a dramatic and startling event, then and now, because it revealed that during his sabbatical Rollins had made a quantum jump in every area of musical procedure. He was no longer "the best young tenorman" but a major innovator whose achievements would have implications for the future course of jazz that have not yet been exhausted, either by himself or by all those he has influ-enced. Most obviously, there was an increase in rhythmic assurance and sonoric variety on Rollins’s part. But these and other seemingly technical gains were all in the service of a shift in sensibility, a unique attitude toward his material that had only been hinted at in his previous work. I imagine that everyone who admires Rollins’s music has commented on its humorous quality, though there seems to be agreement that "humorous," by itself, is not an adequate description. David Himmelstein has added the information that it is "the humor of inwit, of self-consciousness or, as Sonny once aptly put it, the consciousness of a generation nourished on ‘Lux--you know, the Radio Theatre,’ " and Max Harrison has given us the terms "sardonic" and "civilized irony." But the best guide I have found to the sensibility that emerges on Worktime is a remarkable article by Terry Martin titled "Coleman Hawkins and Jazz Romanticism" that appeared in he October 1963 issue of Jazz Monthly. In commenting on Hawkins’s version of "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" (which can be heard on the album Soul ) Martin says that "the whole is a finely shaped drama. Dramatic structure may in fact point to the core of Hawkins’s art. He handles his materials with the ease and cunning of a great drama-tist, and as with great drama the meaning may not correspond exactly with what the characters are made to say. It is the personae and the relations generated be-tween them that contain the essence of the achievement." Much of this also applies to Rollins, though his kind of drama differs in form and content from Hawkins’s. A comparison between "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" and "There Are Such Things" from Worktime may show what the differences are. As Martin points out, one of Hawkins’s methods is to make an initial statement that is romantic in character and then juxtapose it with "highly emotive rhythmic figures" that eventually lead back to the original mood. It is as though he were saying, "Yes, romance does exist, but I want to show you the tough reality that lies underneath." Structurally, Hawkins’s drama is double in effect but single in method--i.e., allowing for foreshadowing devices, he presents one personae at a time--while with Rollins the method as well as the final effect is double ( at the least). No statement is allowed to rest unqualified by him for more than a few measures, and often the very tone quality and accentuation with which a phrase is pre-sented is felt as an ironic commentary upon it. The implications of such an approach are numerous. For one, even though Rollins can retain and heighten the pattern of linear motivic evolution that was hailed en-thusiastically by Gunther Schuller as "thematic improvising," the effect of constant renewal produced by his simultaneous or near-simultaneous expression of multiple points of view is, I believe, the more radical and lasting de-velopment, for it enables the soloist to achieve an emotional complexity that before was largely the province of such orchestral masters as Duke Ellington, whose every band member is potentially a musical/dramatic character. Also, it opens the door to a new view of the jazz past, for the improviser can now range beyond the apparent boundaries of style and make use of any musical ma-terial that his taste for drama can assimilate. Rol-lins’s frequent use of such unlikely vehicles as "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Sonny Boy," "In a Chapel in the Moonlight," "Wagon Wheels," and "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" can be seen in this light--for while one wouldn’t swear that none of these pieces (and there are many more like them) appeals to Rollins on essentially musical grounds, it’s a safe bet that he is drawn to them because he likes to evoke, toy with, and comment upon their inherent strains of corniness, prettiness, and sentimentality . And by bringing orchestral/dramatic resources into the range of the individual soloist, Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane. The finest tracks on Worktime, for me, are "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Raincheck," and "There Are Such Things." Notice, in particular, the utterly unexpected insertion of the verse of "Show Busi-ness" (where Rollins is accompanied only by Morrow’s strong bass line) right after the theme statement. What results is quintessentially Rollins-esque, a compulsively swinging, serio-comic tour de force that at once embraces and bemusedly holds at arms’ length the flag-waving fact of Ethel Merman’s existence.

Eric -- If, as you say, "Peck's schtick gets tiresome," why should it "inspire an interesting defense" of late Joyce or of any DeLillo (the former IMO defensible but not my idea of a good time, the latter just claptrap) or anything else? One would be engaging -- implicitly or explictly -- in a dialogue in which the other party (Peck) already had demonstrated his bad faith by being (again IMO) more interested in engaging in power-games schtick than in anything else. It would, to close the circle perhaps, be like arguing with Stanley Crouch.

I meant "nudging my hand," not "nuding" it -- although "nuding my hand" does bring a strange image to mind.

The problem (if that's the way to put it) about stopping with "Keeper of the Flame," though that's more or less what I've done myself, is that "Keeper" covers the latter days of the Second Herd, and the Third Herd (which is what's on most of the Mosaic set) was a band with a different flavor. I prefer the Second Herd, if I had to choose, but the Third Herd had definite attractions, with its well-matched Pres-drenched tenorman, Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, bass trumpeter Cy Touff, a cooking rhythm section sparked by drummer Chuck Flores, and lots of esprit de corps (though it stopped well-short of the IMO rather artifical flash and peppiness of the Bill Chase/Phil Wilson Phillips era). I'd probably have sprung for the Mosaic Capitol, except that a year or so back I found a playable copy of "Jackpot," the Capitol set by the octet with Kamuca and Touff that Woody played Vegas with in '55. Recorded within days of the celebrated Touff-Kamuca Pacific Jazz date, it has much the same relaxed/urgent feel -- at its best it may be even groovier. One of the first records I ever bought (back when it came out), and lack of it might have have been enough to push me into getting the Capitol Mosiac. On the other hand, vague but fond memories of the Third Herd's version of Horace's "Opus de Funk" (from the "Road Band" album) are still nuding my hand toward the "order" button.

I've got the Accord CD. Haven't listened to it in a while but remember it fondly. The Hyperion CD of his songs is at Berkshire for $6.99: http://www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com/cgi-b...ndOr=AND&RPP=25

Basically, what's happened here is that a thug (Crouch) wrote a terrible book and then got mugged in print by a mugger (Peck); then the thug acted according to type when he got a chance. Moral distinctions are hard to come by in this, I think; thug and mugger deserve each other. In fact, it would be lovely if Crouch and Peck were now linked through all eternity.

Chris -- As it happens, the timing is good: See John Leonard's review of Peck's collected book reviews, "Hatchet Jobs," in todays' NY Times Book Review. Peck's review of Stanley's novel actually was one of his (i.e. Peck's) better pieces of work -- a man with a need to proclaim that we're being fed nothing but dung finds himself feasting on a veritable mountain of it. Peck's problem is that his protests IMO are not genuine (however much one might be tickled by a particular Peck assault) but part of a self-serving stance, as in "I'm the best and/or only brave stable cleaner the Republic has to offer." I think we agree on what Stanley's problems are.