Larry Kart

Crouch versus Peck, genuine cockroach versus wannabe scorpion. On the other hand, aside from that rough "Which circle of Hell are you in, mister?" equivalence, it probably says something about Stanley's egomania that a good many years after Peck's smack at "Don't Look the Moon Look Lonesome" appeared, Stanley should feel the need not only to physically confront its author but also to issue that weird Wild West threat. Again, Peck isn't even a real scorpion, but if we had a world in which the ultimate response to criticism (even of Peck's sort) were violence, I'm hoping that Chuck Norris doesn't write a book.

Don't forget Chicago's own Birfhouse and the various incarnations of Joe Segal's Jiz Showcase.

Speaking of blind spots, I remember Ira Gitler telling me that he didn't care for Von because he though Von played out of tune. I know what he was referring to, but come on! Unless you grant Von his almost always precisely controlled/shaded intonational universe, which fits into/feeds into everything else he does, you've got no Von Freeman. And this from a man (i.e. Ira) with a deep love for Jackie McLean's music.

I agree with Pete C about that Collectables disc. Don't miss its subtle version of "'Round Midnight," which quite naturally moves Monk closer to Wilson's world than you'd think possible, and the majestic version of "Artistry in Rhythm." The Gershwin stuff is great too.

Brownie -- Thanks for the order, but it looks like you'll have to wait a while. On the other hand, my experience so far has been that in anything that has to do with a book, the author is the last one to know -- it may arrive in August or September. BTW, while I'm getting a bit tired of the contents (having read the stuff over so many times for production/editing reasons), I'm really stoked about the cover. It's based on a grainy, black-and-white flash photo (a bit like a Weegee Graflex image) of bassist Nevin Wilson, Ira Sullivan (on trumpet and soloing, in shades and wearing a narrow-lapel pinstripe suit), and Johnny Griffin (he's listening very intently, horn cradled, also in shades and wearing a loose-weave "Who shot the couch?" sportscoat) in a Chicago club circa 1957 (maybe at a Monday offnight session at the Gate of Horn, maybe at the Pink Poodle). The vantage point is angled sharply upwards and it's taken from very close up, as though the photographer were sitting at a front table, about a foot or two from the edge of the raised bandstand and/or as though the musicians were right in your lap. The shot has a tremendous immediacy, I think, and powerfully conveys the aura of the times -- the sense that you and the players were to some degree swept up in a common enterprise. Besides, I could have been in that seat myself at just that time, listening to Sullivan and Griffin (most typically with a rhythm section of Jodie Christian, Victor Sproles, and Wilbur Campbell). A copy of the photo was passed on to me in 1977 by Joe Segal to illustrate an interview I'd done on Ira, who was coming back to town for the first time in maybe 15 years. Joe no longer has the original and doesn't know who took it (could have been just a snapshot, most probably not the work of a pro). Based on what I recall of Ira and Griffin's comings and goings at that time, 1957 would have been the latest possible time for it to be taken. I'll dare to launch a thread on the book when I'm sure that everything is nailed down.

Of course, "funny." I interviewed Zappa for Down Beat, circa 1968, by the side of a motel swimming pool with some of his band present, notably Don Preston, who seemed like a very nice guy. Lots of ominous/sometimes amusing tension between Zappa and his minions. Piece is in Ye Olde Forthcoming Book, which I'm now told is scheduled for November.

I thought that was Frank Zappa, and the line was "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells bad."

It's that Jaspar Jazz Hot article, or excerpts from it, that's included in the J.J. Mosaic booklet.

I think I know (and agree with) what Chuck means -- though I do like both sides of Rodney's "Red Arrow." Elvin was very one-way rhythmically -- elliptical and/or rotational -- and while that way could be as vast as all outdoors, it certainly didn't fit everyone. To those Chuck mentioned, I'd add Earl Hines and Cecil Taylor.

Stanley I first heard on that excellent Tommy Turrentine Time LP. I thought he was very nice but perhaps a little crude in that context, like he'd rather be playing another kind of music. I think I was right. The next time I heard him I think was on that Blue Note album with Les McCann and Candy Finch, which was just a riot, I thought -- a nutty delight. I like the BN Stanley best but also enjoyed that CTI big jukebox hit of his whose name I can't recall right now. After that, things got a bit mechanical maybe, but every time I heard him live in later years in a blowing context, he was a gas. Elvin I first heard pretty early -- either on the "Tommy Flanagan Overseas" (New Jazz) album (all on brushes and amazingly unlike any brush work prior to that) or on one side of Red Rodney's "Red Arrow" (Signal), both 1957, then on the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams "10 to 4 at the Five Spot" (Riverside). It seemed fairly clear that there was something new going on here time-wise, something elliptical for want of a better term (in the liner notes to the J.J. Johnson Mosaic set, there's a fine discusssion of this by Bobby Jaspar). Also, I had a friend who was a very good drummer, and he may have made me that much more alert to what was happening. On the whole, though, the really big Elvin thing hit me when it hit everybody else -- when he joined Coltrane. I remember two moments from that band's second engagement in Chicago, at the Sutherland Lounge in the spring of 1961. First, my drummer-friend's girlfriend (a rather fey type) gave Elvin a box of chocolate chip cookies she'd baked for him; he was delighted. Second, on another night Elvin was late for the second set, then came downstairs from his room (the Sutherland was a hotel) and strolled into the lounge completely unclothed (and no doubt a bit wasted). How, and how quickly, this situation was resolved I don't know; I wasn't a witness but know and trust the people who were.

As a devout Mobley-ite, I wouldn't kick the Blackhawk Mobley out of bed, but just compare his work with that band to his contemporary work for Blue Note, which arguably is his greatest -- Soul Station, Roll Call, Workout, Another Workout. No comparison IMO. Aside from the possible/likely draft directed his way by Miles (and no one could chill you like that MF could), I'd guess that the key differences are the presences on Blue Note of Alfred Lion, Blakey, and Philly Joe, and the presence with Miles of Jimmy Cobb -- certainly a tasty drummer but not one who could give Mobley the kind of empathetic, interactive support he needed.

Don't know whether these qualify as underrated or virtually unknown, but how about composer John Benson Brooks' "Folk Jazz U.S.A." (VIK) and "Alabama Concerto"? The former with Nick Travis, Zoot Sims on alto and Al Cohn on baritone, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson, the latter with Art Farmer, Cannonball, Galbraith and Milt Hinton. "Alabama" is the more ambitious effort, a unique and major effort of long-form jazz composition that also includes lots of strong improvisation; "Folk" is based on more folksy material than "Alabama" (which draws on Harold Courlander's field recordings, but "Folk" has some soulful, very into-the-mood solo work, especially from Cohn (on "Lord Randall, My Son") and Sims (who's lyricism on, I think, "Turtledove," is ungodly). Brooks, while his own man, was a George Russell associate, and it shows.

I caught Bruce once at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, in 1959 or '60. Got in with a friend -- we were were both way underage (a senior [me] and a junior in high school), but my friend was well over six feet tall and looked pretty grown up. Unless my memory is playing tricks, this was a night when Lenny made up or debuted a routine -- the "Jean Laffite is bombarding the Capitol!" one about Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana going batty -- because the events that gave it point had happened that day. Not the greatest thing Lenny ever did by any means, but the "nowness" of it was exciting. In fact -- and I'm someone who went on to write a shitload of reviews and think pieces about comedians over the years and interview lots of comics (from Sahl to Andy Kaufmann) -- the "nowness" that Lenny could create was without parallel in my experience. I remember in particular some interplay he launched with one of the club's Latino busboys. The sense that a norm was being at once casually and threateningly violated was overwhelming -- if only because we knew that Lenny was stepping over a line, and that neither we nor he know how far he was going to go. The phrase that I came up with at the time or soon after, and that's stuck in my head is: "Being with Lenny is like being in the same room with a ticking time bomb." BTW, the idea of Lenny as some kind of crusading civil libertarian strikes me as nonsense. Not that his work didn't bring up such issues -- and to the degree that his work became preoccupied with his legal problems, more's the pity for the most part, in terms of the quality of his work. Pauline Kael, of all people (I'm not normally a fan), wrote by far the best piece about Lenny I know, her essay-review of Bob Fosse's sanctimonious biopic "Lenny" (it's in her collecting "Reeling"). A sample: "Lenny Bruce was on nobody's side. The farthest-out hipster, like the farthest-out revolutionary, has an enormous aesthetic advantage over everybody else: he knows how to play his hand to make us all feel chicken. Bruce's hostility and obscenity were shortcuts to audience response; he could get and hold audiences' attention because they didn't know what or whom he was going to attack or degrade next; and they could sense that he wasn't sure himself.... The scriptwriter of 'Lenny' must have thought that Bruce's material was so good that an actor can say it and this will be enough. But those routines don't work without Bruce's teasing, seductive aggression and his delirious amorality. If they are presented as the social criticism of a man who's out to cleanse society of hypocrisy, the material falls flat.... [bruce] went to the farthest lengths he could dream up not out of missionary motives but out of a performer's zeal."

Andy Fitz probably is Andy Fitzgerald, onetime member of the Joe Mooney Quartet. Didn't we have a thread on vocalist/accordian player/organist Mooney a while back?

As fate would have it, some of the tracks with Herman vocals also include superb work from the band and its soloists (e.g. Sonny Berman on "That's What Uncle Remus Said").

I'm sure that Brooks' career is very much on the plus side, but I recall some controversy (can't cite chapter and verse, but I'm sure Chris can enlighten me--perhaps it involved Billie Holiday material) over Brooks' penchant for salting reissues with previously unissued takes of performances--this in some cases in lieu of (not in addition to) the originally issued takes. This, as I recall, was motivated (or such was the claim of those who protested) by Brooks' background as a collector of 78s, but clearly (so the protesters felt) the originally issued takes ought to take precedence, provided reasons of economy precluded the use of all musically valid takes. Certainly it would be bizarre if the company that owned the rights to the originally issued take of "Me, Myself and I" (to take one possible example) allowed a reissue producer to remove that recording from circulation and substitute an alternate take for it. One case of that of which I'm certain: the 1988 Columbia LP "1940s The Small Groups: New Directions" (produced by Brooks), where the originally issued Woody Herman Woodchoppers recordings of "Fan It" and "Lost Weekend" are replaced by previously unissued alternate takes.

Thanks, Chris. I've never done that AMG search, didnt even know it existed. Weird feeling. Actually, I've written plenty more liner notes than are on that list, but the reason I got the "Filles" gig was that Bob Belden was the producer/compiler/whatever of that reissue, and back when he was in college he read a club review I'd written for Down Beat in '69 or '70 of the so-called "lost" Miles Quintet (the one with Wayne, and Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette in the rhythm section) and thought it was on the money. Belden, being a Miles fanatic, filed that away in his head and later passed on some bootleg Miles tapes of that vintage to me. We've had intermittent contact over the years (at first I didn't even know he was a musician), but he knew who I was, I knew who he was, and voila! It was a lot of fun. And thanks, Greg K, for the compliment.

I wrote those notes, and Jim's name is there because I bounced a rough draft off of him, he had some very shrewd comments, I wanted to use one of them and thought he ought to get credited for it. After all, it was his idea.

Hey, Double M -- "Bob Belden has lied to me on many occasions about these recordings" made me laugh out loud. What I remember most about the band's Chicago gig was how crisp Mickey Roker sounded and how unexpected his rather tight (almost Swing era) time feel was in the context of that band playing that music. (By "tight" I mean nothing negative BTW--just a different approach than I was used to from, say, Billy Higgins.) Another thing I recall is that I came up to Lee between sets and asked him if he knew what had happened to Tina Brooks -- who was still alive but long gone from the scene. Don't recall exactly what Lee said, but my recollection was that while he was verbally noncommital, his facial expression (maybe a wince, then pursed lips) was a three-act play.

I'd say Chuck, easily, but Gould reminds me of that knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" -- rendered limbless, even headless, he doesn't/wouldn't know the difference.

Is there any reason to disbelieve Bob Belden's account, in the BN "Live at the Lighthouse" booklet, of where the Fresh Sounds material came from? Belden, who's reliable on such matters to my knowledge, says (per Bennie Maupin) that the Fresh Sounds material came from a San Francisco gig at the Both/And (broadcast over the radio), two weeks prior to the Lighthouse gig. Thus, the FS performances are airchecks and do not duplicate the Lighthouse performances. Haven't heard the FS discs, but the sound on the Lighthouse performances has always seemed plenty beastly to me (clotted, distorted, you name it). Who was the idiot, one Dino Lappas, who recorded them -- or was Lappas working under weird restrictions? (Belden speaks of the source tape problems, more gently than he should have IMO.) I did hear the band live in Chicago, and somewhere in my brain there's preserved a decent sense of how they really sounded.

Yes, but at times there's a price to be paid for Conyers' "Congressman from the Land of Jazz" role. See Terry Teachout's piece "The Color of Jazz" (originally printed in Commentary magazine, now collected in a book, "The Terry Teachout Reader") about Conyer's bullying attempt to get the racial composition of the Smithsonian Masterworks Orchestra changed when it turned out to include too many white musicians to suit him. (The orchestra was, and I assume still is, a jazz repertory ensemble, a la the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.) Teachout has something of an axe to grind in that piece, but Conyers did too. Take a look if you can find the piece, and see what you think. In that vein, I love Conyers' condescending, gratuitous "I've always argued that white guys can learn to play jazz" -- particularly that "learn."

Brownie -- Don't know about Buena Vista, but I'm looking right at my Disneyland copy of "Tutti's Trumpets." You're right that some of it is more than a little schamltzy, but the section work is pretty staggering, as you might expect given this personnel: Conrad Gozzo, Pete Candoli, Shorty Sherock, Mannie Klein, Ray Triscari, and Uan Rasey. Some tracks with strings, some with saxes, some with full orchestra.

Heard Roscoe at Hothouse Friday night, preceded by almost hour-long live interview with Roscoe (in a genial, informative, statesman-like mood), a fine set by Ted Sirota's Rebel Souls (with Steve Berry subbing for Jeb Bishop and Jeff Parker in fine form). Roscoe was with Corey Wilkes, Harrison Bankhead, and Vincent Davis -- not my favorite Mitchell associates but none of them got in the way, and Wilkes at odd moments showed signs that he might become more than a circus musician. During the interview, Roscoe said something about how on some nights you can do whatever you want, and in some nights you have to work at it. This seemed like a night of the first sort. Wide variety of approaches from Roscoe on various horns -- flute, piccolo, sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass saxes. I was particularly struck by how much time he spent on note-wedded-to-note linear playing rather than on circular firestorms (though "circular" is just shorthand on my part, don't think it's the right term.) In the linear realm, Roscoe is incredibly lucid-compositional -- beginning on flute, it seemed like he could have sustained the skein of his thinking forever; it was like watching a painter who never needs to lift his brush from the canvas. Linked to this (partly because Roscoe lines were relatively exposed in this setting) is something I've never felt as strongly before: For a supposedly "free" player, Roscoe is a potent, novel harmonic thinker -- a la Bach in the solo cello or violin works, his lines (when he's in a linear groove) always imply a bass line that exists in meaningful dialogue with the horn line we actually hear. In fact, as John Litweiler pointed out when we were talking afterwards, this is in part built into Roscoe's sound, on alto especially -- the way most of his notes, timbrally, have a top, middle, and bottom (at the very least). And all of this is linked to Roscoe rhythmic concept(s), which to coin a term I'd describe as "anti-fluid." That is, he likes to build musical machines whose workings always expose the fact that they are doing the work that they're doing, that explain themselves in the act. Thus perhaps, his penchant for finding what I'd call "offbeats of offbeats" -- where Roscoe places his accents (this is especially clear in his solo percussion forays, though there none of them last night) are places where no music I'm aware of has ever gone before; it's as though, in the melodic realm, he had discovered twelve new notes in the octave, ones that somehow didn't seem like variations on the pitches we know. Though we do feel to some degree the "offness" of the these new places, especially rhythmically, it's mostly ( or more like, or wants to be) another centered world (a la Monk). As with Monk, perhaps, the drive on Roscoe's part is not only simply "This is what interests me, and maybe no one has been here before" (i.e. exploration rather than upheaval--at one point during the the interview, he wryly said that if he had to start all over, he'd want to be an astronaut) but also (as implied above) exposure of the workings to himself and to us; he makes a completely lucid music that at once moves like crazy and stands there like a building, a music you can be overwhelmed by (if you're so inclined) and think about at the same time.

Speaking of Jim R's reference to "some very advanced Tal," I heard Farlow at a club in Chicago in the mid-1980s I think -- after the final Concord album was made I'm pretty sure -- and was astonished by what I heard. This was a whole other level of mental and physical agility; Tatum was the comparison that leapt to mind. In fact, in a longish life of listening, the only times I've ever felt that the sheer intensity of musical thought/execution was clear beyond my ability to grasp all that was going on in real time were recordings by Tatum, Bird, and this live Farlow. (Perhaps Cecil Taylor too, but Cecil's a somewhat different story.)