Larry Kart

I'm pretty sure that it came out originally on Pacific Jazz. I believe that label didn't mutate into World Pacific until 1958 (supporting that memory is another one -- PJ albums were thickish and kinda heavy, a la most sleeves of the time (BN for example), but WP sleeves were lighter and thinner, and the copy of "Jazz Guitar" I had was of the first sort. Thus, I'd say yes to (1) and (2). Dick Bock's dicking around with the material probably began with a later WP issue. Whatever, you're a lucky man.

"Little Old Lady"? Maybe a bit, but then there's no Trane solo on that track. Do you think the coy/droll mood of that theme statement would have lasted if he'd soloed? Actually, in her liner notes to "Coltrane Jazz," Zita Carno detects some "almost Monkish humor" in the theme of "Harmonique," but then says that Trane "goes right into his 'typical Coltrane blues stuff.'" Actually (Part Two), these brief touches of humor may have something to do with the title of another track from the album, "Like Sonny." Also, later on, there's something a bit impish in the theme statement of "The Inchworm," but that's probably built into the tune (and/or its associations), and again I don't think it lasts through Trane's solo.

I think -- though this may be obvious -- that one of the things that puzzled us (though I'm only speaking for myself here) at the time about VeeJay Wayne vs. early BN Wayne was his apparent "submission" to the prevailing Trane weather front. It seemed like Wayne on VeeJay was on an alternate path -- that having already taken full account of everything Trane was up to, he had decided, "No, I'm going to go this other way." And not only was there then this sense of "going back" on Wayne's part (though because VeeJay Wayne was the first recorded Wayne, I guess we didn't have anything but anecdotal evidence plus sheer likelihood [we knew that they'd played/practiced a lot together] to back up the feeling that Wayne already knew his Trane close to inside out), but also their paths were pretty different or so it seemed: Wayne's wide-eyed, fully conscious play with angles of style and stance, a la Rollins' taste for the sentimental absurd (Sonny's "In the Chapel in the Moonlight," "I'm An Old Cowhand" etc. vs. Wayne's "The Moon of Manakoora," "June Night," and "Mack the Knife"), while Trane on the other hand climbed night after night toward ecstasy and release. Not that it could or should have been otherwise, but is there a moment of humor in Trane's music? That Wayne the magical trickster (or so we thought) should for a time have become similarly solemn was at the time a puzzlement.

I'm also getting an Angie Dickinson vibe here. Whatever -- they don't make 'em that way anymore.

Chuck's account of how that music was received back then was the way it was -- also the puzzlement at the early Blue Note Shorter and the wondering about where the VeeJay seriocomic master of space, time, and dimension had gone to. Here's something I wrote about the VeeJay Wayne from the intro to ye olde book: "A good example of Shorter’s early, fruitfully disruptive approach to improvisation is the solo he took on 'June Night' from the album Kelly Great, made in 1960 under the leadership of pianist Wynton Kelly. The tune is a lightweight pop ditty, and it’s performed by the group with a coy, two-beat stroll. But as Shorter slides into his solo with a vast languid swoon, his listeners suddenly find themselves in a surrealistic fun house, dropping through unexpected trap doors and on the receiving end of some ghostly musical shocks. At one point, for instance, Shorter rises to a pitch of apparently genuine ecstasy, spitting out a rapid-fire figure like a man who has been plugged into a light socket. A moment later, though, Shorter repeats this phrase with the delicately miniaturized grace of a music box, as though he were letting us know that the appearance of soloistic ecstasy may be just that--not a take-it-to-the-bank emotional fact but a cool, even cold-blooded, act of the will that then can be toyed with or even mocked."

A possible sidebar to this question is that for a few year after jazz hit me on the head, I contineed to think of all classical music as a form of Mantovani, nothing but soupy violins and guys with long white hair waving a baton -- yuck! Then I began playing a Vox Box of the Mozart String Quintets that my Mom had around, and another door suddenly swung wide open.

Either 49 or 50 years ago at age 12 or 13; can't say for sure because my birthday is in mid-May, and it hit me at some point in the spring of seventh grade in 1955. Very fortunately, my eighth grade teacher was a jazz fan, and he took me and a friend to a JATP concert and suggested that I buy a Charlie Parker record. Bless you, Bob Zwetz.

A pair of Tristano-influenced trumpeters (a rare breed) --Don Ferrara and Sweden's Jan Allan. Also a guy who's been around for a good while but is just now emerging -- Steve Lampert. He can be heard in striking form on a relatively recent (2002) Steeplechase album under Rich Perry's name, "Hearsay," though it's really Lampert's date it seems; he wrote most of the tunes. Muted throughout, Lampert (no youngster, b. 1953) sounds like he's improvising the sort of lines that George Russell would have written out in the late 1950s, except that the surface is more complicated than that. One hell of a linear thinker. There's also a new Lampert on Steeplechase that I haven't heard but a bit of; most of it's a suite, and there's some synth plus trumpet work from him that sounds like he's worked electronic Miles and even Hendrix into the mix.

And don't forget -- if he hasn't already been mentioned -- Joe Wilder.

If I were a cat, Bill Coleman would make me want to roll over on my back and purr. Another fine player from that era, though perhaps not quite of Coleman's stature, was Shad Collins.

Don Fagerquist. Sort of a cross between Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Hackett, if you can imagine that.

Sorry to sneak beyond the time frame, but two of this guy's greatest albums were recorded in the '60s, or maybe the late '50s. Charlie Shavers. Yes, he had a taste problem at times, but when he was on -- my God! The albums are as a sideman: "Hawk Eyes" under Coleman Hawkins' name (the fours on the title track!) and Hal Singer's "Blue Stompin.'" Both originally on Swingville; the former's on OJC and the later may be too.

I heard that same Jazz Fest jam session set and thought Brown was kind of jive but also felt that it wasn't a setting where you could be sure about anything.

Clunky -- I mean that there was a kind of big band writing that could be heard a lot in the '50s on both coasts that seemed to draw heavily on the Basie and Herman streams and the Lunceford too (as filtered through Kenton perhaps). One good example might be Shorty Rogers' "Shorty Courts the Count," where brash Kenton-Lunceford brassiness (Maynard Ferguson is on board as I recall) is tacked onto '30s Basie material, arguably to rather decadent and/or inorganic effect. This, BTW, in contrast IMO to the attractive cleverness/brashness of some of Rogers other work of the time or just before that time -- you get the feeling that something was rapidly getting overripe in that corner of the music back then. (Part of the overripeness probably stemmed from the fact that so many of the section players in those '50s bands were so much more virtuosic than their '30s and early '40s predecessors that it was tempting to write for them in a way that placed more weight on volume and upper register effects than on groove considerations and the like.) I'm also thinking of East Coast things of the time like Manny Albam's "Drum Suite." Another example of what might have been at stake around then would be a Fresh Sounds Med Flory LP. The first date is by a 1954 NY-based rehearsal band; it sounds utterly at home in a Herman-Basie groove (there's a great Al Cohn chart here, "No Thanks"); this is the music of the present for these guys. Next two dates are on the West Coast from 1956 and '57, by the rehearsal band that would become the core of the Terry Gibbs band. The style of the music is much the same, but the sensibility has changed; now everything is kind of inside quotation marks. (Actually, this would be less the case when Gibbs took over, thanks I would guess to his sheer animal magnetism.)

Brownie: Is "Experiment in Sound" the same album as the one I have on Jasmine under the name "Walk Softly -- Run Wild"? It's basically the same band as on "Wide Range." Also, the beginning of "Nipigon" on "Wide Range" -- austere theme statement (and what a memorable line!) into Gene Quill's squawling alto solo -- is one of the great moments in '50s big band jazz IMO. The level of execution and commitment from Richards' players has always struck as exceptional by the standards of that era or any other. In the notes to a reissue of "Something Else," Richie Kamuca perhaps alludes to what lay behind that, speaking of the immense respect the guys he wrote for had for Richards. For my taste, the balls-out, theatrical goofiness/deleriousness of some of Richards' ideas saved him from the neo-Basie/Herman/Lunceford but much louder and with higher brass stuff that made a lot of '50s big band writing so dull and/or oppressive.

Tooter -- I think I know what you mean about Clark Terry and agree up to a point. Reviewing him several years in a row when he came into town in the '80s, it was hard not to notice how casual he was about paying attention to the shape of his lines in the moment; he had, a la Harry Edison perhaps, so many stock devices (most of them more or less attractive) that he usually just strung them together--this being especially evident when you heard him on a semi-regular basis. Then one time he was paired with Al Cohn (Clark usually worked as a single), and because Al only had one gear -- all out -- Clark was led/forced to shift into that gear too, and the results were startlingly different. Recordings of Terry at that level don't lie think upon the ground in my experience -- his old Emarcy album Swahili is one and of course his Riverside with Monk. Don't have any of the albums of the old Terry/Bookmeyer quintet any more but recall that he was in top form on some of those tracks (a candidate for reissue?)

Philly -- Charles Sullivan played in pit orchestras on Broadway from 1981-95, according to the notes for his nice 1996 Arabesque album, Kamau, with Craig Handy, Kenny Barron, Rodney Whittaker, and Victor Lewis. (Kamua Adilifua is Sullivan's new name; don't know what he's doing now that he's left the Broadway field.) I heard him with that Sonny Fortune band, too. He sounded -- to borrow a phrase someone once applied to Jean-Pierre Rampal -- like he was using bottled air; when did he breathe? A remarkable player, and if memory serves, a fair bit more fiery in-person with Fortune than he is on the Arabesque album, good though it is. BTW, Sullivan brings to mind another bottled-air guy, Carl Saunders. Definitely underrated, perhaps because he's such a great trumpeter player technically that you tend to think that he can't be that much of a thinker -- but at his best, I think he is.

There's also a nutty Bethlehem, "Something Else," from 1956 with one of the more alarming trumpet sections ever assembled -- Maynard F., Buddy Childers, Pete Candoli, Stu Williamson, and Shorty Rogers -- Stan Levey on drums, and strong solo work from Charlie Mariano and Richie Kamuca. Have never heard "The Rites of Diablo" but have heard good things about it.

An excellent Pickens trio album from 1987, "It's About Time" (Southport) may still be available. Two bass and drum teams -- Dan Shapera and Robert Shy, and Larry Gray and Wilbur Campbell. Pickens is a stone bebopper at heart, with personal Tynerish extensions. The relation between the internal rhythms of his phrases and the underlying beat used to strike me as bit skittery/slippery at times, like a guy who was running on ice, but either that was stupid on my part or Pickens got all that locked in place many years ago. Also impressive is his daughter Bethany Pickens.

Carl Woideck's "Charlie Parker: His Life and Music" (U of Michigan Press) is very good.

Jim -- Don't have the album anymore (bought when it came out and eventually dumped it) so I can't check memory against reality, but as I recall, in addition to my feelings about the uncomfortable mood of the date, the rather airless recording job did no favor to the tenormen. Is the CD sound better?

Leeway -- I'm a bit bewildered by your "I was also pleasantly surprised by Hines' piano playing. For some reason, maybe because I had only heard him at the end of his career, I didn't expect such hip playing." A strong case could be made that Hines was at a peak of inventiveness from his "rediscovery" in 1963 on to almost the very end in '83 -- particularly on the vast number of solo recordings he made during that period (though his working band in person was too close to a lounge act for my tastes). Also, if it's not too late, I'd avoid "Ben Webster and Associates." The lineup is great on paper, but it didn't work out that way IMO. The rhythm section is DOA for some reason (the pianist's comping as I recall was a sore spot -- either Oscar Peterson or Jimmy Jones [i like Jones better that Peterson by and large, but his feline obliqueness rubs some players the wrong way] -- and the none of the tenormen is at his best. For Budd of that era I'd go with the Swingville date for starters. It's also nice for Budd's trombonist brother Keg.

Oops -- I must have been thinking of two other single-word Raney titles from earlier on, "Signal" and "Minor," because I don't see any earlier recording of "Action."

Subhed on page 1 of today's Chicago Tribune, my alma mater: "Spec. Jarob Walsh was sent to his Illinois family to recover from his wounds. But he says the longer he stays, the deeper his sense of disconnect."

Listened again to the JA record. It's a lot like the Steeplechase duet album with Doug R. -- high-intensity improvising, and Raney's comping for himself (that track actually was laid down first) is far from vanilla. Fans of earlier Raney will be pleased to know that two of the pieces here are "The Flag Is Up" and "Action." "Blues Andante" makes clear, as much as Raney recording I can think of, how much Grant Green dug him. Also, the exposed format highlights one of Raney's key virtues IMO: As much as any player, the swing of his lines lies not so much in the attack/accent realm but in the progression of pitches, the way (like a lot of Bach) each note tugs against the harmonic gravity/rhythm this way or that and reshapes expectations of what's coming next.