Larry Kart

Yes, but probably on a weeknight.

You know that Zeitlin, Williams, and Wilson will be at the Jazz Showcase this week, right?

I have a 1983 JA Records (Jamey Aebersold) album "Play Duets with Jimmy Raney." To quote the liner notes: "The right channel contains the melody and improvised choruses. The left channel contains the melody and comping choruses.... You can play either part by turning off the appropriate channel or enjoy the complete recording in stereo." So it's Raney improvising and comping for himself, and its top notch -- all Raney originals too. Maybe it's still available through Aebersold. BTW, while agreeing that Raney is a great guitarist, I also think of him as one of the greatest improvisers in jazz regardless of instrument.

Couw -- By and large I prefer the BN Jackie too; he'd grown, he'd learned, he was to some extent a different man, a better player. But he also was the same man, and the way the music tells the story of how he'd come to be the same but different is far from the least interesting story that music has to tell.

Oops -- pressed the wrong key. What I started to say, was: Don't want to get ponderous about this, but perhaps a la what Jim S. said, Prestige Jackie/Blue Note Jackie presents in especially stark form the autobiographical/personal historical factor in jazz -- both in playing it and listening to it. As I mentioned above, when I first heard the Prestige/New Jazz Jackie back in 1956, that was virtually all the Jackie there was, and that music leapt out of the speakers and grabbed me (and a lot of other people too) right by the throat. It was one of the REALEST damn things I'd ever heard, and emotional realism/truthtelling was one of the things I was hungry for in music and everywhere else I could find it (this was the mid-'50s after all) -- again, I'm pretty sure, like a lot of other listeners. The force and weight of Jackie's testimony of that time will never leave me (it sure didn't/couldn't leave him; he was living it!), and I believe it easily can be heard in his music of that time even if you you weren't around to hear it back then -- the whole context is built right into it. More than that, the fact of the Prestige Jackie, plus the fact of his then dropping off the scene, was a crucial part of the context for the early Blue Note Jackie -- for the joy and relative health/strength/ease of "Swing, Swang, Swingin'" and then for the conceptual breakthrough of "New Soil." Again, all of this is built into the music IMO, though I admit that Jackie is a pretty extreme case of this sort of thing.

Don't want to get ponderous about this, but perhaps a la what Jim .

P.S. It probably was the cover photo of "Jackie McLean and Co." more than anything else that led some to wonder about McLean's racial background.

This is a different Jackie than the early Blue Note McLean -- more acidic in tone, more awkward or laborious in phrasing (but expressively so), and probably more than a little strung out at times, but that's part of the story. Besides, it was this version of McLean that first grabbed me by the lapels and set the stage for his eventual dramatic BN re-emergence, because by then a fair number of us thought that we might never hear from him again. My favorite Prestige is "Jackie McLean and Co." -- with Bill Hardman, Ray Draper, Mal Waldron, Doug Watkins, and Art Taylor. Every track works, but the early McLean performances par excellence IMO are the slow minor blues "Help," where Jackie's solo sounds like a literal cry for...., and "Beau Jack," where he begins by worrying a single jagged phrase almost to a point beyond what seems imaginable or even bearable -- but then from the point of view of what's being expressed, that's the point. Another very good album is the somewhat earlier "Lights Out" -- with Donald Byrd, Elmo Hope, Watkins, and Taylor -- especially the title track, before which the lights were dimmed in the studio to enhance the mood.

There was a Dizzy Gillespie Down Beat Blindfold Test where Leonard Feather played a track from one of the Blue Note jam session albums that Brooks appeared on, maybe Burrell's "Blue Lights" or Jimmy Smith's "House Party." Dizzy dug Brooks' solo and asked Feather who that was. Leonard told him, and Dizzy said: "Tina Brooks? Is that a LADY?"

Sorry if I muddied the waters here by not reading the initial question carefully enough. On the other hand, if drug use barred a musician from having albums released by Blue Note (or made it much less likely), where would that have left any number of Blue Note regulars, from Blakey on down? Almost certainly, Brooks' drug use (if, as seems likely, there was some) had nothing to do with Blue Note not releasing anything under his own name after "True Blue." Drug use would have been a problem with Blue Note only if it prevented a musician from showing up at rehearsals and in the studio in shape to play.

Talking to Brooks' friend and musical associate trumpeter Oliver Beener while working on the notes for "Minor Move," I was told by Beener that the cause of Brooks' death was "general dissipation." That doesn't explicitly say drug use, but it seems likely that drug use was part of the picture.

We were in London in about '88, at the Forbidden Planet bookstore on our last afternoon in town while our son (about 12) spent at least an hour culling out from the stock every precious Judge Dredd comic book he could find. Just as we got to the counter, the whole block was evacuated because of a bomb scare (IRA I believe), and we were told that the store would not reopen that day. Only now am I beginning to be forgiven for this.

I know that Lazaro Vega = Blue Lake, just dunced out on your given name while typing that reply and didn't feel like hunting for it. Would love to hear what Kalaparusha had to say. Don't know that Louis Smith/Christian duo album, will look for it. Another Chicago guy (at one time) who had/has that open, perhaps even vulnerable, non-ironclad "pro" feeling was Chris Anderson. I have cassette I made of Frank Chace rehearsing with pianist Bob Wright (a sadly little-known player who had one foot in ragtime and Harlem stride, one foot in Tristano but really sounded like no one but himself and who no longer is able to play because of arthritis or some similar muscle-joint condition). Among the pieces they play are "Warm Valley," "If You Could See Now" and "Ladybird." Commercially available at one time from ragtime pianist-writer Terry Waldo was a cassette Waldo had made of Wright playing rags and stride pieces. It's something else.

Blue Lake, sorry for mixing up what horn Armacost plays on what track. It's been a while since I listened to the album. In my recent experience -- a couple of live performances last Sept., several recent albums -- Kalaparush has been pretty variable, but at his best he can stop your heart. At the Chicago Jazz Fest he played a ballad (said later that he'd essentially improvised it on the spot; it sounded like that was the case) that was one of the most beautful songs I've ever heard -- as though Coleman Hawkins had improvised "Body and Soul" as well as played his solo on it. That night at a club, or maybe it was the next night, it seemed like he and the trio never got into gear. Could be that the variability (if I'm right about that) and Kalaparusha's ability to go to deep primal places are aspects of the same thing. He's got little or no "professional" armor, but when his (honest, vulnerable, open?) human presence aligns with the musical setup of the moment, it's something else. I've gotten some of the same feeling from other Chicago musicians in other styles over the years -- in particular, Wilber Campbell and Nicky Hill, maybe Jodie Christian and clarinetist Frank Chace too -- an exceptional sensitivity to the immediate musical environment (sometimes to the point of vulnerability if things weren't going just right around them) that allowed them to go to places that more iron-clad "pros" would never dream of. Kalaparush's background and era are different, though, and all this may be just my imagination working overtime.

FWIW, I wasn't knocked out. Here's an email I sent today to someone I'd urged to go but who couldn't make it: "Actually, you were in luck. The brief opening set (with Jeb Bishop, Thomas Maier [contrabass sax), Peter Schmid [bass clarinet and e flat clarinet), Fred Lomborg-Holm, Kent Kessler, and Tim Mulveena) was quite good, with Bishop in a very relaxed and creative frame of mind, but the featured group -- led by Jorrit Djikstra and with most of the same players (James Falzone in, Maier and Schmid out) -- was not very successful I thought. I like Djikstra's playing on alto all right, but he used a lyricon (yuck!) on two pieces out of four before I left (would have stayed till the end, but I had to get up at 6:30 a.m.), and his writing was full of what someone once called "twiddly bits" -- the kind of thing Miles Davis probably was referring to when he said of an Andre Hodier piece that it was 'like a bad modern painting.'" Schmid and Maier (sp?) are Swiss. The opening set BTW was "free," in the good sense.

Paul -- What I understood MW to mean by "Jimmy Raney was bebopper!"was that beboppers by and large (in his opinion) were prone to build solos by stringing together a lot of licks, not by thinking melodically. I recall that he said something like that in a DB Bystander column about Serge Chaloff. So for me to cite Raney as a great jazz lyricist was in Martin's view absurd. I still say he was dead wrong on this one, but then by that point he was pretty angry.

Barring a deluge, I plan to catch the band in Chicago tonight.

Jim -- My feelings about Williams are way on the plus side. Not that many critics in any realm ever do as many things right as he did and do them on the spot too. (His immediate response to/role in making a way for Ornette was a great thing, even if some feel that he stepped over a critical ethical line or two at that time, praising a guy in print while he also was involved in pushing/guiding his career to some extent.) On the other hand, I didn't have to work with/for Martin. The chewing-gum story is for the sequel (or "sequel").

Jim -- Martin Williams blowing his top must have been something to behold. I was never on the receiving end in person but do have several knife-in-the-gut letters and postcards from MW. He was my idol I guess back in the mid- to late-1950s when he was writing for Down Beat, the Saturday Review, Evergreen Review etc. -- he seemed like the only guy around who was dealing with the music seriously (although in Martin's hands, seriously sometimes became "seriously," which to an impressionable teenager of a certain sort must have been part of the charm). When I got to DB in '68, he still had a column there, and we corresponded/talked on the phone a fair bit over the years on a tense/friendly basis -- the master/mentor thing still hanging in the air in both our minds I think. That altered some when he asked me to look at the about-to-be-published revised version of "The Jazz Tradition." (I'd reviewed the first edition of "The JT" for the American Record Guide back in '70 or so and said then that it was as good as it was [and is] but also made it clear that I thought Martin's approach was a bit puritanical in its reluctance to talk about the expressive/emotional side of the music--though I understood that he felt, with good reason, that there'd been too much "impressionistic" blather of that sort in the history of writing about jazz. In effect, his master/mentor was B.H. Haggin.) Anyway, I gave him some I think useful responses to the revised JT, and after that I think we met more as two grown-ups, to the degree that was possible. The thing was, Martin was an inherently testy guy -- not only because he had legitimate oppositional responses to a lot that was going in jazz, the arts in general, and the world in general, but also because he was embattled bureaucratically at the Smithsonian and elsewhere and seemed to find himself in (or seek out) relationships with young disciples whom he would on occasion browbeat unmercifully, perhaps a la "The Great Santini"--Martin was the son of a Navy officer I recall), in one case to the point of a nervous breakdown on the part of the disciple (also the son of a high-ranking military man I believe). BTW, I mean nothing sexual by "relationships with young disciples." I'm pretty sure that neither Martin nor the guy I'm thinking of was wired that way, not that there's anything wrong with that.) My favorite perhaps-revealing personal encounter with Martin took place at a Duke Ellington conference that was being held at the U. of Illinois-Chicago in the early '80s. Martin was there with his current tweedy young disciple, and I sat down next to them at what turned out to be a long Gunther Schuller lecture. Back then I was a smoker, and after 40 minutes or so I began to fidget and brought out a pack of Dentyne. Martin noticed this and said quite sternly: "You chew gum?" I sort of knew what he meant -- that the Virginia patrician side of him regarded gum-chewing as a vile, vulgar habit indulged in only by shop girls in 5 and 10 stores or guys who pumped gas -- but mentally and physically I was caught in mid-motion and said without really thinking: "Sure, you want some?" The one good putdown I've ever delivered in my life, and I didn't even mean to do it. My favorite by-mail dispute with MW was about a long contra-Bill Evans piece I'd written for the Chi. Tribune in '82 or '83. MW said in a letter that I didn't care for Evans because I was "afraid of lyricism." I replied that it seemed a mistake to equate lyricism with romantic moods, that to me lyricism in music primarily meant a commitment to the life of the evolving line and that to the degree that highly patterned harmonic sequences determined the shape of Evans's lines in much of his later music (IMO), that made his status as the jazz lyricist par excellence rather shaky. And I added that my idea of great jazz lyricist was Jimmy Raney. To which MW replied with a one-sentence postcard: "Jimmy Raney was a bebopper!"

Jim S wrote: "What was Hamilton's "dirty little secret" (or perhaps it was Concord's) was that Scott Hamilton's REAL roots weren't in the Swing Era, but in R&B. This explains a lot of things about a lot of things, especially why Hamilton didn't really dig deep into the vernacular which he was appropriating, as well as why those who WERE conversant with it found him sorely lacking. A real ear-opener for me (and possibly a sigh of relief for Hamilton) was Duke Robillard's SWING album, a collection of music that was "jazz" in surface but R&B in style and intent. Hamilton seems to have felt a LOT more comfortable playing this stuff than he did trying to channel the then still-living Flip Phillips. Ever since then, it seems like a bit more relaxation has crept into his playing, and a bit more stylistic signifying has crept out." OK, that's pretty much what I was picking up on when I heard Hamilton live with Rosemary Clooney way back when but without taking the next logical step and thinking that there was, or would be, a literal R&B connection, probably because, as you say, the ambience that Concord and others wrapped around him was so "Thank God, we've turned back time -- Here's a young guy who plays like the guys we loved when we were young." Anyway, that Street Beat/Jump thing was a proto-R&B sound in the hand of some players (the early Lockjaw, Jack McVea, etc). P.S. Have you heard my new band, the Squirrel Nut Beiderbeckes? Also, I didn't know that Martin Williams wrote about Hamilton along those lines. I do remember Martin, about 20 years before, slamming Jack Sheldon on just that basis -- referring to West Coast trumpeters who copy Miles Davis but "put the climaxes in the wrong places." But, hey, in that case I'd say that Martin was wrong -- Sheldon did do some funny things along those lines, but I think that was because Sheldon had an impish/eccentric/even surrealistic musical sense of humor that was his alone, not because he was a Davis copyist who had only grasped his model's surface gestures.

Red -- If I had to pick one from the list, I 'd try the 5/26 Empty Bottle gig. They're all very good players on a good day, and usually these informal groups (this is a new one to me) are put together with a fair amount of preparation. Adasiewicz is an interesting composer-vibes player in a kind of Al Francis vein, Josh Berman is a cornetist who might be described as having one foot in Don Cherry's camp and another in Ruby Braff's and/or Tony Fruscella's (if you can imagine that combo), Keefe Jackson plays mostly tenor and can be very good (I said something about him in the Eric Alexander thread in "Recommendations"), Jason Roebke is a good bass player, and Frank Rosaly is an excellent drummer. How spacey or straightahead the music will be on this night, I don't know; I've heard each of these guys do both in various groups. My second choice would be the Hungry Brain gig, with some of the same players. Abrams is a good bass player, Rempis is an excellent alto/tenor saxophonist; don't know who Eisenstadt is. A factor might be locations/ambience. The Brain is further out from the downtown area but a comfortable neighborhood bar (about a third of a block east of the corner of Belmont and Western), a relaxed friendly place with good acoustics. The Empty Bottle, closer in, is an armpit-like rock joint/bar in not the greatest neighborhood -- parking nearby on Western Ave. (not sidestreets) is advised; spots on Western usually are easy to find. Neither place, as far as I know, is that accessible by public transportation; taxi cabs certainly will get you to both. Getting back I'd say that you probably could find a cab cruising by on Western fairly soon; at the Brain you'd probably have to call for one. Can't vouch for Ari Brown at Green Dolphin Street, haven't heard him in some time, but that's a club that would be in the Chicago Reader listings. Wednesday - May 26 ******************************** * Rolldown w/ Jason Adasiewicz, Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, Jason Roebke, Frank Rosaly 9:30 PM at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western - 773-276-3600 ($5) Sunday - May 30 ******************************** * Josh Abrams/Josh Berman/Harris Eisenstadt/Dave Rempis 9:30 PM at the Hungry Brain, 2318 W. Belmont - 773-935-2118 (donation)

Dan -- About Scott Hamilton and syntax, here's one specific thing I had in mind: Hamilton got the Ben Webster-Flip Phillips sound/articulation down pretty well, but it seemed to me that when it came to constructing phrases and whole solos with that sound/articulation combo, he was drawn to that 1943-45 so-called "Street Beat" approach, a kind of "Jump" thing that is certainly nice in itself. But then when it came time to play ballads, it seemed to me that what Hamilton did is take those Jump/Street Beat figures and essentially slow them down, with results that sound kind of "off" in themselves (to me) and that is not the syntax of ballad playing in that Webster-Phillips style; their phrasing on ballads is more or less rhapsodic, not slowed down "Jump." Not that Hamilton doesn't have the right to do things differently than his models, if those different ways work, but it didn't seem to me that they did work very well, and it also seemed pretty likely that his different way was based on a less than good enough understanding of how the style he liked actually worked. If I'm right, that's an example of one of the temptations/dangers of a revivalistic trawl through the past: You fall in love with one of the more immediately attractive manifestations of a prior way of doing things, and you emulate (and are often rewarded for emulating) those traits, but without grasping how the whole thing that gave rise to the traits you dig actually worked and was put together -- its syntax so to speak.

Marty -- Some young to middle-aged tenor players who seem to me to stand out are Walt Weiskopf, Mark Shim, and Tim Armacost. (In fact, if any Eric Alexander fans are willing to trust my recommendation, I think Armacost might knock you out. He's big-toned and muscular, swings like crazy, and has a self-developed harmonic extensions thing going that to my ears really works. I'd recommend "Live at Smalls" (with Tom Harrell) and "The Wishing Well" (with Bruce Barth, Ray Drummond, and Billy Hart), both on DoubleTime. BTW, on "Live at Smalls" Armacost plays Ornette's "Invisible" (on soprano) and really plays on the tune as given throughout, which is a kind of crazy thing to do but really stimulates his inventiveness. Harrell, by contrast, gets pretty hung up on that framework. Another guy I'd urge Alexander fans to check out is Ralph LaLama. Yes, LaLama's from the previous generation, but stylistically they're probably not that far apart, and they've both been on much the same scene for a good while, long enough I think for the differences between them to be not merely a matter of age and experience. You can listen to LaLama note to note and really feel the choices being made; also, within a basically muscular, drenched in the changes style, he's often outrageously melodic, a real song singer. In a more avant-garde vein, there are two young guys around Chicago on what might be called the post-Vandermark scene who show a lot of promise IMO: altoist Aram Shelton, who's put out several self-produced albums ("On Cortez" with his trio Dragons 1976 and "Arrive" by a quartet of that name), and tenorman Keefe Jackson, who has yet to record except as a member of an ensemble where he doesn't get to show what he can do. Jackson, if this be not blasphemy, reminds me a bit of the young Kalaparusha -- he's got that "sculptural" thing, where every gesture implies a larger context; you hear the thing that's stated and the unstated mass it's been carved from. Got my fingers crossed on him. And FWIW, free as they may be, Shelton and Jackson seem to be fully schooled players too. About Jim's "the giants are gone" point, I guess I don't look for/expect giants on the order of Bird, Trane, Tatum, Pres, et al. these days, figuring that if they come they come, we'll all know it, and respond accordingly. What I do look for is genuineness on whatever scale, personal in-the-moment engagement with the material. Was Pete Brown a giant? Was Herman Chittison? Dave Schildkraut? Harold Land? Shafi Hadi? Joe Thomas? Tony Fruscella? Russ Freeman? The list could go on and on, through a lot of different eras. And then that thing came to be hard to come by I think, no matter what the scale of the attempt, and it seemed like we were faced with not asking for/expecting that thing, and/or pretending that we were getting it when a voice inside said that we weren't. Genuineness, as outlined briefly above, I'll hold out for -- while admitting that each of us judges that factor subjectively and admitting too that there are certain (here's that term again) post-modern ways of going about things that put genuineness through the wringer in a perhaps necessary and useful manner.

Jim -- The "Worktime" notes are in the book. Or do you mean that I changed the way they end? If so, I thought that the old concluding sentence or two didn't work anymore because they played sort of lamely off something that Martin Williams once wrote that I'm sure almost no one remembers. Anyway, the new ending seemed decent, and I don't think it's a case of me pretending to say something then that I couldn't have said then.

Dana--The original version of that reply to McDonough's piece did have the "spread your legs" line in it; I took it out for the book version (didn't seem that funny any more). No, I haven't heard any more Alexander since the '94 vintage EA on that Magnerelli album. I'll try more EA (not that anyone necessarily cares) when, as I said up above, someone who digs him now but understands what bothered me about EA's playing back then can tell me what's changed in him and how. If that sounds snotty and unreasonable, so be it -- life is too short to listen to everyone and everything. About Hamilton over the passage of time, I mentioned that his playing on "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" seemed pleasantly lively and real to me, but not so much that I felt the need to seek him out. Life is too short etc. Dan--Either I didn't make myself understood well enough and/or you didn't really read what I wrote. Either way, I'm sorry. Marty--Quinichette is an interesting case. I think about him in couple of ways. One: What happens when I put him alongside guys like Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, who also were drenched in Pres and of the second generation? (Though maybe Perkoins and Kamuca were really of the third generation, because they were young enough to have heard and been affected by Getz, Sims, et al.) Whatever -- do I hear genuine, distinctive invention from all three of them, even in their most Pres-drenched modes? (I think so.) Two: Quinichette is an older cat, b. 1916 -- only seven years younger than Pres and almost a decade older than most first-generation Pres disciples (white or black). Obviously Q imbibed his Pres whole, but he was out there playing professionally with name outfits in the late '30s (though his strain of Pres is more the Post-Basie Pres in tone and articulation, no?) Sure, Q sounds a good deal more like Pres than the clearly Pres-affected-to-some-degree Budd Johnson did, but their cases might be somewhat similar (all three with Southwest links), with Q just catching a very intense case of the Pres virus. Three: Somehow the fact that Pres referred to Quinichette as "Lady Q" rings a bell with me. Yes, Pres used the "Lady" tag a lot, and I certainly don't assume that this means anything literal about Q's personality, but I'd bet any amount of money that he was a guy who spoke in Pres' language because Pres spoke to something deep in him. And even then, is it really that hard to tell them apart? If I ever mistook one for the other, it was probably thinking for a moment than Pres of a certain vintage was Q, not the other way around.