Larry Kart

To answer that Scott Hamilton question, here's another piece from the forthcoming book. ( I do recall one Hamilton album, "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" with Gerry Mulligan, that didn't have the problem(s) I go on about below. Maybe Gerry's presence helped: In a 1981 review of a performance by Rosemary Clooney, I wrote this about two members of her band, tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton and cornetist Warren Vaché: "Not so gratifying [as Clooney] were Hamilton and Vaché, relatively young players who began by emulating Swing-era stylists and who have yet to find a personal manner. More disturbing than the revivalistic impulses of Hamilton and Vaché, though, are the ways in which they misunderstand and cheapen the style they profess to admire. Each man presents a surface cosmetic warmth, with Hamilton crooning á la Ben Webster, and Vaché putting a burry, Bunny Berigan-like edge on his tone. But the techniques that Hamilton and Vaché apply in such a haphazard fashion were part of a specific musical-emotional language. To hear that language being trifled with is both musically and morally disturbing." That review led to a dialogue in Down Beat magazine with critic John McDonough, who saw the desire of Hamilton and Vaché (and that of other young musicians) to work within the stylistic patterns of the jazz past as a very positive development. This was my response to McDonough’s piece: [1982] If we were building the ideal jazz musician, we would probably want to make him an innovator. But innovation is not the question here. Instead it is the degree of honesty and understanding with which specific players deal with the music’s past. First a distinction should be made between those jazz artists who have been inspired by their predecessors (Louis Armstrong’s Swing-era disciples and the host of Lester Young acolytes of the 1940s would be good examples) and, on the other hand, those players whose approach to the jazz past is essentially revivalistic--as the music of Scott Hamilton, Warren Vaché, and many of their contemporaries seems to be. No matter how humbled he may be by his model, the disciple of the first sort doesn’t wish to recreate the music of Armstrong or Young. Rather he hears something in the inspiring artist that speaks to something in him--a musical/emotional message that the disciple wishes (and needs) to expand upon and, as much as possible, make his own. The revivalist, however, regards the chunk of the jazz past that attracts him as an essentially completed act. And often he is drawn to the past of jazz in part because it belongs to the past--because the music speaks of values that seem to have been needlessly abandoned and that the revivalist wishes to reanimate, preserve, and inhabit. Injecting one’s own personality into the music is at best a side issue, the goal instead being to accurately bring to life what is no longer as alive as it once was. Now jazz revivalism has an intriguing, quirky history; and I would not want to be without the music of Lu Watters, Graeme and Roger Bell, or Dave Dallwitz. But revivalism works best when it deals with styles in which the soloist added color and point while the ensemble remained the dominant force; it runs into special problems when the style being recreated is one that relies on the soloist’s ability to express an individual instrumental personality. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Hamilton and Vaché are self-conscious revivalists, their music certainly is based on late Swing-era styles in which individual instrumental personality was paramount. We love Ben Webster and Don Byas, Buck Clayton and Bobby Hackett not just because their music was beautiful in the abstract sense, but also because it told their stories, revealing something essential about the kind of men they were. And this storytelling aspect of the music was expressed in a very precise musical/emotional language--one in which the individual artist’s tonal and rhythmic inflections (the growls, smears, slides, and so forth) were both his trademark and the means he used to convey his evolving emotional messages. And this storytelling, languagelike aspect of the music has, like all languages, some specific rules of diction, grammar, and syntax. It is there that I part company with most of today’s more-or-less revivalistic players, whether their models come from the thirties and forties (as Hamilton’s and Vaché’s do), from the fifties (as do those of Lew Tabackin and Richie Cole), or from the quite recent past (as is the case with David Murray). To my ears, these musicians often speak the language they profess to love in a haphazard, inaccurate, even vulgar fashion, making grammatical and syntactical errors in the realm where notes are translated into emotion that are as disturbing as if they had flubbed the changes or turned the beat around. Place a typical Hamilton performance alongside a solo from such a master storyteller as Ike Quebec (or compare a Lew Tabackin effort with something by Sonny Rollins, or listen to David Murray next to Albert Ayler), and one hears countless musical/emotional gestures that have been mishandled or misunderstood, as though the perhaps unwitting emulator were wearing a tweed jacket with candy-striped pants. So it’s not just the emulative aspect of these players that is troublesome, because my knowledge (such as it is) of the music that inspired them tells me that they aren’t even good emulators, let alone personal craftsmen. (A question for another day is whether one can be a craftsmanlike disciple of Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, or John Coltrane--in the same way that one could, and perhaps still can, be a craftsmanlike disciple of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, or Don Byas.) That a number of these young revivalists have been praised, and sometimes hired, by such masters as Buddy Tate, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines, does not automatically settle the aesthetic issues in their favor. It’s understandable that many older players (and those critics who have great affection for their music and may not care that much for later developments) would be cheered to find younger men paying homage to the past, for no one likes to feel lonely and most of us like to be flattered. But even if there were no trace of self-deception in the praise of Hines, Tate, et al., that praise is refuted by their own lastingly vital music, which remains the standard by which their would-be disciples must be judged. While I certainly wish that there were as many personal craftsmen at work in jazz today as there were in 1935, 1945, and 1955, I believe that the craftsman approach to jazz is, for a number of reasons, becoming harder and harder to sustain. In any case, if jazz is about to turn itself into a largely revivalistic, repertory music--a kind of living museum in which everyone from Johnny Dodds to Albert Ayler is fair game--it seems all the more important to protest when one hears jazz’s glorious past being reproduced in ways that are musically and emotionally inaccurate. To do otherwise would be to admit that we no longer hear the difference.

Yes, indeed. Had no idea we were both full of bull (i.e. Taureans).

Based on the only Eric Alexander I've heard -- his work as a sideman with Joe Magnerelli on "Why Not" (Criss Cross, rec. 12/94) -- I'm in Jim S.'s camp. One more-or-less shopworn (albeit "swinging") phrase after another, stapled together like pieces of cardboard, little or no sense of organic language-understanding or personal emotional involvement -- the latter all the more annoying because so many of the Dexter-ish gestures he throws around are brimful of emotion in the hands of their originator and sound rather ghastly (to me) when the sense of personal presence has been sucked out of them and/or been tossed aside. (That's what I mean by lack of "organic language-understanding," which may jibe with what Jim S. was reacting to.) Damn it, jazz is NOT a game and/or an athletic contest -- not in this style and at the level Alexander apparently aspires to. It isn't a game for Magnerelli, for one, whose Dorham roots are readily apparent but who is (or so it seems to me) making a good deal of personal contact with the material in the flowing moment. He's testing/being himself. Alexander, by contrast, is jumping over hurdles while modeling for a poster. Makes me want to scream. I know, you'll tell me he's grown a lot by now, but I'll trust that only if someone can tell me that they hear something of what I hear in late-'94 vintage Alexander and can say where and how all that athletic cheesiness evolved into something else.

Scott Hamilton is at the Jazz Showcase that week, the Denny Zeitlin Trio (with Buster Williams and Matt Wilson) comes in 5/1-6. Otherwise check out the listings in the Chicago Reader, available online, though I recall that they only go out a week from the current date. In an avant-garde vein, you might find these gigs interesting. 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) * Greg Ward & friends 9:30 PM at the Velvet Lounge, 21281/2 S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 * Jim Baker/Harris Eisenstadt/Kyle Hernandez 8 PM at the Hot House, 31 E. Balbo, 312-362-9707 Thursday - May 27 ******************************** * Daisy/Hatwich/Rempis/Rosaly Quartet * Harris Eisenstadt Group w/ Tatsu Aoki, Keefe Jackson 9:30 PM at 3030 W. Cortland, 773-862-3616 Friday - May 28 ******************************** * Harris Eisenstadt Quartet w/ Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Jason Roebke 9 PM at Candlestick Maker, Chicago, IL, 9pm * Triage - Dave Rempis, Jason Ajemian, Tim Daisy 11:30 PM at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 W. Fullerton (no cover) Saturday - May 29 ******************************** * Harris Eisenstadt Quartet w/ Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Jason Roebke 10 PM at the Velvet Lounge, 21281/2 S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 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)

Hey, Joe -- You should have written the book! You say some really interesting things -- "'The problem of influence,' it seems to me, cannot be isolated within the influenced" is something I would have loved to steal. On the other hand, having a conversation that pushes your (i.e. my) thoughts ahead of where they'd rested is what it's all about. BTW, I wish I hadn't said "post-modernism" or anything like it -- the term gives me the creeps and seems to me to be flung around a lot more than it should -- but it was lying right there on the road to the next several sentences (about Misha Mengelberg and the whole Dutch crowd, trimmed off below), and I couldn't resist.

Joe -- Some more about Shorter and the "soloistic ego" from the introductory chapter to Ye Olde Forthcoming Book: "Is the expression of individual instrumental personality still the norm in jazz ? The facelessness of so many technically adept younger jazz musicians is often remarked upon ("The soloists have become so generic ," in the words of veteran composer-valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer); and this is commonly attributed to the homogeneity of the jazz education system, the long-lasting, pervasive influences of John Coltrane and Bill Evans, the sheer weight of the music’s past, etc. But perhaps it also is a kind of revolt or protest from within, a way of saying that the role openly expressed, on-going individuality has played in jazz no longer matches up well with the habits of the rest of the world or that it now comes at a price that is too high to be paid. "And yet Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter already were stepping back from the direct expression of self some forty years ago--guided, especially in Rollins’s case, by Coleman Hawkins’s example. The rich complexity of Rollins’s musical thought, and his ability to at once dramatize and ironically comment upon virtually any emotional impulse that came to mind, led him to express multiple points of view--one could even say summon up multiple selves or characters--within a single solo. This was, however, not an approach that Rollins could sustain during the 1960s, in the face of rapid stylistic change in the surrounding jazz landscape. Responding to those changes in his own work, as he did quite strikingly up to a point, also meant that the broadly shared musical-emotional language of romantic sign and sentiment that had so deeply stirred Rollins’s own sentiments and wit was now becoming historical. It was a language that could still be referred to and played off of, but for him apparently not with sufficient immediacy. "Shorter’s temperament--also deeply, even subversively ironic--led him at first to toy brilliantly with the idea that any soloistic gesture could or should be taken at face value. In the typical Shorter solo of the early- to mid-1960s, seemingly forthright, "heated" musical-emotional gestures are disrupted, even mocked, by oblique, wide-eyed shifts to other levels of speech (cool, chess-master complexity, blatantly comic tonal and rhythmic distortions, and so forth). Rollins had said, in effect: "There are many selves at work here, and I am present in all of them." Shorter took the next step: "Why assume that any of these selves is a self, that any of them is me?" Significantly, this aspect of Shorter’s music emerged at the same time that Coltrane was plunging headfirst into the expressionistic sublime, although Shorter’s seemingly innate distancing diffidence also seems to have played a role. In any case, after he left the Miles Davis Quintet, Shorter increasingly withdrew from the solo arena (from 1970 to 1985 he was a member of the jazz-rock group Weather Report), and on the rare occasions when he has returned there, it is his diffidence that he essentially expresses. (That Shorter returned to the concert stage and the recording studio beginning in 2002 is a hopeful sign, though the rather studied elegance of the results so far suggests something less than full engagement.) "In the music of Rollins and Shorter, humorous or ironic speech turns into doubt about the act of speaking, about the on-going integrity of the language itself. Here, it would seem, the scrim of post-modernism begins to descend upon jazz, perhaps before the concept was even formulated.... Etc.

Thanks, Chaney. In the photo, which is about three years old and was taken in an Ann Arbor alley, are (left to right): Toby Summerfield, bass; Brian Hacker, guitar and vocals; Jacob Kart, guitar; and Chris Salmon, drums. In real life, Toby is about the size of your typical NFL defensive tackle.

It's a treat (also even a necessity) to be here, talking and listening. I remember how weird (even angry) I felt when the BNBB went under, only to discover (thanks to Chuck, I'm pretty sure) that Organissimo was up and running and that in any number of ways it was/is much better. One of the few times I can think of in recent years when something like that has happened, in any realm of human endeavor.

Don't know about any signings yet; I (and the publisher's publicity department) haven't gotten that far. I'd definitely like to get to the Ann Arbor Borders though; my son worked there after he graduated from the U. of M. (he works at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago now and plays in a genuinely musical rock band named [somewhat ironically] Crush Kill Destroy that took shape in Ann Arbor--the three other members are all from Michigan). I always liked the town -- good used book stores, good used record store (hope that one still exists), breakfast at Cafe Zola, etc. P.S. I'm pretty sure that Crush Kill Destroy has an active website, with songs and info. They're loud but not THAT loud (the name comes from an episode of "Lost In Space" where a murderous android went around repeating that phrase), and they think highly of bands like Tortoise, Polvo, Don Caballero, and Isotope 217, if that has any meaning.

Thanks for nailing that down, Alankin. Figures that the author wouldn't be the first to know.

Joe G wrote: "I hope you continue to share your thoughts with us for a long time to come." As a former boss of mine liked to say: "Sounds like a plan to me." Yes, BTW, I was born 5/16/42. Jim S. wrote: "It's not hyperbole for me to say that, although I'd have been a musician without your writing, I'd not have been the same kind of musician, and definitely not the same kind of thinker." Omigod! I bear some responisibulty for the way Jim THINKS! B)

My recollection is this October, maybe September. If so, it will be out at the same time that Dan Morgenstern's really big collection of his stuff emerges (from Norton). That could be good for me (joint reviews of both books when otherwise mine might not have been noticed), not so good (reviewer decides, as some reviewers will do, that one of two books on the same subject has to be much more valuable than the other and picks Dan's), or just make for more fun (Dan and I joked about doing joint appearances at bookstores, etc., and any best of Dan M. book is going to be excellent).

Jim -- I'm not trying to disappear, far from it. But at my age (exactly 62 years and 39 minutes now) you get forgetful in spots, and when you forget something, the deal is, you don't remember it. Right?

A lot more than I do either. Chris Potter to me is the epitome of today's facile, nobody's hardly ever at home saxophonists. I say hardly ever because I recall a Scott Colley album from a few years back where Potter seemed to be fairly personal; on the other hand, I caught him live in NYC a few years ago, and both his playing and his "I'm not really here for this one" body language (it wasn't his gig) were pretty creepy. Of the Shorter-influenced players around these days, the one who seems most striking me is Walt Weiskopf, who has taken aspects of Wayne to a place where Weiskopf sounds only like himself. Everything he's recorded for Criss Cross is worth hearing IMO.

Lazaro -- Now that I think about, I probably shouldn't post that Shorter "interview," for several moral/practical reasons. Down Beat does own the rights to it (I was a fulltime employee there at the time), and it may well be available through them (their website?) for a fee. Also, a number of the pieces in my book were old Down Beat pieces that they kindly let me reprint without a fee (just an acknowledgment), when they could have asked me to pay for the right to reprint them or denied me the right to reprint them altogether. (The Shorter "interview" isn't in the book because it ran in DB under his name, and it didn't feel right to me to include it.) "Creativity & Change" (all 4,912 words of it) ran in DB on 12/12/68, if someone wants to track it down.

Lazaro: Don't know if it's on-line anywhere. If you can wait a while -- a few days, maybe less -- I'll scan it in and post it here.

Lazaro wrote: "Is that really a protest?" Maybe not, but close enough for jazz. FWIW, Here's an e-mail I sent to Davis after I read the Atlantic piece: That was a fine piece, and it was a kick to see that quote from my "Odyssey of Iska" review in it. Unfortunately I'd forgotten all about it when I was compiling a book of all my jazz stuff that seemed worth preserving ("Jazz In Search Of Itself," due this fall from Yale; it includes some new material, too), though there are other, later pieces in the book that say similar things about Shorter. BTW, Wayne's mixed/troubled/ironic/you name it feelings about the soloistic ego arise pretty clearly in that 12/12/68 Down Beat he wrote, "Creativity and Change," as well as IMO a good deal of his early recorded work, particularly "Kelly Great" and "Introducing Wayne Shorter." (Actually, "Creativity and Change" was an interview I did with Wayne, which we printed under his name because what he had to say was, as I recall, very close to a non-stop monologue. I'd gone to the Plugged Nickel the night before the interview took place, in Sept. or Oct. I think, with Dan Morgenstern (DB editor, my boss at the time) and approached Wayne between sets, whereupon he said that he didn't want to do an interview because he really had nothing to say. Meanwhile Miles -- knowing what my role probably was because I was with Dan -- said hoarsely from the other side of the room, "Don't tell him anything, Wayne." Wayne took this in, looked at me [probably I seemed a bit stunned by what Miles had said, because I was -- brand-new on the job and nervous, and Miles didn't sound like he was kidding at all] and said [perhaps out of pity, but also I think because Miles had said "Don't..."], "Come by my motel tomorrow afternoon, and we'll do it." When I got there, I must have asked him some questions, but essentially Wayne just picked up the mike of the tape recorder and spoke into it at length.) Anyway, the first thing on his mind that day was "Art as a competive thing among artists. I wonder if artists choose to compete among themselves, or are they goaded, pushed, or lured into it as the result of the makeup of this particular society?" Etc. almost throughout. I also was struck -- and this was very much a matter of tone (and of course my own point of view) -- by the passage where Wayne talked about the reception the Quintet had received when they played the Greek Theater at Berkeley (that summer, I think) -- this when Berkeley was Counterculture Central. I swear, talking about the enthusiastic reception of the more than 20,000 people who heard them there, Wayne sounded (before the fact) like Sally Field at the Oscars: "They loved us, they really loved us!" In effect, his tone said, "They (i.e. these Young People) have (and/or I grant to them) the power to validate me" -- which to me (having strong feelings about jazz as a touchstone [or even THE touchstone] of wisdom and validity, and also having mixed to negative feelings about the professional Young People of the time; I knew one of the leaders of the Free Speech movement, a purebred con man) seemed a strange and dangerous attitude for a great young jazz musician to have. In any case, "Creativity and Change" seems to me to be brimful of all sorts of turbulent ambivalence (for want of a better term) and yearning, as though the "one of the strange Shorter brothers" persona had long ago begun not to work for him. (Not that I thought it should have continued to -- anyway, I don't get a vote -- but the music that probably arose from that stance in part was a unique, terrific thing.)

Yuri Egerov on an EMI two-fer.

"I'm Late, I'm Late" from the Eddie Sauter/Stan Getz "Focus" is Sauter's take on/homage to the second movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste.

For avant-garde type doings, the Reader listings can be spotty. Try here for further info: http://www.restructures.net/chicago/music.htm That scene is very strong and quite varied in Chicago now. If you're interested and need specific recommendations for a particular week from among a bunch of unfamiliar names, let me know and I'll tell you what I know.

Here's a review I wrote of the IAI Hillcrest LP for Jazz magazine in 1974. Not sure I still believe everything that I wrote in it, esp. about Ornette's lack of influence, but what the hell -- that's the way it seemed at the time (at least to me): Ornette Coleman worked with this group (cornetist Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Charlie Haden, and pianist Paul Bley --the nominal leader, who recorded the group in live performance) for six weeks between his first and second studio recording sessions, sometime between March 1958 and January 1959. The logical question is, how does Coleman sound at this early date, freed from studio pressures and united for the first time with Haden? Well, he sounds great, much more at ease than on his first album, Something Else. And even though, compared to what was to come, there is something of the gawky adolescent to the Coleman we hear on Live at the Hillcrest Club, no other recording of his has a comparable feeling of looseness and spontaneity until the Town Hall Concert album of 1962. And do these tracks tell us something about Coleman that we didn’t know before? I suppose not, but merely because they’re beautiful in themselves and unexpected messages from the past, they do help to explain why the most successful innovator of the sixties (successful in the sense of producing performance after performance that really worked) should in the long run have had such a negligible effect on his contemporaries and successors, compared to the impact of men like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. (Very few players showed Coleman’s literal imprint, and if there were others who grasped the principles of his music without wishing to sound like him, they must have decided that these principles coudn’t be applied by them.) It comes down to this--Cole-man is both a pre-tonal and a post-tonal player, and, in a sense (a very fruitful one for him), he reads the history of tonality backwards to its pre-tonal state. What enabled him to do so, in addition to innate genius, was the accident of birth that placed him in a provincial center (Fort Worth, Texas) where Charlie Parker’s latest stretchings of triadic harmony could be heard alongside musics--blues, rhythm and blues, cowboy ballads, and what have you--that were either pre-tonal or so crude in their tonal functions as to be pre-tonal by implication. You can call it naïve or the ultimate sophistication, but sensing the relation between a music in which tonality was on the brink of ceasing to function and musics in which it functioned quite simply or hardly at all, Coleman was able to preserve what for him were the plums of tonality --the emotional colors of triadic harmony, especially the most basic ones (who aside from Monk has made so much of the octave jump?)--without adopting tonic-dominant cadential pat-terns and phrase structures. This explains why the internal rhythm of Coleman’s solos often has a bouncy, downhome lope to it, a la Swing Era alto saxophonists like Pete Brown and Tab Smith or proto-r&b figure Louis Jordan (even though Coleman will interject phrases of startling asymmetry, and even though that internal rhythm has a floating, precisely controlled relation to the stated beat of the bass and drums). Conversely, the men who were most involved in stretching triadic harmony to its furthest limits to date in jazz, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, also were the men who carried the subdivision of the beat to its furthest point to date--because such subtleties of accentuation were necessary to throw into relief, and so make articulate, melodic lines whose harmonic implications otherwise might have been inchoate. On "Klactoveedsedstene," Coleman and Cherry play Parker’s spikey theme with tremendous élan, which should settle any lingering doubts about Coleman’s rhythmic control and confirm that his sometimes radically simple rhythmic choices were real choices and not the results of any instrumental in-capacity. The analogous simplifications of his melodic-harmonic universe can be heard best here on "The Blessing," where he takes a mellow, strongly organized solo highlighted by a subtle sotto voce passage of implied doubletime. Improvisations like this--"Peace" on The Shape of Jazz to Come is another--reveal that however free Coleman is of tonic-dominant functions (in the sense of not needing to touch home base at specific intervals), his music has plenty of cadential possibilities that he can find as emotion dictates. And it is these moments of resolution, which give back to us the most primary pleasures of triadic harmony cleaned of the grime of long use, that ultimately divided Coleman from his contemporaries. However much they might respect a pre-tonal universe and make gestures toward it, they lived in a post-tonal world and could not read the history of tonality as Coleman did. But if his route has turned out not to be one that others could take, perhaps that makes the beauty he has given us all the more treasurable.

Interesting about that "collector." Lord knows that jazz fans come from all sorts of different backgrounds and in various ages, shapes, and sizes, but the first time I laid eyes on the guy I had the feeling that he was an alien being. Maybe it was that his body language (Bush/Cheney seem to have revived that concept) made it fairly clear that he wasn't listening to the music, just waiting like a lizard for it to be over so he could do his thing. And his name fit him like a lizard's skin: Rafe Simone.

I recently read Chistopher Browning's "The Origins of The Final Solution, 1939-1942" (U. of Nebraska Press), published this March, and found it very enlightening, a real step forward in nailing down the stages by which Final Solution came into being. I wouldn't say that Browning supports Arendt's "banality of evil" stance (I'm with Gershom Scholem on what underlies Arendt's thinking there), but Browning's account of the "logic" by which the Final Solution proceeded has a great deal of historical versimilutude IMO. Here's an interview with Browning: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/intervi...t2004-02-11.htm

Saddest jazz autograph story I know of and can vouch for (I was there) was when Mingus was playing the Jazz Showcase when it was on Rush St., underneath the Happy Medium (the late '70s, I think). At the bar is a creepy collector with a big pile of Mingus LPs; between sets he asks Mingus to sign them. Mingus's face lights up -- Here's a guy who has everything I've ever recorded is what he seems to be thinking -- and he takes hold of the pen that the collector gives him. But then Mingus realizes that all the albums are still shrink-wrapped -- they've never been played -- and his face falls. (The collector of course has been thinking only of the value of a signed mint-condition album.) Knowing Mingus's reputation, an explosion seems inevitable, but instead he proceeds to sign every damn album at a sad, steady pace; there must have been at least 30 of them, maybe many more.

Not exactly an autograph, though it's that too, I treasure the postcard I got from Paris from Sarah Vaughan in May 1985, completely out of the blue. I'd done an interview with her about two years before that which came off pretty well, in part I think because as we sat down backstage she addressed her valet as "Redcross," and I asked if he were Bob Redcross of the Parker tune "Red Cross" (he was). That relaxed things a good bit, and we went on from there. Anyway, two years later, with no intervening contact this postcard came to me at the Chicago Tribune. It read, verbatim: "Hi Their. Don't be shocked. Its only me from over the Seas Said Sarah Vaughan The Singer (smile)" I get choked up every time I look at it, in part for reasons I can't really explain.