Larry Kart

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.

For anyone who's curious about vocslist Dominique Eade, her "The Long Way Home" (with Bruce Barth, Mick Goodrick, Victor Lewis, and Dave Holland) can be found for $5.98 at Daedalus: http://www.daedalusbooks.com

Ooops. In case anyone followed my recommendation and spavined themselves and/or a loved one in the process, I meant Sibelius' First Symphony (esp. the first movement), not his Second Symphony.

You might find Dominique Eade worth a listen. Her two RCA albums -- "When the Wind Was Cool" (songs associated with Christy and Connor) and "The Long Way Home" -- are both out of print I believe but often can be found at websites and stores where cut-outs accumulate. Both albums have strong back-up bands (Benny Golson, Dave Holland, etc), and Eade is an often daring, always heady singer, though her rather "white" timbre (as in almost vibrato-less, nothing to do with race) will not be to all tastes.

Technically a return to high school movie, "Grosse Pointe Blank" definitely has its moments.

The Miles-Cannonball "Autumn Leaves." Sibelius' Second Symphony.

My Dad -- age 92, once a very sharp lawyer and still pretty sharp on most days -- got one of those (Nigerian in origin) "You've won the Spanish lottery" letters a month ago and fortunately called me to share his joy before he took the steps in response that eventually would have cost him a fair-sized amount of money. A few minutes spent rooting around the Internet, and I was able to gather enough info to convince him that it was the scam it is. What's typical, I think, is that even before I looked I asked him wether he'd entered this or any lottery, and he said, No, but couldn't quite see why that meant he couldn't have won anyhow. After all, they'd sent him a letter saying that he had. This scam takes in thousands of people every year.

The self-serving interviews with Artie Shaw in the mid-1980s Canadian film bio of him convinced me that Shaw was/is a narcissistic jerk in the top class. On the other hand, he played like an angel more often than not, and I'm unable to detect in his music (esp. in his own playing) that blend of hollow intellectual pretentiousness and rampant insecurity that makes him so hard to take as a human being. BTW there was an amusing encounter between two other candidates for the Jerk Award -- Getz and Mulligan -- at the Chicago Jazz Festival ( in 1985 as I recall, for reasons that will become clear in a bit). The situation (Chuck Nessa probably can correct me if I've got it wrong) was that one of them (Getz, I'm pretty sure) was to join the other (that would be Mulligan, then) and his rhythm section toward the end of Gerry's set to play Zoot Sims' "The Red Door" as a tribute to Sims, who had died that March. But during the afternoon rehearsal for that evening's concert, Mulligan had pulled some shit -- refused to run through the tune with Stan, pulled his rhythm section off the stage, I'm not sure what, but very harsh words were exchanged between the two according to an eyewitness (not Chuck and not me either). Anyway, the eyewitness, who was driving Stan back to his hotel, was genuinely concerned that what had gone down between Stan and Gerry had been so nasty that perhaps that evening's schedule would need to be revised. Those concerns were voiced to Stan, who replied: "Don't worry, I've played with the fageleh before, and I can play with him again." (In Yiddish, "fageleh" [pronounced "Fay-geh-leh" in case my spelling is off] literally means "bird" but is the slang term for someone who is effeminate and/or an effeminate homosexual (not that there's anything wrong with that). My assumption is that Stan didn't mean that literally; rather, "fageleh" expressed his feeling that Gerry could be a prissy/bitchy control-freak.

Thanks to all those who recommended "Deep In a Dream." Got it the other day, and it's very intense. Let me try to return the favor by touting an excellent and similarly intense 2001 disc (rec. 1999) by altoist Kim Richmond, who counts Mariano as an influence, "Ballads" (CMG). Basic setup is Richmond (soprano on a few tracks), pianist Reggie Thomas (new to me and very soulful, a bit reminiscent of Donald Brown), bassist Trey Henry, and drummer Joe La Barbera (who's in top form). Appearing on some tracks are trumpeter Clay Jenkins, baritonists Bill Perkins (must have been one of his last dates), Vinny Golia, and Bob Carr, and percussionist Brad Dutz. Richmond is a deep singer, in Mariano's class but his own man.