Larry Kart

I listened again to the track ("Hannibul") from the Sticks and Stones album that appears on the anthology disc "Document Chicago: New Jazz and Improvisation" (482 Music) and feel that it is not a very good representation of what Matana Roberts and colleagues can do, mostly because it's one of thoose "linen closet" recordings. Probably best to wait for their Thrill Jockey disc. However, there is a lot of strong (and well-recorded) stuff on "Document Chicago." for further info go to www.482music.com (I have no connection with the label.)

Matana Robert's website is http://www.geocities.com/robertsmatana/ Sticks and Stones has an album out, which you can link up to from the website, but the track I heard from it on an anthology disc didn't quite match what I'd heard live from the band a night or two before, mostly because she's so much a "sound" player I believe, and the sound quality on the disc seemed rather tight and dry. (I'll be getting the album anyway.) Roberts said the band will be making a new album for the Chicago Indie label Thrill Jockey in a month or two. From what I know you like, and from what I've heard of your own playing, Jim, I think you'd like her.

Heard Matana Roberts several times in Chicago about five years ago in a jam session format, when she sounded quite a bit like Greg Osby. Heard her again in Chicago last month with Sticks and Stones (bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Chad Taylor), and she sounded great and like no one but herself. What I particularly liked, if this makes any sense, is that the shape of her sound perfectly matched the shape of her lines -- in both cases there was a distinctive, highly expressive "curve" at work, as there was in Benny Carter's playing, though of course she and Carter don't sound alike.

Mike-- I don't think that "afraid of the consequences" in your "Once you've reached total freedom of musical expression, everything you do has to sound conservative after that. That's what happened to Stravinskij after "Le Sacre du Printemps", he had broken all conventional boundaries of his time, and either was afraid of the consequences himself or didn't see any further development in that direction" is a fair or accurate reading of the music that S. came up with in the '20s or of how and why he came up with it. "Didn't see any further development in that direction" is more likely, but even then I'd rather emphasize S's fierce "make it new" curiosity/inventiveness. I don't think that works like, say, the Octet, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, "Les Noces" or "Oedipus Rex" shows signs of being less urgently or less personally produced than ""Le Sacre" was. Less shocking to the public, yes, but that's not S's fault.

Lazaro -- I hear the same JH-related thing in Malaby as you do, but most of the time it nearly drives me crazy. One perhaps revealing example is the way he and the leader play on Dave Ballou's 2001 Steeplechase album "On This Day," where all the pieces were supposedly improvised from scratch. But the results essentially consist of everyone, especially Malaby, laying down such a carpet of harmonic ambiguity (apparently in this case in the name of potentially making everything "fit") that what you mostly get is all this dial-twisting, side-slipping, "after you Alfonse, after you Gaston" soup -- actually stating what I'd call an idea is almost impossible. I've heard all the horns involved, esp. Ballou and Billy Drewes, sound much "freer" when they were playing in a less "free" context. Another player heavily influenced by JH, for good or ill, is Rich Perry, who when he was a newcomer to the Thad-Mel band was known as "Little Joe." In Perry's case, what I hear fairly often is that the melodic element of his playing, such as it is, has almost nothing to to do with note to note relationships i.e. the lines aren't lines but are essentially moves toward and away from usually quite oblique harmonic nodal points, and that those nodal points, as they line up, are the real melodic element, albeit a rather slow-moving one and one whose relationship to all the notes that have been expended in order to nudge things around harmonically seems sort of...wasteful? Now if there were some sort of, in effect, meaningful contrapuntal relationship between the notes and the harmonic "nodes" (that's how I think Herbie Nichols' music works), you might really have something. But too often what I hear from these guys sounds like fidgeting. The only heaviliy JH-influenced player I know of who shows strong signs of coming out the other side is Mark Shim. Also, now that I think about it, has the permutation-machine aspect of JH we've been talking about been a fairly direct source for what Osby and others have been doing for some time now?

Chuck, I feel funny about "Lawrence" too, and for the life of me I can't remember why or when I switched back to the name on my driver's license, checkbook, etc. It might have had something to do with the chapter I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz" several years ago, because that's the way it is there, but I don't think anybody has ever called me "Lawrence" other than a traffic cop. Maybe there's time to change back before it's too late.

Book should be out in fall 2004 from Yale University Press; they have the final version of the manuscript as of two weeks ago. Title is "Jazz In Search Of Itself." Contents are all the stuff I've written from 1968 on that seems worth preserving (arranged in a way that seems to make sense), plus a fair amount of new framing material.

Jim, What you say reminds me of a sentence I wrote a few months ago: "Jazz is an art in which history is always happening, and it is happening to us." Of course, you could say that about a whole lot of arts, and other things too, and you'd be right, but what I mean is that once you get bonded to this music and live through some of it in conjunction with the pace and events of your own life, it's like the texture and surge of history as it's happening in both realms almost becomes a single, physical sensuous fact -- and not only that, the music can begin to feel like a music that to some perhaps unusual extent is about the way its own history is running through it and through the lives of the people who love it. Another self-quote from something that hasn't seen print yet: "Unlike the two other chief new arts--photography and motion pictures-- that arose or coalesced at some point during the nineteenth century, jazz does not have a primarily technological basis, though it would come to benefit greatly from technological means of dissemination (the phonograph record and radio). Instead, jazz’s primary 'material' is the quintessentially historical set of human circumstances under which it arose--the collision/interpenetration of particular peoples under particular conditions in a new and expanding nation that had a form of government that was based on particular principles. And perhaps it is that inaugural immersion in the flux of history that has made jazz’s further artistic development so immediate, visible, and intense--as though this art were compelled to give us a running account of its need to be made and the needs its making served."

Jim, when you say, "I wonder how much of our differing views on the cat is chronological in nature," you're right. I first heard JH when he made his first recordings, and it was like he was being taken among one good-sized segment of listeners as the more "reasonable," rational, "craft as we know it, and as we use to validate ourselves and our union card expertise, still matters most" alternative to all that nasty, threatening stuff that Trane and others had begun to do. I'm not saying that JH was thinking along those lines, but that was the feeling that was in the air (and that may be why my favorite JH of that time is his work as a sideman on "Black Fire," where Hill's structures usefully occupy, even consume, all of JH's agile intellect in the act). A possible "of a certain time" parallel is the perhaps semi-forgotten initial response to Benny Golson. Golson came to light nationally as a player at a time--1957 as I recall--when people like Whitney Balliett were not only saying that Rollins and Trane were ugly but also were yearning for some warm-toned, graceful alternative that would turn back the tide -- a Scott Hamilton before the fact, in effect. In that light, Golson's first records were greeted--by Nat Hentoff, in particular, I recall, though he was not the only one--both as though Golson were a new Lucky Thompson (the resemblences were real) and as though history could be rolled back toward a time of supposedly kinder, gentler, more cozy tenormen (not that this is fair characterization of early Golson or any L. Thompson; I'm just trying to describe the initial response to Golson and what seemed to underlie it). But then Golson's recordings began to reveal all the common ground he had with Trane, and that little trip back to a "we sort of wish bop had never happened" island paradise had to be aborted. Understand that I'm not saying that early Golson wasn't terrific; I'm just saying that sometimes good music can be put to ideological uses, often through no fault of its own, and that this, as you suggest, can shape responses. As for pretty bad music being made to serve ideological "let's turn history around" goals, see the career (after a certain point) of W. Marsalis.

Jim -- I just want to know one thing: How do you make those big BIG letters? Also, what about the inside/outside thing I mentioned? Not that I expect you to agree with me, but digging your approach to all things musical, I wonder what your take is on that aspect of JH, if in fact you see it as a real aspect at all. (I don't have the '60s BN album "In 'N' Out," but the title of the title track suggests that JH was thinking along those lines to some extent at that time.) Finally, I think you're right about JH being a reclusive spirit, a kind of musical introvert. That's one of the reasons I like some of the late laidback Verve dates; he's not trying to be more muscular and ballsy than he really is (or more than I think he really is). About the licks thing--of course everyone has them, but it's how, when, and why you use them. My problem with JH here is encapsulated in your phrase "his own idiosyncratic permutations on the standard vocabulary." That is, licks may be the wrong term for what sometimes sounds to me like the byproducts of a self-invented and (I would say) too-heavily-invested-in-for-his-own-good permutation machine (especially in terms of harmonic options), one that was pouring forth so much information of one particular sort at such a very high rate that it must have been difficult for JH to adjust the controls in order to bring other useful options into play in the moment. How seldom--or so it seems to me--does JH ever surprise himself, or even let himself be put in a position to be surprised, especially by the arrival of something direct and "simple," how seldom does he come up with (or even just allow himself to play) a phrase that isn't covered with characteristic JH dense harmonic beadwork. No, it's not literally all worked out beforehand, but the ways in which JH moves through a solo at any given period in his career do seem, at least to me, pretty foreordained when compared to other solos JH might or did play at that general time. A possible reference point here might be the somewhat older Clifford Jordan (b. 1931 vs. JH b. 1937), who like JH had a very definite set of harmonic and timbral fingerprints and a relatively surefire way of producing them but who always struck me, in any of his several somewhat different stylistic periods, as a soloist who usually had a good deal more room to manuever than JH did on the plain-and-direct-is- possible vs. allover-design-must-predominate front. But then, as Chuck says, you have to be stupid enough to bring up misgivings about JH in this house.

I won't presume to speak for Chuck, but because I share his mixed to negative feelings about Joe Henderson and admire T. Washington, I'll take a shot. About JH: He was IMO a very formulaic, licks-bound player (albeit a hip one at times, for what being hip did for you at that time and place), his sound was the saxophone equivalent of the sound of a "mike" singer (I heard him once live paired with Johnny Griffin in the mid-'80s, and next to Griffin he was close to inaudible), and especially in the '60s I couldn't stand the way he'd bounce between "inside" and "outside" playing in the course of a single solo, as though the "outside" stuff was more or less a noise element. It's in that realm that T. Washington is an utterly different player--when TW goes "out," he goes to a place that he has to go and that's no less logical to him, if sometimes bizarrely logical, than where he's been before; when JH goes "out", it's like he's saying "Excuse me, I have to go the mens room for a while, but when I come back you can be sure I'll have washed my hands." That said, JH does have his moments. I like some of his Milestone stuff; loved a live performance by the band of that era that included Curtis Fuller and Stanley Clarke and found some of his late wispy Verve stuff kind of touching.

Gerald Donavan is that Chicago drummer's given name. He later went under the name Ajaramu, played in a duo in the '70s with pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers.

Lazaro -- No, damnit, I wasn't there that night. I'd stopped writing about jazz for the Chi. Tribune in 1988 and might have been out of town on family business during that Jazz Fest.

Jim, actually the version of those "Worktime" liner notes that will be in my (he said, clearing his throat) forthcoming book has a different ending, in part because "The rest of 'Worktime's' delights etc." was a straight steal from the end of one of Martin Williams' liner notes. Why I did that I now have no idea -- I almost certainly had time to think of some other way to bring the thing to an end; maybe it was a kind of joke? -- but I thought that in 2003 I should adopt a slightly different exit strategy. About you and "Worktime" in Denton--to complete the circle perhaps, "Sonny Rollins Plus 4" was the first record I bought with my own money, i.e. money I'd earned, not from an allowance. Our blond wood Webcor phonograph was in the living room, where my Dad would read the paper in his easy chair after dinner (a real "Leave It To Beaver" scene), and every night for I think several weeks I'd play the album, usually repeating "Pent-Up House" several times -- in effect, trying to memorize Clifford and Sonny's solos on that track without having that as a conscious goal. Finally my Dad exploded: "Don't you have any other records!" Funny thing was that while I of course understood what he meant as soon as he said it, until he did, the thought hadn't entered my mind that what I was doing was anything other than logical and necessary.

Jim, no I didn't write that DB review of "East Broadway Rundown." I did write the liner notes for an early '70s LP reissue of "Worktime," though, which was a lot of fun because that probably was THE album that proclaimed that Rollins was who he had become, the first one he made (or at least the first he made under his own name) after his period of woodshedding in Chicago. I may have mentioned this before, but a drummer I knew secondhand who was then at the U. of Illinois worked up some sort of Rube Goldberg device so that when his alarm clock went off, instead of ringing, it triggered his record player to drop the needle on side one, track one of "Worktime" -- "There's No Business Like Show Business."

Another thing about the "maybe he knew EVERYTHING" Rollins of the mid' to late-'50s. It wasn't though he or his music came across as some inherently distant and/or bewilderingly ecstatic genius-type thing a la Bird or Coltrane. Instead, it was utterly down-to-earth and street-cornerlike, made out of stuff that everyone knew (or anyone could know) and then just built from the inside out and way upwards in a way that seemed to say, "You could do this too in your way, You could see what I see and know what I know--Maybe you already do." Jim, I think the key to what's happened to Rollins over time -- in addition to the dental problems of the late '60s that You Must Be mentioned -- is that the athletic, in-the-moment relationship that a soloist must have to his horn and his ongoing thoughts rests on certain assumptions ("assumptions" isn't the right word, but as a player yourself you probably know what I mean: a kind of basic faith that the whole process is worth it/makes sense, for yourself and others), and that for a long time in various ways Rollins found that this "faith" for him was wavering or ebbing. For a time, of course, he built that sense of doubt right into his music (Wayne Shorter did too, in his way), as both men had to do because that doubt was a big part of who they were. But eventually...

Late, thanks for the nudge. I listened to "Movin' Out" for the first time in a long while, and it was beautiful reminder of the early side of the time when Rollins seemed to be (and probably was, at least for some of us) the most important man on the planet. The "speaking eighth notes" thing you mentioned was at or close to the heart of it -- I think of it as a way he could build multiply shaded dramatic, sometimes ironic, points of view right into the texture of the music, as though the instrument and the thinking behind it had become spontaneously orchestral, a la Ellington or Mahler. And even though it's probably a thing that's impossible to talk about, the sense that the music gave you of Rollins's take on/grasp of the world we all lived in was that he knew EVERYTHING that mattered, or at least more than anyone else--accumulated novel wisdom plus the authority of an on-the-edge-of-the-horizon explorer. Can't think of any people in the history of any art who were more that way than Rollins was back then.

What about the rhythm section on the excellent 1958 Stitt Argo date ("Propapagoon," "This Is Always," etc.). issued with no liner notes (cover art on both sides) and reissued on CD in 1990 on MCA? The notes say its "possibly" Barry Harris, William Austin, and Frank Gant, but no way that's Barry Harris. I've always felt that. believe it or not, it's the Ramsey Lewis Trio (Lewis, El Dee Young, Redd Holt)--Young's distinctive bass playing being the giveaway.

Just listened to Natural Essence (the old LP with its murky sound--this due to the Liberty-era pressing I assume, not RVG). The great track for me is "Yearning For Love"--the piece itself (the relationship between Shaw's part and main line!), and then Washington's appropriately yearning/explosive just barely on the rails at times solo. However you want to characterize what Washington is playing, that's the kind of stuff that can't be faked.

As the idiot who gave "Natural Essence" a ***1/2 review (out of *****) for Down Beat when it came out (in a review that coupled it with the first or second Steve Miller album!!!) and who then grew to love the album in general and Washington in particular, let me quote from a piece I wrote back in '86 that touches upon "Natural Essence" by way of a Stanley Crouch remark about the then-current band Out of the Blue: "These young men aren't about foisting the clichés of twentieth-century European music on jazz," writes Crouch of a group called Out of the Blue, which tries very hard to sound like the clock had been turned back to 1965. "It is an ensemble luminously in tune with integrity." But if "integrity" and "foisting" are indeed the issues, it seems fair to ask how the music of Out of the Blue's eponymous first album stands up alongside a representative and stylistically similar album from the late 1960s: tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington's Natural Essence, which includes trumpeter Woody Shaw and alto saxophonist James Spaulding. The two groups share the same instrumentation and the same musical techniques, as the heated rhythmic angularities of bebop are linked to free-floating modal harmonies. And even if Out of the Blue's trumpeter Mike Mossman and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett haven't directly modeled themselves on Shaw and Spaulding, they certainly sound as though they have. But the emotional tone of the two albums is quite different. While most of the members of Out of the Blue sound as though they thought of their music as a style (that is, as a series of rules one must adopt and accept), the music of Washington and his partners is fundamentally explosive, a discontented elegance that keeps zooming off in search of extreme emotional states. In fact a passionate need to exceed itself lies at the heart of Washington’s music. And while stylistic patterns can be found on Natural Essence, they only emphasize the mood of turbulence and flux--defining the brink over which Washington constantly threatens to jump. So even though the music of Washington and his mid-sixties peers was less openly radical than that of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, it was by no means a separate phenomenon. Indeed, the strains of transition that supposedly were confined to the jazz avant garde may have been even more violently felt in the music that lay, so to speak, just to the Right of it.

Re: "Opinions are like you know what. Everybody has one." If you know the music of Lester Young and Brew Moore, the statement that Moore was "a very good tenor player if you want to hear somebody playing Lester Young riffs. But he never went much further than that" is an "opinion" that can only be based on a denial of -- or (more likely in this case, a simple lack of -- information, combined with a need to sound authoritative no matter what. This may be the root cause of the behavior that Christiern referred to. In any case, Moore, while deeply influenced by Young, took that influence and built something on it that was quite individual. Certainly no one could confuse Moore's style (i.e. his sound or his phrasing) with that of Young or those of any of Moore's Young-influenced compatriots -- Getz, Sims, Eager, Cohn, Steward, etc. If you can't hear that--to quote an old line of Le Roi Jones--you need ear braille.

A lot to respond to in the Giddins interview, but I'm baffled by this passage: "The saxophonist Brew Moore once said that if you don't play like Lester Young, you are playing wrong. That is why most of the people reading this conversation never heard of Moore -- a very good tenor player if you want to hear somebody playing Lester Young riffs. But he never went much further than that." If Giddins thinks that all Brew Moore did was play Lester Young riffs, he is very much mistaken --as one of Giddins' mentors, Dan Morgenstern, would be the first to tell him.

Miles had to be head of the CIA.

The poodle story sounds plausible to me. In that vein, does anyone remember when Dizzy Gillespie ran for president in, I think, 1964 and was asked in an interview in Down Beat who the members of his cabinet would be. He said that he would name Peggy Lee as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare because "she's always so nice to her musicians." (Mingus was his Secretary of Defense.) I met Lee after a show in the late '70s or early '80s, and the closer you got to her the more indistinct her features became. Or at least that was the effect.

I know about Bock's editing habits in part because the product that he released over the years bore the marks of it. Also, as I recall, knowledgable people--musicians, other fans-- would say something about it from time to time. Finally, Bill Perkins spoke about it directly in a mid'-90s Cadence interview. As for other interesting jazz info "like that" that I might have, are you, as they say, vibing me? A whole lot of people here know (e.g. Christiern and Chuck Nessa), or think they know, a whole lot of things. You'll have to be more specific. Or is it just gossip you're looking for?