Larry Kart

One apparent sad/ugly offshoot of the Peggy Lee vs. Disney lawsuit over "Lady and the Tramp," in which Lee rightly prevailed, is that her name was not mentioned in the "necrology" segment of Oscar broadcast in the year of her death (2002), although the names of a great many other Hollywood figures were, including more than a few less prominent than she was. (Lee was, of course, in addition to "Lady and the Tramp," an Oscar nominee as best supporting actress for "Pete Kelly's Blues.") It's possible that the failure to mention her name on the Oscar broadcast was just a big goof, but I think it's more likely that it was a deliberate act of revenge for her lawsuit.

I wrote them in English and they appeared that way over here; maybe they were translated into Japanese for that market, maybe not--I certainly couldn't tell. A fair number of Blue Notes, some (maybe all) previously unissued at the time, came out over here on LP by way of Japan in the early '80s -- for example, Mobley's "Poppin,'" Grant Green's "Matador," the two-trombone album with Slide Hampton and Curtis Fuller, the Sonny Clark with Wilbur Ware, etc. Pretty sure that all of that stuff has made it onto CD in one way or another. I'm still hoping for a Conn. version of Tyrone Washington's "Natural Essence." I have the old LP, but in terms of sound quality (not music) it was not what it should have been for a Van Gelder-engineered recording, undoubtedly for reasons that were beyond his control.

A shrewd but unfortunately brief survey of the underlying issues that have shaped jazz in Australia is Terry Martin's chapter "Jazz In Canada and Australia" in "The Oxford Companion to Jazz." Martin, a native of Adelaide who has lived in Chicago for many years, rightly emphasizes the remarkable work of the best Australian "revivalists" (the Bell brothers, Ade Monsborough, and above all the late Dave Dallwitz), who aren't really revivalists but musicians who have at their best built something beautiful and new upon their fondnes for bits and pieces of the jazz past. (Dallwitz is one of the great jazz composers; check out his "Ern Malley Suite.") Among Australian modernists, I've been knocked out by Bernie McGann (again, that homemade deep transformation of non-Australian impulses is present) and am interested by Mark Simmonds, and Scott Tinkler.

I wrote the liner notes for the early 1980s Japanese Blue Note LP original issue of "Minor Move" but have not seen the current American CD reissue (or maybe I did but didn't buy it because I have the Mosaic set). Anyway, does someone who does have the current issue of "Minor Move" tell me whether my notes are used there. Just curious.

Dick Bock of Pacific Jazz was notorious for editing (and, in the further issues of the same performances, re-editing) material that probably would have been better left alone. Also, as Bill Perkins explained in a Cadence interview, apart from the decision to edit or not edit, Bock was a terrible editor in mechanical terms (i.e. in handling the tools of the trade) and in terms of being able to keep track of the form of a piece; thus some of the edits resulted in dropped bars. etc. This led to Perkins' getting into that end of the business himself, as a form of aid and self-defense; apparently Bock welcomed the help.

Just to keep things straight, Walter van de Leur's book "Soemthing To Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn" demonstrates beyond any doubt that four movements from "The Queen's Suite," six of nine movements from "The Nutcracker Suite," four of five movements from the "Peer Gynt Suite," "Agra," "Isfahan," and "Blue Bird of Delhi" from "Far East Suite," and "Star-Crossed Lovers," "Half the Fun," and "Up and Down, Up and Down" from "Such Sweet Thunder" are wholly the work of Strayhorn. I recommend the book to anyone who thinks that the music of the two men was indistinguishable, a fiction that some of those around Ellington (and Duke himself at times) were eager to promote. On the other hand, Strayhorn and Ellington were using much the same timbral palette (the actual members of the then-current Ellington orchestra), even though there were clear structural and harmonic differences between their composing/arranging styles.

All of tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf's Criss Cross albums are worth checking out. He's taken an aspect of early Wayne Shorter and run off with it to a place that's all his own, I think. And he swings like crazy. The one with Joe Locke as his frontline partner may be his best blowing date, but all the ones with several horns in the ensemble are strong -- he's a fine composer/arranger.

Heard Ayler sit in with the Tchicai-Rudd Quartet (probably with Louis Worrell and Milford Graves) in, I think, spring 1966 (in effect, the "New York Eye and Ear Control" band without Don Cherry) in a loft above the Vanguard. Hope I never forget what the sheer size of Ayler's sound felt like; it came up through the soles of your feet and went out through the hair on your head. It was huge, but I wouldn't call it loud because it needed to be that size for genuine musical reasons--to bring all those overtones to life, for one. Only thing I've ever heard like it is Roscoe Mitchell in full flight, though Mitchell is Mitchell and Ayler is Ayler.

A passage from John Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle" that may have some bearing on Chuck's "sewing machine" remark: "The relaxed, subdued atmosphere of West Coast jazz had a healthy acceptance of stylistic diversity and innovation, but it also accepted the emotional world of pop music at face value; even original themes are treated like more hip, more grown-up kinds of pop music. In bop's freest flights it could not escape reality, but these Californians were not aware of the conflict of values that was the source of bop." I know, Mulligan and Baker were not really Californians, but I still think this makes a lot of sense. Also, Mulligan as a soloist usually strikes me as pretty earthbound, rhythmically and melodically; I think Baker is the real player of the two, though they do fit together damn well in what is undoubtedly Mulligan's concept.

A Donald Lambert-Tatum story from Dick Wellstood's great notes to Lambert's Pumpkin LP: "One night Lambert got all liquored up in Jersey [where he lived] and headed for Harlem, looking to do battle with Tatum, who was generally acknowledged to be the King. He found Tatum and Marlowe Morris (considered second only to Tatum), sitting in the back room of some bar. Lambert flung himself at the piano, crying, 'I've come for you, Tatum!' and things of that nature, and launched into some blistering stride. Tatum heard him out. When it was all over and Lambert stood up, defiant, Tatum said quietly, 'Take him, Marlowe.' "

A few years after he made his Argo albums, maybe 1965 or so, Clarence Shaw had a nice litle combo, himself and a rhythm section (don't recall the players' names), that worked fairly regularly at a Wells St. club (not the Plugged Nickel, not the Brown Shoe, it was close to the corner of North Ave. and Wells on the east side of the street). Shaw was in great form at the time. I recall a detailed, enthusiastic John Litweiler Caught in the Act review of the band in Down Beat.

One good place to add some flesh to this Bowie quote from Lazaro -- "It's just about really being sensitive, and trying to play a music that is about music. It's about emotion, it's about traveling through these different emotions, and it's about showing the listener all these pictures. We expect the listener to have, like, a movie going on when they hear us. That's what it's all about for us. -- might be "The Little Suite" from "Sound" (Delmark). As I recall, that incredible performance/creation was pretty much without precedent in jazz up to that time, though it probably has indirect, spiritual/musical roots in Red Hot Peppers Morton and some Mingus. But the spirit of it, the joy and wit, the play between abandon and control, the amazing "efficiency," for want of a better term, of every move! And it never gets old or even that familiar, just rears up on its hind legs every time.

I agree that Wilbur was a drummer unto himself, but here's what he had to say about Ike Day in a 1969 interview I did with him that wasn't published at the time but will be part of, as they say, my forthcoming book. I've tacked on the two sentences from Wilbur that end the interview because they've always struck as both profound and very funny. "Ike Day was about my age, might have been a little older. A thin guy. A truly amazing drummer. Max and Art [blakey] and everybody had respect for Ike. Ike was the kind of cat --it’d be zero outside, and he’d walk up to the stand and beat off some way up tempo and never miss a beat, clear and precise. He was more out of the Sid Catlett school because that was his era. He was established with his own voice and his own style before I’d ever heard of Max or any of them. He’d come by the house and we’d practice. He sort of brought me along and showed me a lot of things. Just listening to him was a lesson in itself. He could take two pieces--a cymbal and a bass drum--and make it swing. He was a natural drummer. He had fast hands, and he used both feet and both hands. If the tempo was up there, he’d be on the bass drum and it wouldn’t be loud--you felt it more than you heard it. Next to old man Jo Jones and Big Sid, Ike could do more with a pair of sock cymbals. He could make them breathe. Dorrel [Anderson] was like that too. A hell of a natural drummer. We all came up together--Dorrel, Ike and myself--but Ike was the older more experienced one and could play better.... "Every drummer who’s been playing can play anything he thinks of; the trouble is thinking of things to play. Lots of cats can play what they think, but they don’t think it."

Free For all asks, "How were Roscoe, Muhal, Jarman et al received by the jazz audience in Chicago at that time? Did they work in clubs? Was there a large audience for their music? Who was a big draw jazz-wise in Chicago around then? Were the north side/south side scenes separate- what I mean, was there much integration of the black and white musicians at that point?" And Chuck rightly warns that description of the local scene is complex. But I'll give it a try. The not large but for the most part dedicated basic audience for Roscoe, Muhal, Jarman et al. was drawn from maybe four somewhat overlapping groups: First, the members of the AACM themselves had some connection to an African-American cultural/political ... I don't think "movement" is quite the right word, but something between a movement and a yeasty, coalescing community; and I recall that, depending on the location of a particular event or concert, a fair percentage of the audience would consist of people who were connected with that community, including of course musicians who weren't playing that afternoon or evening but wanted to hear what fellow players were doing. Second, as in any good-sized urban center at the time, there was a body of hard-core jazz fans who'd been paying attention to what was up on the so-called cutting edge nationally as a matter of course , and some of those listeners had become aware of what was up in their own town and realized that these were world-class innovative players, even if they weren't yet well-known. Third, overlapping with the second group, and again as in any good-sized urban center at the time, there was a fair amount of free-floating counter culture sentiment, looking for sorts of cultural activity that had, or could be thought to have, a rebellious, "let's remake the world" tone. And Lord knows, a fair amount of this music gave you the feeling that the world was being remade. Fourth, and of course overlapping with the third group (as well as the second), a good number of AACM members lived in or near Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, which is where the University of Chicago is located, so there were a fair number of U. of C. students who belonged to groups two and three and began to follow these musicians, who were as it happens often synergistically jamming or holding concerts in U of C. student lounges or other venues. I don't think there was much if any club work for AACM-related players playing their music on their own terms -- other than the kind of Ajaramu/Claudine Myers gig I mentioned in a previous post, where players who had straightahead-ish inclinations were hired to play more or less that way and then could test the boundaries. Also, there was sideman work to be had in blues and r&b bands. I don't think there was much integration of the black and white musicians at that point, for a couple of reasons. First, there was both an actual and perceived by those white musicians who might be interested cultural/racial clannishness to the AACM community. Not that I recall any overt hostility, actually quite the opposite in many instances, just a sense that this is more or less our thing. Second, I don't think there were all that many (or at least not as many) white musicians in town at the time who were that interested in/knowlegable about the kind of the music that the AACM players were making, and some of those who were (e.g. bassist Russell Thorne, drummer Hal Russell) were just the kind of tightly wound customers who might have trouble getting along with most people they didn't already know, as well as a good many people they did. A shame, because I wouldn't have been surprised if Thorne and, say, the Jarman of that time had turned out to have a lot of common ground musically. Of course, Muhal, the elder statesmen, had had a long professional career in groups of many types, including the MJT Plus Three, which had included non-African-American trumpeters Paul Serrano and Willie Thomas.

Another Chicago late '60s memory, probably from 1967: Drummer Gerald Donovan (Ajaramu) and pianist/organist Amina Claudine Meyers had a gig at a bar on, I think, Stony Island Ave. Don't know if Roscoe M. and Maurice McIntyre (Kalaparush) were both sitting in or one of them was part of the band and the other was sitting in, but they were both there that night and in very relaxed form, yet this was a neighborhood bar, not an AACM concert, so as I recall there was some playful sense in the air of "How much are we (or they) going to get away with?" It was some customer's birthday, thus the inevitable request for "Happy Birthday." Roscoe, Maurice et al. not only played "Happy Birthday," but played it with as much motivically based intensity as, say, Monk played "Little Rootie Tootie," and as I recall, they played angular, beautifully logical variations on "HB" for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes -- not at all broad or parodistic, just taking what was given and running with it, though there was an underlying air of deadpan I'm not sure what to call it, maybe a distant echo of Buster Keaton. I recall that the audience was more than pleased.

An excerpt from a piece I wrote for Down Beat's 1968 year book, Music '69 (published in Jan. '69). The event described probably took place in April or maybe August 1965, the two times that year the Coltrane Quartet was in Chicago: "The second Chicago-based player of the new music I heard was Roscoe Mitchell [bassist Russell Thorne was the first]. Coltrane was in town, and Elvin Jones was appearing at an off-night session [at a club on Wells St., probably the Brown Shoe, definitely not the Plugged Nickel--and I think it was on a Sunday afternoon, not an off-night]. As Jerry Figi once put it, Elvin was laying about "with a vengeance, one of those prehistoric movie-monsters crashing through a city…"--in the process wiping out a James Moody-like tenor player [his name was Bob Poulian]. Suddenly, in the middle of a tune, a young alto saxophonist climbed on the stand and played a solo that met Jones more than half-way. What he played, a version of the bird-like cries that Dolphy used, was inseparable from the way he played it. His raw, piercing sound was powerful enough to cut through the drums, and Elvin found himself playing with and against someone. When the saxophonist had finished, he climbed down and disappeared into the audience. Someone was able to answer my question with the name Roscoe Mitchell, and I filed it for future reference."

In case Chuck isn't in a mood right now to go over those days again, here are links to three interviews in which he does: http://www2.kenyon.edu/Projects/Ottenhoff/.../Aacm/nessa.htm http://www.jazzweekly.com/interviews/cnessa.htm http://delmark.com/rhythm.nessa.htm They were amazing times, and Chuck, I'd say, was more than a midwife. The musicians involved would have to speak for themselves, but from where I sat, his commitment, savvy, taste, and across-the-board honesty had a great deal to do with that scene's flowering the way it did. I think of it like this: Imagine those musicians and either no one (or no one much) wants to record them, or those who do lack Chuck's qualities/abilities/attitude. The scene itself, not to mention our record of it so to speak, would not have been the same, and to an extent that's difficult to calculate.

Chris, Charles Burnett's segment of "The Blues" sounds like a disaster (haven't seen any of them myself), but I have seen two of his fiction films, "To Sleep With Anger" (1990) and "The Glass Shield" (1994), and they were excellent, especially the first one. Later on he did cross paths with Oprah on a project ("The Wedding"), which may have messed up his mind.

Ooops -- make that the Lost Cosmic Unity label. My own Cosmic Unit is, however, still missing.

David, I like "New Ideas" too and had the pleasure of reviewing an excellent but apparently quite obscure Al Francis trio album (with John Neves and Joe Hunt) from the mid 1980s, "Jazz Bohemia Revisited" on the Lost Cosmic Unit label. This led to brief amiable contact with Francis -- phone conversation or by letter I don't recall. You say you knew Francis at one time. Do you know what's happened to him? He was a helluva player and an original, maybe in a class with Walt Dickerson if there were more of his work to go by.

Interesting to get a former Borders employee perspective. I guessed there was something fishy about this coupon, though it didn't occur to me that it had been dicked around with in the way it seems to have been. When I tried to use it (on an $18.99 classical disc), suspicions were confirmed. The coupon coding when entered said that the price was now $7.60 (plus tax), i.e. 60 per cent off! The bemused clerk noted the discrepancy and then sold it to me anyway. Not a particularly good feeling but probably not the worst thing I've ever done.

Others who were around back then can confirm or disagee, but my experience was that encountering Coltrane on "Mainstream '58" in the context of that time was absolutely thrilling/shocking, even if (or especially if) you already were familiar with and knocked out by "Blue Train" and all the various Prestige dates from '57-8, under his own name and as a sideman, that flank "Mainstream." Fo whatever reasons, the phase of/style of Trane that Ira Gitler dubbed "sheets of sound" made ( or seemed to make, in terms of recordings) its full debut here, and again it was thrilling/shocking. I think that Trane's partners here had a lot to do with this -- in particular the several sorts of fairly extreme "laid-backness" that Harden and Louis Hayes display e.g. the former's slow-mo lyricism and the latter's glassily even, behind-the-beat ride cymbal work. Together with Doug Watkins' marvelously precise and also fairly laid-back time feel (laid-back by comparison with P. Chamber's more forward-leaning approach), this perhaps gave Trane just the sort of backdrop -- at once very alive yet kind of "neutral," if you know what I mean (a la, maybe the Basie Band rhythm section of the late '30s) -- that left him free to dump all the snakes out of the sack.

Shaw is a great clarinetist and bandleader, but am I the only one who, after watching "Time Is All You've Got," felt that he also is one of the all-time narcissisitc jerks? Also, and in much the same vein that his vaunted (esp. by Shaw himself) intellectuality is fairly hollow because it's mostly for show and/or a case of wishful mirror-gazing?

A lovely record, as are almost all the Vanguards. BTW, in later years Ruby, being Ruby, professed to despise all the playing he did back then. Nice to know the name of the place where these were recorded; the feeling of "space" around the band was akin to Columbia's 30th St. studio but a shade less reverberant. Who needs stereo? Also BTW, the person who screwed up the Vanguard reissues, initially at least (haven't checked to see if he's still got the gig) is Sam Charters. A couple of years ago I sent Vanguard a detailed, angry complaint about the hash he'd made of the Mel Powell material -- mis-attributions, jumbled sessions, etc. (Charters apparently didn't listen to the material or bother to look at the liner notes of the original LPs, or both). Vanguard's reply was noncommital, but a friend of mine who knows Charters says that Sam did get yelled at a bit and that, as might be expected, he was very upset that someone out there had made his life more difficult.

P.S. The NY club where I saw Mobley in such grim shape was The Tin Palace.