Larry Kart

BTW, I'd seen that piece of John's before but didn't remember it well enough. What a beautiful, soulful, insightful piece of writing. There are two lives at stake and on view there -- Hank's and John's.

Chuck, I remember (or think I remember) being at the Jug, Von, Hank, Hank Crawford affair, but if so my memories of it are very dim -- perhaps because it was kind of a mess? Also -- and how many times does this happen? -- I probably wasn't thinking along "focus on Mobley and treasure the memory" lines because I didn't know how close he was to the end. On the other hand, I did hear Hank in New York, before or probably after this -- at some club-based "festival" with, I think Philly Joe in the band -- and he was in very poor shape, almost unable to get enough air through the horn to make a sound. That was indelible because it was so sad, almost shocking. Don't think I ever heard another great player, in person at least, who was in a similar condition but still trying to play -- maybe Lester Young with JATP in fall 1955, before he was hospitalized for a month or so and then came out to make "Jazz Giants '56" and "Pres and Teddy." As I recall, the New York thing with Hank just seemed cruel, like somebody should have stopped it, but maybe Hank himself felt otherwise, given the alternatives.

Guess I need to explore Smith more; all I know is the old Roost "Moonlight in Vermont" album. BTW, looking at my previous post. I notice an unintended ambiguity. I meant that Farlow's range of dynamics and touch had increased quite a bit over what I'd heard from before, not that he had gone beyond Tatum's range of dynamics etc.

Oops. Yes, Farlow, too. BTW, I heard him live in the mid-'80s in Chicago, with a bassist (probably Larry Grey) and a good boppish drummer (Robert Shy), and he was in a place that seemed to be a fair bit beyond anything I'd heard on record from him, incredibly fluid in thought and articulation, virtually Tatumesque, and with a good deal broader range in dynamics and touch, all sorts of expressive shadings as seen from an express train. In fact, the speed and intensity of meaningful musical events that night seemed to me to be at or close to the limit of what the human mind (or at least my mind) could assimilate. I got the feeling that what I heard was not the result of the fairly common difference between live and studio musical selves (the great Farlow material taped in Ed Fuerst's apartment is not stylistically different from studio Farlow of the time) but rather of a late-ish development in his overall musical approach that, as far as I know, was not documented on record.

FWIW, my old boss at Down Beat, Dan Morgenstern, told me that he went do an interview with Lloyd in his early "Love-In"/"Dream Weaver" hey-day, and when Lloyd answered the knock on the hotel room door, he said that it was too bad that Dan hadn't arrived a minute or too earlier, when Lloyd had been levitating. As I recall, Dan politely inquired further, and Lloyd explained that he meant that quite literally, that he'd been hovering a foot or two off the floor for some time that afternoon.

Django and Christian, in classes of their own. Grant Green is Grant Green. Otherwise, Jimmy Raney, in the top group of improvisers regardless of instrument (and an influence on Green, to complete the circle).

There's some wonderful, utterly relaxed and genuine, Getz blues playing on this album, maybe one of the earliest where he really got things together in that area: The Soft Swing (Verve MGV 8321) Stan Getz (ts) Mose Allison (p) Addison Farmer (B) Jerry Segal (d) NYC, July 12, 1957 All the Things You Are, Pocono Mac, Down Beat, To the Ends of the Earth, Bye Blues There's some superb stoptime playing from Stan on both blues (Pocono Mac and Down Beat), the whole thing just a lovely day in the studio. Don't see that it's out on CD in the U.S. right now, but it probably was/is out in Japan.

I like Herb Ellis a fair amount of time -- especially once in-person in the mid-'80s, when he was away from the O. Peterson orbit (BTW, Jim, "Twangity-splangity-fleep-floop-doo" is pure genius) -- but on Nothing But the Blues to my ears he and even more so Getz seem to be trying so damn hard. There are couple of places where Stan almost brays like a mule. My guess is that Roy's macho presence kind of freaked him out.

"Actually, I think he does go a little Cockney at one point - perhaps you have to be British to hear it." Maybe it's at the very beginning -- "Oiy like the sunrise" instead of "I like the sunrise."

Great on paper maybe, but I've always found it rather artificially heated and "off" in some way, as though the twanginess of Ellis' conception of the blues, combined with Getz's hardbreathing attempt to be even bluesier and more twangy (if you can be twangy on the tenor saxophone, Getz does it here), led the whole thing to curdle. Also, Stan Levey's typically mircoscopic ride cymbal beat, which I like a lot in other contexts, is not what was needed here. Maybe someone like Gus Johnson would have saved things.

I'm of two minds about the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- liking it to some extent but feeling that the time feel (overall as well as that of the rhythm section) was a little too buckety-buckety, and that too much of the writing had tense, pinched-shoe tightness to it. But for those who really like the MCJB, there are two topnotch concert recordings from their 1960 European tour that are a good bit more intense than anything that I know of that will be on the Mosaic set -- a 2-CD set on RTE (which used to, and may still, be available at Berkshire Record Outlet for a song) and a single CD on TCB. Much material crops up on both discs, but Zoot is in uncommonly serious form (for that time, IMO) on the TCB on "Apple Core" (the notes refer to him "going positively berserk," which is not far from the truth), and the band as a whole sounds excellent on both the Paris (RTE) and Zurich (TCB) concerts. The RTE, if I recall, is especially well-recorded, particularly the rhythm section, which helps a lot.

I'm of two minds about the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- liking it to some extent but feeling that the time feel (overall as well as that of the rhythm section) was a little too buckety-buckety, and that too much of the writing had tense, pinched-shoe tightness to it. But for those who really like the MCJB, there are two topnotch concert recordings from their 1960 European tour that are a good bit more intense than anything that I know of that will be on the Mosaic set -- a 2-CD set on RTE (which used to, and may still, be available at Berkshire Record Outlet for a song) and a single CD on TCB. Much material crops up on both discs, but Zoot is in uncommonly serious form (for that time, IMO) on the TCB on "Apple Core" (the notes refer to him "going positively berserk," which is not far from the truth), and the band as a whole sounds excellent on both the Paris (RTE) and Zurich (TCB) concerts. The RTE, if I recall, is especially well-recorded, particularly the rhythm section, which helps a lot.

Christern, I agree with you about a lot of Al Hibbler, but "I Like the Sunrise" (which I love, along with the rest of "Liberian Suite") is inconceivable to me (and might not have been conceivable to Ellington) without the timbral eccentricities of Hibbler's voice as a given. (Don't know if Chuck agrees with me on this.) At the least, we can be grateful that on this occasion Hibbler didn't do his mock-Cockney thing.

Yes, that's the interview. Kudos to Joe. As a former journalist, I'm sure he must have been handling his side of things very well to get so much good talk out of Robertson, who certainly sounds like he's a great guy in addition to being a fine player.

"Amazing technical control and a fully worked-out artistic sensibility which produced solos of a happy/sad clown quality" sounds exactly like what I heard from Herb Robertson live, and while I've heard much less recorded Robertson than you have, there is at least one track from one album -- Mark Helias' 1987 "The Current Set" (Enja), w/ Berne, R. Eubanks, V. Lewis, et al. -- that I think comes close to capturing him running wild. I believe the piece is "Rebound," it's definitely on Side 1. BTW, I have "The Current Set" on LP, don't know if it's on CD. Also BTW, I recall reading a Robertson interview somewhere, online probably, where he speaks of the influence he had on Dave Douglas (perhaps through direct teacher-student contact? I don't recall) and makes some friendly but wry comments on Douglas' trumpet playing.

Thanks, James. But when I heard Shim a week or so ago at the Chicago Jazz Festival with Elvin Jones, he was pretty disappointing. My impression was that this was a more conventional framework than he would have preferred (and his frontline companion was the would-be tricky and lame Delfayo Marsalis), but it seemed like Shim, trying to sound more straightahead, ended up sounding like no one much was home at all. Just a lot of almost Lockjaw-like gestures, thrown together with a sort of "Is this what you want?" lack of conviction and/or interest. By contrast, and by chance, Ed Wilkerson played in the afternoon with the local Burgess Gardiner Big Band (nice outfit), and on Gerald Wilson's "Blues for Yna Yna" was faced with a similar situation to the one Shim may have faced with Elvin -- i.e. the chart, and the style of the band as a whole, called for Wilkerson to simplify and broaden his normal solo style a fair bit in order to fit in. But he easily and naturally made that adjustment and played a powerful solo that filled his role in the piece and was, at the same time, clearly an Ed Wilkerson solo. Maybe the difference is just a matter of experience, but I wonder if it's more than that. The sense of core personality/identity we used to get and expect from every gifted soloist is now something I keep my fingers crossed for every time, because too often it goes right away. Hope I'm wrong in Shim's case, because everything else I've heard from him was strong and novel.

I recall being entranced some 30 years ago by Lee's contribution to vibraphonist-composer Gunter Hampel's "The 8th of July 1969," with a band that included Antony Braxton, Willem Breuker, Arjen Gortner, and Steve McCall. According to the 5th Edition of the Penguin Guide, it is (or was) out on CD on the Birth label.

I'm not playing either, but Barney Wilen was one fine player. Never heard anything by him that wasn't very good. If I had to choose, I'd say he was definitely more of a natural than Tubby Hayes, who as good as he could be usually sounded to me like he was working too hard at it. Also Wilen, like Wardell Gray, was one of those guys whose soul seemed to be perfectly attuned to the instrument -- it's like the tenor saxophone rolled over on its back and put its paws up in the air for him.

Oops, that's right. "Slow Drag."

Check out "Suicide City" from "Caramba." There are times when Higgins sounds like he's playing backwards. Also he talks/sings delightfully on one track.

Miles' point about Peterson as a blues player seems clear enough, whether or not you agree with it -- that Peterson employs cliched blues devices rather mechancially and too excess. As for socio-economic background as a measuring stick, I suppose you could argue that a Rockefeller heir might be a very unlikely blues player, but beyond that it quickly gets absurd. For example, take the names of all the pianists mentioned here so far and, if we had the information, rank them in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds. Who would then want to argue that this ranking determined their relative merits as blues players, with the most "deprived" being the bluesiest?

Shouldn't Horace Silver be in the running? As for Peterson, Miles' harsh old (1958) assessment seem sound to me: "[Oscar] even had to LEARN to play the blues. Everybody knows that if you flat a third, you're going to get a blues sound. He learned that and runs it into the ground worse than Billy Taylor."

I may have mentioned this before, but on page 99 of Ira Gitler's "Swing To Bop," Benny Bailey is quoted as follows: "During Miles' early formative years, they shared an apartment in New York, and Freddie, being more experienced than Miles, was sort of schooling Miles. I happen to know for instance that on the recording of 'Billie's Bounce' that Miles made with Charlie Parker, his solo was exactly the one that Freddie played for this particular blues. Evidently, Miles said that he was nervous on the date and couldn't think of anything to play, so he did Freddie's solo note for note." I'd add that both Bailey (b. 1925) and Webster (b. 1917) were from Cleveland, so there probably was some background there, and that that 'Billie's Bounce' solo is excellent and, IMO, not much like anything else that Miles played before or since.

Here's a report on a June 2002 sighting of Shim that I sent to a friend. I agree that he's among the most promising younger guys: Back from a week in Manhattan, where I heard one pretty interesting band, lead by bassist Mark Helias, with Herb Robertson, Mark Shim, Craig Taborn and drummer Eric McPherson. The drawback was Helias' themes, which were not very interesting in themselves and which, on several pieces, the frontline was expected to noodle around for many minutes at a time. Shim sounded at least as usefully eccentric as does on record, sort of like a cross between Joe Henderson and Ike Quebec, but that doesn't do him justice; the main effect is that whatever figure he seems to be thinking of when he begins a phrase turns out to side-slip into two or three or more others before the next breath is taken and/or the next sense that a phrase has begun occurs, and you pretty much can't, in the listening moment, tell where the side-slips occur--the effect is of an oblique layering of lines. Emotionally this doesn't come across as trickiness or a "method" at work but as a kind of lush courting of disruption, a la Tyrone Washington perhaps, or come to think of it, Ed Wilkerson. Whatever, Shim certainly shows promise. Robertson was far beyond anything I've heard from him on record, though perhaps I haven't heard the right ones. What he does that's most striking is use a plunger mute not so much for color but to further break down rhythmically an already multi-noted, swift tempo passage. That is, each note that's already been articulated quite a bit by lips and fingers can be broken down further by the plunger into "notes" of different timbres, interspersed with leaps (Shavers-like perhaps) into a near freak register. Robertson's control of this process is close to mind-boggling, and his goal is primarily rhythmic and line-shaping, I think, not coloristic; in any case, again, I heard no trickiness or a desire to charm but a technique driven by considerable intensity of thought; there were times when it seemed that the 1945-6 Gillespie was in the room, not in terms of sonic resemblance but dramatized exuberance-scariness. This was the most straightahead format in which I've heard Taborn, and he got into some very lush, neo-Hancock grooves.

Re "Homecoming": I believe that Woody's band was not the only thing that Dexter "borrowed" around that time. He also hooked up with publicist Maxine Gregg (a.k.a. "Little Red" of "Little Red's Fantasy"), a development that went a long way toward lowering Woody's spirits when he discovered upon returning from a summer European tour that Gregg had cleaned out their apartment and left him for Dex.