Larry Kart

Those David Himmelstein liner notes to "Settin' the Pace" are something else. I particular like the line about Dexter briefly leaving the studio to perform "his bebop ablutions."

That brings to mind the very fine tenorman who took Young's place with Russell, Paul Plummer, who became an even more striking and individual player in later years. I know of three recordings of his work besides what the two albums he did with Russell ("The Stratus Seekers" and "The Outer View") -- a 1986 LP, "Detroit Opium Den" (Resound), with drummer Ron Enyard, guitarist Tony Byrne, and organist Steve Corn, and two Cadence CDs, rec. 4/3/97 at a gig in Indianapolis, "Driving Music Vols. 1 &2," with Al Kiger, Enyard, pianist Charles Wilson, and bassist Lou Lausche. (All these musicians were based in Indianapolis and/or Cincinnati.) Unfortunately, per a phone conversation I had with Enyard a couple of years back, Plummer began to suffer from severe dental problems, at some point after the '97 recording had to have all or most of his teeth removed, and is no longer able to play very much if at all. He was special, though -- perhaps comparable stylistically to the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins-band era but his own man really. And if you only know his work with Russell, he did continue to grow.

It's probably inseparable from the direct-pickup issue, but I recall that early Ron Carter (up to say 1969) was one kind of bass player -- hip, alert, inventive, tasteful, etc. -- and that Carter from the '70s on was often twangy, self-indulgent, even just plain obvious and boring or crude, as though everything he played was being placed within quotation marks. At some point in that decade, his presence on a record became a reason to avoid it for me, unless there were some powerful other reason not to. Before that, though, the standard was very high -- not only his work with Miles of course but also, say, Sam Rivers' "Fuschia Swing Song" and a terrific album under Bobby Timmons' name, "The Soul Man" I think it was, with Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Cobb.

Yes, Jim, I did write that review of "Thesaurus" for Down Beat back in '69. What I said about Perkins' bari playing was: "'Calamus' features Bill Perkins on baritone, trying to sound tough. I admire his tenor playing, but I don't think he has yet mastered the larger horn." I wonder if Clare Fischer might have been "projecting" a bit, as they say in the trade -- the review did make some very snotty, smart-alecky remarks about his writing, which I wish I could retroactively dial-down about a third, in part because a remastered CD reissue of the album eventually went a long way toward clarifying some of the close-voiced reed textures that on the LP sounded very muddy. Why Perkins left the "sound" behind and, as I think he admits in the Cadence interview, tried to get tough, is a story that's pretty much told in the music he made, as well as in the interview. The most successful latter-day Perkins I know is on the two Fresh Sounds albums he made with Lennie Niehaus, because Lennie's extremely oblique harmonic and rhythmic thinking makes Perk's more off-the-wall forays sound less ... I think "gawky" would be the right word. Niehaus and Perkins are very effective when soloing simultaneously. Also, there's the late album "I Wished On the Moon" (Candid), where Perk played with Rob Pronk's string-laden Hilversum Orchestra, and as he says "the sound" suddenly came back to him. In the Cadence interview Perk says that on an unreleased 1958 date of Jimmy Van Heusen tunes that he did for Dick Bock, he "sort of played a half-baked imitation of Sonny Rollins, without getting into Sonny Rollins, and Dick was really disgusted.... But then I felt the urge to change because the thing is at the time I really hadn't studied the music....I was starting to hear the Sonny Rollinses of this world ... and trying to play like that, but I had no idea what they were doing. Now I think I have a good idea of what they wwre doing."

Lovely, true thoughts Jim. I had a similar response to "Almost" (though I don't recall sleeping with that solo) and the rest of Perkins' work on "2 Degrees" back when it came out, with that very West Coast-looking girl on the cover. Try to track down the interview Perkins did with Cadence that ran in Nov. 1995. As I recall, he speaks about being in that mid-'50s "zone" but also about his need/desire to leave it, in part because he didn't think he was tough enough rhythmically or harmonically compared to other players on the scene. He had a lot of self-doubt as a player and speaks of this with honesty and insight. It's among the most revealing accounts of what it was like to be a white West Coast guy of that era, not that Perkins wasn't very much an individual.

Had the good fortune to heard Bailey live in Chicago in the early '80s, I think. He was in great form. Of the recordings I know, I'm particularly fond of "For Heaven's Sake" (Hot House), with Tony Coe, Horace Parlan, Jimmy Woode, and Idris Muhammad, rec. 1988. I recall reading somewhere that BB tended to get a bit uptight when he was the leader on a studio date, but not this day. Very relaxed rhythm section and an excellent job of engineering too. BTW, does anyone have further info on BB's claim, on page 99 of Ira Gitler's book "Swing To Bop," that Miles' solo on "Billie's Bounce"with Bird was a note for note re-creation of a favorite Freddie Webster chorus? Certainly that solo doesn't sound much like anything else Miles was playing at the time.

Excerpt from the notes I wrote for the Mosaic Tristano-Konitz-Marsh box: "...in December 1957, Marsh will almost come to grief in the company of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Describing the partnership between Chambers and Jones in the liner notes to Hank Mobley’s Poppin’, which was recorded less than two months before the first of the two dates that make up the Atlantic Marsh album, I wrote that the drummer and bassist "shared a unique concept of where ‘one’ is--just a hair behind the beat but rigidly so, with the result that the time has a stiff-legged, compulsive quality. The beat doesn’t flow but jerks forward in a series of spasmodic leaps, creating a climate of nervous intensity that was peculiar to the era. Either the soloist jumps or he is fried to a crisp on the spot." Well, Marsh did survive the encounter, and he is a bit more at ease on the next date in January 1958, when Paul Motion takes the place of Jones and pianist Ronnie Ball drops out. For even though Chambers’ broad rhythmic impasto, so full of directional energy, still threatens to ride right over the nodes of rhythmic ambivalence that Warne must leave exposed, the absence of a chordal instrument makes just that much more space available to the soloist, who is especially fluent on "Yardbird Suite." One wonders, though, what this album would have been like if [Oscar] Pettiford and [Kenny] Clarke had been present." But don't let that discourage you from getting the Mosaic box, though. It's full of wonderful music. A Chambers question: Does anyone know who wrote about (and where) his deliberately playing between the notes pitchwise at times in a walking context -- say, inserting a note that was a fair bit sharp beween two that were on the button in order to give his lines an extra edge, a bit more forward lean?

"Step Lightly" is a nutty piece, akin to some of Horace's writing on "Stylings of Silver."

Let's no forget "Fontainbleu." While it's a bit episodic (intentionally, I'd say), much of it is gorgeous -- and lovingly played by Dorham et al.

Ted Brown's analysis of Warne's solo on "Black Jack" stands out for me. He really sees the trees and the forest. Also, on page 210 (the book needs the index it doesn't have), Brown relates a very intense anecdote about his relationship to Warne, one that cuts several ways at once.

About "Playful Intentions," Phil has a great sound (bottom to top--and there is quite a top at times), he'll follow an evolving line to the ends of the known universe no matter what and make it work, he has no licks I can detect, he writes and picks nice tunes, and the album is an album, not just a collection of tracks. Also, everyone else is in fine form, especially Bill Carrothers, and it all feels unusually "open" -- little or no sense that anyone is presenting themselves, strutting their stuff.

Best choice I know -- and I heard of a guy who actually used it -- is Sonny Rollins' "There's No Business Like Show Business" from "Worktime."

Maybe the most loony but unfailingly interesting (at least in certain moods) "too written" jazz record I know is the Rogers-Andre Previn RCA album "Collaboration" (from I think 1954 or '55), with Rogers arranging standards on one side that are directly followed by Previn originals on those changes; then on the other side they switch roles. Previn not only solos a good deal but also plays a prominent role in the ensemble on many tracks (he's not yet into his Hampton Hawes-Horace Silver bag, though that's within sight); Rogers is about as cute-clever as he ever got; and the execution by the band (Shank, Cooper, Giuffre, Bernhart, Manne, etc.) of some extremely tricky writing is often breathtaking. Yes, it's incredibily precious and bitty, but to me it's redeemed because it's also quite mad, like certain kinds of vintage '50s science fiction. Now that I think of it, Rogers dug some of that SF, or at least knew about it; his first Atlantic album, "Martians Go Home," is named after a very good SF novel of the time by Frederic Brown.

Yes, to several of the names mentioned above, but while part of me felt this was a bit stale or too obvious or wrong for some reason I've forgotten, the first player who came to mind was Dave Douglas. I think he'd pick right up on Hill's stuff, if he hasn't already, and would bring a lot of perky, quirky drive to the proceedings.

Some under-the-radar Kamuca worth checking out is on Shelly Manne's album of music from the TV show "Checkmate" (originally on Contemporary, now on OJC). It dates from Oct. 1961, by which time Kamuca had been trying to assimilate as much Rollins and Trane as his third-generation Pres approach could handle, and it seems to me that here he's got it all together. The themes, by John Williams (yes that John Williams), are post "Kind of Blue" modal to some extent, and the player Kamuca had become by then just eats this material up. By contrast, his frontline partner, Conte Candoli, was then trying his damndest to sound like "KOB" Miles, and the mix between this impersonation and Conte's actual, brassy Diz-Sweets soul is a bit uneasy -- he tries so hard to wiggle himself into the "style" that at times he sounds like he's trying on a girdle. Russ Freeman is on piano (he too eats up the material), Chuck Berghofer is on bass. Concord-era Kamuca is a bit different -- wonderfully mellow, completely mature, and the album on alto captures Bird's spirit (the freedom and rhythmic fluidity) about as well as anyone this side of Dave Schildkraut.

Strange that there's been no mention (unless I've missed it) of Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges. Maybe there's too much to chose from, and the standard in both cases is so high. For Webster, how about "Have You met Miss Jones" with Tatum? For Hodges, maybe "Passion Flower"?

For one kind of thing, though it's hard to say exactly what that thing is -- actual soul-baring torment, a dramatized remembrance of same, or both -- Serge Chaloff's "Body and Soul" from "Boston Blow-Up" (it's on the Chaloff Mosaic set). The confusion (in my mind at least) arises because it's pretty clearly a set piece in some respects, particularly the coda, but the emotional story-telling seems very raw and in the moment. Whatever, I don't know of anything else like it.

My God, Jazzbo, where did that image of Christy at bat come from? It's a heartbreaker. The whole happy-sad American girl thing is right there.

What I remember about ECM's sound, at least in its mid- to late-1970s heyday, was that Eicher and his engineers made sticks on ride cymbals sound like knitting needles.

A great find for me in two ways -- because I came across it as a battered but playable LP, and because the gap between what I thought it would be like and what it turned out to be is vast -- is "Shelly Manne and His Men Play 'Checkmate'" (Contemporary), now available as an OJC CD. The reason I didn't expect much is that it's jazz versions of the score of the 1960-1 TV series "Checkmate," which starred Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure, and the music is by Johnny Williams, the one-time jazz pianist who went under the name John Towner for a while (so as not to be confused with the other piano-playing John Williams, who worked with Stan Getz) and who eventually became John Williams, the composer of the music for "Star Wars" et al. But the tunes not only are OK, or are made OK by Manne and Co. (Conte Candoli, Richie Kamuca, Russ Freeman, Chuck Berghofer), most of them end up in a Miles-modal bag, which leads to some interesting results, especially from Kamuca and Freeman. There's some '58 material jam session material from Kamuca, issued on Fresh Sounds I think under Scott LaFaro's name, that shows him trying to add chunks of contemporary Rollins and Coltrane to his second-generation Lester Young soul, and it isn't happening at all. By late '61, though, he's in a beautiful place, less wispy and/or brittle than he used to be, warm, relaxed, lyrical, harmonically agile and rhythmically spot-on -- a really soulful, personal player. (His three Concord discs from the '70s -- "Drop Me Off in Harlem," "Richie," and "Richie Kamuca's Charlie" -- are excellent; the last, a Bird tribute on alto, captures the spirit as well as anyone this side of Dave Schildkraut.) Freeman on modal material is a gas -- in the face of the Bill Evans wave that swept over (maybe that should be "swept under") so many pianists of his generation and style, Freeman keeps his Powell-Silver articulation and doesn't get all soft and impressionistic -- while Candoli tries very hard to sound like Miles, though his peppy brassiness seems to be at war with this. All in all, a very interesting record, especially for Kamuca.

Don't play the trumpet, but I believe that Ruby Braff also played a lot of "off the horn" notes. In both cases (his and Fruscella's), it mostly sounds like it's just the note they need to continue the thought, but there also is a spooky chalumeau edge, as though an extra level of intimacy and/or mystery had been reached.

Further thoughts about Fruscella-related trumpeters: Definitely one of them, and perhaps among the progenitors of the style, was John Carisi. Of course better known as a composer-arranger, Carisi could really play, though examples aren't abundant. Best to my knowledge, and a fine showcase for his writing too, is the previously unissued 1956 date on 1988 RCA CD "The Arrangers," which includes new settings of "Israel" and "Lestorian Mode" and the first versions of "Springsville" and "Barry's Tune." As for Don Joseph, a must for his admirers is the reissue of Chuck Wayne's 1957 VIK album "String Fever" (on Fresh Sounds, I think, and, with valuable alternate takes, on Euphoria!). Joseph solos on more than half the tracks and is in particularly fine form on "Embraceable You" and "Lover Man." Nice quote from drummer Sonny Igoe in the Euphoria! liner notes: "[Don Joseph] became a legendary trumpet player, but he was only a legend on Staten Island!"

Bebop, when you say, "As a used-to-be tenor player, I think the man articulates like he's got a mouthful of marbles and it drives me nuts," I think you're pointing right at a big part of the problem. While there were times when Hank's control of the horn was not ideal (probably because he was under the weather physically or, in the case of the "Blackhawk" material, feeling a draft from Miles) what Bebop and probably many others hear as "mouthful of marbles" articulation is, in the view of Mobley admirers, entirely purposeful rhythmic ambiguity/subtlety, although its working aren't always that easy to grasp because so much is going on at the level of the smallest perceivable rhythmic units -- the musical equivalent of a wink or a shrug. All I'm saying is that Mobley is one of those players where you really have to hear every note to grasp what's going on, this compared to players like Dexter or Rollins, who so thoroughly dramatize the through line of their thinking that it's like their solos come with Cliff Notes (no value judgment here, BTW, just different ways of being).

"THAT's what you were dreaming about as a teenage boy?!?!?" Among other things.

I mentioned this once before (on the BN Board I think) and no one bit, so I'll try again. Has anyone ever dreamed (as in dreamed up) a Great Find? Once in my teens I dreamed I was in a large record store (probably Rose Records in downtown Chicago) flipping through the bins when I came across a disc that featured the unlikely frontline team of Jack Teagarden, Paul Desmond, and Cy Touff. This was the era of listening booths, so in the dream I actually listened to one track -- Teagarden stating the melody of "Stars Fell on Alabama" with his usual grace while an inspired Desmond fluttered around him like a butterfly. Don't recall what Cy's role was, if any; in fact, his utterly off-the-wall presence in the dream is part of what made it seem so real.