Larry Kart

Listened to this work tonight for the first time, and to my surprise was entranced by the sheer logic and harmoniousness of Mendelssohn's thinking, plus his often exquisite craftsmanship. Excellent performance; Flor really knows how to handle Mendelssohn; Lucia Popp sings like an angel.

Good stuff, huh? Smith of course, but Wallace Bishop is quite something, Hill too.

As Stan Kenton As Stan Kenton used to say: "THIS is an orchestra!"

As I may have said here before, I played a peripheral role in Hawkins' final days -- peripheral but it looms large in my memory. Dan had brought Hawkins to Chicago to play with Roy Eldridge, Barry Harris, Truck Parham, and Bob Cousins for a Saturday public TV show taping, to be followed by a Jazz Showcase performance on Sunday afternoon -- a great idea, but Dan had no idea of in how poor a shape Hawkins was. Upon arriving at O'Hare, Hawkins collapsed, was taken to a hospital but insisted that he wanted to and felt well enough to play, and both the Saturday taping and the Sunday Showcase performance went on as planned, with Hawkins in poor shape. I was assistant editor under Dan at Downbeat at the time, and he asked me to take Hawkins to the airport on Monday morning because Dan had DB obligations that prevented him from doing so himself. I went to the hotel, the Executive House on Wacker Drive, carefully ushered Hawkins into a cab and to the airport, where a red cap recognized him and supplied a wheelchair. We were early for his flight, of course, so I asked Hawkins if there were anything he wanted. He said "The airport bar," and when we got there he ordered a Courvousier or two. When we got to the gate, the attendants blanched -- here was a strange-looking uncommunicative man, wearing a much-rumbled but originally elegant pin-stripe Hart, Schaffner, and Marx suit, and with a long scraggly beard and in a wheel chair. They wanted to put him in coach, but I knew he had a first class ticket so I kind of threw a fit, insisting that he had a first-class ticket and that's where he was going to sit or there was going to be trouble. And that's where he sat. As he was being wheeled backwards onto the plane, he looked at me with what seemed to me to be an expression of some gratitude -- or perhaps it was a look of "justice has been done." This I will never forget. When he got back to his NYC apartment, I think he was visited by a few friends, probably Barry Harris and Tommy Flanagan, but despite their best efforts he wouldn't eat, and he didn't last much longer -- maybe a month.

Great concert from Zurich, 1949, on two CDs (with bassist Ernest Hill and drummer Wallace Bishop). https://www.amazon.com/Live-Zurich-Switzerland-Willie-Smith/dp/B004O0UQWY/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1541481495&sr=1-2&keywords=willie+the+lion+smith+storyville

Another thought or two about Eager. Ira Gitler, who knew him as the best 52nd St. Lester Young disciple who also was knowledgeably into Bird, told me that when he heard Eager at the Umbria Jazz Festival in the '80s he was at once saddened and angered at how Eager had wasted/dissipated his gifts over the years. Ira IIRC said that he knew that it was somewhat unfair of him to think that -- a man lives his life as he does/as best he can -- but he had been shocked by how far below what he had heard at Umbria was from any of Eager's previous latter-day performances. Ira added that on the 52nd St. scene Allen had been known for behaving like an arrogant jerk -- in particular, dissing other tenor men whom he felt were not up to his level. When I heard Al Cohn seemingly go out of his way to destroy Allen musically at the Showcase (I think there also was some facial expression/body language coming from Al along those lines), I thought that Al might have been one of the players Allen had dissed and that he was, in effect, taking revenge. At that point, for one reason or another, Eager could barely play on changes anymore. IIRC, he kind of got through "down" versions of "Invitation" and a c. 1959 minimalist Coltrane blues line ("Equinox") in both cases doing little more than sounding out the pieces for a chorus or two. I taped the opening sets from my seat in the audience but erased the cassettes, never wanted to hear them again. Forgive me if I've said some or all of this before here, but it hit me hard at the time and it remains in my memory.

Actually, IIRC, when I tried to do that phone interview with Eager he was working as a night desk man at a Miami area hotel, which might have affected his willingness,ability, or desire to participate. The occasion for the interview BTW was Eager's coming to Chicago to play at the Jazz Showcase with Al Cohn.

As I've said here before, Eager in the mid-'80s was in grim shape, both as a player and FWIW as someone who could not coherently participate in a phone interview -- I tried to do one with him. I think that Allen Lowe had the same experience. But then both Allen and I are impossible people.

No intent to be snarky, believe me, but just about everybody who knowns anything about Eager knows this. Pretty sure that it got a fair amount of coverage at the time, on a jazz musician wins at Sebring basis. Also, McCluggage's name certainly rings a bell for me, speaking as someone who paid some attention to auto racing at the time. As for Eager, later on he was part of Timothy Leary's circle at Harvard when LSD research was going on. Eager, with his bebop attitude, reportedly said, "To hell with 'research' -- let's get high!" And there ya go.

Five tunes by the Adderley band of the time (w/Junior Mance, Sam Jones, Jimmy Cobb) , five by Shearlng's quintet (w/Toots Thielmans, Emil Richards, Al McKibbon, Percy Brice and Armando Peraza). I know most of the Adderley's EmArcy albums; I think they surpass them here. The band is on fire, Nat is in particularly good form, as is Junior Mance and the whole rhythm section. Shearing's Quintet is more forceful than usual, and are quite transforrmed on a long version of Curtis Fuller's "Soul Station," where the Adderley's join them (dig Al McKibbon here). Shearing's fairly batshit locked-hands solo on this track (begins at at about 7:30) must have been akin to the Shearing performance that Kerouac famously wrote about in "On the Road." 72 minutes in all.

Yeah! I see that Sal on his last or next to last exchange with Med also picks up on Med's last idea -- at which, I think, Med raises an eyebrow/tips his hat. Al and Joe Henderson shared the stand at the Jazz Showcase at some point in the '80s, but during that engagement each man basically played on his own, though I think there were a few tunes in each set with both of them. What I recall was that Joe, fine as he was, was almost blown through the wall by the sheer forcefulness of Al's playing. Wonder what Al and Johnny Griffin would have sounded like together.

You don’t need to know about this 1982 album but probably would like it if you did. Al is in superb form, Perkins for once gets his latter-day conceptual oddities working for him, Flip is Flip, Sal is Sal (at several points during exchanges he playfully takes off directly from Al’s last ideas), the rhythm section is good (John Bunch, Duvivier, Don Lamond), and Al wrote nice charts that are played with much zest. “Not Really the Blues,” a handsome moody Cohn original “Woody’s Lament,” “Tiny’s Blues,” Al’s “I Wanna Go Home,” “Four Others,” “Tenderly,” and “The Goof and I.” Wish the album were twice as long. BTW, I feel blessed that I got to hear Al a good deal in Chicago in the '80s (by himself, with Zoot, with Lee Konitz, with Joe Henderson, and with Allen Eager, who sadly was in grim shape). With age, Al just seemed to get better and better, stronger and stronger.

Good -- there are more than I recall. I need to hunt for the ones I don't have. The group's original rhythm section -- Larry Willis, Walter Booker, Jimmy Cobb -- was choice.

I heard Fortune with Tyner several times and agree that he was the best horn companion for McCoy. I also heard Fortune blow the roof with Nat Adderly-- a combo that is captured IIRC on two CDs.

Fusco went to Syracuse, then to the Jets but not for long. He tells a funny story in the liner notes to one of his Criss Cross albums about his time with Buddy. Andy as you might expect, is on the large size, and right after he joins the band he's seated behind Buddy and the band manager, to whom Buddy says, "What about this new guy? He's pretty big, do think I could take him? I've got some Karate moves, I could give him one in the neck, one in the crotch..." At which point Andy gets up, walks past, and says 'Hi Buddy...' It was just Buddy doing shtick. What WW large ensemble album was that? He's done several, some anything but lifeless. Try his quartet album "See the Pyramid."

Gould reminds me some of an older alto player I really like, Buddy Rich vet and former New York Jet offensive lineman Andy Fusco.

From an e-mail I just sent to a friend after listening to "Out in the Open": 'More Trane-like of a certain period of Trane than we [i.e. my friend and I] usually care for in other players, but Dillon's particular timbral “cry” seems to be his own, as are the rhythmically interesting/interactive ripples (and the melodic roulades within them) that he generates with seeming spontaniety or, if you prefer, a certain obsessiveness. He bears some relationship in the aforementioned traits to Walt Weiskopf, whom I have a considerable taste/weakness for, but Walt's intervallic preoccupations, which Dillon shares in part, and the rhythmic/melodic ripples those preoccupations generate, seem to be in good part the result of a fair amount of prior pondering/woodshedding on Walt's part, although Weiskopf does sound quite spontaneous to me in the course of a solo, while Dillon’s approach seems to me to be less heady, more from the gut.'

I'm a Chrome user. I'll try some of the above suggestions.

Does anyone know a good safe way to download YouTube sound onto ITunes? The one method I’ve found, flv.tv, is said to be a source of malware. And if you do know of a good safe way, could you walk me through it?

They're all on a Hep CD, "Buddy De Franco, 1949-'52 Studio Performances." A mix of Capitol and MGM material.

I can think of some David Murray records.

(at least for me) — the six tracks Buddy DeFranco made in 1952 for MGM with Kenny Drew, Raney, Teddy Kotick, and Art Taylor. Raney is really flying free on those — melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, he’s close to a Parker-like level.

Frank Morgan! A "bitcher and whiner" in the top class. I posted before about the time he time he berated the house rhythm section (Willie Pickens, Larry Grey, Wilbur Campbell) at the Jazz Showcase after the first set of the first night for no good reason at all, after which Willie, who grew up with Frank in Milwaukee, said that that's the way he always was -- adding that he thought it was because Frank had a deep fear of failure because his father had been very hard on him as a boy. BTW, Wilbur was far from happy to be spoken to that way. On the other hand, Frank, in the years after he got out of prison and became a media darling, probably got as much or more out of his talent than he deserved.

Sam Taylor (not Sam the Man but a youngish NYC-based cat who has an album out on Cellar Live, "My Future Just Passed") Adam Kolker Stephan Riley Walt Weiskopf (no kid now but a favorite of mine)