Larry Kart

I recall reading somewhere (wish I could be specific) the claim that Ben Webster's recorded solo on "Cottontail" was not improvised by Webster but written out for him by Ellington, Until I read that, it had never occurred to me that this might be the case. Yesterday, I bought this album (below), which is full of delights and includes a June 12, 1940 "America Dances" aircheck of "Cottontail" on which, aside from a few familiar figures toward the end, Webster's solo is not all the same as his solo on the band's recording. Any thoughts?

Jim Self, the Hollywood studio and classical tuba stalwart who, among other things, gave us the tones for the mothership in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," has made several nice jazz albums -- his model as an improviser being Art Farmer. Also, one of Self's classical albums has his setting for tuba of Debussy's "Syrinx" -- as he says in the notes, "it's 44 semi-tones below the notated pitch." The results are quite beautiful, though what a snake that would have been. This one is quite good:

First time I heard a big band live was Basie on this very tour. "All that air moving around you" is a fine way to put it. IIRC, the first tune they played at that concert was the semi-flagwaver "Stereophonic," and after the trumpets cut in I pretty much had to pick myself up from the floor. Think I was sitting just a few rows from the stage, too. And that sax section!

Plan to be there.

Glad to hear that story. I remember when the Fairmont tried to book entertainment, but I was no longer writing about jazz for the Tribune in the nineties and thus missed that gig. That was a swinging band. Quite a solo from Benny Green.

I'm a fan of all three singers, and/but they're quite different from each other. For me, on these tracks Forrest brings her own fine, urgent, and as Jim says floating time feel to the proceedings. Is it finger-popping swing? Not here, but it shouldn't be, given the material and the moods. Is it it powerfully, meaningfully rhythmic? For me, yes. A different backing? It would have to be just right, and not every overtly swinging small group or big band of that time would have been. This way, the accompanying forces' rhythmic feel, such as it is, leaves Forrest's own rhythmic feel, not mention her considerable sexiness, to be felt quite clearly.

Don't know.

Oops, I misspelled "Vernel."

I had some pleasant encounters with both of them through the years (I was a great admirer of their work, of Jackie especially), but after Roy passed I found out from a longtime close friend and sometime musical associate of Jackie's that Roy was a control freak in the top class who abused Jackie emotionally on a consistent basis. One of the big problems that Jackie had after Roy passed is that she pretty much didn't know how to do anything in terms of practical living -- finances in particular. Roy had swept all that over to his side of the table and kept Jackie in the dark. Fortunately, she had a male friend of her age who had been fond of her for years, and he tried his best to help her out/help her along. Lord knows she could sing like an angel almost until the end. BTW, she couldn't read music; everything she sang she learned by ear.

Was listening to it in the basement yesterday, and when I came upstairs my wife -- who is a talented classical pianist and very good interpreter/spontaneous re-harmonizer of show tunes, though far from steeped in jazz -- said, "Who IS that drummer?" Pretty hip of her to pick up on Vernell Fournier, and from the basement yet.

Indeed. I assume the altoist is Ernie Watts, but who is the trombonist?

OK -- now some tracks from the Forrest album (her subtle reshaping of "Embraceable You" is really special): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkt4NQ1AAoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fqPYRikSgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbMCpjtPWw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R77jEHNP4RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apeJs4KiJ58

Just ordered James' "Ten Modern Jazzmen." RE: cause and time of James' demise, my only source says he doesn't know for sure but thinks it was in middle age and from an illness.

Yes -- string orchestra led by Carmen Dragon; leader on the big band tracks not identified, may also be Dragon. Brief trumpet solos by, annotator Scott Yanow speculates, Manny Klein or Andy Secrest. Dragon's name may make the blood run cold, but so far the tracks with strings aren't particularly soupy or swirly; nothing can mess with Forrest anyway; she's in charge.

James didn't quite "co-author" this book; assembled/edited by Max Harrison, it's a compilation of uniformly worthwhile and at best superb essayistic record reviews (many of them, I think, originally written for Jazz Monthly) by the writers listed on the cover. An altogether terrific book. Also known as "Modern Jazz: The Essential Records." My first copy literally fell apart after the cover fell off; fortunately I found another copy.

Don't know precisely what happened to James (i.e. why) except that, per his younger Jazz Monthly colleague of the time Terry Martin, James died in early middle age. I'll try to find out more, but I recall that it was matter of illness, not of any sort of dissipation. I know that James was active as late as 1968 because in that year he wrote a somewhat negative review of Lester Bowie's "Numbers 1&2" for Jazz Monthly. Haven't seen that whole review, but George Lewis' exceprts from it "A Power Stronger Than Itself" make clear how puzzling that music could be to a listener whom one might think would be well-equipped to respond to it.

The price on Amazon is prohibitive, $71, but if you have any fondness for (arguably) the best band singer of the '30s and '40s and ever see this two-CD set of Forrest transcriptions from 1949-50 at a reasonable price ( (I got it a re-sale shop today for 27 cents!) don't hesitate. Forrest is in superb form, the program is all standards (54 tracks, most of them about 2 minutes, but that's fine; they're all Forrest, hardly any instrumental work), and sound quality on Forrest is quite good. If you don't know her, one way to describe Forrest is that if Judy Garland were a jazz singer, she might have sounded something like this. There's a throb in both their voices, a more or less erotic throb in Forrest's, while what makes Forrest a jazz singer, a least by my lights, is that she subtly reshapes melodies like an improvising instrumentalist -- Benny Carter perhaps. https://www.amazon.com/Complete-World-Transcriptions-Forrest-1999-11-16/dp/B01K8MJT7Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1537636742&sr=1-1&keywords=helen+forrest+world+transcriptions

Another piece of mine on Mobley is coming on that site if it's not there already -- the liner notes for "Poppin.'" I like that one better than the one that's posted now. It's looser, in a good way I think. P.S. Michael James was one heck off a noble pioneer when it came to taking hard-bop players seriously and writing about them in shrewd detail. Believe me, a lot of those players weren't getting much positive critical attention back then, or much critical attention at all. In some cases, their music wasn't even being understood, was felt to be some sort of ugly abberation. Witness, for one, Whitney Balliett's infamous and later on suppressed put down of Sonny Rollins in the liner notes to John Lewis' "Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West." In the course of praising the certainly praiseworthy Bill Perkins for his gentle lyricism, Balliett went on to say this: "There is [in Perkins' playing] none of the hair-pulling, the bad tone, or the ugliness that is now a growing mode, largely in New York, among the work of the hard-bopsters like Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, and JR Monterose." Actually, I kind of like "the hair-pulling" -- in one way, it's completely out of left field; in another way, it reveals exactly where Whitney was coming from. Also, of course, his lumping Mobley together with Rollins and Monterose from the point of view of their supposed shared tonal-timbral characteristics etc. is evidence that he wasn't even paying much attention. For sure, Ira Gitler was giving the up-and-coming hard-bop stalwarts their due in real time but in a more fan-like, less analytical manner than was James' style. James passed away much too soon.

I heard Kuhn in Chicago with the original Coltrane quartet (with Steve Davis and Pete LaRoca), and at that time he was about as avant-garde as Paul Bley was. Later on he pulled in his horns a fair bit, albeit in a natural (for him) evolutionary manner.

A gem. The four standards here -- "Alone Together," "My Ideal," "I Had the Craziest Dream," and "Old Folks" -- are superb. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dorham+old+folks It's a paltry word for it, but the continuity!

Wild Bill Davison and Ralph Sutton in fine from. Of the rest of the band, all Danes, reedman Jesper Thilo stands out.

I always preferred Henderson when he got foxy and oblique, rather than hot. This is a good example. It's his solo on the final track, "Neither Here Nor There," of Mulgrew Miller's album "Hand in Hand," which begins at about 53.18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzRv6WM8PAU&start_radio=1&list=RDGzRv6WM8PAU Larry Kart

Of course it is, but that doesn't mean (see Kevin Drum's blog post above) that the original Serena-U.S. Open incident had a racist basis or a sexist one either.

Blogger Kevin Drum, obviously a tennis fan though he usually deals with politics, weighs in with some context and common sense IMO: After Saturday’s great Serena Williams meltdown in the final of the US Open, I geared myself for what was inevitably to come: an endless parade of woke op-eds and online articles explaining that this was just another example of how hard women have it in tennis. Especially black women. Especially strong black women. Especially Serena Williams. There’s always the double standard. Always the demand for ladylike behavior. It’s scandalous and it needs to end. Now. This came from all over, much of it from people who don’t play tennis and didn’t watch the match. They just knew that this was the appropriate response to anything bad that happens to Serena Williams. And so Twitter went nuts. But I’m happy to see that over the past couple of days, as tempers have cooled, a few people have had the fortitude to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it was Williams herself who acted badly. Maybe the umpire did OK after all. Maybe men are treated about the same. For those of you who didn’t watch the match (or did!) here’s a lengthy bullet list of what happened: Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, made a clear and repeated gesture suggesting that Williams should rush the net more often. This was not a subtle movement. It was very, very obvious, and he admitted to it afterward. The umpire saw it and called a warning for coaching, which is illegal. Note: although the penalty goes against the player, it’s actually called against the coach. It doesn’t matter if the player saw or responded to the coaching. All that matters is that the coach did it. That’s the rule. Williams got upset and told the umpire in no uncertain terms that she hadn’t seen the gesture and would never cheat. “I’d rather lose than cheat,” she said. But she held her temper at this point. The warning cost Williams nothing. It’s basically meant as caution to the coach to knock it off. Later in the match, Williams lost a game while she was serving. This is like striking out with the bases loaded: it’s very bad. She got mad and smashed her racket on the court, breaking it. That’s an automatic infraction. The umpire has no discretion here. He called a penalty, and since it was her second, Williams was docked a point. When Naomi Osaka began serving in the next game, she started 15-0 up. Williams was pissed, obviously, but a lot of people have publicly wondered whether she even knew that the coaching warning was a first infraction and that she’d therefore lose a point for the next infraction. This is insulting. Williams has been playing professional tennis for two decades. Of course she knows the rules. To suggest otherwise is to paint her as a moron. Osaka won the game. But she was playing very well and probably would have won the game anyway. When the game was over and the players went to their seats, Williams exploded at the umpire. She had been seething ever since the original coaching violation was called, and now she couldn’t keep it in. She yelled, she demanded an apology, she called him a thief, she swore he would never again work one of her matches, and she ranted and raved. At the next changeover, after she had lost yet another service game, the rant continued. The umpire now called a third infraction for verbal abuse. This meant Williams lost a game. Osaka held serve at her next opportunity and won the match. As many people have pointed out, Osaka was playing well and there’s a pretty good chance she would have won regardless. Osaka was up a break, 4-3, and had to hold her serve twice to win the match. After the penalty made it 5-3, it meant she only had to hold her serve once to win. We’ll never know for sure, but there’s no question she was in command of the match both before and after the penalty. So what’s the conclusion from all this? First, Williams was out of line about the coaching penalty. It’s true that “everyone coaches” and it’s also true that it doesn’t get called a lot. But it does get called, and Mouratoglou’s coaching was far from subtle. The umpire did nothing wrong here. Ditto for smashing the racket. That was an obvious code infraction. And that leaves only the third code infraction. This is a judgment call. There’s no question that Williams was ranting and screaming. In one sense, calling a verbal abuse penalty was a no-brainer. On the other hand, it’s the tail end of a grand slam, and some umpires would have just let Williams run out of steam and then allow the match to play out. You could justify either approach, I think. As for the charge of sexism, I don’t see it. I watch a fair amount of tennis, and I’ve seen men throw temper tantrums. I’ve also seen them get called for it. But with the caveat that I haven’t seen every temper tantrum in recent history,¹ Williams really did have a pretty epic meltdown. I haven’t seen anything like it that I can remember. The penalty may have been a judgment call, but it was a perfectly justifiable judgment call. If you want to take Serena’s side on this, that’s fine. But please don’t do it on a knee-jerk basis. Williams’s behavior was atrocious, and the umpire, at worst, made a barely incorrect judgment call toward the end of the match. That’s it. ¹Please, please don’t bring up Ilie Nastase or John McEnroe. That was nearly 40 years ago, before the current code infraction system was even in place, and in fact, both of them frequently received penalties during play.

I didn't know that either.