Larry Kart

I also like the duo's "My Foolish Heart"on You Tube. Is anything you've recorded available commercially?

I really like your playing.

Heard them at the Chicago Jazz Fest. They were very good.

An early Weston favorite:

A sample of Black Diamond. They were a good deal more "galvanic" at the fest than on this video from two years before, but this will give you flavor. I like the grain of their sounds. As for Melford, she did get a bit bluesy at one point but otherwise was smashing and crashing to a fare thee well and quite coherently too. Forgot to mention among the Fest highlights Chicago-based tenorman Dustin Laurenzi. He's a friend of the Black Diamond players, and while you can hear the kinship -- the grain in the sound for example -- he's his own man. There's a CD. A sample from a live gig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hepvd8p-S8E

Some highlights IMO: Friday afternoon: Greg Ward and 10 Tongues: Mingus-related ("Black Saint and the Sinner Lady") ensemble's six-part piece for dancers (here minus the dancers). Beautiful writing, albeit Mingus-related, played with tremendous precision and zest. Fine solo work by Ward, tenorman Tim Haldemann, trombonist Norman Palm, bass trombonist Christopher Davis, and trumpeter Russ Johnson. There's a CD. Friday evening: Muhal Richard Abrams Tribute: Myra Melford was galvanic, Amina Cluadine NMNyers was soulful, all the horn soloists were in fine form (reedman Mwata Bowden, trumpeter Leon Q. Allen, tenorman Ari Brown) and bassist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Reggie Nicholson swung their behinds off. Left before the Louis Hayes Quintet because the previous set was a bore. Then a huge rainstorm chaotically wiped out the rest of the evening. Futunately no one was hurt. Saturday afternoon: Black Diamond: Young tenormen Artie Black and Hunter Diamond, both Indian University grads, were a real highlight for me. Individual offshoots of Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, they are, as I said, quite individual, serious/thoughtful as all get out. There's a CD. Matthew Shipp/Ivo Perelman: A difference of opinion here. I warmed to them a good deal after a while; a friend whom I respect winced in dismay. Saturday evening: Tribute to Willie Pickens: Pianist daughter Bethany Pickens is a real player, horn soloists Eric Schneider (alto), Pat Mallinger, (tenor), Ed Peterson (tenor), and Donald Harrison (alto) were in fine form (nice how they listened approvingly to each other) as were vibraharpist Stu Katz, Bassist Larry Gray, and drummer Robert Shy. Kenny Barron Quintet: Very professional set all the way, not a hair out of place, from Barron, tenorman Dayna Stephens, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, and drummer Jonathan Blake. I was particularly impressed with the warmth and strength of Stephens, but a hair or two out of place would have been welcome. Big raindrops beginning to fall, I was fearful of another downpour and to my regret missed Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, excellent by all reports, and Ramsey Lewis (reports said "meh.") Sunday afternoon: Jamie Branch's Fly or Die: Back in her hometown, Branch was nervous at first, but the gaalvanic drumming of Chad Taylor got her going soon enough. Jason Stein Quartet: Bass clarinetist Stein and Keefe Jackson on contrabass clarainet conjured up a truly deep, dark sound yet were as agile as can be. Several Tristano-school lines ("Wow," for one) picked on the vibe of Black Diamond from Saturday. Sunday evening: Arturo O'Farrill Sextet: Kick-ass Latin jazz, O' Farrill himself quite strong on piano.

Why will no one like it?

They are clever, though.

Nice band, nice chart, and I think I might take the singer home with me.

You're right on target there. A whole lot of women don't like that song's lyrics, though.

Have we mentioned this one yet?

A nice one. Flip and arranger Dick Hyman collaborated closely on the charts. Fine RVG recording too. Like his model Ben Webster, Flip was born to play ballads. Good choice of songs; Flip does a few on bass clarinet. Sample this album 1 Try A Little Tenderness 6:30 $0.99 2 A Cottage For Sale 6:09 $0.99 3 Violets For Your Furs 6:00 $0.99 4 Im Glad There Is You 6:27 $0.99 5 You Don't Know What Love Is 5:40 $0.99 6 This Is All I Ask 6:15 $0.99 7 Street Of Dreams 4:15 $0.99 8 All The Way 4:31 $0.99 9 Dream 4:51 $0.99 10 What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life 4:08 $0.99 11 As Time Goes By 4:40 $0.99 12 Goodbye

Me too.

Wave 1 E rec NYC 11/60 Ronnie Ball-p; Al Schackman-g; Peter Ind-b; Sheila Jordan-voc Yesterdays (Kern/Harbach) 6:00

No -- I thought it was gorgeous. Isn't "Laura" inherently very ripe?

BTW, Jim, Sultanof is an expert on Robert Farnon's music; he worked with Farnon on getting authoritative scores in shape and published. Also, do you know Farnon's arrangement of "Laura"? Good grief!

Randy Marsh's father tenorman Arno Marsh is still with us I believe, and he was a mainstay in the Herman band in the Mars label era. Randy was the original drummer in Organissimo, and a damn fine drummer too. Sultanof bio: http://www.ejazzlines.com/pages/about-us/jeff-sultanof-biography/ Also go to Doug Ramsey's blog Rifftides and enter Sultanof's name in the search box. He's made a number of interesting posts there over the years.

Right. But even though I don't recall the precise wording of his threat, his knowledge of where I lived, the makeup of my family, and some other details that suggested actual recent observation of me on his part was kind of ominous. I'm thinking that without doubt the guy is unhinged, and if he's been brooding about this for 30 years, where in his head might he chose to go next. In any case, I'm temperamentally mellow enough to not have lost any sleep over it. Besides, from what I recall it was a really terrible play. One other odd thing. This play had in its lead role an actor whose performance in a recent local production of Bernstein's "Candide" I'd praised; he was very funny there, in a kind of Mel Brooks bag. But whatever his talents, he couldn't save this play, and the person who made the threat had cooked up some conspiratorial, personal spite on my part story that I couldn't begin to decode that explained why I'd praised this actor's performance in "Candide" but thought that this new play was so bad. Another odd thing. The envelope the threatening letter came in had a genuine Chicago return address on it. But the postal inspector who investigated (it's illegal to send threats through the mail), said that no one at that address sent the letter.

As long as the threat wasn't carried out. I got an anonymous death threat (though it was possible to take a good guess as to who sent it) in response to a review I wrote of an original musical show. Strange thing was that the threat came some 30 years after the review appeared in the paper! Talk about nursing a grudge. In fact, the threat was menacing and specific enough (either the person who made it was nuts or could do a good imitation of being nuts -- he knew where I lived, the members of my family etc.) that I contacted the police and the postal service (the threat came in the mail). The postal inspector did a seemingly sincere job of trying to track down the person who sent the threat, but it all finally went nowhere. I think the intent of the threat was just to spook me, and it did ... for about five minutes. Then it began to seem both sad and funny. BTW, I looked up the review of that show; it was very negative, though after 30 or so years I didn't recall much about the show.

Those two responses were certainly factional to some degree, though they may not have been planned in advance, as most of the disruptions that Big Beat Steve mentions were. French audiences in general are were/are fairly "free" along those lines. As for factional disruptions, in the late '40s or early '50s the young Pierre Boulez organized an infamous disruption of a concert of Stravinsky's neo-classical works, which Boulez and his pals then professed to despise. Of course, in later years Boulez the conductor made recordings of those same works. (see below) "As Paris repaired itself from four horrific years of Nazi occupation, the great Russian neoclassical composer Igor Stravinsky returned to the city which he had called home before the war. Thousands of Frenchmen and women gathered at the Theatre Champs-Elysees that winter to hear the French premiere of Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes and Four Norwegian Moods, pieces he had written during his exile in America. But to Stravinsky's surprise, as he walked toward the conductor's podium, instead of being greeted by the cheers of endearing fans, he was pummeled with a fit of prolonged shouts and jeers. "In the audience a small group of students from the Paris Conservatoire, France's leading music academy, booed the aging Russian considered by many as the greatest composer of his time. But the young men did not boo him because he was Stravinsky -- they were actually fans of his work. They booed him because the music establishment, mesmerized by his neoclassical revival, had all but deified Stravinsky, deeming his school of thought as the only school of merit. So in order to bring attention to their own avant-garde composing methods, these bold students hissed and raved in the face of the man that was both their musical hero and intellectual nemesis. And leading the fracas was a wild-eyed country boy named Boulez." BTW, Stravinsky had no idea that Boulez had organized this demonstration until many years later (1966). When he found out -- this after a good deal of friendly correspondence between the two composers -- Stravinsky was not happy (see link below). . https://www.jstor.org/stable/964114?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conten Further, Robert Craft writes that IS "was fully informed of the controversy surrounding a festival of his music after the liberation, but the dossier he kept on the affair ... does not mention Boulez. That Stravinsky understood Parisian musical politics at the time is evident in a letter to [conductor] Manuel Rosenthal, dated 1/12/46 (which also has relevance to the initial subject of this thread): "The sincere and spontaneous manifestations against the Sacre in 1913 [were] comprehensible because of the violent character of this score.... But one doubts the spontaneity of a howling manifestation against the Norwegian Moods, the elements [in the music] that could provoke boisterous protestations being totally absent.... Unless I am mistaken, it seems that once the violent has been accepted, the amiable, in turn is no longer tolerable."

"...relying primarily on Tamara Levitz’s chapter “Racism at The Rite” in the book The Rite of Spring at 100." A tertiatry source of the present day relying on a secondary source of the present day (the chapter "Racism at the Riot," which sounds like it's got an axe to grind). That settlles it then. A quote from Levitz on another subject: "In this talk, I investigate the early history of the American Musicological Society’s as an institution of white supremacy with the goal of providing the understanding necessary to dismantle that system in the present.... I uncover and critique how knowledge production in the American Musicological Society was and continues to be determined by 1) white property, or ownership of land, resources, media, and ideas; 2) white undemocratic acts of excluding racial and gender minorities; 3) white privileged practices of social distinction; and 4) white institutional acts of settler colonialism. By undertaking this historical analysis and critique I hope to encourage a shift in the American Musicological Society away from its current emphasis on strategies to increase minority representation that maintain the status quo, and toward direct political activism that ends white supremacy. " An axe-grinder par excellence.

Fascinating composer.

He'll do that to you.

Thought I'd mention the Supersax live in Japan album. There's some stunning Warne there.