Larry Kart

You know, just fuck people, fuck people in general. And specifically, too.

FWIW, I just ran across this in Wyndham Lewis' "Time and Western Man' (p. 187, Black Sparrow Press ed.): "I will state very briefly my own belief as to the true character of artistic creation. The production of a work of art is, I believe, strictly the work of a visionary. Indeed, this seems so evident that it scarcely needs pointing out. Shakespeare, writing his King Lear , was evidently in some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work of art an entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids. *** To create King Lear, or to believe that you have held communion with some historic personage -- those are much the same thing. The traditional romantic epithet for the poet -- and ... all creators are equally poets -- namely 'dreamer' ... accurately describes all creative artists; though of course, it need not apply, indeed could hardly do so, to the great number of practitioners of art who do not possess the essential qualifications of the artist. "If you say that the creative act is spell, a talisman, an incantation -- that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely." I quote this not to cite Lewis as an authority -- for me he is a very equivocal figure for many reasons and in more than few ways -- but because this passage surprised me coming from a man whom I had previously thought of as having had no sympathy whatsoever with any notions of supernatural power, quite the opposite in fact. *** Blake and the Man Who Built the Pyramids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visionary_Heads

This two CD-set preserves a two-hour Topeka, Kansas, Feb. 1955 concert, with the Basie Band, with Joe Williams and guest soloists Lester Young and Stan Getz (seperately, not together); the George Shearing Quintet; Erroll Garner Trio; and Sarah Vaughan. The Basie band is in fine form (fSonny Payne surprisingly to me plays his ass off); Frank Foster is exceptionally good (especially on "Basie Talks"), as is Williams (this vivid version of "Every Day I Have the Blues" preceded the hit recording); and the three tracks with Pres ("Jumping at the Woodside," "I'm Confessin," and "Every Tub") are to me worth the price of the album, though others might disagree. Yes, Pres is not in terrific shape physically here, but that leads him (forces him?) to play (and mostly to make things work) in about as abstract-minimalist a manner as one could imagine. It's not quite like anything I've heard from him, before or later. "I'm Confessin" is superb, a journey into caverns of the soul; and on "Every Tub" Pres is eventiually quite forceful, especially his fog-horn-like low-register honks that are, again, different from any honks I've heard from Pres before -- not I think his usual false-fingered honks but a dense, deep and dark, near-multi-noted sound that might have come from Albert Ayler! Works like gangbusters in the context of the chart too, A nice added touch is that there's a mic right next to Basie at the keyboard, and one can hear the quite specific at times sounds of encouragement and response (even perhaps wonderment) that he directs at Pres. https://www.amazon.com/Count-Basie-Lester-Young-Birdland/dp/B000001LZ5/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1535405821&sr=1-1&keywords=stars+of+birdland+on+tour

Nope -- have know no Klan members in real life, not that I know of, though I've known some people who were, or who I thought were, pretty close to being bigoted/racist. What you say is very interesting.

Anyone seen it? Any thoughts? I saw it last night and left my seat to wait for my wife in the lobby halfway through. Among other things, it was as inept a piece of film-making as I could imagine. My thoughts: Even at this late date, Lee just doesn’t know how to get through a scene or how to get from one scene to another. Like at one point the black undercover cop goes dancing at a nightspot with a black female activist to whom he’s attracted. OK — so they dance and they dance and they dance and they dance, among many like-minded other people who are dancing, for what seems like forever. And there’s no point to this — emotionally, plot-wise, whatever. Among all the rave reviews, there was one strong demurral from a critic on Vox (you can find it on the ’Net), who accurately IMO pointed out that politically the film was pretty much nowhere. It tells us that the KKK people we see are really stupid oafish bigots, but we, the current mostly or entirely white audience in our seats, are implicitly not like them, nor is it suggested that we are. She also wondered what the heck a black audience would make of the movie. A little sign of Spike’s magic touch — the movie begins with a KKK spokesman, played by Alec Baldwin, spouting right at the camera reams of racist talk, much of it aimed at the Jews as well as at …, but he keeps blowing his lines and then talking back in an angry manner to the unseen person who’s filming him for this circa mid-1960s join the Klan commercial. What is the point of this character's not being able to read his pro-Klan racist copy without making mistakes? KKK spokesman can’t read? They’re so inherently angry that they’re just waiting to lose their temper/lash out? What? On a personal level, I left the theater in mid-film in part because in addition to the gross ineptness of the filmmaking and the sheer murkiness of the lighting and/or film stock, all the racist talk from the KKK characters, especially the prominent "Jews are vermin" stuff, got to be … well, I can’t say this for sure, no doubt I’m going many steps too far here, but it felt to me like Spike was not so much depicting this vile stuff but inflicting it on us in some weird ugly under-handed manner My wife didn’t really like it, but she took to heart some of its “lessons" more seriously that I did/could — particularly a scene where Harry Belafonte recounts to an audience of black college students (after showing them clips from “Birth of a Nation”) the time he saw a friend of his lynched. (I was in the theater lobby long before this.) Also, she was caught up in the implicit/explicit links the film made between its particular tale and the rise of Trump. Again, do I need Spike Lee to assemble and deliver a lecture/demonstration on this topic? P.S. Again, the film stock Lee used here looked as though it had been run through a sewer. My wife noticed this too but said that this might have been an aesthetic, expressive choice on Lee's part. As my very young son used to say in protest over one thing or another: “No! Not!"

Ok, I get it. Thanks.

Simon, I like that post. BTW what you've said reminds me that I can trace my career as a would-be music critic right back to its point of origin. Again, I'm in the kitchen of our Chicago apartment with my mother, where she and I would listen every weekday morning and afternoon to a roster of radio soap operas. One of them, "Lorenzo Jones," had a theme song -- played on a seasick electric organ and incorporating some of "Funiculi Funicula" -- that I found almost literally nauseating: I can establish that this was when I was about age three, in 1945, because the first piece of music that I responded to with enthusiasm rather than disgust was the then new Number One song on the Hit Parade, "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," written by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer for the film "The Harvey Girls," where it serves as the very effective opening number. I didn't see the film back then; I was just caught up in the considerable happy swing of the song itself. So those were the negative and positive poles of my three-year-old musical universe. Everything flows from there. I'll look for it.

I have no idea what their message to those of us who have pre-ordered means. They want us to pre-order more than one set? The want us to set up the equivalent of a lemonade stand and convince random passers-by that THEY need to order the set? What?

Found a copy on the Internet at a decent price and will order it. Other copies available. I've read a lot of Mellers and always find him stimulating.

"I mean, c'mon, do you really need words to be able to tell you if you're standing in front of a general or if you've just stumbled across a dead rat with your lawn mower?" No, you don't need words to tell you those things, but you do need words to tell someone else about them (i.e. to communicate those experiences). OTOH, I can imagine a skilled interpretive dancer doing a pretty good job. "And besides, if words alone were the most definite medium for conveying an idea, where's the traction for lying, deadpannng, punning, ironyizing, or any of that saying one thing and meaning another stuff?" I see no contradiction there. Rather, all those things play off of the definiteness of words. One hears the definite thing that those words usually mean and then one detects the irony, the pun, etc. If the definite usual meaning of the phrase "Go, and never darken my door again!" were not there in our minds, then my father's shaggy dog story about what he said to the guy who'd applied the wrong shade of wood stain to our front door would have been meaningless.

Words are not the ultimate expression of communication, but they are the most definite. And if vibration patterns are essentially what every language is, tell me how the vibration patterns of two different words that have two different meanings -- like "rank" as in "foul-smelling" and "rank" as in "front rank" -- serve to differentiate them.

"Language" = use of words in an agreed way as a means of human communication. (My emphasis) The language of music is analogous to the language of verbal discourse but lacks the "agreed"-meanings element of words. OTOH, using its non-verbal means, music can present us with meanings that are very intense and more or less inescapable in their power to affect us, even though they are less definite, more amorphous than the paraphrasable meanings of verbal discourse.

I think that some improvisers and composers do have or take a "path" or "paths" to a "not here" place or places that is/are not "above/beyond chord changes, meter, tempo, sound" per se (i.e. the materials there are not of a wholly different order that the one you mentioned) but that is/are "not here" in that those materials in each person's case are beyond what they know at some point of their creative need and that they then reach out into that "not here" place and find that what they need has now become available to them. Again, there's a lot of possible variety here -- from my examples of the pondering over multiple drafts Beethoven and the, I assume, near instantaneous Charlie Parker. Mozart, I would guess, was not unlike Parker in that respect. Though what Mozart came up with did not always emerge under such pressure (though he was by all accounts one heck of an improviser) I think it tended to be reached out to and grasped by him in a similar in-the-moment manner -- as a "gift of the ear" is the way I think Wolfgang Amadeus might have put it. "But for a comparison, do you know how you feel about a piece of music before you write your review?" Good question. Typically, especially if it's one of those deadline reviews, I know how I feel in a "kernel" sense, and then as I write I uncover/discover further thoughts and feelings. These are seldom if ever in contradiction to what I felt right off the bat, but fairly often those further thoughts and reflections are enlightening and fun too. Also, as those further thoughts and feelings crystallize into the relative concreteness of words, those words typically interact with what I'm thinking and feeling.

Like all of of us here, I get a great deal of pleasure from music, and normally I don’t ask myself what the nature of that pleasure is. Instead, I normally ask myself the not unrelated question of what it is that performer X or composer Z is doing that delights and intrigues me and how what they do differs from what performer Q and composer M do that I also respond to with delight, and what those performers and composers do that differs from the music of other performers and composers that doesn’t interest me or that I even find annoying. Now as I ask myself those “what it is that delights or doesn’t delight me?” questions, I am, at the same time, necessarily trying to divine the nature of the language that these musicians and composers are speaking — an act that is more or less inseparable from my more or less spontaneous sense of how well or ill they are speaking it. At this point I should add that when it comes to music, the words “language” and “speaking” are metaphorical — at least in relation to verbal or written language or speech. The language, the patterns of meaning, of any intelligible piece of music is a beast of a different order, I think, than any intelligible piece of verbal discourse. Not that the former can’t be quite simple and familiar and the latter quite complex and esoteric. But this side of sheer nonsense (intentional or not), written or spoken acts can always be decoded/paraphrased/put into other words — because they are made up of words that have fairly definite meanings in themselves. Yes, the fairly definite meanings of particular words can be horsed around with to a fare-the-well by those so inclined, but horse around though they will, they can’t turn a horse into a picket fence or vice versa. But though the materials of music — its notes, tones, rhythms, etc. — are quantifiable/measurable to a great degree, they are not quantifiable/measurable in terms of their meanings in the way that the words of verbal discourse are; and the larger musical acts made up of those materials are even less quantifiable. Which is not to say that the materials of music — and the larger musical acts made up of them — are less intelligible than the materials of verbal discourse (i.e. words) are; rather they are intelligible along other more fluid, less definite lines. In particular — and it pains me as a onetime would-be music critic to say this — we all probably can agree that even the most elegant verbal account of a particular piece of music cannot stand in for that actual shaped sonic experience in the way that a careful paraphrase can reasonably convey the sense of just about any verbal act. As I’ve said, an inseparable part of the pleasure of music for me — in addition to just letting it wash over me — is the attempt I can’t help but make to reach out toward its “language-ness,” to try to detect its modes of meaning. Johnny Hodges’ vibrato, for instance. Why and how does it do its work, and why and how (a somewhat different question) does it affect me? Likewise, Benny Carter’s no less striking vibrato, and Lee Konitz’s relative lack of same. And what of this reaching out in itself? Is this just a quirk or habit that a few of us engage in for better or for worse, or is there some underlying principle at work here? I think there is. And in an attempt to kick the can down the road, I’m first going to kick it sideways and then backwards — away from those who listen to music and try to apprehend its principles of language and toward those who actually make music, the performers and composers. It is my firm belief that even those performers and composers who are most inclined to codify things do not know before they they place their hands on their instruments or put pen to paper exactly what the meaning of their next act of musical “speech” is going to be — not only its meaning to their listeners but also, and perhaps as important, to themselves. Why? Because even the sort of hyper-aware performer or composer I’ve just described is dealing with materials whose components of meaning are, again, necessarily more indefinite than than the components of verbal language are. (And here I want to raise the possibility that the relative indefiniteness or fluidity of the materials of music may well play a crucial role in what many of us find to be music’s tremendous power.) In any case, what do such musicians and composers do? Like every less hyper-aware maker of music does, they reach out into the personal realm of musical material that is available to them and they make choices — try to feel their way toward whatever destination they think or hope might be out there for them. And as they reach out they inevitably react to/reflect upon the choices and connections they’ve made on the basis of what those choices and connections mean to them; they are, at least momentarily, their own audience. One can see this process at work in all the drafts and sketches that Beethoven, perhaps the ultimate self-questioning/self-reflective composer, left behind. Indeed, in some of his later works, that self-questioning/self-reflective process eventually gets built into the language of the work itself. So it is more or less inevitable — I want to say natural — that we apprehend the presence of choice among alternatives in a piece of music we're listening to. Likewise we are, or can become, aware of the performer or composer’s pre-choice process of reaching out into the realm of potential musical materials — materials whose eventual meanings (when they’ve been shaped, reshuffled, combined, etc.) are not yet fully known to the would-be music maker. And it is my belief or intuition that this reaching out to or among inherently somewhat indefinite musical materials in order to create shapes of more definite satisfying meaning is, in itself, an act or source of meaning, for both the maker and the listener. I said a while ago that in order to kick this can down the road, I needed to go sideways and backwards — sideways from the listener to the makers of music, and backwards to the kitchen in which, at age nine or so, I sat watching and listening while my mother listened to classical music on the radio. You’ll have to take my word for it that she was at once intensely yet gently responsive to what she heard — like a leaf in the wind is the image that comes mind. And what I cannot in any way prove, though I believe it to be true, is that as she listened to a Schubert song or a piece of Mozart (both among her favorites), she not only understood the meaning of those realized sounds and their story-telling emotional significations, but she also grasped how and why their makers had to reach out into a realm of relative evanescence in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Her mother, who had a lovely contralto voice, used to sing to herself in her own kitchen, a favorite of hers being Robert Burns’ My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. The emphasis of this act of self-performance on the part of my grandmother was always placed on the phrase “my heart is not here.” And though she was a first-generation immigrant to America — from Russia, not from Scotland — the “here” where her heart was not was, I would say, not literal but metaphorical. And even more so, I believe, was this the case for my mother as she listened to and grasped the music on the radio and, in effect, or so it seemed clear to me. let her heart travel to the places where those long-dead music-makers had gone in order to make their music. That is what I thought I had witnessed. And without my being at all conscious of this at the time, I was learning in effect that there were such “not here” places, that some music-makers needed go there, and that those who only listened to the musical results could go there too and even try to understand and speak of the pleasures and meanings of reaching out to this “not here-ness.” I said above that I wanted to raise the possibility that the relative indefiniteness of the materials of music may well play a crucial role in what many of us find to be music’s tremendous power. Now I want to try to be more precise. If the materials of music are inherently less definite than the materials of verbal discourse, I think that for some of the actual makers of music there is yet another realm of potential musical material, that realm of the “not here,” that those music makers reach into when their current level of knowledge does not give them the answers they require. What they then find and come back with may crystallize for them right off and be felt as sheer gifts of the “ear” (one suspects that this often was the case for Mozart or Lester Young); or they may be mulled over in multiple drafts, as was the case with Beethoven or perhaps, in his own way, Monk, and then be incorporated into the final work in the form of expressively reified doubts or meaningfully preserved hesitations. Or what they find in that realm, as was the case with Charlie Parker on many occasions, may be grasped, examined, and displayed inside-out, right-side up, and upside-down in a veritable eye blink, with the sheer visceral compression of these acts being felt as a key part of their meanings. In any case, some listeners as they experience the music itself not only sense the presence of its makers' paths of choice but also feel impelled to trace those paths back to where they sense they came from — to the realm of material that was “not here” and that had to be reached out into by the music makers in a beyond the rational manner. And when one is impelled to trace or try to trace those paths, a particular pleasure can be felt. First, one becomes a kind of shadow participant in the act of creation, not just a recipient of creation’s gifts. Second, one gets to brush up against some of the “not here” oneself. The belief that one has done so may be a chimera; that is a possibility one has to admit. Nor is there any method that comes to mind that would prove things one way or the other — or for that matter prove or disprove that the “not here,” in the sense I’ve been talking about it, is at all present in the world of music. And yet if, say, Lester Young were not in touch with some form of the “not here” that he then brought down to the world of the here and now, then I really don’t know anything, do I?

- show quoted text - Also, I have second thoughts about Bernstein's live Vienna Phil. recording (1980). I was listening on LP, and everything I said about it above still applies. Then today I listened to the same performance on CD and could hardly believe the difference. The fussy dynamic shifts are evened out (if that's the way to put it), and the whole sonic picture is more "forward,." This is the most joyous first movement of the Sixth I've ever heard, and if joyousness isn't the whole story, Bernstein makes it seem like it is.

I've sampled all three on YouTube and like Kleiber the best. There's a certain nervousiity (is that a word?) in his approach that is quite unusual in my listening experiences pf the Sixth and that I can imagine becoming a bit wearing, even febrile, if it were to persist throughout, though on the other hand the virtues of that nervousity are quite striking; it certainly makes the work take place in the "present." Interesting to read the editorial remarks on Kleiber's Sixth on YouTube -- that he found the work extremely difficult and performed it seldom, though he loved it. Of versions of the Sixth that I've now sampled thanks to recommendations from others, I was bowled over by Klemperer's. That one I'll' have to buy; it's different than Monteux's but ranks alongside it IMO. P.S. Interesting that Erich Kleiber's Sixth also has some of that nervousity; it's a gem, somewehat better I think than his son's:

I'll try to check those out. Thanks.

I vote for the Beethoven Sixth. I have one great recording (I won't say perfect, even though that's what I think) -- Monteux with the Vienna Philharmonic. Listening to a set of Beethoven LPs I'd just purchased, Bohm with the Vienna Phil., I was dismayed, after enjoying Bohm's First, at how pedestrian his Sixth was. So I hauled out every Sixth I had around at the moment -- Bernstein, Vienna Phil., Furtwangler 1944 (Berlin} and '54 (Vienna), Jochum with the Berlin Phil., and Harnoncourt with the COE. Harnoncourt is just quirky, lots of lunging accents; Jochum is almost impossibly slow but does capture some of the vital pastoral mood/moods; both Furtwanglers edge close to the ideal but not close enough for me, both too slow for one thing, though not as slow as Jochum, and I find some of F's point-making a bit too "conductorial"; Bernstein is so fussy with dynamics that this pretty much becomes what the performance is about; Bohm, as the Brits say, is just po-faced. And Monteux? A perfect flowing tempo for the first movement -- why doesn't anyone else capture what he does? -- and from then to the end I sit there stunned, absorbed, you name it. In particular, what a simple piece of music it seems in Monteux's hands up to a point, and then one feels (I feel) that it is in fact not simple at all. Any other candidates for the "most difficult famous piece to get right?" Or candidates for a Sixth that surpasses Monteux's?

"Thesaurus" is the only one of those you've mentioned that's at all comparable, and "Extensions," while different, is arguably superior -- certainly in execution. And though it does lack Warne Marsh, Jerry Coker is an interesting substitute.

You probably missed the best one then.

Bob West played on several West Coast dates, including Clare Fischer's "Extensions."

Yes, that's some of the best Byers I know. Do you know and have any thoughts about his RCA Jazz Workshop album or his "Byers's Guide," neither of which I've heard?

Some excerpts from Marc Myers' interview with Collins: Some passages from Collins' Jazz Wax interview: JW: Who did you room with (with Herman)? DC: Trumpeter John Howell. I learned a lot from him about playing trumpet in a section. Certain things you learn by sitting next to a guy in a band. Not talking but by listening and locking into what the lead player is doing. I was the jazz trumpet. The first chair in Woody’s band was John or Al Porcino. JW: What’s special about the lead trumpet? DC: When you have four trumpets playing, they all have to move around on a sheet of music like one instrument. In the trumpet section of a good band, you learn how to play intuitively. You learn how to make the same mistake the lead trumpeter makes. That’s how close the horns have to be and how hard they have to be listening to the lead player. JW: Was trumpeter Burt Collins a relation? DC: Not at all. We just happened to have the same last name. Woody used to drive him nuts. Woody would fool around by announcing, “That was Burt Collins, Dick Collins’ Jewish brother.” That was Woody. It really burned Burt to be compared to anyone. JW: You were featured on Nat Pierce and the Herdsmen for Fantasy in 1954. DC: Actually, that was my session but Nat took over the whole thing. It was my date. He just arranged it. But somewhere along the way he became the leader instead of just the piano player. He just made himself the leader, New York style [laughs]. I just let it happen. Nat never said anything and neither did I. W: You knew Al Cohn, who was on both [RCA] albums. DC: Al and I got along real well. One night he came up to my hotel room. I had no booze or pot. Al didn’t ask for anything. He just sat down and wrote a chart on the bed. We talked and he wrote while we talked. JW: Which song was it? DC: The Long Night—on Horn of Plenty. He had nothing to drink, not even a Coca-Cola. He just wrote and talked. It was amazing to watch him work. JW: Who introduced you to Cohn? DC: Trumpeter Al Porcino. I remember the three of us were standing together. Al Cohn turned to me and said, “That’s Cohn, without an ‘e’ ” [laughs]. That’s pure Al. I mean, who would even bother to say that? Al, that’s who. Al would just sit down and blow. He was amazing. JW: Why did you cut back and stop recording in 1962? DC: The business was slowing down. I said to myself, “Someday you’re not going to be 30 anymore. You’re going to be 65 and then 70, and everything will have changed. What will you be doing?” The answer, invariably, was, “Nothing.” I had no real skills other than playing the horn. I only had an undergraduate degree. JW: What did you do? DC: I decided to get a masters degree in library science. I went back to school and became a librarian in the pubic library system in Los Angeles. I worked there for 15 years and today I’m living on that pension. I don’t have to worry about a Saturday night, as some older musicians do. JW: Did the people who worked with you at the library know who you were? DC: No. I kept those worlds separate. I was still playing locally at night. I’d work during the day at the library and play at Disneyland at night in Anaheim for a week or a month. I joined the local union in Orange County so I could do that. JW: Did you enjoy being a librarian? DC: I loved it. Too many people look down on the job but it’s as honorable an occupation as any other. Eventually I was hired by Cal Tech to help the university create a special library for earthquake engineering. I had to read all the books to determine which ones we should have on the shelves. I jumped right in and had a ball. JW: Do you have any regrets? DC: Just one. I wish I didn’t drink so much early on. JW: How did you manage to play so beautifully? DC: Thank you. Maybe because I liked to memorize song lyrics before blowing on the melody. My dad raised me that way. A new piece of sheet music would come in and we’d start learning the lyrics and melody at the exact same time. P.S. Collins' early trumpet teacher was Red Nichols’ father. From part I of the Collins interview: Starting at age 6, I took lessons from Red Nichols’ father, who lived in San Jose. When I first went over to his place, he tied a trumpet from the chandelier. When I reached out to grab the horn, he said not to touch it, that I had to learn to play the trumpet while it hung there without putting my hands on it. The point was to teach me the right way to blow. So I had to approach the instrument delicately. JW: How did you do it? DC: I had to learn to blow without pressing my mouth into the mouthpiece. The whole idea was hands off, easy treatment and no force. Nichols was a great guy. He'd take three or four kids out to the park, and we'd sit around a tree. He’d have a half a crate of apples out there, and we'd eat them while we talked. I ran into Red Nichols [pictured] years later and told him I had studied trumpet with his father. Red said, “Yeah, so what?” JW: Didn’t he get along with his dad? DC: Apparently not. I think Red’s father gave him hell. Like Conrad Gozzo’s father, who told him, “If you make one mistake that’s one. Second mistake, that’s two." After the third mistake, his father would whack him with rolled up paper.

Just played this 1954 RCA album for the first time in many years and found it quite interesting. Personnel is the Herman band of the time with NYC additions/subs: Collins, Al Porcino, Charlie Walp, or John Howell, trumpets; Sonny Russo, Billy Byers, trbs.; Dick Meldonian, Al Cohn, Bill Perkins, Richie Kamuca, Jack Nimitz, saxes, Jimmy Raney, guitar; Nat Pierce, piano, Red Kelly, bass, Chuck Flores, drms., arrangements Cohn and Pierce. Understandably more tight-knit than the typical NYC studio band of the time — the saxes are particularly together, but then the trumpets and the trombones are too, and I’ve always liked Flores’ Don-Lamond-inspired (or so I assume) drumming. This was a good period for Cohn’s writing I think — all his charts here sound fresh, and while there are a good many soloists, no piece sounds like a string of solos; Al’s writing is always there. Collins’ mellow, more or less neo-Hackett and/or Don Fagerquist-like horn is attractive, and all the other soloists are in fine form — the Pierce original “Donna Mia” inclues a long chase sequence with Perkins and Cohn that is very intense, a real joust of styles and ideas. My old LP has a complete list of soloists, but oddly it doesn’t mention that (obvious to the ear) on two tracks Collins and another trumpeter do the chase thing. Probably it was Walp; Howell was a lead player I think. Only drawback, for my taste, is that Kamuca only gets one solo; this was good time for him too. There was a previous Collins RCA album, “Horn of Plenty,” which I used to have, but it’s disappeared. I was hoping that Fresh Sound had combined the two on one CD, but no such luck, though they have issued them separately. Mark Myers did a nice interview with Collins (then 85) a few years ago on Jazz Wax. Collins left the business in 1962 because he had a grim sense of where he’d probably be in later years, got a degree in library science and became a librarian (natch) — a profession that he liked.