Nate Dorward

It's perfectly possible to do something (morally) wrong without doing something illegal. That Proper seem not to be breaking copyright law in their country don't mean that they're not doing anything ethically wrong. I've been tempted by some of the boxes from these various companies but have so far avoided purchasing any.

Glad to know it's available so easily in Europe--hope that it's equally easy to find over here.

Yeah I know what you mean about Malaby: Adobe is 2/3rds of a great record. So not quiiiite there yet, though it's certainly worth hearing; Malaby often sounds better on other people's discs because he's not the world's best composer. Have you heard Disambiguation with Malaby, Karayorgis, M Maneri, &c? A nice disc. I remain pretty underwhelmed by Back Together Again, though there's about 3 tracks I like (the first two in particular). Tracks like "Louisiana Strut" just are dead in the water--some hot drumming but it never goes anywhere. Bull Fiddle is OK but somehow never really grabbed me. Review as follows.

Yes, AMM's an important group. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who will chime in (Jon Abbey I think pops up on this board occasionally, for instance). There's enormous disparity between their earliest work & the later work--the earpiercing racket of The Crypt (1968) bears little obvious relation to the latterday AMM with John Tilbury. I've found that Newfoundland (Matchless) is an excellent place to start, or The Inexhaustible Document perhaps.

Luke--thanks for the story: I remember hearing that Live at Smalls disc when it came out, but Hewitt's appearance on it was so brief I don't even remember it!

Never really got with Tsahar, really--the one concert I saw was close to appalling--but Malaby's good, as is Perelman, though in very different ways! -- Well, assuming he stays on good terms with Bob Rusch, we can expect a lot more of Mr Finn, since Rusch tends to be very generous with studio time for the musicians he's excited about. What I'll be interested to see is how big Fiin's bag is. Steve Smith, by the way, has heard a prerelease version of one of Finn's next discs (I think it's to come out on Clean Feed) & commends it highly.

Yes: I recall that the composer Louis Andriessen is so fond of the technique that he named a band for it (Hocketus).

I share your enthusiasm for the disc. But "groundbreaking"? It's in the classic free-jazz tenor/bass/drums mould, Finn playing in a late-Trane/Ayler vein. He has a great big sound which I like. Anyway, I wouldn't call it groundbreaking, but it's definitely one for fans of good blowing. Interesting to read in the liners that he was a student of JR Monterose's. I look forward to hearing more from Finn. The sound on it is indeed quite good, much better than you'd expect from Rusch's comment that it was originally submitted as a demo. -- Ah yes, the usual skeptical comments about CIMP sound cropping up, I see. Though I've heard a few CIMPs where the balance was problematic (I think to complain about "CIMP sound" is misleading: the usual complaints I hear specifically concern the balance between bass & drums), mostly I've found them just fine, & sometimes just about as stunning as the elaborate producer's notes would have you believe: listen to a disc like Adam Lane's Fo(u)r Being(s) or Trio-X's Journey, for instance. They sound pretty darn good, both musically & sonically. Anyway, I'll let Rusch fight his own battles but on the whole I've been pretty pleased with the label's output. They could stand to pare down releases--most are in the 65- to 75-minute range, & if not enough tracks are recorded to get it to that length then alternate takes are inevitably added--but that's a minor criticism. Of the new batch I've heard only the Eisenstadt & Gagliardi: too early to tell but the tracks I heard of the Eisenstadt are certainly fascinating, not least for the stunning lineup (three trumpets: Roy Campbell, Paul Smoker, Taylor Ho Bynum) & for his distinctive use of hocketing in the arrangements. I've avoided the two Dunmalls having found the Emanem Hour Glass pretty dull. -- But, yes, the most striking thing I've heard yet was the Finn on CJR: it's the real deal.

It's true that Lacy doesn't append the dedications to the titles of the pieces a la KVDM, but when he contributes liner notes he's usually at pains to spell out the dedications; & as I said if you look at the scores (often reproduced in the packaging) the dedications are written out & often little photos of the dedicatees are pasted to the score (e.g. the image of Beltrametti on the score of his setting of Raworth's "Out of a Sudden", published as the endpapers of Clean & Well Lit). Similarly with Braxton: the dedications are usually mentioned only in the liner notes (e.g. take a look at the liners to the Willisau set), though occasionally they're marked explicitly in the packaging (notably on For Alto). Vandermark doesn't interest me as a musician but I don't begrudge him the McArthur, & yes by all reports he's a nice guy.

Nonsense: virtually every Braxton & Lacy composition is a dedication. For instance, just grabbing Lacy's The Holy La: the title track is for Leonard Bernstein; "Inside My Head" is for Dick Francis; "Blue Jay" is for JF Jenny-Clark; "Flakes" is for Mark Rothko; "Cliches" is for Jo Maka; "Retreat" is for Bob Marley; "The Door" is for Josef Haydn. Or Vespers, which dedicates each track to everyone from Keith Haring to Stan Getz. You could come up with similar lists from most of Lacy's or Braxton's discs. Lacy even often includes little photographs of the dedicatees at the bottom of his scores.

True, KVDM's habitual dedication of pieces to his idols begins to look like opportunism, but why's it any different from or less admirable than Steve Lacy or Anthony Braxton's acts of homage? Simply because they're more important musicians?

You mean they don't teach capital letters in cash-strapped American schools? Things are worse than I'd imagined. Seriously, it's not ignorance, it's a stylistic choice. An annoying stylistic choice, to be sure, but that's why you put on a style: to please friends in your circle & annoy those outside your circle. Back on topic: there's no discussion of the tune in Straight Life but there's an appreciative description of Mario, the dedicatee, who was Pepper's favourite drug dealer of the time.

dude, i think it highly unlikely, bec. miles recorded kind of blue in march and april 1959, and pepper recorded las cuevas de mario in octover 1960. draw the obvious conclusion.

No, the buzzing's there on the CD-ROM too. It's just the natural buzz of the hand drum as far as I can tell.

The Perelman/Sclavis disc is pretty good stuff. It's split between quartet tracks (Perelman/Sclavis/Rogers/Lopez) & trio tracks (Perelman/Wodrascka/Lopez). Though the Sclavis tracks are good the Wodrascka ones are actualyl the most striking, as she manages to crank up the music's harshness a few notches. The Anderson/Drake is pretty good, though I'm not as ecstatic about it as some I know. Yes the drums are loud (though at least Drake isn't a noisy or splashy drummer): you get every bass drum thump & buzz.

Agree with Michael F about the matter of choice of instrument. If it'd been up to Anne she'd be playing guitar or ukulele at 4-1/2 (she finds the instruments fascinating) but there was no way she could have even fretted the strings properly at the time! Recorder is good, that's actually how I started out (eventually, as I said, shifting to piano on my own), with the bunch of students under Priscilla Evans in Halifax (she had virtually every kid in town playing recorder during her years as a teacher).

Yeah it'd be nice for more dance & rhythm to get integrated into learning music, not just pitch. I do a lot of clapping games with Anne & work hard on her ability to read & hear rhythms. But I don't dance & can't help there, though she does do a little ballet in school. I found a private teacher who as long as the kid could physically play the piano comfortably & had the physical & mental ability to start, was willing to take kids who were very young. Anne is lucky because she's very coordinated & can concentrate hard. I should say that it takes a lot of fortitude on a paren'ts part too--you've got to concentrate hard too, trying not to make the practice sessions gruelling conflicts-of-will but still getting work done. It's difficult for me because as a pianist I'm almost entirely self-taught because my parents had no stomach for that kind of thing--so I picked it up later, on my own. I've never had parents commanding me to practice or the like. But with Anne I simply decided it was as important as getting her to read & write, & so it's more formalized. The point about making it a social occasion is a good one--face it, playing any instrument solo isn't half as pleasurable as playing in a group. I look forward to when Anne can accompany others. We often do singalongs at the piano often (you should hear a 6-year-old singing "Peel Me a Grape"), & she really loves singing with her own playing, too.

Our daughter started on piano at 4. She's 6 now & still playing & doing very well (pounding out simple Bartok Mikrokosmos stuff, bourees, &c). I think piano's the best place to start, really, for all the reasons outlined above--it's a good grounding to have even if the kid eventually shifts to a different instrument; the physical layout of the keyboard makes music theory much more obvious than, say, on a wind instrument; the music you make sounds nice immediately, unlike on violin where the first few years aren't pretty. In addition to piano, some kind of elementary voice training is very useful, even just participatory singing with the choir in the local church. My wife sings a lot (part of the choir in our church) so Anne gets a lot of exposure this way.

Getting back to the original post: Ray Draper was not a very good tuba player & should not be taken as a benchmark of his fast a tuba is (or of the kind of tone it can produce). I had a very interesting correspondence with a tuba player about Draper, & she had a lot to say about the guy: she felt some sympathy for him (he was only a self-taught teenager on those Prestige dates; afterwards he ended up going through a lot of personal troubles & died relatively young) but said he'd done a lot of damage to the instrument's rep in jazz circles. If you want to hear a stunning improvising tuba player try Howard Johnson or Michel Godard. They ain't slowpokes, I assure you. In terms of speed: computers can play as fast as you like. In terms of acoustic instruments, I'd imagine that an instrument like a piano has an advantage in terms of speed over a horn because the mechanism to produce each note is physically independent, so it's only limited by handspeed. But probably a vocalist or hornplayer will now prove me wrong.....

Chuck--many thanks. I take it the Pepper/Marsh session is the same as the date issued on the first side of The Way It Was!? I like that compilation a lot (the outtakes on Side B from Pepper's other dates of the time are nearly as good as the original LPs). Yes the Xanadu LP is great stuff! I dug it out of a recordstore bin full of Xanadus a few years ago along with one of the Dolo Coker discs--a find.

Ha! My biggest screwup on one of these yet in misidentifying the AEOC track as William Parker, Roy Campbell et al. Oh well, it happens.

I think that some of the Five Spot material with Griffin isn't available elsewhere (some was on that Blues Five Spot LP, but there's also another couple things, including a track with Blakey sitting in, which I haven't seen elsewhere). The Italy set is the same as usual but there's a total of 12 tracks from France rather than the 8 on the OJC. The Blackhawk sessions have 11 tracks on the set, whereas the OJC has 8 tracks. I'm going by the track listings on amazon.com, which I hope are reliable. None of this stuff's terribly important, though the extra Five Spot stuff at least is nice to have.

As far as I know the aborted session with Shelly Manne & the early version of "Crepuscule with Nellie" are only on the Riverside, yes. I don't quite fathom why you'd want to purchase the Riverside set for the sake of those cuts though, as the session with Manne was very unhappy, & "Crepuscule with Nellie" was redone, better, by the same band the next session (the Hawkins/Coltrane/Gryce sessions). "Coming on the Hudson" was issued on LP as part of a studio bin-ends set called _Blues Five Spot_. It's OK, though unremarkable. The main value of the Riverside set by the way is the presence of a fair bit of live material unavailable elsewhere. I think some of the alternate studio takes, too, aren't on the current OJC reissues (though that may be merciful: "Played Twice" & "I Mean You" do get done to death on the Jones/Rouse & Mulligan sessions, respectively....).

Yes, this would be incredibly useful. The discography at www.warnemarsh.info is awe-inspiring but it's of limited use for the casual jazzfan because (1) a large proportion of it is listings of broadcasts from public radio; (2) given that Marsh's favourite handful of compositions appear on virtually every album, just knowing that a disc has a version of, say, "Subconscious-Lee" isn't terribly helpful; (3) there's no qualitative judgments, comments about sound-quality &c. A dumb question, Chuck: is that you on the left in the photo under the "Producer's Note" to All Music? I assume so, though actually I'd initially thought it was Alan Broadbent! I wish Hat Art or someone would do a proper reissue of Ne Plus Ultra--in particular I wonder what happened to the rest of those sessions--there's one track from a live date ("You Stepped Out of a Dream") which is pretty astonishing, but the rest is studio material (notable for a 15-minute freely improvised track, "Touch & Go").

Yes I have most of the Atlantics too (separately, not the boxed set, now O/P), & the (O/P) twofer with Giuffre. It's a good set. But those are from the earlier career (up to the early 1960s); after that it becomes more of an uncharted territory, especially for those like me who are largely dependent on CD reissues rather than original small-label vinyl.