Teasing the Korean

They can be more interesting. Harder? Not necessarily, although it is harder to fake your way through them if you don't know them well. You can get lost in a tune like "Alone Together" if you go on autopilot. Songs with longer forms like "Begin the Beguine" may require some advance discussion about how to handle the soloing. The soloists are likely not all going to blow over 96 bars.

Cole Porter's "Night and Day," if I'm not mistaken, is more or less AABA, but it is 48 bars. The first two A sections are each 16 bars. The bridge is then 8 bars, and the final A is an 8-bar variation one the second half of the earlier A sections. "Autumn Leaves" is 32 bars, but AAB. The A sections are each 8 bars; the B section is 16 bars. Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," if I"m not mistaken, is 96(!) bars, consisting of six 16-bar phrases: AABACC. Each A section features subtle melodic and harmonic variations. The final two C section are similar to the A sections but melodically different. Some may characterize it as an AABAAA form, with each A being different.

Yes. It is in Haiku form, possibly the only (well known) pop song in Haiku! "Alone Together" by Schwartz and Dietz is in AABA form, but the first two A sections are each 14 bars instead of the customary 8 bars.

Keep 'em coming!

What are some standards in unusual forms? "I'm Old Fashioned" is in A-B-C-A, the final A being a variation. "Moonlight in Vermont" is in A-A-B-A, but features six-bar A phrases rather than the usual eight-bars. "Lazy" by Irving Berlin is in A-B-C-D, perhaps the only example I've ever heard of a 32-bar pop song where nothing repeats. "One for My Baby" features the second A section in a higher key than the first. Lots of Cole Porter songs feature slight variations on the A themes as they are repeated. There must be hundreds of these. What are some of your favorites?

Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter are both Bregman. Harmonically, his charts are very square. Considering all the great jazz and pop arrangers working at the time, it is astonishing that this guy got the gig. I guess it helped being a blood relative of the label owner.

We simply disagree about Ogerman. I love his arrangements. I find them to be very tasteful and minimalist. As for Diana Krall, I don't listen to her. My idea of a bad arranger is Buddy Bregman, who ruined at least two of Ella's Songbook albums.

How do you search for it? I put in Cal Tjader Big Beat and all I got were album tracks.

Have you found the videos on YouTube or anyplace else online? I haven't found them.

Does anyone here have the second Playboy After Dark collection that includes Cal Tjader's performance on Playboy's Penthouse, circa 1959 0r 1960? I have the first volume with Cy Coleman, Lenny Bruce, Ella, etc. The second volume seemed to go out of print quickly. If I had known Cal Tjader was on it, I would have hopped on it immediately. Can anyone tell me which and how many songs he does, who was in the band, if he talks to Hef between songs?

If the original is worth $450 million, the color print I made from this thread ought to fetch a few hundred thousand, right?

True, but unlike most contemporary "jazz" artists, he earns a regular paycheck.

I tend to like the Milestone period the best, because of the conceptual nature of the albums and interesting group configurations. These albums used to be everywhere for little money, because everyone seemed to want the Blue Note or Impulse! stuff. The savvy consumer buys when prices drop.

I have passed up copies of this for far, far less than $1,000. Live and learn...

While we all may define "genius" differently, I think you could make a strong case for broad, genre-shattering influence or disruption to be one element of genius. I don't believe that any contemporary jazz artist can have that sort of influence anymore, either within jazz or beyond, regardless of how talented he or she may be. It is the sound of a tree falling in the forest when no one is there to hear it.

Understood, but it's 45 minutes or so that I could have spent listening to someone else.

As someone with a roomful of LPs, the vast majority of which are either jazz or jazz related, I have to wonder what would compel anyone to buy a Wynton Marsalis album. I can imagine a pleasant passive experience, for example, hearing a Wynton Marsalis track on the jazz station while you're getting ready for bed and brushing your teeth and thinking, "That was OK," but I can't imagine actively pursuing his music.

Thanks, I did not know about that site. I do have some Wing reissues. Most are straight reissues, but some appear to be Pickwick-like grab bag collections. I could be mis-remembering.

Looking through EmArcy's discography, it would appear that they took jazz "seriously," certainly in comparison to the other majors (except Columbia).

Ha! Mercury, of course, had an impressive classical line, "Mercury Living Presence." I wonder how those LPs sold? I also wonder if Mercury's jazz sessions used any of the same engineers as those on the classical recordings. There must be jazz artists today who wish they could sell 19,999 copies of their records.

Thank you!

I have accumulated an awful lot of LPs over the decades on the EmArcy label. I realized today that I know almost nothing about the label, except that it was a jazz label and a subsidiary of Mercury Records. So I waddled over to Wikipedia to see what else I could learn, and Wikipedia told me, basically, that EmArcy is a jazz label and a subsidiary of Mercury Records. It seems that Mercury and Columbia were the only major postwar US labels who dedicated themselves to jazz in any kind of organized, strategic fashion. Yet while I know about George Avakian, Teo Macero, and Irving Townsend, I know zilch about EmArcy. So can our esteemed community shed any additional light on the label, or provide a Web link? Who were the EmArcy masterminds? Did Mercury treat EmArcy as the folly of some junior executive, or did they recognize jazz as an important American genre? How did the records sell? Based on what I've encountered over the years, I would guess they sold fewer copies than Columbia, but more than any of the independents. Thanks in advance.

Ask him about Cal Tjader's Soul Burst album, on which Chick played.

Well, every film back then a track or two representing what the teenagers were listening to. Half of Henry Mancini's "Touch of Evil" is that kind of thing.

Nice! Russ Freeman was doing such interesting rhythmic stuff that you didn't typically hear from pianists of that era. He also played very tasteful chord voicings that did not necessarily use eight or nine or ten fingers, but rather very well chosen notes, with nice tensions and resolutions. I always recognize his playing.