Tom Storer

I know Sheila Jordan never misses an opportunity to let people know that Dorham was a fine singer. She sings one of his songs, "Fairweather," on her 2003 album "Little Song."

Bright Moments, who is the smiling cello player in your signature?

Personally, I'd rather go to a nursing home than die, but who knows how I'll feel when the time comes. My father, in his late 70's but still pretty valiant, was going through a perfectly understandable period of depression and self-pity after his wife passed away about a year-and-a-half ago. He was a little unsteady on his pins and had been forgetting things, so he decided the time had come to go to an assisted living place--to us it seemed clear he just wanted to give up the fight and be looked after. A relative took him to check out one such place, and that was enough. Creeped him right out. "I'm not ready for that yet!" he declared. Hasn't mentioned it since.

What a great thread. I'm going to dig out "Worktime" now. Also, Steve Grossman is playing Paris in early July in a quartet with Alain Jean-Marie on piano. I haven't been getting out to the clubs anywhere near enough; this will be a good occasion.

I voted for the glass of wine, but if that was unavailable I would drink the beer. But why his forehead? And--wait a minute. What effect would this have on Lucky Thompson? I wouldn't want to hurt the guy. But hey, he's dead! Gosh, I just don't know what to think.

I know he's on "Live at the East" by Sanders, along with Cecil McBee. Great stuff. He blew my mind when I was a youngster just getting into jazz and I heard "Light as a Feather." I moved on from there and he's not one of my favorites at this point, but he has a lot of personality. People also forget that he was the fusion bass guitar god in the 70's, before Jaco arrived. Unfortunately, his own solo fusion efforts plunged inexorably over time toward commercial dreck. His first record, "Children of Forever" (Polydor, 1972) is worth hearing if it's still in print: Chick Corea, Pat Martino, Clarke and Lenny White, with Andy Bey and Dee Dee Bridgewater on vocals!

I like Tabackin, too. I seem to recall Larry Kart being less impressed with him in his book, though. I'll dig it out (unless Larry cares to elaborate).

I've never heard of the practice of salting watermelon. In general, I salt before tasting, but not on fruit. But I like salt on cucumber. I'll have to try it on watermelon.

Great self-interview, Allan. I agree with what John Tapscott said--you have nothing to feel stupid about, let alone disgusted or guilty. You reacted to the man who was in front of you, not his past, which you didn't know about, or bad things he may have been doing offstage. I also believe that people's crimes do not cancel out their good parts. Take to heart a French saying, la sympathie ne se justifie pas, elle se constate--the sympathy, or liking, that you feel for someone, is not something to be justified; it is only something that happens and that you recognize.

Excellent! That's a fine review you wrote, too. Stick around!

What's wrong, Paris isn't good enough for you??

Looks very interesting, jazzolog, thanks for the tip. Is that your own review?

I found my wife and son watching it and we guffawed through a few songs. It's so bad it's quite a laugh. I didn't see Germany, though, so I don't know what you're apologizing for. What does Kenny Dorham have to do with it?

I have Zone Alarm Pro and it does a great job for me. No complaints. I find the firewall part easy to use, which is always nice. I also use a program called SUPERAntiSpyware that saved my computer from a particularly pernicious spyware program that had polluted my system. Took me all weekend and the use of a fantastic site called www.bleepingcomputer.com to finally kill it. If you're ever swamped with a virus, spyware, adware or whatever and ordinary means don't solve the problem, I highly recommend this site--a guy on the site walked me through the problem, directed me to download various programs and run them, and spent considerable time over three days analyzing the log files they generated and narrowing it down to the offending files and registry entries. Efficient, serious, professional, and free of charge. It's like a mission with them to stamp out this shit. I was so pleased I gave them a ten-buck contribution via Paypal.

"You have to know the rules to break them" basically means that if you break rules only because you haven't learned them well enough--the mistakes of beginners or incompetents--then you're not going to fool those who are in the know. However, this has kind of morphed into a slightly different meaning, "only if you can prove you know the rules will we indulge you if you choose not to follow them." If someone is merely using different rules, it doesn't make any difference if they know or don't know the rules they're not using. In jazz, however, conservative listeners often believe that if musicians aren't using the rules of harmony, rhythm and vocabulary that they, the listeners, are familiar with, then there are no rules, it's nothing but chaos. However, they'll grudgingly grant musicians the right to leave the beaten track if they can show that they know where the beaten track is--that's what makes them part of the club, and if they're part of the club then they can be excused. This is what leads to situations where people demand that "free" players demonstrate bebop chops before their non-bebop music will be seriously considered--clearly ridiculous. Another meaning has to do with a knowing breaking of the rules--a transgression whose relationship to the rules gives it a richness of meaning. In this way musicians can carry on a dialogue with the past and a reflection on the present. When AACMers played blues or swing in a broadly approximate way, full of intended awkwardness, excess, or dissonances and irregularities that in the context of "the rules" would be mistakes, they were commenting on "the rules" with irony and deep affection, mocking them in a teasing way while demonstrating that they remained a source of joy and expression even when altered. That's another important way to break the rules that is only possible when you know them.

Paul, that paragraph brings one up short, and it's understandable that you should feel somewhat indignant. But to illustrate the pitfalls of reacting to one paragraph quoted out of context, you said... Since the paragraph comes from the liner notes to the Sam Rivers Mosaic set, it's more than likely that Cuscuna did indeed mention the rest of Rivers' career.

In other words, Cuscuna is guilty of sloppy thinking as well as sloppy writing. Quite possibly. That quote, just read like that out of whatever context it came from, sounds like Stanley Crouch could have written it--and at the time, he actually did write things just like it (cf. the liner notes to L. Jenkins/R. Ali's "Swift Are the Winds of Life"--from memory, something like "it is becoming quite clear in this music just who can play and who can't"--sounds a lot like "shoving a lot of the screaming pretenders off the stage"). But give him a break--Cuscuna is not Wynton in disguise.

The flaw in your reasoning is that you're assuming that the way to get people listening to new stuff is to gradually nudge them in a kind of linear way from what they now like to something not too different, then from there to something a little further over, etc. But I think people often do the opposite, they have some kind of revelation when hearing something entirely different. Maybe the more different it is, the more likely it is to make an impression. Hit or miss, obviously, but so is the gradualist approach, which is "give them some jazz that won't scare them off." My approach now--I stopped evangelizing long ago, but sometimes people ask--is to give them a variety of styles, from most traditional to way outside, figuring that will cover all bases. But always things I really love myself.

I prefer a line Tommy Flanagan liked to use. He'd play a Dizzy Gillespie tune, for example, mention that it was bebop, turn to the audience and say, "Of course you know what bebop is. Bebop is the music from before the Beatles... and after the Beatles."

Exactly. There are those who criticize Roach and Roy Haynes for insufficient technique, for that matter, usually in the form of a back-handed compliment. It's nonsensical. There's "how fast and complicated can you play?" virtuosity and there's "how much incredible music can you create?" virtuosity. There's an astounding bootleg of Rollins, Henry Grimes, and Klook, recorded in Aix-en-Provence in 1959. Anybody who can fly at that level is so far up there that "technique" is a detail. I'm reminded of a conversation I overheard at a Grover Washington concert in the mid-70's. A group of beautiful and stylish young women were discussing a party they were planning to go to after the concert. This was some sort of college function. One of them was wearing denim, but that does not begin to describe how her simple outfit was supremely elegant, hip and refined. It was a work of art. But denim. "They say no jeans allowed," her friend warned her. The one in denim gave her a look. "Honey," she said, " I am beyond jeans."

I recall Betty Carter furiously slamming Lou Donaldson because, according to her, when he "went commercial" to make a buck he would tell young musicians, "Forget that old-style jazz, that's the past, you have to live in the present," and then in the 80's when swingin' jazz was back in style, he presented himself as a hero of the noble old tradition and criticized the very compromises he had not only made himself but encouraged others to make. That was her point of view. I'm just reporting.

Kenny Clarke was perhaps the single swingingest drummer I've had the pleasure to see up close and personal, and like many of you I've seen an awful lot of them. I moved to Paris in 1979 and my jaw dropped when I saw him advertised as playing in a little club. I had no idea he was still alive, in those pre-Internet days when not everybody knew all there was to know about everything. I went and sat not ten feet from the drums and I swear my calf cramped up from too much foot-tapping. It was an organ trio with Lou Bennett on organ and Christian Escoudé on guitar. Clarke was wearing a suit and tie and I can still see him poking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and smiling mischievously at the others as he poured on the rhythm. In the few years before his death I saw him many more times, including a great couple of nights with Walter Davis, Jr. and Pierre Michelot that was issued as "Live at Le Dreher" on some French label. And one night I was at a posh club that Gérard Terronès ran for a while in La Défense to see David Murray, who was playing, if I remember correctly, with Alan Silva and Oliver Johnson. Clarke showed up the door and expected to be "on the list," but he wasn't, and they wouldn't let him in until someone in charge came up and basically said "Do you know who this is?" After the show he went backstage and a loud shout of "KLOOK!" could be heard, followed by joyous laughter. He and Murray emerged, arms around each other's shoulders.

In my experience, it's impossible to predict people's tastes. I've had non-jazz-listening friends be wowed by stuff I never thought they'd enjoy and be indifferent to stuff I was sure they'd love. A one-shot compilation may or may not do it. It's total guesswork. Once I made a friend of mine three 90-minute cassettes (remember the cassette days?), one of 20's and 30's jazz, one of lyrical, swinging jazz of the 50's and 60's, and one of free stuff. I figured he'd go wild for the Miles, Monk and Mingus, and maybe have his mind opened by the more adventurous cassette. I threw in the Armstrong and Morton, etc. almost as a joke, since virtually no one I knew at the time (apart from the occasional jazz geek) ever heard it as more than a historical curiosity. Naturally, that was the one he loved.

Any word on Thursay and Friday nights' performances?

Wow. Those are some memories! I grew up in White Plains, a commuter ride away from Manhattan. Once I was old enough to pass for drinking age, I would go into Manhattan and hit the clubs whenever I had saved enough pennies, and Bradley's was one of my stops. In those days, Bradley's was strictly solo piano or piano/bass duos. Only later did they allow horns and drums. I recall Jimmy Rowles and Sam Jones, Hank Jones and Red Mitchell, often with people like George Coleman or Dexter Gordon standing near me at the bar... Nostalgia's not what it used to be!