Dr. Rat

I've often thought it might be useful to get an internet review database going in a knowledgable group such as this one. There can be contrasting views and some give and take, the space is infinite to preserve OOP recordings that may be found used, etc., etc. I've always liked the Penguin guide, though I've disageed with it pointedly (I am no fan of a lot of the AG stuff they (or one of them) loves, and the prejudice against humor (which I love) was pretty apparent in the first edition), but I've also always thought it could be done a lot better. Scott Yanow over at AMG does an OK job, but he has a lot of collector's prejudices (e.g., completism) which I have little patience for and a lot of his reviews seem perfunctory, but I don't envy him. It's amazing how difficult it can get to say something sensible and useful about music when you are called upon to do it every day. I can imagine dancing about architecture, but dancing about it day after day! sheesh. But give & take with interesting interlocutors really helps. --eric

Well, I guess we should root for Ryko? I figure they'd run the place with some semblance of decency. $70 million or so seems cheap for all that great catalog. --eric

Disclosure: I own no WM albums, I've never been able to relate to his music: there's always been a coldness and impersonality to it to my ears. I did like the Marciac Suite -- things seemed to be warming up a bit. I've got the entire release the other day for the station, and I have to say, it's pretty good. No saxophone player, which I think is a good decision. Piano, drums, bass manned by the ususal strong younger players: Eric Lewis, Ali Jackson, Carlos Henriquez, respectively. All have recognizable personalities. The album starts with a slow blues with Dianne Reeves singing (and she can sing) and the low-key approach predominates until the last, title track. There are lots of simple-sounding melodies here, and a wistful, reminiscining-about-childhood feeling to the proceedings. A lot of this feel seems to eminate from the pianist, Eric Lewis, who at times puts me in mind of Vince Guaraldi, not someone I ever thought I'd be reminded of on a WM recording. Relatively lightweight in both intention and actuality, which I take to be a positive step for Marsalis. While there's still a certain reserve to the music I recognize from before, but this at least sounds personal rather than (how I'd characterize a lot of earlier recordings) "official." The last title track is a series of episodes--some of which sound like good little grooves that should have been developed, others like opportunities for WM to show off some aspect of his playing. A disappointing ending to the album. --eric

Seems to be the word of the week, so: Next week: that word in the Evlyn Waugh quote in Conn's sig.

Halfway through this interesting Kotzwinkle book. If you haven't read him before, he's an easy read but rewarding. --eric

Willie Mays was my idol when I was a kid, passed down from my dad for whom he was "the greatest" and "most exciting" player of all time. My dad insists that if you hadn't seen Mays play, you were no judge of his impact. But an even more special place in my dad's heart is reserved for the under-recognized breakers of the color barrier: Larry Doby and Monte Irvin foremost amongst them. So Monte Irvin's always been a name to reckon with in the family mythology. Here's his info from the hall of fame: Monte Irvin Monford Irvin Born: February 25, 1919, Columbia, Alabama Batted: right Threw: right Played for: Newark Eagles, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs Elected to Hall of Fame by Committee on Negro Leagues: 1973 Career Batting Record Hall of Fame Plaque One of the finest African-American players in the years preceding integration, Monte Irvin fashioned a career of dual excellence in both the Negro leagues and the major leagues. A high-average hitter with some power, he provided the most potent bat in a Newark Eagles lineup that also included legends Willie Wells, Biz Mackey, and Mule Suttles. The well-spoken and dignified Irvin crossed the color line in 1949 and was a key contributor to two Giants pennant-winners, batting .458 in the 1951 World Series. Did you know ... that as a teenager, Monte Irvin set a New Jersey state high school record for throwing the javelin? In 764 career games he hit .293, 99 home runs and 443 RBIs. And From baseballlibrary.com: Irvin became one of the brightest stars in the Negro Leagues, playing in four East-West all-star games. After hitting league highs of .422 in 1940 and .396 in 1941, he won the triple crown in Mexico with a .398 average and 30 home runs in 68 games. Many Negro League owners felt Irvin was the best-qualified candidate to break the major league color line, but Irvin was drafted in 1942 and spent the next three years in the army. Upon his return from the service, Irvin was tentatively contacted by the Dodgers' Branch Rickey, but felt he needed to play himself back into shape. He earned MVP honors in the 1945-46 Puerto Rican Winter League. He then led the Negro National League in RBI and hit .389, taking the Eagles to a victory over the Kansas City Monarchs in the 1946 Negro World Series. Irvin hit .462, slammed three HR, and scored the winning run in the seventh game. He was ready for the majors, but Rickey did not want to pay Eagles owner Effa Manley for the rights to Irvin's contract. Irvin remained with the Eagles and proceeded to lead the NNL in HR and RBI. After Irvin spent the 1948-49 winter in Cuba, Rickey relinquished his claim, and the New York Giants paid Manley $5,000 for Irvin's contract. Assigned to Jersey City (International League), he batted .373. He debuted with the Giants on July 27, 1949 as a pinch hitter. Back with Jersey City in 1950, he was called up after hitting .510 with 10 HR in 18 games. He batted .299 for the Giants that season, playing first base and the outfield. In 1951 Irvin emerged as a star, hitting .312 with 24 HR, leading the National League with 121 RBI, and finishing third in MVP balloting. He hit .458 in the 1951 World Series and stole home off Yankee pitcher Allie Reynolds in the second game. During an exhibition game in April 1952, Irvin broke his ankle sliding into third. He reinjured the leg in August 1953 and never regained his earlier form. He was sent down in mid-1955, and spent his final ML season with the Cubs. He scouted for the Mets in 1967-68, then joined the Commissioner's office as a public relations representative. The Committee on Negro Baseball Leagues elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1973; he later became a member of that body and of the Hall of Fame Committee on Baseball Veterans.

Only recently has it hit the dump, though. --eric

Hey Jim, Could you do Monte Irvin next. He memory needs some pub, but I'm committed to rats.

An album cover by Russell. The music must have been pretty strange, --eric

Wow, that's pretty cool. Pee Wee Russell apparently was also interested in painting for a while. They have some of his stuff at the Institute for Jazz Studies in Newark, NJ. There's some nice prints in an old box set I've got. I'll see if I can't scan one. --eric

I have this one. Haven't listened in a while (it's buried in a moving box somewhere), but I remember liking it pretty well. Poncho Sanchez likes it (from http://www.descarga.com): Cal Tjader Monterey Concerts CD (Prestige 24026), Reviews: "Not only was Willie Bobo a great timbalero, but this album showed that he was also a great jazz drummer. This album inspired me to pick up the timbales. The sound that Mongo gets on the congas is something that you can't hear on records today. I wonder how they did that. If you want to hear some great sounding congas, listen to this." (Poncho Sanchez and Ramon Banda 96/97 Catalog) Song titles include: Doxy Afro Blue Laura Walkin' With Wally We'll Be Together Again 'Round Midnight Love Me Or Leave Me Tu Crees Que S.S. Groove A Night In Tunisia Bess, You Is My Woman Lover, Come Back To Me Tumbao Musicians include: Paul Horn Lonnie Hewitt Al McKibbon Willie Bobo Mongo Santamaria

Also worth picking up for the pictures: Albert Murray's Stompin' the Blues. They're in B&W and not even glossy, but a nice collection of 20s and 30s photos and phonograhic art. The words not recommended for the more excitable amongst us, even if you do have time on your hands. --eric

That was a money issue, I'm pretty sure. He asked for X. They thought he wasn't worth it. I think they were wrong.

And Don Byron, Brian Blade, Mark Shim... The thing is, while Blue Note has these artists on their "roster" (i.e., back catalog) I'm afraid VERY LITTLE CAPITAL has been allocated to their projects... despite the Norah-generated cash infusion. Yeah, I wonder what the circumstances of a typical recording project are like now caompared to, say, 1960? How much time is there? How much expertise on hand? What choice of sidemen? How long does it take? How much time to write or select or rehearse material? I also wonder how much of the differences come down to up-front money and how much come down to broader changes in the business. --eric

I just can't beleive anyone thinks anything on TV to be worth recording. Get a DVD player! --eric

That's the spirit. I got into college radio when it was deep into the "so bad it's good" thing and I can remember getting into intense arguments about Creed Taylor. But, you know what? I actually like some Creed Taylor stuff now. I can do without the condescending "so bad it's good" attitude, but the surprise I've had is finding a lot of hyphen jazz is just plain good. I think Dusty Groove does a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in an area of music that has plenty of chaff. I've never been so misled by their reviews that I bought something entirely hateful (even when they praise something I think is horrid, I can usually read between the lines and see that they're praising it for the wrong reasons in my book). --eric

I don't know how you meant that, but I thought Blue Note really lost out on an opportunity with its last Dorough release--my sense is that this is a guy who can sell records with the right promo. I thought they should have made him into a project. --eric

If what you liked on More than Mambo was the more lush exotica-sounding stuff, go for his Verve catalog. If you liked the great Bill Fitch solo on Insight, You might be more pleased by his earlier work for Fantasy. Ritmos Calientes is a good one. Black Orchid and Live at the Blackhawk are also highly recommended. At this time Tjader was hiring and heavily featuring some of the best Cuban and Cuban style percussionists: Mongo Santamaria, Armando Paraeza, Willie Bobo, etc. Some very nice rhythm workouts. Guy that plays sax on some dates, Chombo Silva, did a fine job of soloing on tenor. --eric

I think I'd have to agree with Dan. Artists like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones do represent a risk as they involve a certain reposition of the company in the consumer's consciousness. But I suppose with the reissue program having a separate identitiy and integrity in the minds of the jazz die-hards, and the contemporary artists in the "serious" jazz realm selling rather poorly, they felt secure in moving in this direction. BUT, I would say that the Blue Note tradition is mostly in music that is decidedly UNprobing. The records that made the label's reputation (the reputation they are now in the process of altering) were mostly pretty straightforward. There were some progressive records, of course, but I think "Lee Morgan" or "Hank Mobley" when I hear "Blue Note," not "Andrew Hill," and I think that's pretty much the case with most people who think anything at all when they hear "Blue Note." And I think Blue Note's stable is pretty risky. Osby, Moran, Lovano--I doubt any of these guys are ever going to make them EMI's idea of ROI. --eric

Does anyone know what Rufus Reid is playing on these dates? Speculation flying in the studio on Friday: Close-mic bass? Electric? Ampeg baby bass? --eric

Been rereading your post. I am as much against competing lies as a model for discussion as anyone. You see this a lot in science debates right now--in topics touching on health and environmentalism, especially. I regard people who publish without regard to truth with contempt. But on the other hand there will be no direct access to truth in these matters--there will always be doubt. One simply should not publish things and call them truth, because six months later someone overturns your truth and you've done nothing but confirm just the sort of feckless skepticism you decry. The scare quote serve a purpose: they guarantee a healthy doubt. Something I feel that is absolutely necessary. And I'll say again, people have been publishing baldfaced lies and bullshit forever, since long before the death of unscarequoted Truth. They do it because they can get away with it, not because they do or don't beleive in unscarequoted Truth. Are there shockingly low standards in some areas of academia and publishing? Yes, indeed. But I just don't think it has anything to do with people not beleiving in truth, mostly because I haven't met anyone who doesn't operatively beleive in truth yet and I've met few people who OK with the competing lies syndrome outside of politics. Standards get ignored and dummified because people are overburdened or lazy or afraid to exercise their judgement. In publishing and academia, I think we have more of that today than we have had, but I think that has a lot more to do with the economics than philosophy. --eric

You obviously are more deeply read than I in this field, so I'll defer to your judgement on these issues. I think, partly because of Living Blues and the people surrounding it, the state of blues scholarship is well ahead of where Wald might like it to be. A lot of his disputes seem to be with the legends that still seem to have a lot of popular currency. But I'm thinking on the country/city issue, he might be referring to Sam Charters' early work? There seemed to be a pretty strong current of thought in John Hammond/Alan Lomax day that in the country (or the prisons) there was to be found some kind of purer, ur-music. But then it turned out that the delta region had had a lot of in-migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was about as far from Lomaxian hopes of a "Land that Time Forget" as you could get in the rural US. But again, I'm sure the scholarship is well beyond this. Thanks a lot for the very interesting post. --eric

Not up on the obit page, but available by searching. Also an AP obit. --eric

Walter Perkins, 72, Drummer, Is Dead; Played With Top Jazz Artists By BEN RATLIFF Published: March 1, 2004 Walter Perkins, a jazz drummer who played with major artists including Ahmad Jamal and Carmen McRae, and was part of a band in the early 1960's called the MJT +3, died on Feb. 14. He was 72. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Barbara Perkins. A busy sideman with a strong and light sense of swing, he left Chicago, his hometown, for New York in 1965. He is probably best known for a hard-bop record on which he was one of the leaders, "Walter Perkins' MJT +III," released on the Vee-Jay label in 1959. The group's name stood for Modern Jazz Two; Mr. Perkins and the bassist Bob Cranshaw were the two, and the three others were the trumpeter Willie Thomas, the alto saxophonist Frank Strozier and the pianist Harold Mabern. After moving to New York, Mr. Perkins played and recorded with Gene Ammons, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and George Shearing, among many others. In 2002 he made a comeback on a William Parker record, "Bob's Pink Cadillac" (Eremite). From the 1970's to the late 1980's he taught drum-corps classes at Girls and Boys High School in Brooklyn. He later conducted classes and workshops in many New York City public schools, performing for young people through the arts-education group Young Audiences New York. In recent years he often played in Queens, where he lived, at clubs like Carmichael's, Brandy's and the Skylark Lounge, and he started his own drum corps at the Merrick Park Baptist Church in Jamaica. In addition to his wife he is survived by his daughters Rochelle Mask of Baldwin, N.Y.; Denise Perkins of Brooklyn; and Marilyn Turns of Queens; 13 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Speaking as somebody who recently spent quite a while in a desperately hip graduate department, I don't really see this. In fact, I think it's pretty remarkable how little effect all the high-falutin theory talk has had on scholarly practice in fields like history. Most folks whom anyone pays any attention to learned the lesson pretty quickly from the hash Edward Said made of Orientalism. In historical analysis, no standard of truth means no basis for complaint. I specialized in 18th-century periodicals, and I can assure you, putting truth in quotes didn't get me out of one bit of dusty book reading or out of one monograph on 18th-century historical and social context. And, of course, I want to be right, too. (Making the big assumption that I actually finish this damn thing--highly doubtful) It would be wonderful to just bring an end to some of the sociological debates I work around with some truth that will strike everyone like Paul on the road to Damascus. That'd be super. But I doubt very much that'll happen. What'll probably happen (if I do very well, and making the further assumption that anyone gives a damn) is that what I write will have a big effect, it'll have to be responded to, and those who wish to beleive something other than what I believe about how social and communicative processes work will set to work, find other facts and sources, find mistakes and blind spots in my work, and transform the picture to fit their set of assumptions and cherished beliefs about the contemporary world. That I take to be about as true as true can be. That'll represent a bit of progress, no doubt--arguments will be honed, certain ways of seeing things ruled out. But the big important questions will remain open. Now there are probably ways of transcending this process, but it won't be through historical fact-gathering. The route to truth is just too long and winding in that direction. Well-thought-out scientific approaches to fields like contemporary sociology, psychology and ideology suggest themselves, but they aren't quite on the horizon yet, I don't think (at least not all of them). --eric