Cornelius

Dan, You disclaim anti-intellectualism, but you say that you agree that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." I see that as a self-contradiction, unless I misunderstand what you mean by that aphorism.

Would you point to where Coltrane made those comments about the need for musicians to be good people? I don't doubt you that he said that; I'm just interested in reading more. / Conservatives today call themselves 'libertarians'. Social liberalism, but without having to pay taxes for all those welfare bums. There's no ideology there except the ideology of self-interest. As if the massive wealth of corporations is protected by some ethical-political statute of limitations on genocide, slavery, war, invasion, plunder, theft, and corruption. What a crock. / I think you mean Stan Levey.

Thanks, couw. I tink I got you now.

"[...] sanitised, respectable front as a solid affirmation of cultural seriousness and high-brow gravitas. Anything that deviates from this is dismissed by Crouch and his mates as decadence, self-indulgence [...]" [sNWOLF] I suspect that's an overstatement. / Along the lines of Allen's comments about the beats and hippies, at least these events loosened a bit the stick that goes up our culture. It seems to me that the self-permission that was demanded to take LSD and to deviate from routine ideation, art, and behavior has contributed to our freedom.

"[...] a denial of validity really isn't that far off from the failure to connect if the mode of communication is what it is all about. If someone has big problems with people intellectualising emotional reactions and proceeds to call those intellectualisations invalid, I cannot blame this person. It only denies objective validity of the intellectualisations for the person in question. It would be great if those broadminded enough to think this were nonsense would nonetheless take it as a valid opinion." [couw] I don't understand this, though I might guess at parts of what it means.

"Could you provide a couple of examples where [Mobley] plays the same thing on two different recordings?" [Lazaro Vega] Off the top of my head the first comparison that occurs to me is his blues solos on various heads during the early '60s. Perhaps "Pfrancing" on Someday My Prince Will Come could be your prototype for comparisons. Later, if you like, I could give you the chorus numbers. He plays variations on them scattered throughout other recordings. Basically a chorus or two with less variation than you might expect. "But they're usually "micro" patterns [...]" [JSngry] But there are the chorus routines too. / Interesting comments by Larry about "Cool Struttin'." I also like the comment he makes in the book about the rhythmic effects of the team of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.

I appreciate many approaches to writing about jazz: technical, biographical, and illustrative/metaphorical/impressionistic/sensorial/psychological (for lack of a better term for writing that describes the writer's sensorial and emotional responses in metaphors (or other tropes) that compare music to other sounds, sights, and concrete and psychological experiences (such Kart's enjoyably apt description of Mobley's tone as "like a blue gray cloud," if I'm quoting correctly). And I'd love for there to more writing that does a good job of combining these approaches. But the passage I quoted seems to go on to an ideational/metaphysical/ontological (for lack of a better term) approach. I'm not necessarily opposed to this kind of thing, but my radar of skepticism does start blinking like crazy. And in this instance, my radar gun dictated that I pull the speeding car to the curb. My feeling is that (not necessarily in order of importance), first, the prose is too dissimilar to its subject; second, the prose did not enlighten me and that some of what it is meant to convey was better articulated by Kart's own more down to earth metaphorical explanations in this thread; third, the rhythms, imagery, and voice of the prose did not appeal to me; fourth, along the lines just mentioned, for me, the particular ontological (for lack of a better word) analogies used "run past" Mobley himself in a way that distracts from digging him. I surmise that Kart does not mean that Mobley himself felt or thought about the things Kart finds in his playing. So, granted, the analogies could still be good even if Mobley did not think and feel those things; that's why they're analogies and not reports of Mobley's actual mental experiences; and I just said that I do dig analogies like "blue gray cloud." But the ontological analogies that Kart got carried away with are so abstract (and I found not too logical even as abstractions) that Kart has "upped the stakes" so that the conceits better be really well constructed now. Perhaps there's a kind of series of levels, from literal to concrete to metaphorical to ontological: For examples (I'm just improvising a rough notion here, so don't hold me to this in every detail): Level 1 (literal) "He played even eighth notes with the rhythm section's Latin beat"; Level 2 (musical illustrative) "His sound is brassy"; Level 3 (metaphorical, loosely speaking, since it could be another trope) "His tone is like a blue gray cloud"; Level 4 (a little further out) "His tone is a brittle as a skeleton on a highwire"; Level 5 (further) "His biting articulation and rhythmic displacements are the clarion call of political alienation" Level 6 (ontological): "[...] as though each move he makes has a counterpart in a wider world that might not exist if Mobley weren't compelled to explore it." (By the way, I have a better sense of what Kart means by that now, but I feel the rhetoric is inflated relative to its meaning.) So when the rhetoric becomes so attenuated relative to the message, the rhetoric demands of itself even more deft execution than casual comments like "smoky tone." Please do not misunderstand. This does not imply that I don't think writers should stretch boundaries, especially to move past expressions, like "smoky tone" that have become pretty worn out. I only find that in the passage Kart was out there, but the prose, the constructs, and conceit weren't enjoyable or meaningful enough for me to give him the rope of confidence to lead me out there with him. / Lazaro, thanks. / The import of something that someone posted is invalid. The poster teased that Dan spends a lot of time in a thread about Kart while claiming not to like or be interested in Kart's work. There's no contradiction there, though. The amount of time Dan spends commenting about Kart is likely a function of Dan's feeling that it is important to be present to keep up for his position against Kart's writings and posts and to defend himself against counterattacks. (This is irrespective of my feelings about Dan's position.)

"hey Cornelius - I think I'll go back and edited those old posts so it looks like I'm only attacking Dan Gould -" You better be joking, you time-stamp revisionist, you!

Allen, It is painfully ironic to me that I had to defend myself against charges of anti-intellectualism here. You see, arguing against anti-intellectualism, especially the view that jazz writing needs to be dumbed down, is one of my own gravamens! I get in arguments all the time with peope who insist that jazz writing needs to stay simple, simple, simple! That anti-intellectualism, anti-analyticalness, anti-scholarly, anti-substantiveness drives me NUTS! Damn, in another forum, continually, I have to defend my own posts from posters who cry that my posts are too "academic" and that the posts use what is deemed inpenetrable vocabularly (can you believe, people are offended that I am "pompous" for using words such as 'vitiate'?!). (This is not to imply that I'm some great jazz scholar.) And I've defended myself from a charge of anti-intellectuality lodged by a writer (you) whose book I've very much appreciated (with some reservations) as quite enjoyable writing, a refreshing critque (even as I may have some points of disagreement) of jazz historiography, and rescource for discovering more and more music.

"I did not challenge the reason for the book." [Cornelius] "Only by implication. The book's main theme is challenged by some criticism you laid out before." [Lazaro Vega] What is the main theme? How do my comments challenge that theme? If you construct an argument that my comments do challenge that theme, I still want to be clear that I have not personally contested whatever may be the raison d'etre of the book.

""Jordu" reminds me of something Benny Golson would do -- just real subtle dynamics, whereas "Sandu" seemed more unequivocally hard bop. [...] Hard bop pianists -- Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons -- seem to put more sweat in their playing." [Lazaro Vega] Part of the problem is that 'hard bop' was never a good rubric from the git-go. It's a term that's never had a consensus of agreement, and which is used in misleading, confusing, and beside-the-point ways. Many tracks and albums that are classified as hard bop are ones that don't fit the cliché definition "funky, churchy, hard driving." I posted this elsewhere: "There is too much music closely associated with hard bop that does not fit the usual definition. What about a soft ballad played by a hard bop musician? Is the ballad performance not hard bop? That would mean that the performer switched styles just to play a ballad. And not all hard bop is especially funky, but rather some hard bop suggests different colorings than the blues. And hard bop and so-called "cool" are not always so far apart. Some tracks on hard bop albums could be taken as "cool" jazz, while some tracks on "cool" albums could be taken as hard bop. I think there are better ways to categorize jazz styles. Primarily, I prefer that categorizations be based not so much on mood, energy, and color, but rather on more objective elements like form, melody, rhythm, etc. It's as if one wanted to base a book about automobiles on their colors, with chapters on red automobiles, blue ones, etc. Instead, you'd likely point out that it would be better to categorize automobiles by manufacturer, or engine type, or function (sedan, wagon, etc.)." So I think it's too narrow a definition not to include Golson as a prime hard bop player and composer. I even think subtle dynamics are more, not less, a characteristic of hard bop as compared with bop. "Jordu" is very much a hard bop tune, especially the way it conveys the minor key. And many pianists not as aggressive as Silver or Timmons are still hard bop. As to whether Jordan is definitive (or, perhaps you mean 'typical'), I'm not inclined to argue that he is, but just to bear in mind that that wasn't the original question.

"Corn and co. here are challenging the reason for the book [...]" [Lazaro Vega] 1. I did not challenge the reason for the book. Please don't put words in my mouth. 2. I have no company. If I did I'd be in a hell of lot of trouble with the tax boards. "[...] even if that communication is of an imagined soul or a soul personna [...]" I like that way of putting it. And it goes along with Larry's remarks about dramatic personae. I've often thought that jazz musicians are like actors. They convey these musical personalities, or sometimes take multiple roles. In that sense, I think authenticity is over-vaunted. In one sense, an actor's art (I'm not addressing the Brechtian sense) is not to be authentic, nor to actually feel the experiences of his character, but rather to convey these experiences as they are even sometimes faked. In that way acting is an act of courage, an "existential leap of faith," if you will. To fake, and to commit to that fake, is its own authenticity. I think jazz musicians may share in that. It's not so much a matter of what the soloist is actually feeling, but what the soloist makes us feel. The trumpet player may be in a really lousy mood that night, but the music from his horn is a much different story. For me, Hank Mobley is an extraordinarily fascinating case - raising all kinds of questions - in this regard. "Nothing is a foregone conclusion as [Mobley is] soloing." That's not true. Mobley sometimes played whole routines that are basically the same from one performance (even on different compositions, but especially blues) to another. So, there's a lot that is improvised, some that isn't, some that's improvisation of nuance, but it's not true that his solos are completely without pre-determination. One thing that interests me is how Mobley makes even planned routines sound tentative.

Larry, Thank you for your previous post (about drama and soloists' lines). Some interesting ideas put in interesting terms. Allen, Dan [written before I saw your "FU ... No, FU ... No, you FU" exchange]: I think Dan is rash to conclude "beyond a shadow a doubt" from one passage and some discussion about it that the book would offer him nothing at all. However, I did not sense that Dan meant that Kart is utterly vacuous in anything Kart might ever write, only that Dan thinks (by what I think is a poor inference) that Kart's present writings are vacuous, which is a gross overstatement. So while I think Dan pushes his case much too hard, I don't believe he went over (though maybe somewhat approaching) the line where criticism becomes personal insult and hardly "completely out of line." On the other hand, if Dan really meant to convey that there's "no there there" in Kart's mind (not even a possiblity of worthwhile thoughts), not just his writings, then that would be a personal insult. / Recall that the matter did not limit to consideration of Duke Jordan as a soloist, though that is probably the most important part of the matter. Anyway, "Jordu" is a very famous hard bop composition.

Thanks, Allen. I haven't thought about Dan Gould's posts enough to firmly opine on the fairness of your characterization of them, though my hasty impression is that you were, at least, somewhat unfair to him also, though his remarks were pretty harsh too. Perhaps I'll have time to give a more detailed followup on Duke Jordan. But first these points: 1. If we're going to examine whether he's a hard bop, as well as a bop, as well as a uniquely styled musician, we'd be assisted by some discussion of what those terms mean. As a start, I don't think of hard bop always as hard toned or hard driving, though it often is. For example, Mobley playing a soft ballad is still hard bop. The 'hard' in 'hard bop' doesn't need to be taken too literally. 2. As to contexts, among many others, 'Art Farmer Featuring Gigi Gryce', 'The Happy Blues', 'Watkins At Large', 'Here Comes Louis Smith', 'Blue Lights', 'True Blue'. 3. As I mentioned, sometimes the difference between bop and hard bop is not great. Sometimes it is a difference not so much in the soloists' lines but in the musical setting of them - the arrangements, the kinds of tunes, the style of the rhythm section, or just different musical emphases.

AllenLowe, I've responded to your criticisms with attention to their specifics and have disclaimed the contempt you ascribe onto me. Instead of a meaningful response, you come back with sarcasm that is sophomoric. At this point you've become plain unreasonable.

AllenLowe, You say that the following is directed also to me: "If you get nothing out of Larry's book than chances are you get nothing out of the music. This is the problem with jazz, audiences and musicians alike - a lack of intellectual background or perspective, a decided anti-intellectualism and a failure to understand that jazz is like all art forms and deserves the kind of sophisticated analyses that other forms receive. The failure to perceive this is why there is so much bad writing about jazz." I did not post that I got nothing out of the book. I posted that certain kinds of passages left me cold. As to getting nothing out of the music, what a non sequitur! Get hold of yourself, please. Yeah right, all these decades I've been thriving on the music, relishing its details, inspired by its nobility, and I've been getting nothing out of it. As to anti-intellectualism (decided anti-intellectualism, no less [emphasis mine]), again, a non-sequitur and factually incorrect given my intellectual interest in the music. As to bad jazz writing, generally I agree that it is almost surely due to the lack of intellectual energy you describe. But someone not appreciating a particular piece of writing that you do appreciate does not entail that that person is anti-intellectual nor reflects a failure to understand jazz as art deserving of intelligent analysis. "[...] it's the tone of Cornelius and Goulds's posts that bothers me - instead of engaging one of the country's finest jazz critics (and I am not exaggerating in that assessment) they seemed determined to prove that his whole approach is symptomatic of some kind of hyper-intellectuality [...]" Again, you've gone past what I actually wrote, this time to impute onto me a motive that I don't have (or at least you say that I "seem" to have this motive). 1. I am not interested in proving anything at all about his "whole approach." 2. I have no interest at all in combating "hyper-intellectuality." I don't even know what that is. However, that does not entail that I won't express my dislike for certain intellectual writing - but not on account of its intellectuality per se, just as I alluded to in my original post. "[...] the nasty and contemptuous tone of some of these posts [...]" Since you've lumped me with another poster already (and I'm not opining on his posts), this needs my response. Some of my criticisms were point blank and harsh. That is not contempt. I don't have contempt for Kart and should resist any attempt by you to characterize me as contemptuous of him. As to 'nasty', there are too many senses to that word for me to untangle in this instance, but I think 'harsh' or 'tough' are fair characterizations and 'nasty' is a less fair one, especially as it might suggest a personal attack.

You wouldn't be dicking me around, would you?

"I suspect by now that you may just be dicking around with me here [...]" Oh please, it wouldn't even occur to me to waste my own time "dicking someone around," whatever that might entail. The purpose of my posts is to express my thoughts and to be elucidated by the responses. [i just saw your last post, but I'll leave this in anyway.] "In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line..." If you mean drama in the structure of the solo, then I don't agree. Though, extraordinarily great structure is not what I usually seek from Mobley anyway. "[...] his music seems to mull over multiple possibilities in the moment far more than, say, Rollins or Dexter Gordon do [...]" I don't think of it in those terms, but I would agree that Mobley usually doesn't have the kind of resoluteness that Gordon has. "Mobley builds into his lines a sense of how open, or ambiguous, an act it might be to choose one possible path over another." That doesn't capture my own sense of Mobley, but, again, I do hear a kind of tentativeness, maybe a shyness, sometimes. On the other hand, Mobley used a hell of a lot of pat material in his solos, and fairly long stretches of it sometimes. I guess you can hear this as an achievement of making himself sound shy even when he knew pretty much right where he was going. It's a tough and interesting question. However, that manner of his doesn't strike me as expressing adventurousness, though I do find adventurousness in other aspects of his playing. "[...] my writing leaves you cold [...]" I wrote that passages such as I quoted leave me cold. I didn't make a flat judgment of your writing. "[...] you don't think that the Donald Byrd of, say, "Off To the Races" was brassier than the Byrd of "Senor Blues" or "Nica's Dream"?" As I mentioned, I grant that one can hear Byrd going in and out of brassy. However, your overview suggested increased brassiness during the period his lines got leaner and blusier. That's not so much 'Off To The Races', which is some of his fastest (hence, many notes) playing, but rather starts decidedly with 'Fuego'. On that album he plays pocket trumpet, so that complicates things, but on succeeding albums there's a lot of playing that turns from brassy towards softer edges, rounder and mellower sound.

Thanks, Larry. I better see your point now about "stylistic upheavals." I had read it in a different sense. Duke Jordan was a '40s bop player, but he was also a '50s hard bop player (the difference sometimes not being great), so I'm skeptical about the trope you used only because it doesn't ring well in my ear to say that "X is the Y of Z", when Y is his own "of Z." Maybe Roll Call also was before Davis (I don't know.) Allen, "I'm not sure what the problem is [...]" I went in to some detail about the problems I find, even posing non-rhetorical questions about them. "I, for one, had no trouble discerning Larry's point -" I must take your word for it that you didn't. However, I can usually get the gist of most writing, while passages such as the ones I quoted strike me as unnecessarily opaque. Moreover, they didn't ring a bell sympathetic with my own sense of Mobley's music, upon pretty extensive listening to him for many years. "10 paragraphs of so-called "technical" analysis could have" Why would it be [only] so-called and "technical" (in quotes) if it were indeed technical? Anyway, I don't think that all jazz writing has to be strictly technical, but a lot of jazz writing could use some technical stuff woven into the kind of impressionist accounts we usually get. If the writer mentions technical considerations, then I think some followthrough is helpful, otherwise it often reads to me as arm waving.

Larry, Regarding the Hank Mobley chapter: * You wrote that Mobley was "relatively untouched by the stylistic upheavals that mark the work of major contemporaries, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane." But Mobley's work in the sixties was very much influenced by ("addresses," one might say) developments in Coltrane's music, especially modal improvising and Coltrane's hard tone. Modal improvising might not be a stylistic element, but if it's not, then what are the stylistic developments that don't reach Mobley? And the advent of Coltrane's tone is probably not an upheaval, yet your comment seems misleading even if not literally untrue. * Sonny Clark is suggested as the hard bop equivalent of Duke Jordan. But wouldn't Duke Jordan be the hard bop equivalent of Duke Jordan? * You wrote that Mobley recorded Soul Station while with Miles Davis. My recollection might be incorrect, but I somewhat recall seeing a Miles Davis chronology that lists Mobley joining Davis after the recording of Soul Station. * Mobley's career as a recording artist is divided by you into "three rather distinct phases": '55 - '58, '60 - '61, and '63 - '70. This omits 1) Recordings as a sideman beginning in '53 (and even earlier if some discographers' listings of Mobley as having recorded with Paul Gayten are accurate), 2) 1959, 3) the 1972 date with Walton, 4) The 1980 date with Montoliu. I offer these periods: '53 (or earlier) - September '54. Formative. Nov '54 - '58. Classic. '59 - '61. Resurgence. '63 - '65. Extensions. '66 - '72. Late. '73 - '86. No commercial recordings except '80 date with Montoliu. For me, the three periods spanning Nov '54 - '65 are prime Mobley. * You wrote that Mobley offers a "melancholically quizzical musical universe." You mean that Mobley suggests curiosity that is imbued with sadness? I've not noticed people having that kind of curiosity, so I'm not able to imagine it in Mobley's music. Or do mean that Mobley's music is odd and imbued with sadness? I feel sadness, wistfulness and bittersweet in some of his ballads, but don't think of his music in general that way. * If you think this quote is too long for fair use, I'll delete it: "As James [another writer] suggests, [Mobley's] best work of the period is so spontaneously ordered and so bristling with oblique rhythmic and harmonic details that its sheer adventuresomeness seems inseparable from the listener's - and perhaps the soloist's - burgeoning sense of doubt. That is, to make sense of Mobley's lines one must experience every note - for there are many points of development, each of which can inspire in Mobley an immediate response, that the ambiguities of choice become an integral part of the musical/emotional discourse. And that leads to the genius of stage two for as Mobley gained rhythmic and timbral control, his music became at once more forceful and uncannily transparent - as though each move he made had its counterpart in a wider world that might not exist if Mobley weren't compelled to explore it." Say what? What is the "as if" counterpart of each move? How can the existence of a world be contingent on one's compulsion to explore it? Do you mean that by exploring, Mobley created? Okay, but how is that a metaphor for greater transparency? Why must one experience every one of Mobley's notes to understand his music any more than you'd expect to have to listen to every note of any jazz musician? Because the listener has a sense of doubt? A sense of doubt about what? About the adventuresomeness of the music? Do you mean that the music is so adventurous that there's doubt whether the musician's choices of notes will turn out to be good ones or what adventurous gambit they'll embody? But what is meant by "ambiguities of choice"? Is there an ambiguousness after the choices have been made? I'm not necessarily averse to open-ended, free-associative writing about jazz, nor even to bringing ontology into an appreciation of a soloist, nor do I expect unreasonable literalness, but writing such as quoted above just leaves me cold: I don't know what it means, what I'm supposed to take from it, and, without cogent (or even any) discussion of specifics regarding the rhythms, harmonies, and musical choices mentioned, I don't know whether it's even worth my effort trying to figure it out. Regarding the chapter that includes Donald Byrd: You wrote, "The first Donald Byrd was a clear-toned trumpeter with a gift for light and graceful playing over the chords [...] in succeeding years Byrd used fewer notes, a brassier tone, and attempted to assimilate more blues feeling, but these were changes of costume rather than changes of heart." He didn't just try to bring more blues sound into his playing, he did bring more of it into his playing. And you might find certain passages in his later playing as brassy, but, overall, I think his playing became less brassy in the early sixties (which, I surmise, is the period you have in mind, since this is when he began to simplify, slow down, and express more blues feeling). You wrote that Byrd was unable to find a musical voice. I think he had a clear and beautiful musical voice. I don't find his stylistic development in the early sixties to be at all phony. I don't like the particular album (Slow Drag, recorded in '67) that gave rise to your review of his career, but he made a bunch of fine albums in the early '60s, as well as magnificent work in the '50s. I think you've underestimated a beautiful musician.

My copy: Atlantic SD 1412, stereo, copyright 1963. "Loads Of Love", no "My Kind Of Love". I rank this as one of the great albums of jazz. Indeed, the interaction is at an extraordinarily high a level of beauty and artistry. Years ago I had this album (to the exclusion of all others) playing continually for several months. When I A/B'd a few years ago, it seemed to me that some of the distortion from the original recording (especially Hall's solo on "My Little Suede Shoes") is even more prominent on the Collectables CD release than on the LP.

"[...] Verve was doing string records for just about all of its star horn players of the time: Bird, Clifford, Webster, Eldridge, Hawk, Flip Phillips, etc.." [John L] Clifford Brown? When did Granz record Clifford Brown?

Is there anyone around here who knows Glenn Barros from Fantasy well enough to find out whether he meant on-demand download or on-demand disc?

Yes, there are some real good tracks. The musicians play with wonderful fluency in the idiom - with beautiful feeling and some originality. One of the very best hard bop albums I've heard in the last few years.

I'd love to see a list of all material owned by Fantasy not in the current catalog. I wonder how big a list it is. Also, it would be interesting to find out whether it has been Fantasy's objective eventually to issue everything (or virutally everything) it owns. I don't know why one would assume that that is not the goal.