Larry Kart's jazz book

[JSngry]

I think it's simple, really. Larry's critiques are based on his own responses to the music, expressed in language that is also based on his own experiences. Very personal reactions and articulations of same.The language he uses is very often alive with the same type of creativity that inspires it. In other words, it's often "impressionistic" instead of "literal".

How well one does or does not "receive the message" is probably dependent on what one is looking for in jazz writing (as well as how much one does or does not share the same like/dislikes that he does). Myself, I've found his writing to often be as inspired, insightful, and creative as the music he's writing about. It's not writing for those who prefer a straight-up historical approach based on facts, narratives, oral histories, and things like that. With the Kartian style, one gets something else entirely - one man's opinion, nothing more, and nothing less.

Now myself, I dig both approaches. Then again, I'm eclectic in my tastes, perhaps even to the point of being a slut. But a QUALITY slut, mind you!

Thing is, I can appreciate how somebody might not dig Larry's approach, especially since he speaks of his dislikes as eloquently as he does his likes (and a lot of the joy that I get from his writing stems from having so many shared likes, discovering that many of the reasons for those likes are similar at root, and hearing those likes, and the reasons for them, articulated so damn creatively. That's bound to piss off some people who have strong passions for that which he dislikes. But otoh, who doesn't like hearing something said that they wish they could have so eloquently/creatively said themselves, or hearing somebody point something out that they might have felt, but not quite yet had a handle on?

What I can't appreciate is an unnuanced, blanket disdain for the approach itself, if only because I think that Larry's writing is extremely "jazzlike" in it's conception and execution. Like a jazz musician, he gets a feeling, and then goes about articulating his personal expression of it in the way that suits him best, and refines it until he feels it something that has to "come out'. Some writers do this about love, or history, or politics. Larry does it about music. If he doesn't connect with everybody, that's cool (with me, anyway), but this is most assuredly not some guy blowing smokerings and random musings that have got squat to do with shit, and I find the implication that it might be to be just plain wrong.

Disliking something, STRONGLY disliking something, for a failure to connect is one thing, but flat-out denying the essential validity of that thing in the first place is something else entirely. That's not saying that anybody here has actually intended to literally do that. But I get the impression from some of the terminology being used in this thread, that it is being implied, if only as a combat maneuver. And I'm taking this opportunity to say that I find it beneath what I know to be the dignity and intellegence of those who are doing it.

Yeah, we all have gut-level reaactions, pro and con, and they're wonderous things. But really, once the guts are spilled, can't we go about the business of cleaning up the mess and/or making chitlins?

[Guest Chaney]

I wonder what John Litweiler might have to say about all this.

[Rooster_Ties]

I wonder what John Litweiler might have to say about all this.

I was just thinking the very same thing...

[couw]

FWIW, and as an editor of "english for foreigners," I would put many question marks and a lot of wiggly lines with the example text by Larry as posted by Cornelius. As I would with many writings on this thread, by more than just Larry, BTW. But, that's just the international perspective of some dude who knows his english to some extent and has a hard time understanding what is meant without reading these particular sentences more than once.

[couw]

Disliking something, STRONGLY disliking something, for a failure to connect is one thing, but flat-out denying the essential validity of that thing in the first place is something else entirely. That's not saying that anybody here has actually intended to literally do that. But I get the impression from some of the terminology being used in this thread, that it is being implied, if only as a combat maneuver. And I'm taking this opportunity to say that I find it beneath what I know to be the dignity and intellegence of those who are doing it.

this touches on the intellectual/anti-such debate, and 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. As all opinions are equal, right?

The terminology is a whole other matter. Like style really.

[JSngry]

I'm not hearing Mobley as a pattern player.

Oh, Hank definitely had his patterns, and they became more pronounced as the years passed (and to me, that's where the action in The Total Hank Mobley Story lies - in his gradual paring down of his once relatively large array of choices to a relative stubborn few. Why? I've got my theories, discussed somewhere/elsewhere on this board, but this probably ain't the best time & place to go into them). But they're usually "micro" patterns, and you're never sure (usually) which other micro pattern he'll use next. to some extent, this is true of all players, but with Hank, that's sort of his raisin day eater, because he'll surprise you in his choices - you're not as much suprised/delighted/whatever by the specifics as you are how the whole thing is put together. And often enough, he'll disrupt the micropatternology of it all by throwing in some totally unexpected (off-the-wall, even, if you think about it) harmonic gamesmanship that is as ultimately "correct" as it is initially shocking. This is something he did until the end. And to top it all off, all this was delivered with total soul and sincerity. No "cleverness" to it, just invention and feeling in honorable and humble service to each other.

Hank was HIP!

[AllenLowe]

"As all opinions are equal, right?"

no - not really - but it is also, as you noted, a matter of style. And that's not crap -

[couw]

"As all opinions are equal, right?"

no - not really - but it is also, as you noted, a matter of style. And that's not crap -

please elaborate

[AllenLowe]

well, if we thought all opinions were equal, we would not have any - because than they would not be opinions but facts -

Edited January 21, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Lazaro Vega]

Thanks Jim, er, raisin day eater.

Edited January 22, 2005 by Lazaro Vega

[Cornelius]

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.)

Edited January 22, 2005 by Cornelius

[Cornelius]

"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.

Edited January 22, 2005 by Cornelius

[Cornelius]

"[...] 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.

Edited January 22, 2005 by Cornelius

[couw]

I don't understand this, though I might guess at parts of what it means.

it means that the opinion of stoopid people, who don't understand or "connect to" all the intellectualisms, counts too. Even if it says that the intellectualisms are worth jack shit. If you are going to be broadminded, you will have to accept the stoopid opinions too.

I actually find that a rather refreshing modus at times.

[SNWOLF]

I've skimmed throught the comments here, and a review by E.J. Iannelli in All About Jazz, and I'm intrigued enough to put an order in.

The artist as a social rebel chapter interests me, since jazz has been trying to clean its image up and present a 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, etc etc et al.

The fact is art has always been accompanied by deviance of one sort or another, whether chemical or charismatic - in the righteous spiritual or radical political sense. While conservatism, and the conservative sensibility and praxis is crucial for the preservation of great works (they CONSERVE them), normative deviance walks hand in hand with a lot of truly creative artistic products.

The book review was interesting to me for one reason, at least: Ortega Y Gassett. I read his Revolt of the Masses years ago, and was impressed by many of his points, but he suffered from the same problem that the more populist H.L. Mencken did: that is, they don't understand that artistic depth, substance, quality and meaning does not necessarily run in tandem with specious, socially-mediated notions of vulgarity and refinement. Mencken loathed jazz. He didn't think that highly of blacks either, with his muddle-headed notions of racial superiority that he had misappropriated from Nietzsche. Mencken had it in for Jews from time to time too.

I've got no idea what Gassett thought about the notion that you can have a sophisticated art form that exhibits a unified sensibility; that is, balls, heart, and brains, in full integrated communication. Now, that is where I DO agree with Wynton's rhetoric: that IS democracy, meritocratic, SANS-entitlement, PRO-can-you-deliver.

Frank Zappa gets a look in. After his 1970s output I stopped listening to his music. It became increasingly mean-spirited, peevish, self-righteous, and puerile. I think half the reason for that was he was a very smart guy in a very dumb industry. I re-read his "autobiography" a couple of years ago and I was awe-struck at how a middle-aged man was still foaming at the mouth over adolescent anguishes and fist-shaking alienation. Jesus Frank, get over yourself. But like a lot of emotionally and socially-dyslexic geniuses, they simply DON'T grow up, they're perpetual pouting teenagers who manage to impress with their vicious brilliance.

With Frank, I would occasionally read his interviews. He would always have something independent and interesting to say, delivered in an idiosyncratic and savage manner from one-off mind. I finally got heartily sick of his musical nastiness when I was at a party, and someone had put on Zappa's "Suicide is for Arseholes". This was a day after I'd gone to a musican friend's funeral (he'd killed himself), and Frank's sneering, control-freak heartlessness just emphasised to me that it wasn't suicide that was for arseholes, it was Frank Zappa is for arseholes, and anxious adolescent boys. Women have always seen the neurotic insecurity that lies behind Zappa's angry bravado; but then, women have a habit of mothering ostensible tough guys anyway.

As for Bill Evans. I liked his stuff on Kind of Blue, and "Know What I Mean" by Cannonball Adderley, but, I guess like Larry, I find a lot of his playing nerdishly coy, effete, cloying. And his exasparating choice of corny, winsome, nursery-rhyme fluff gets on my nerves. I don't see this as a case of turning shit into art, I see it as a case of turning shit into highbrow elevator music. Yes it's clever, even brilliant. Yes Evans has an extraordinary, nuanced, subtle touch at the keyboard. Yes he evinced an unmatched, deeply-felt interplay with his "Classic Trio" with LaFaro. But to me it just sounds like a Sunday Painter's water colour fading in the attic. It's decadent in a limp, mincing kind of way.

I don't know how you will employ Rimbaud. Perhaps as an example of someone who liked to derange his senses. At least one thing came out of Coltrane's eventual abstinence: he got better. That's not always the case. Rimbaud went off to be a trader in Africa, and what little information we have of his activities there, it seems he had a thoroughly quotidian, miserable time. From inflamed poet to everything he was trying so hard to flee from. Although, if you take a more pragmatic, libertarian perspective, I guess you could say he was evincing his independence and self-determination in another capacity.

However, it seems that when many jazz musicians, or artists, give up the drugs and booze, they save their life and sacrifice their art. I don't believe this is some lurid, romantic distortion. Just read the biographies, listen to the music, look at the pictures. Those guys getting wasted are in permanent overdraft, and they either have to stop or die. It's like anyone who withdraws more money than they've got: they can use it for a high old time, for impassioned, picaresque adventures. But you have to pay up eventually, and sometimes that price is death. Great art functions, and is created at, a higher emotional and creative intensity, and people can only sustain that pitch for so long.

As for Kerouac. I don't know what Larry has to say about him, but he was my hero when I was 14; and to me that just about sums it up. His vapid, maundering sentimentalism, his unconsciously condescending purple prose enshrining Mexican and Black women and their dusky charms - yuck. He was trying to open up reality, intensify his consciousness, but what most of it amounted to was feeble escapism and adolescent self-indulgence. The various characters he celebrates seemed to me, as a pre-adolescent, a panoply of unfettered humanity. You get to meet most of these types in real life and you realise they stir up creative self-dramatising theatre wherever they go because they're in an urgent flight from themselves. They're brilliant bullshit-and-banter companions when you're smashed or running too, but ultimately they're childish, narcissitic, reactive, monstrously selfish pains in the arse.

I don't think I would have been able to put up with Burroughs, Ginsberg and the rest of their mutual admiration society for long; despite the boy-bonding, they were essentially engaged in shitfaced monologues. They are "secret heroes" - to use Kerouac's coinage - for generations of suburban middle-class kids with arty pretensions - but the way I see them is the way I perceive a great deal of bohemia in general: it's not an alternative to the mainstream, it's the very EMBODIMENT of it: it's casual superciliousness, the sense of elite exclusivity, the sense of personal status based more on HOW YOU ACT, and BEING ON THE SCENE, that is, the sense of entitlement they were socialised and enculterated with in the suburbs, as being further up the foodchain because you are elect.

Workingclass and immigrant families don't think like this, and that's why they make up such a small proportion of bohemia. And those that have artistic talent usually work their arse off to get somewhere; and if they can't cut it, they join the family business, or whatever, instead of drifting around being hip in bohemia. So that extension of bohemian privilige embodied by the beatniks, hippies, and beyond I loathe. There's this hilarious passage in Straight Life, by Art and Laurie Pepper, where Art looks around the hippie scene and dissects its fundamental fraudulence brilliantly. The difference between the intensified awareness of Art and the ersatz posturing of Artiness has never been presented better.

[Chuck Nessa]

cute, and

[Chuck Nessa]

I forgot to mention I missed the announcement of the dickhead festival. Welcome y'all.

[Chuck Nessa]

There's this hilarious passage in Straight Life, by Art and Laurie Pepper, where Art looks around the hippie scene and dissects its fundamental fraudulence brilliantly. The difference between the intensified awareness of Art and the ersatz posturing of Artiness has never been presented better.

'cept, Art and Laurie "worked" this to the end of his life.

"fundamental fraudulence" was their way of life.

I say this as a fan, late friend and associate.

[AllenLowe]

SN WOLFE: Given your feelings about pseudo-bohemianism (which I largely share) you might appreciate Zappa's own distinction between hippies and freaks; he liked freaks and hated hippes for their pretensions. And Frank was a pain in his self-righteousness, but did plenty of good work after 1970. As for that suburban birthright of narcissicism, well, it also makes me think of the anti-war movement of the 1960s - the biggest jerks were always the rich kids, they were the most hedonistic radicals of all, willing to put anyone at risk but themselves, to talk the talk in the stupidist and most destructive and self-deluded kind of way - hence Jane Fonda and other rich kid radicals who, when the smoke died down, had already moved on, to Republicanism or the family business, while everyone else did the real work. But we shouldn't forget that out of these bohemian/political movements came things that liberated many people, and a very golden age of rock and roll, and some good writing and poetry (lots of good Ginsberg, Burroughs and Junky, Kerouac and the Subterraneans, Vanity of Duluoz, and more). Chuck: I spent a memorable day with Art and Laurie in Boston during the beginning of his comeback and know what you mean, I found Art an interesting combination of nice guy/hustler/pyscho/b.s. artist/jazzer. But when he took the stand, all else was forgotten (and presumably forgiven) -

[Cornelius]

"[...] 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.

Edited January 22, 2005 by Cornelius

[Cornelius]

Thanks, couw. I tink I got you now.

[SNWOLF]

I'm interested in what both Chuck Nessa and Allen Lowe have to say about Art Pepper. Obviously, via his book and the odd article, I'm getting a fairly edited, spin-doctored version.

As to Art Pepper's "working it", I can imagine that only too well. I've been around enough junkies to know they put the best car salesman or charismatic religious preacher to shame - i.e. the ultimate conmen. I remember an interview with a drummer that played with Charlie Parker (Lou Levy? Might be wrong) who had been a junkie himself during Parker's prime, and when asked about Parker's mercurial brilliance, his various masks etc, his answer was blunt: that Parker was a conman, so acting came easy.

It's hard to know whether Pepper exhibited bullshitting, hustling, sociopathic tendencies because of years of junkie conniving, or because he was naturally devious. Going by some of the comments in Straight Life, I suspect the latter. I remember the first time I saw Notes of a Jazz Survivor, and was really dissappointed initially: I had built up this portrait of Art in my mind, and when I saw his swaying, sneaky visage in the flesh he just seemed like another two-bit, lying, self-obsessed junkie loser.

I think all this in many ways negates the earnest belief by people like John Coltrane and Charlie Haden that, in effect, you have to be a beautiful person to play beautiful music. Well, Art Pepper , Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others in the major creep category demonstrate that aesthetic sublimity doesn't have to come from a gilded soul.

Allen: yeah, you're right about the cultural benefits of various boho shifts. For example, people discovered that a lot of the ideals of the sexual revolution were not practicable, because of that annoying bugbear sexual jealousy. Yet generally (promise-keepers excepted) the maturity, transparency and pill-induced fearless pleasure of sex has increased, immeasurably.

Kids will usually tend to excess, and the wonderful thing is, once the dust has settled, and the flakiness has been separated from the pragmatic, society usually benefits emotionally and culturally. And conservatives, through osmosis, often loosen up too. A conservative of today is a very different beast to one 30 years ago, although they would be very reluctant to admit how substantial the effect of liberal thinking has been on their values. So yes, a bit of extrapolation and overstatement on my part, rhetorical exaggeration to make a point, but I think the central permises hold.

As to Zappa's later material: I find it anal-retentive and clinical. Classic boy-nerd humour over rigid perfectionism. The stuff of his later period I can put up with is his live material, when HE plays guitar, and not the tasteless stunt-guitar showoffs.

A lot of the beat writing appeals to teenagers (not surprising). I find that painters and musicians like it more than writers, since writing has a very different aesthetic to music and painting. That is, writing is a DRY medium, whereas music and painting is a SATURATED medium. For example, you can pile on the passion, like Coltrane going ballistic, and it's emotional, intense, it transports you. You apply the same aesthetic to writing and it's turgid, purple. As another example, there are some great lyricists, whose romantic, poetic sensibility is liberated by the constraints of the song form, yet when given a broader canvas, such as the short story or the novel, it's unreadable. A classic example is Nick Cave, whose book And the Ass Saw the Angel, is truly awful, excruciating.

I liked Junky and Naked Lunch, however. Although the original letters to Ginsberg, pre wanton cut-ups, actually make for better reading. Burroughs was a brilliant letter writer. When it comes to the Beats, ultimately I have to concur with Gore Vidal, who regarded them as marginal figures, who wouldn't have achieved the profile they did were it not for the extraordinary networking and promotional skills of Ginsberg. That perhaps is an over-haughty dismissal from Vidal, and like myself he appears given to sweeping overstatement for rhetorical effect (beware literal-minded pedants) but the forlorn, self-pitying, alcoholic bathos of Kerouac is not a destination I'm heading any time soon.

[Cornelius]

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.

Edited January 22, 2005 by Cornelius

[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.

[SNWOLF]

With regards to libertarianism, only a certain percentage of the conservative population call themselves libertarian. They may have some sympathies with the economic theories that undergird libertarian theory, but generally conservatives find libertarians just too weird, eclectic, and individualistic. I suspect also that there are some modern day liberals who once upon a time would have been flag-waving lefties, but who find the modern day left far too doctrinaire and puritanical.

Myself, I would call myself centre-left; boring I know, but that's where I stand. It's very interesting reading publications from the seventies and seeing how the antic vibrancy and sensuality of the left congealed into a very prim and sententious, school-marmish thou-shalt-not. For any passionate, freethinking individual that was a major turnoff, and I suspect a lot of very intelligent and talented people decided ultimately, fuck-it, and became nihilistic, hedonistic consumers in a blinkered, reactionary way (cocaine optional).

It's almost as if the virus of po-faced presbytarianism, which 60s expressionism was trying to liberate itself from, reconfigured itself politically and invaded the host, turning the left into their parents and drying up all the juices.

Cornelius - as to the Coltrane quote, I'm moving house at the moment so I'm furtively gaining access to computers here and there while I write the odd missive and check email. You could trying googling it. Haden did his be pure of heart number on a recent interview that is on Allaboutjazz, but I've read other interviews where he spreads that particular gospel.