Larry Kart's jazz book

[Chuck Nessa]

With a fair amount of "late Pepper listening" under my belt (on record and live) I think the quality/quantity of "honesty" in Art's solos had something to do with the content of his bloodstream. When he was "straight" (meaning little stimulation) he could be selfconscious beyond belief. When "medicated" he was just fine by my estimation. The last decade of his life is worthy of a couple of books based on my limited exposure.

[Cornelius]

I remember hearing tracks that sounded histrionic, with grandiose emotion, and without the musical force to back it up. It came across to me like he wanted you to know all the great anguish his phrases were supposed to represent and for you to know what an emotional kaleidoscope he is. And all the while what he was actually playing was not that individual or imaginative - pretty pedestrian if you took away the exaggerations in his phrasing. And the sound and articulations struck me as ugly. Just being "raw" doesn't do it for me. He's supposed to be so hip. But that kind of thing sounds so unhip to me. There are so many other guys who are, to me, so much more soulful, so much more expressive, with so much more subtlety, technique, melody, and effortlessly compared with the overwrought emotional machinations I heard in Pepper. But my impressions of some of his later work were formed from listening many years ago, so I do want to give his later stuff another chance.

Edited January 24, 2005 by Cornelius

[JSngry]

This is shaping up to be the most winding thread I've ever read...

Carry on!

[Cornelius]

"the most winding thread I've ever read"

See. We're full of wind. Either that, or I missed the posts about Kai.

Edited January 24, 2005 by Cornelius

[SNWOLF]

Chuck - by "medicated" I assume you mean the cocaine he was using to supplement the methadone. By that stage he was probably so fried that he needed some sort of stimulant to reanimate what was left. I've known people who have been on methadone for lengthy periods and, although it takes away (sort of) the craving for smack, it has the effect of dulling, sogging out the emotions and so people on methadone sometimes get into speed or cocaine to feel a bit more alert and alive - more EMOTIONAL. And emotion was Pepper's aesthetic stock in trade, especially in later years.

Cornelius - Yes, I agree with you to a certain extent. I think when Pepper was not inspired, or in good physical shape, he probably was going through the motions, doing the musical equivalent of bad method acting; overweening, empty emoting. There's a bit of that on his documentary DVD. Except for shred of Patricia, he's not in the zone, and he overcompensates. He's in bad physical shape, and his tone is thin and dull.

Other aspects of his playing, expression-wise, I don't believe are "ugly" in the way, perhaps, you intend that description to be used here, or the way people often use that term with regards to music.

Coltrane's tone was regarded as ugly by many critics, listeners, and musicians, for a long time, because of it's unsentimental, abrasive timbre. What is "ugly" and what is "astringent", or even "dissonant" expressionism?

I believe a lot of Pepper's playing that some would find "ugly" is in fact intensely, uncomfortably, beautiful. "Ugly Beauty" to borrow a term from Monk. The path from pretty, to beautiful, involves an aesthetic that is subjective and peculiar to the individual listener. There's moments on Village Vanguard, and San Francisco Samba, where Pepper is really reaching for it, it's a vocalised howl of stark, raw emotion in places. To some, that would be self-indulgent, ugly, nihilistic - even instrumentally incompetent. But to those who are willing to travel with him aesthetically and emotionally, it's art of the highest order. It's vicious in its intensity. And even though it sounds dangerously unbridled, it's under magnificent control. That's the mark of a top-rank romantic artist.

[AllenLowe]

When he was in Boston we spent a day together, as I was writing a profile for a local jazz magazine - he had missed his methadone shot, and was arguing with Laurie about it - it turns out, the real reason he missed it was becasue it required a drug/urine test, which he did not want to take, for obvious reasons - so that day, leading up to the gig, at his request, I drove him around Boston where he made various stops to see "friends' - by evening he was feeling much better -

[Joe]

Another semi-digression... judging from his songs (I don't know, pick one at radom from BLONDE ON BLONDE), Dylan did not have much nice to say about the bohemian crowds that (once) embraced him.

To be in it is not necessrily to be of it.

The late Pepper I find most fascinating is to be found on those Atlas sessions. Pepper and Konitz, Pepper being asked to recreate the halcyon days of West Coast jazz, Pepper and Sonny Stitt at his frostiest... little grandstanding on those sessions.

[ghost of miles]

Another semi-digression... judging from his songs (I don't know, pick one at radom from BLONDE ON BLONDE), Dylan did not have much nice to say about the bohemian crowds that (once) embraced him.

To be in it is not necessrily to be of it.

I always thought "Positively 4th Street" was a pretty scathing put-down of said crowd.

[Joe]

Another semi-digression... judging from his songs (I don't know, pick one at radom from BLONDE ON BLONDE), Dylan did not have much nice to say about the bohemian crowds that (once) embraced him.

To be in it is not necessrily to be of it.

I always thought "Positively 4th Street" was a pretty scathing put-down of said crowd.

Another good example; I believe this song is widely assumed to have been directed at Phil Ochs.

And I blieve I may have read somewhere that "Just Like A Woman" might be about Joan Baez, but it might also not really be about a former flame or female hanger-on at all. So that the put-down, as usual with Dylan, is made up of several layers of verbal brilliance moving both with and against one another. (If that makes any sense.)

[AllenLowe]

while I like those songs, I think they represent what is truly wrong with Dylan, and why, though I admire his music, he is really not the poet he wants to be - he is just so above everyone and self-righteous that it blocks any true vision. At the risk of inflaming Clementine, I must quote something that Francis Davis, in his article on Dylan, notes, from Yeats: "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” As Davis correctly adds, “Dylan has never been able to tell the difference.”

[Joe]

Allen -- I would agree. I enjoy Dylan a lot, but less than I value him as as someone to study. Though there are times when I wish I had never watched DON'T LOOK BACK; he and Neuwirth could be so vicious.

My favorite Dylan remains NEW MORNING, a record which is a bit softer in the middle -- and the head, probably -- than those acknowledged masterpieces. On songs like "The Man In Me", "Went To See The Gypsy" and even "Sign In The Window", he does step into different personae, becomes people who might entertain the possibility of castigating themselves or regretting who they used to be.

[Cornelius]

SNWolf,

I meant ugly on the particular tracks I heard a long time ago; I don't think his sound is always ugly. This weekend I got into some Art Pepper albums and enjoyed a lot of what I heard. I'm still reforming my view of him, but so far (a tentative view) I'm finding that his tone is not ugly, but not exemplary, not beautiful, has a hollowness, not especially crafted, but when it's working for him it is astringent (in a good sense), does have a haunting quality, and its idiosyncrasies do make for good jazz. On Smack Up do I detect an Ornette Coleman influence (and not just on the Coleman tune)? Spurred by your enthusiasm, I'm very much looking forward to reinvestigating Pepper further, at least with the few albums that I have at my disposal while so many others are piling up on my want list.

I've never thought of Coltrane's tone as abrasive. It's hard and cold (sometimes has a softness and warmness too), but always (from at least ca. '56) exquisitely beautiful - sometimes it literally (and I mean literally) takes my breath away.

/

Allen,

Yeats: "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

That's a beautiful quote.

Edited January 24, 2005 by Cornelius

[SNWOLF]

Regarding the Yeats quote - yes, it's a great quote, I'd never heard it before; I'll try to brand it in my brain.

Pepper and Coleman. Aside from the Ornette Coleman track that Art Pepper plays on Smack Up, Pepper liked Ornette's music early on, and gave him encouragement. Years later, Ornette Coleman was doing a concert, spotted Art Pepper in the audience, and invited him on stage and introduced him as one of the few people that had supported him and believed in him when Coleman was being denounced in all quarters as a bullshitting charlatan.

Years later, Pepper is on record as saying that he loved Coleman's music, but didn't want to go in that direction himself because it didn't suit his personal aesthetic.

Edited January 25, 2005 by SNWOLF

[Larry Kart]

Talk about winding -- in downtown Chicago today I ran into a guy who said he was up in Interlachen, Mich., over the weekend, listening a jazz show on the radio when the host played the title track from Sonny Clark's "Cool Struttin'" and either before or afterwards read the account I posted here a few days back of how the rhythm section works being the soloists on that track. Would that have been you, Lazaro?

[Larry Kart]

Oops -- I meant "behind the soloists," not "being the soloists."

[SNWOLF]

After initially sounding a bit furtive and muffled, Jackie McLean achieves one of the fattest, baddest, nastiest tones on his horn ever on this record, although I feel the album starts to sag a bit half way through.

Edited January 25, 2005 by SNWOLF

[Chuck Nessa]

Talk about winding -- in downtown Chicago today I ran into a guy who said he was up in Interlachen, Mich., over the weekend, listening a jazz show on the radio when the host played the title track from Sonny Clark's "Cool Struttin'" and either before or afterwards read the account I posted here a few days back of how the rhythm section works being the soloists on that track. Would that have been you, Lazaro?

That far North, a better guess is Dr. Rat.

[Chuck Nessa]

Chuck - by "medicated" I assume you mean the cocaine he was using to supplement the methadone

Yup.

[Lazaro Vega]

Larry -- yes. In the third hour of the Saturday morning jazz program, so between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Chuck, I've actually sat in the parking lot at Interlochen after a concert and listened to Blue Lake (90.3 FM, folks).

That was such a great quote, Larry, and I had to. Here's the hour (including some music by request for Chet Baker). By the way, Larry, where's the tip jar?

Miles Davis -- Deception -- Birth of the Cool

Chet Baker -- Duet for Chet and Zoot/I Married an Angel -- with Strings

Chet Baker -- Dots Groovy -- Big Band

Ken Vandermark 5 -- Full Deck (for Jack Monterose, author of Dots Groovy) -- Sympatico

Jazz Datebook (concert announcements)

Charles Mingus -- West Coast Ghost -- East Coasting

Larry's rap.

Sonny Clark -- Cool Struttin' -- Cool Struttin'

Jazz Profiles preview: Miles Davis Kind of Blue

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers -- Ecaroah -- Jazz Messengers

Thanks for passing along your friends message. I'm happy to know people are really listening.

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro, the guy who caught the show was Jack Fuller, former editor (then publisher) of the Chicago Tribune and, until he recently retired, chief of publications for Tribune Co. He's also the author of several novels, including one about a Coltrane-like jazz musician, "The Best of Jackson Payne."

[Larry Kart]

P.S. Jack (so it has been reported) is being paid a bit more than $51,000 a month, though "only" for the first year of his retirement, to serve as a consultant to Tribune Co. I think he should take care of the tip jar.

[Cornelius]

On the Cool Struttin' album I hear McLean as full toned from the start. I kind of feel your point, SNWolf, about the program losing steam. But I think that's because the first two tracks are so intense that I'm exhausted by the time the bebop head on "Sippin' At Bells" comes up. Those first two tracks - especially back to back - are so concentrated that I can hardly stand the pleasure sometimes! I mean, those '&' beats - Clark's comping, the accents, the suspense in the delays, Jones's and Chambers lurching beat, the drum rolls - are an ecstatic ordeal! When I hear the plunking figures in Clark's solos, I almost visualize the piano keys themselves sagging with all that blues ripeness - like boughs sagging right down to the ground with this ripe, rich fruit. I find that after the first two tracks, if I kind of let my mind rest as the record plays, I can recover my concentration to groove with the rest of this great album (and bonus tracks).

Edited January 26, 2005 by Cornelius

[SNWOLF]

Sonny Clark was greatly admired by Bill Evans. The feeling was mutual. Bill Evans even liked - in fact loved - the assymetrical punctuation of Thelonius Monk, and he had no aversion to the soulful shout of hardbop, so I guess I'm still intrigued why his own playing veered towards lace and pastel. You can't blame impressionism, or classical music, which many jazz musicians loved. That would be like saying Faure inevitably would lead to Miles Davis' trumpet attack on Jack Johnson. You can't pinpoint sensitivity and introversion, since most artists are sensitive and introverted, whatever masks or repartee they learn to employ.

I even went to the trouble of reading a biography of Evans, "See How My Heart Sings", which gave me no psycholocical clues to Evan's' wounded retreat from life, his desire to escape into a cute, soft-focus, high-brow tweeness.

Edited January 26, 2005 by SNWOLF

[Nate Dorward]

Losing steam? I'd always thought "Deep Night" the highpoint of the album....

[Cornelius]

"Deep Night" on Cool Struttin'. Man, how I cherish it. I crack up when Mclean plays that scale figure at 5:13.

Edited January 26, 2005 by Cornelius