Larry Kart's jazz book

[Larry Kart]

Agree on that Connor Atlantic, though it's also good to check out the earlier Bethlehem material, which pretty much made her name (e.g. "All About Ronnie") and often is very spooky along the lines I described. Of her later stuff -- and her later musical self is a big part of the story I think -- I particularly like the mid-1980s "Classic," and not only because I wrote the notes for it. But then there any number of reasonable people -- Martin Williams was one -- who couldn't stand Connor, though she just a hip supper club thing or worse, couldn't stand her intonation for one thing (but then, Martin thought very highly of Mel Torme -- talk about a respect for certain sorts of musicality leading you to miss the big picture). For what it's worth, Ran Blake was and is ga-ga over Connor.

Lazaro -- I don't quite get what you mean by "Is it true that the challenge is, 'If anything is possible what will hold the improvisation?'" Did I say something like that? If not, and it's entirely your own question, the terms seem a bit too loose or to make too many assumptions (e.g. that word "anything" and about improvisations necessarily being "held") for me to grab onto right now. Also, FWIW, my extended take on the avant-garde and whatver the issues involved there are or may be is not in this book but in the chapter on that subject that I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz." Would love to have included it in this book, but Oxford U. Press quite rightly would have said "no."

[AllenLowe]

Hey Larry, is there anyway you can post that Oxford Companion piece?

[Lazaro Vega]

Good question, Allen. Would be interested in reading that, too.

Recall seeing a downbeat review of a Muhal Richard Abrams Delmark recording by Larry where he notices that after the head the solos have little relation to it.

In any case, Larry, there were a few paragraphs of response I had down when the power went out here.

Now the kids are up and my attention is frequently interrupted. For instance the baby just pulled about a 50 piece puzzle off the shelf and all over the floor. Really, on New Year's we had two other kids over from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and then spent the next three hours picking up. Fell down on the couch, opened up some champagne and toast -- Happy New Year! It was a RIOT. There were grass skirts involved, Frankenstein hands, and big long horn blasters.

But, no, the idea was not yours. However, it did seem to fit with what you were asking about where does one go emotionally from Roscoe? The notion of "holding" an improvisation comes from something I really can't write about right now. Got to go stop a fight.

[Larry Kart]

Allen, I don't know for sure what the ethics and legalities of this are. It's a long -- about 5,000 words -- self-contained chapter in an under-copyright work, and I was paid by the publisher for writing it. My assumption is that, from the publisher's point of view, it would be wrong for me to post it. I know that when I felt I had to quote about a two-hundred word passage (about Cecil Taylor) from it in my book, I had to go Oxford U. Press' rights and permissions department and get their OK.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Come on, people - $13 used via amazon. Bite the bullet. It's a great book.

I paid full price when it was new - yeah, I'm a sucker, I know.

Mike

[AllenLowe]

that'll work - I'll either pick it up used or go to the library -

[Lazaro Vega]

I remember reading some of these pieces in the Trib, Larry, and the brevity of your writing, the compression of the ideas and the smoothness of jounalistic process at its best comes back to me as the highest standard.

"Listening to him [Philly Joe Jones] is like watching someone weave lace out of barbed wire..." Sounds like you had some interesting Grand Parents, there, Larry. lol. Damn, that's a great image.

"Holding the improvisations." When the music reached the point after Ornette and Miles where "anything was possible," the challenge to the ensemble was what structure will be designed to "hold the improvisations" and how will that structure be arrived at? (Basic Nessa observation, by the way). Same thing happened in Europe when that intellectual plateau was reached, except they had a more or less agreed upon system with 12-tone and it evolutionists.

In jazz there's a multiplicity of answers and processes to the challenge -- and those are the guys who you mentioned, the top drawer artists of the so-called avant-garde. The example they set, above all others, is if anything is possible first be yourself. A self informed by history and education and group interplay of ideas, but ultimately the music you make should sound like you. Which is a sort of oblique lesson if you're a musician looking for some licks to cop or some other form of influence (i.e. the emotional message you point out).

Emotionally and musically it would seem those great musicians of the post-'59 era still have much to offer "the tradition." But in today's commerce drivin world those lessons appear mystical or cryptic.

Just some thoughts here during "nap time."

LV

[AllenLowe]

There's room for a very broad discussion on post-free players who still play in open formats. I must admit I've become a bit bored with the scene - and feel like there is a whole generation of formalists who've arisen and whose music is faithfully covered in poublications like Signals to Noise and The Wire - both of which I read and like, but both of which reflect too many musicians who can talk the talk but not much else. By formalism I mean that they've embraced the idea of formal innovation without coming to grips with the need to rejuvenate the music structural, technically, and through its content. I've just been disappointed too many times, after reading an intelliigent interview and than rushing to the web site to hear just one more sonic illustration of what was current 40 years ago -

Edited January 10, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Chuck Nessa]

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro -- I don't like the phrase "anything was possible" because it so easily can be twisted by unfriendly folks into (but this isn't what you're thinking or saying) "they're just doing ANY damn thing" or "my five-year-old (or in some cases, a chimp) could do what (say) Jackson Pollock did there." The things that Ornette, Roscoe, Cecil et al. are/were doing are the things that make sense to them to do -- no less sense, and with no less thought and work behind them, than the things that Ellington, Armstrong, Parker, etc. decided to do. Litweiler's book, I think, distinguishes neatly between metaphorical freedom (i.e. Freedom as a bullshit label) and "genuine" freedom: "Genuine freedom occurs when the artist can communicate most intimately with the materials, the langauge of his or her medium; each innovation in jazz, from the beginnings to the present, appers so that jazz musicians can reveal what cannot be revealed in any other way.... f these innovations do not increaed the artist's capacity for communication, the only Freedom, with a capital 'F,' results."

The problem I have with "holding the improvisations" is that to me it doesn't seem to have worked out that way in practice over time i.e. that there's this, I don't know, "hot" or "inspired" improvised solo thing that some compositional/framing/holding impulse is trying to catch up with and is failing to do so. Maybe all I'm saying here is that in the post-Ornette stuff that involves ensemble work and upfront compositional thinking, the improvisations by and large aren't "held"; rather the solo work, the ensemble and the overall strucure is fruitfully permeated by much the same thinking -- and in all directions. Isn't that what it sounds like is happening?

Now there are of course still "problems," and Allen alludes to them. And some of them are really tough to solve and may not be "solvable"at all -- given the nature of this music (our music?) -- or perhaps they can be solved only in ways that leave too many listeners (and good musicians) on the outside looking in for the health of anyone. But I still hear enough good answers often enough to think that we're doing more than OK. Besides, while talent alone may not be enough, if you have any other amount of historical or moral or philosophical machinery at hand and you don't have enough talent around, you got nothing. Also, while I think, on a good day, I can recognize talent when I hear it, I sure can't will it into being, nor do I know anyone else who can.

[AllenLowe]

Yes, I don't mean to tar everyone with the same brush and there are many players whose concepts of "free" improvising" I find challenging and fresh - heard Joe McPhee a few years ago up here, and he was great. Also, I have played on the same bandstand as Roswell Rudd and Julius Hemphill, and words cannot describe the way in which the stage (and the band) seemed to levitate. There was a pianist I worked with from Vermont a few years back, Andy Shapiro, one of the greatest free players I've ever known or worked with, and a great human being, but he's dead now, recorded on one CD with me, though I regret never putting together a full-scale project for him. The great improviser creates his own structural logic, whether it's based on chords or scales or not. I am admittedly weak on current players, being out of the loop up here in Maine, but heard Matt Wilson's group a few years ago and was impressed though I feel they made their point early and went on a bit too long. Also have gotten a bit tired of the freeing-up-the-classics thing; feel like I've been there and done that, and even find (and I'm in a minority on this) groups like Dead Cat Bounce a little tiresome, as great as they play. And I'm particularly jaded by one guitarist whom I used to know and who is a one-trick pony and can really play very little but who has turned his small and only occasionally interesting ideas into a kind of new-music legend. The guy can not really play, and the critics adore him and it does get to me now and than. It certainly is a bit harder for many people to judge performers who work in more open forms, but there are enough people around with a sense of perspective and history to at least guide us into some relatively uncharted territory.

[AllenLowe]

Part 2 - as Larry says there are problems - some involve the issue of whether free playing has created its own cliches and conventions, which I think can be true to some extent. I have no absolute problems with the formalists I mentioned previously - I believe that form is the issue we must grapple with - except that they too often confuse gimmick with idea, mannerism with style. I tend to think that the solutions are rather classic - that the best music comes from a seamless integration of composition and improv, from a continuity between the two. It is for this reason that I've become so impatient with contemporary playing that makes such a decisive cut between the two (the old string-of-solos problem).

Edited January 11, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Chuck Nessa]

[Larry Kart]

Hmm--would that one-trick-pony guitarist be Joe Morris, Allen? If so, count me among the duped. And by that I don't mean that I'm un-dupable.

BTW, one kind of freeish playing that drives me nuts is the kind that crops up on several recent Steeplechase albums under Dave Ballou's name, with Tony Malaby in the front line, and that I've heard from other players in live settings. (BTW, I've liked Ballou elsewhere, when he's the only horn and/or is playing within given frameworks, and Malaby elsewhere seems at least OK to me, could prove to be much better than that if I knew more of his stuff.) Anyway, it's a version of the so-called "time, no changes" approach, where typically you get a kind of Alphonse and Gaston effect, as in "after you, Alphonse -- no, after you Gaston." That is, everyone is so concerned with the supposed decorum of in-the-moment collective creation, so concerned with not playing something (particularly from a harmonic point of view) that's going to get in the way of everyone else, that all you get are more or less apologetic, noodling adjustments and dial-twistings in the hope that some sort of collective being will eventually take shape. And it doesn't; it's just a collection of hems and haws. I keep wanting to scream, "Will SOMEBODY play something that they really think is interesting and really want to play and forget about not stepping on someone else's toes?"

[AllenLowe]

Actually, no it's not Joe Morris - intials are L.M., though I don't think he's particularly known among the jazz crowd, more of a new-music type - as long as we're talking about annoying modernists, there is a certain kind of minimialist, sonority approach to composition that makes ME crazy - one note played, repeated, a la Lamont Young, recycled, repeated tones, "soundscapes" that make their point on first impact, and than quickly lose their impact - and than an idiot interview with same in the Wire, in which the musician seems to think that he/she is the first to discover all this -

Edited January 11, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Lazaro Vega]

Yes, Larry, especially in the music of Sun Ra -- "The "Magic City," for instance -- the structure seems to be spontaneously arrived at. What is the principle organizing element of a performance when song form, harmonic pathway, meter and dynamics are open to the myriad interpretations "free" implies? "Holding" isn't the right word -- structures supporting the music is more to the point. And whether that's the bit of theme in Ornette's "Free Jazz" or Coltrane's "Ascension," or Cecil Taylor's "Unit Structures" concept, all of those methods seem particular to the leader (and yes, they are "mere" starting points which ultimately are driven by the improvisations). Thus the quandry, and perhaps the troubles you and Allen are alluding to, much to Chuck's delight: how is one influenced by this music?

You touch on that in the Bill Evans chapter, somewhat -- how people avoided the issue of dealing with the breakthrough in Ornette's music, et. al.

Man, I'm really enjoying your connectedness to the artist's emotional message throughout this book.

Believe me, how many times have listeners called to rant about "a cat walking on a piano" (No man, he's playing with his hands and sometimes forearms, but I'm pretty sure that cat was sitting down), or "that's a duck call" (in response to Interstellar Space) or "a third grade band could play that" (in response to Albert Ayler)? Heard it all at some point (thankfully followed by the curious calling to find out more). So I hear what you're saying about Freedom and shucking. Even at its best the music is misunderstood by the business minded culture we live in.

p.s. Your comment some months ago about Malaby playing nothing that resembles a melody (a paraphrase at best) where instead he jumps from harmonic node to harmonic node isn't born out by some of the encounters I've had with his music, especially "Adobe" (Sunnyside), a trio date with Paul Motion on drums where he plays "Humpty Dumpty" beautifully. In an interview he did with us here at the station during a live hit (with his wife Angelica Sanchez on Wurlitzer keyboard and drummer Tom Rainey) he mentioned some of the music in that band was based on "interval studies" as well as their long playing history (6 years and going). They really came on like a band. Perhaps the "all-star" attitude premeates every style of jazz and in those situations there's just nothing to go on except politeness. Not that I'm making an excuse for what you were talking about above, but so much of jazz these days seems made for being accepted at dinner parties, and the musicians come on like that. (Alphonse and Gaston by Cootie and Rex -- now that shit was funny!).

Edited January 11, 2005 by Lazaro Vega

[Larry Kart]

" Your comment some months ago about Malaby playing nothing that resembles a melody (a paraphrase at best) where instead he jumps from harmonic node to harmonic node isn't born out by some of the encounters I've had with his music."

Wasn't I talking about Rich Perry there? If so, I caught him live a while after that with Rufus Reid and revised my mixed but respectful feelings a good ways upward. A really nice guy, too.

As for "What is the principle organizing element of a performance when song form, harmonic pathway, meter and dynamics are open to the myriad interpretations 'free' implies?" -- it can be, in the right talented, honest hands, any or all of those things, plus probably some others. I think "The Magic City" is a good place to start. It's certainly one of those pieces that feels free as its details unfold yet is experienced as a convincing, "it has to be just this way" whole. We could all (not sure how far that "we" extends in practice) assemble a lot of other examples, from Ornette's "Beauty is a Rare Thing" to many things of Roscoe's and right on to the better pieces (alli mprovised-from-scratch) on an album by some young Chicagoans that I'm about to write liner notes for. I'm afraid that in the course of doing that, I'm going to have to end up trying to answer your question, or at least poke and prod at it.

[Nate Dorward]

Oh cmon Allen, spit it out... you've given us two initials..... So far the only name that springs to mind is Loren Mazzacane (Connors). Whose music I haven't heard at all.

Even if you're not quite sold on the Dead Cat Bounce I'm glad you bring them up--I liked their new one a lot, & my editor at Exclaim! did too, so I even sneaked a little feature into their year-end issue about them. & just got my first Charlie Kohlhase album last year, Play Free or Die, a terrific album except for a few dead spots in the 2nd disc. So it's been something of a heads-up for me on the Boston scene. -- Joe Morris I've never been crazy about frankly--maybe I got the wrong discs (No Vertigo, Many Rings & the awful Eloping with the Sun) or saw the wrong concerts or something. He's extremely verbose, on his instrument & in person. That said, I really like Whit Dickey's Prophet Moon with him & Rob Brown.

Sigh. Larry's book is still on order at the bookshop but hopefully will arrive soon....

Malaby's Adobe is very nice, though maybe not quite as superb as some reports would have it. But he was terrific last year with Open Loose here in Toronto, & no trace of after-you-ism to his playing, so maybe (Larry) it's the context that prompts that kind of self-conscious tastefulness that's irking you? He seemed to be one of the first players I know of to incorporate, not just broad-brush avantgarde effects (dissonance &c) into his (more mainstream) playing but also some of the subtle things like John Butcher/Evan Parker-style microscopic-detail focus on sound even when playing fast.

[AllenLowe]

Yes, Nate, that's the name - Loren Mazzacane (has used some other names as well) - a nice guy, I knew him in New Haven 15 or 20 years ago - he came up with a nice idea of sustain and a nice, ringing sound on the guitar - but, honestly, he could not do anything else, and I've listened to the recordings, as much as the Wire and Cadence like to rave about him, there's no there there, as the saying goes.

As for open playing I've done both inside and out and am aware of certain pitfalls. Larry's book has a particularly smart section on the use of outside techniques for standards and his weariness therein (he particularly mentions some David Murray performances, as I recall) - I will say that on the surface it is easier to play without chord changes than with them, and at the risk of being coy I did work with one VERY FAMOUS player who was shockingly weak on playing changes, though his other work is quite good - and also with a well known free drummer who, try as he might, could not keep 4/4 time. Now, that doesn't mean they HAVE to be able to do these things - but, given that they cannot, they need to be aware of their limitations and not go in that direction. And this time I will not reveal names, and I do apologize in advance.

Now, as one who plays chord changes and more open pieces, I do work less hard (or, maybe, I work hard but in a different way) when playing "free"- but on the other hand the standard with which to judge my own playing should remain the same. The problem is more with my accompanists - if they know how to deal with this kind of playing (open) than it can be as satisfying and artistic as playing changes; if they do not, it than becomes something of a chase to nowhere. I've been lucky in this respect, but am skeptical about the internal editing mechanisms of many musicians.

I think one of the reasons I have done no recording in 10 years is that I am so bored with jazz in general, and am looking for a vehicle to make it fresh to myself, a way to integrate some different ideas about older music and about newer techniques applied to traditional forms of pop. Some of this boredom is my own doing, the result of having having spent 30 or so years in almost complete jazz-surround. I hope to have some vague resolution to this in about 6 months.

Edited January 11, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Joe]

Mr. Lowe, Mr. Kart -- Mr. Abbey will see you now.

Edited January 11, 2005 by Joe

[Larry Kart]

To me what Allen says above amounts to another way of saying that, in any or every context, it all comes down talent, honesty, and overall alertness**, plus your place in the chain of historical circumstances and possibilities - -that is, are the things that you're drawn to do by your internal daemons things that the evolving art really needs people to do at the time you're able and willing to do? And your place, in this sense, is something you probably can't do much about. From what I can tell, the career of painter Arshile Gorky is an extreme example of this -- incredibly talented, he made himself into a seemingly artificially humble acolyte of Picasso in the '30s, and then further humbled himself before the younger and inferior-to-himself painter Matta in the '40s, all because Gorky's positional role in relation to "advanced" European art of the time (in his own mind and to some degree in fact) was so damn fraught. And then, as f***** up as all of this might have been or have seemed to be at the time, damned if it didn't lead to some great paintings that apparently Gorky could have come up only in the inside-out, upside-down way that he did. Probably not a typical case for any art or artist, but revealing in its complex weirdness, and sadness too.

**Alertness BTW includes self-awareness; the willingness to work hard at what needs to be worked hard at goes without saying, but the hardness of hard work is not, contrary to what Wynton and others like him have said on many occasions, a virtue in itself. Wynton really likes the being smacked on the head with a ruler example, as I recall; rules imply punishment, and that's good for you -- oh boy.

[AllenLowe]

yeah, my problem with Wynton is how damned middle class he is - this idea that if you listen to good music and educate yourself in the right way (shades of the Great Books curriculum, Chicago readers) you will become a good person because this is all so good for you - and good is, after all good - my feeling is that you listen to the stuff because it's great music, the hell with personal betterment. And as George Steiner pointed out some time ago, culture does not make one cultured, hence the Germans and their development of Mozart, Beethoven, Heine, etc - I'm sure Adolf and Eva spent many a quiet evening together listening to the Victrola -

Edited January 11, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Rooster_Ties]

That, and Wynton's implied notions about what music is "less than good" (in his not-so-humble opinion), or essentially being bad, or at the very least severely substandard.

In fact, by extension, one almost wonders if he thinks listening to bad music results in bad people. No, not literally (though I think he would say this literally, in terms of Rap), but the idea that not listening to good music (i.e. jazz that swings), will result in one not becoming as good as one might otherwise become.

I've probably beat this horse enough...

[Simon Weil]

I think one of the reasons I have done no recording in 10 years is that I am so bored with jazz in general, and am looking for a vehicle to make it fresh to myself, a way to integrate some different ideas about older music and about newer techniques applied to traditional forms of pop. .

Well, I haven't been bored that long - but the last 3 or 4 years have been dreadful, in my opinion. But, I have the feeling that's so right across the cultural board, film art, wherever you look. I can't but see that as a cultural thing in the wider sense- i.e. to do with Society as a whole.

If you ask me this is what you get out of the rule of the market - dumbing down run riot and practically nothing new on the horizon. Sure you get dotting the i's crossing the t's kind of innovations in art, but then the market can sell that as "cutting edge".

The whole environment is so conservative right now, that anything that really is cutting edge will get sat on by the Ben Ratcliffes of this world.

Unless of course you don't care.

Simon Weil

[Larry Kart]

BTW -- who is Mr. Abbey?