Impressive Brubeck-Desmond "These Foolish Things"

[Larry Kart]

This by way of Doug Ramsey's site (Doug being Desmond's biographer):

http://www.dailymotion.com:80/relevance/se...roma-1959_music

Normally, I like Desmond a good deal (with some passing but hard to formulate reservations at times), and have problems with Brubeck in the realms of rhythm and his moments of IMO pomposity. Here, as Ramsey says

http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/

praising Desmond's solo, it's interesting to see how the typically very self-critical Desmond indicates at the end of his turn that he thought it was special, but while enjoying it myself, I also felt that more so, or more clearly so, in this case than in many other instances (though perhaps it's a basic Desmond trait), he somehow remains on one plane -- in particular, that his harmonic inventiveness is always in service to his melodic sense, never the other way around, or even, so to speak, in dialogue. Well, perhaps that's badly put or just wrong -- whatever, I can't shake the sense that Desmond almost literally remains on a single plane, perhaps akin to an angled pane of glass above or below which one can't or shouldn't move, a la Ben Hogan's famous conception of the proper swing plane in golf. As for Brubeck here, that's some pretty hip un-hip playing, if you know what I mean. That is, I can see as much as I ever have been able to, why he would want to do it this way.

[JSngry]

I think that Desmond used playing the way that other players used heroin.

[Larry Kart]

I think that Desmond used playing the way that other players used heroin.

Hmm -- maybe we're on similar wavelengths here.

[Larry Kart]

Or to put it another way, it's kind of (pardon) masturbatory.

[Larry Kart]

OK -- this "Take the A Train" from the same concert makes it even clearer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJixf0j_myw

And I've also found the perfect contrasts, Art Pepper's sublime (at times arguably even tragic) "Besame Mucho" and "I Surrender Dear":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC2T1Yu9InQ...feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyt6fm7OZh4...feature=related

You see what I mean by "planes"? Art's playing here is about establishing them, pushing against them, and moving through them (with a certain joy and at a certain cost -- these being inseparable).

[alocispepraluger102]

a big part of me loves the idea of playing on a plain

[Nate Dorward]

Thanks for that posting of the Pepper videos--jesus, I've got to get that album (the only one from that period of Pepper's I'm missing, I think). Not sure I'm hearing "planes" there, exactly! but know what you mean about the contrast with Desmond. Oddly enough, listening to "I Surrender Dear" in this version, more uptempo than the ones I've usually heard (e.g. Monk's), it makes me think Art's moving it in the direction of a Cole Porter tune--that kind of use of chromatics & unexpectedly wide intervals to give it a kind of elegant but urgent drama & melancholy. (Maybe it's the tail-end of the A section, which in Pepper's phrasing sounds like "I Get a Kick Out of You" that's contributing to this sense.)

Sorry, but Brubeck's solos on both those tracks just make me go Agh!

[Larry Kart]

Excerpts about those two Art Pepper pieces from Terry Martin's great two-part essay about Pepper, from Jazz Monthly, Feb. and March 1964:

"The white aesthetic of self-exploration dominates, but here is no self-indulgence ... each nuance of feeling is tested for strength; sometimes it gives and both listener and player feel the pain, and against this the sheer pleasure of blowing.... 'I Surrrender Dear' is not the brilliant 'Old Croix' but a deeper exploration: the inevitability of the restless theme statement rises in a reiterated and modulated motive variant that merges with the final theme paraphrase, which in turn is decorated with a brief recapitulation of this shape. The movement passes naturally to the beautifully spaced break that sets his solo lines stalking freely over the harmonies. There are marvelous ascensions from a crushed lower register and countless rhythmic shifts, suspensions, reiterations. Indeed expressive formations abound in the solo (each has the solidity of a theme), and one wonders how he has been thought to be merely another altoist....

"'Besame Mucho," alto all the way, is for me possibly the greatest solo he has ever recorded; although I often turn to it for pure enjoyment I nevertheless end by being moved by its fusion of invention, elan, and passion. It is full of mastery -- the staggering doubletime near the end of the even meter section; passion -- the gleaming tone and lyrical paraphrase; and tragic insight, the whole nervous fabric pierced with desire for a transcendent serenity, ascensions that soar above the kaleidoscopic rhythms and spaces of his underworld, analogous to the bold and equally tragic gestures on 'Parker's Mood,' 'Billie's Bounce, ' and 'Chi Chi,' reflecting back to 'West End, 'Potato Head' and beyond; almost 'style beyond style.'"

And this from earlier on in the essay:

'[M]elodic fragments dealt out with a sharp sense of time require reassembly if a coherent expressive end is to be served. Again Pepper seems to delved back into the middle era [i.e. the Swing era] independent of Parker; despite the fragmentation there is a constant sense of formal resolution, a tendency to symmetry... It should be stressed that total asymmetry is not essential to the modern style, but its imprint must remain. Pepper in his own way attempts to regain a classical order from the chaos revealed by the bop greats... It seems that his stint with Benny Carter may have been critical in molding his sense of form, since Carter is a master of construction.... Certainly [Pepper] relies strongly on similarities of melodic shapes, these stemming from the choice and direction of intervals, not from resemblances of melody as such.... The altoist builds not on the original melodic figure laid down at the beginning of the solo but on its shape; thus the melodies developed later need have no close relation to the germ cell in melodic terms. Here is a reason for the absence [in Pepper] of note distortions which are often used, e.g. by Parker and Rollins, to create the required ambiguity. The shapes themselves must be kept clean and unambiguous if they are to form the main constructive element; the ambiguity undeniably present springs from Pepper's individual use of rests. Carter's melodic figures, which are placed symmetrically, result in symmetry. Pepper ... places his asymmetrically and thus only tends toward overall symmetry. This is one source of his lyrical tension.

"Pepper has never sought beautiful melodies for their own sake.... Rather his melody is completely absorbed in the expressive fabric of the music.... Rarely does he strive for a melodic paraphrase of the theme, being generally more interested in the emotive possibilities of interlocking fragments arising from germ cells of the theme and the effect of altered dynamics. Melody suffers change under constant redistribution of the pattern of rests; in this respect we may note the the mastery of Monk, another who is more concerned in reading meaning into the melddy rather than extending further the melodic limits during his improvisations...."

About my "planes" notion -- this from Martin's essay is what I had in mind: "[Pepper] relies strongly on similarities of melodic shapes, these stemming from the choice and direction of intervals." My emphasis.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

what are the art pepper links?

[Tom Storer]

It pains me somewhat to find fault with Desmond, but this interesting thread (thanks, Larry) is helping me pin down some of my own "passing but hard to formulate reservations." Terry Martin's mention of "kaleidoscopic rhythms" and "chaos" do underscore what I think Desmond lacks: a certain hardiness or hunger, a willingness to do more than caress, in however lovely a fashion, his own undeniably alluring melancholy. Desmond's playing radiates the loneliness of the man who, in the end, is quite content with his own loneliness and finds solitude in fact to be rather cool and hip.

The rhythm sections he always preferred were those that served as a comfortable backdrop against which he could approvingly listen to himself lay down the gorgeous tone and beautiful melodic turns that he knew he could spin out at will. Where Pepper and many others have a dramatic bent in which you sense them testing themselves, searching, risking, Desmond is one whose pathos comes from expressing some sadness within that one feels he not only knows and has accepted long ago but which, rather than vanquish or transform, he gets quite a kick out of observing endlessly, martini in hand. Hence the aptness of your adjective "masturbatory," alas. Pepper is out in the alley with a hooker he's in love with, Desmond is alone in his overheated penthouse.

That said, Desmond's onanism is one I wouldn't want to do without!

(Chewy, the Pepper links are in post #5).

Edited January 26, 2008 by Tom Storer

[JSngry]

Yeah, really, Desmond was Desmond, and that was that. You got what you got, and if wasn't always prefect, so be it. There's still much to love, and if there's reservations involved, again, so be it. How often in life do we find love that eventually doesn't come with some reservations? If it's our spouse (and/or a really, really good friend), we grow through/past it, but for everybody else....life's too short to be wondering why people are like they are and not like we wished they were (or think they could/should be). Which is not to say that it's not fun to ruminate on, or that we can't gain focus within ourself by doing so, just that in the end, nothing changes, especially when it's dead people we're talking about.

Is that masturbatory too?

[JSngry]

Now as for Pepper, that was one tightly-wound motherfucker, always had been. I sensed it even before it became "common knowledge", and I suspect many others did too. Net result was a certain "fascination", but no real desire to get too close for any real length of time. If my own life would have been predicated on sanity and sensibilty from the beginning, then maybe, but those qualities took a while to take root, and the one thing I've always believed in is that you don't sit down at somebody else's game with more than you can afford to lose.

Now, if you put the "best" (i.e. - least off-putting) qualities of Desmond & Pepper together, you probably get at least 50% of the way to Lee Konitz, and Konitz is a player I've always warmed to, sometimes quite deeply so ("sanity and sensibility" aplenty, there). That might seem like an irrelevant conjecture, but we're talking about three men of roughly the same time period and not wholly dissimilar "cultural" backgrounds, so it's more like an observation of life's crapshootin results than anything else.

Sometimes (Often? Always?) "liking" a particualar player is at least as much a function of how one receives their personal vibe as it is the question of are they "good (or even great) players". I think so long as you know what stirs what in you (and that's the benefit of discussions like this, eh?), then if one decides that there are "lesser" players that one "likes better" than "better" players, then hey - that's playing directly to Music As Life rather than Music As Music, and that's a good thing, usually, as long as you keep it real (whatever that means, and if you have to ask, well, don't until you've figured it out...).

[JSngry]

OK -- this "Take the A Train" from the same concert makes it even clearer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJixf0j_myw

Oooh, I dunno...that one devolves into what you/we are talking about, but it takes awhile to get there, and until it does, it seems pretty up-front to me.

Then again, maybe it just took a while for the shock of the change to the minor to wear off...

[JSngry]

Sorry, but Brubeck's solos on both those tracks just make me go Agh!

Yeah, me too.

But...

[JSngry]

And I've also found the perfect contrasts, Art Pepper's sublime (at times arguably even tragic) "Besame Mucho" and "I Surrender Dear":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC2T1Yu9InQ...feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyt6fm7OZh4...feature=related

You see what I mean by "planes"? Art's playing here is about establishing them, pushing against them, and moving through them (with a certain joy and at a certain cost -- these being inseparable).

Yeah, but I don't get the sense that those "planes" were anything that he didn't already know he couldn't work with.

Which is why, for all it's self-evident reservations, I really have a preference for his later work. The notion of "forced moderninity" is one I accept, but unlike many, I don't see tha as a necessarily negative quality, becuase unlike this stuff, which is ultimately playing what you know even if don't know how much of it you're going to know at any given moment, the later stuff was really all about going out into a place where he wasn't at all sure if he knew what it was, or even where it was. And that makes for more of Mister Pepper's Wild Ride than does this, I think, although I know mine is not the consensual opion in many quarters.

If you've ever spent much time hangingout among video games, you know that there's people who can excutehighly difficult games with great ease, simply because they've learned the patterns and probabilities and are ready for them in pretty much any permutation. Yeah. it's "seat of the pants" on one level, but on another,, it's really staying just getting better at one thing than it is "moving ahead" to some other place. When Pepper decided to really "move ahead", he took the type of risk that many players like to think/talk about, and they type that almost as many flirt with to varying degrees. But he just said "fuck it" and went on ahead and jumped off the cliff. He might have ahd a bigass umbrella to keep him afloat, but he sure didn't pack a parachute, if you know what I mean. To me, that plays directly to his "true nature" as a crazy motherfucker a lot more than his earlier work, which seemed to me to be more about "keeping it a secret", did, and when I choose to spend time with him, that's almost alwyas where I choose to spend it, and why. It just seems more "real" to me.

Now of course, I never even heard Art Pepper unitl 1973, so by then the secret was out. I can see where if somebody had a history with him going "back before" then the opinion would be different. But that's my story, and I got no choice but to be stickin' to it.

[Nate Dorward]

Speaking of which, the only Pepper footage that seems to be on YouTube is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koNqHz4-WG8...feature=related

I take it this is from his troubled mid-1960s phase where he was tackling Coltrane head-on..... I really don't like it at all but it's still fascinating.

[Larry Kart]

Yeah, but I don't get the sense that those "planes" were anything that he didn't already know he couldn't work with.

Just to be sure I'm following you, you mean "anything that he didn't already know he could work with," right?

[JSngry]

Yeah. I get confused w/all the gramatticals sometime and just go for what sounds/feels right.

[JSngry]

Probably should have written "I don't get the sense that those "planes" were anything that he didn't know he couldn't already work with."

Or does that not balance out either?

Like I said, I get confuised sometimes...

[Larry Kart]

Probably should have written "I don't get the sense that those "planes" were anything that he didn't know he couldn't already work with."

Or does that not balance out either?

Like I said, I get confuised sometimes...

You know, I can't say anymore about the balancing out but I do know what you mean now.

I guess I would say that for me the moment-to-moment "presentness" of those two Pepper solos remains that way; and they were recorded 51 or 52 years ago. Also, I don't get the feeling that what Pepper was working with there was anything that he had more in his back pocket than, as T. Martin said, Bird had in his back pocket when he made "Parker's Mood" or Armstrong in his when he made "Potato Head Blues." Compared to Pepper's other best work of the period, these two tracks from the Tampa album (plus "Pepper Pot" from there) are a peak of freshly reached ripeness.

[JSngry]

I've always had a hard time listening to Pepper in "present tense", even when he was alive, maybe because the operative word there seemed to be "tense". That's why I tend to prefer the later stuff, the "tenseness" is owned up to and actually embraced. And for a guy like Pepper, who always seemed to be gaming in one way or another, and for whom the game seemed to be hiding just how fucked up he was (in a not necessarily cosmically "bad" way, mind you), well, that just seems to be a logical progression towards "redemption", although if anybody could said to have been irresolutely "damned" (again, in a not necessarily cosmically "bad" way, mind you), I'd say it would have to be Pepper.

That's just how it's felt to me. I make no claims of "rightness" in matters such as this.

[Teasing the Korean]

I can see how some may not go for Desmond's playing, but I don't understand how you can call it "masturbatory."

[JSngry]

It's not necessarily a disparaging thing...

[Larry Kart]

I can see how some may not go for Desmond's playing, but I don't understand how you can call it "masturbatory."

That was me who said that, bouncing off of Jim's comment that soloing for Desmond was like heroin for some other guys. What I meant, in line with other things I'd already said or would later say on this thread (and remember I like Desmond) is that his playing seems to me to be extremely self-contained, even on its own terms -- that, in particular, his obviously very clever harmonic sense never seems to interact with (but instead to be wholly at the service of) his desire to (pardon the phrase in this context) extend his melodic lines. Likewise, he'll seldom do anything rhythmically (though he's agile there too) that might disrupt the steady melodic flow. Given all that, what I was thinking then was: An erotic act without a partner. And, yes, I know that in "real" life Desmond was quite the lothario.

[Teasing the Korean]

That was me who said that, bouncing off of Jim's comment that soloing for Desmond was like heroin for some other guys. What I meant, in line with other things I'd already said or would later say on this thread (and remember I like Desmond) is that his playing seems to me to be extremely self-contained, even on its own terms -- that, in particular, his obviously very clever harmonic sense never seems to interact with (but instead to be wholly at the service of) his desire to (pardon the phrase in this context) extend his melodic lines. Likewise, he'll seldom do anything rhythmically (though he's agile there too) that might disrupt the steady melodic flow. Given all that, what I was thinking then was: An erotic act without a partner. And, yes, I know that in "real" life Desmond was quite the lothario.

Gotcha.