Larry Kart

Whew!

Interesting fact I stumbled across some years ago: On June 14, 1955, in New York City Clarke recorded a seven-tune date for Decca backing his then-wife Carmen McRae (issued on the album "By Special Request") and all of the great Lee Konitz-Warne Marsh album for Atlantic, with Sal Mosca, Billy Bauer, and Oscar Pettiford. No doubt Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson and other studio mainstays of that era had days that were just as busy or busier ,but somehow the fact that the Lee-Warne album was one of two dates that Clarke did that day just tickles me, perhaps because his playing on that album is so magical.

A.B. Yehoshua's "Mr. Mani" Some Bowen novels are more avant garde than others. My wife and I were both defeated by the complexity of The House in Paris, but very taken by The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart. Bowen's "The Little Girls" is terrific, IMO.

Moved to "Artists."

One of his specialties was medieval music.

Vulgar perhaps, but nothing particularly personal here. Do drug stores in Texas not stock laxatives?

I see what you mean. OTOH, I would say (with the caveat that I've heard a lot of Ervin over the years and not as much Harper) that while there's a familial relationship between Ervin's sound and Harper's, I find the former's relative graininess, its Dexterish vacuum cleaner-like "whoosh," to be very appealing, while Harper's flatter (if you will), slab-of-slate sound is or amounts to something else -- "a lot more variety of fingerments," yes, but the sum total for me, even with Ervin's more limited supply of ideas, is that Ervin's music is more varied and potentially "open," and Harper's is more narrowly focused. Also, there's something about Harper's undeniable intensity that strikes me as more forced than expressively forceful -- as though, pardon the image, he were trying to expel a hard stool.

Then there's Emo Phillips' line: "It takes a pot of hot coffee to get me going in the morning. Oh, I've tried other enemas...."

I just changed the topic title.

http://www.nola.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/12/our_times_the_louis_armstrong.html

Take two scoops of (ideally) freshly ground coffee (or however much it takes to brew a good strong cup for you) cover the ground coffee with water in a one cup metal measuring cup or pot and boil the coffee-water mixture on the stove, making sure that it doesn't boil over. Meanwhile, place a fine-enough mesh strainer over your coffee mug and when the coffee-water mixture begins to boil, pour it through the strainer, leaving the grounds in the strainer as the coffee essence drips into the mug. Then pour enough milk to fill the mug through the grounds that are still in the strainer, remove the strainer, dump out the grounds, and put the mug filled with the coffee essence/milk combo in a microwave and heat to taste -- about 1:40 does the trick with good-sized coffee mug for me. The results are like rocket fuel. Of course, all this only makes sense if you like a coffee-milk mixture. A sprinkle of cinnamon in the bottom of the mug before you begin can be nice. If all this sounds complicated, I do it rapidly and often more or less in my sleep. The idea of boiling coffee, I've been told, is regarded as barbaric by the French, but this method was taught to me by a talented female violinist who spent a good many years in Finland.

What distractions?

Good Scandanavian style*** coffee and one piece of wheat toast with jam (chosen from about five different kinds). *** recipe on request

Links to some of Gushee's work: http://jazzstudiesonline.org/resource/how-creole-band-came-be http://jazzstudiesonline.org/resource/nineteenth-century-origins-jazz

The notable jazz scholar, critic, and musicologist -- author of the superb book about the Creole Jazz Band, "Pioneers of Jazz" -- has died at age 83. I hope Allen Lowe, who knew him well, will share some thoughts.

With Ahmed Abdul Malik and Osie Johnson.

The violinist is Peter Mirring.

What elements of cohesion do you find here that are you find lacking in the Reiner? In particular, the transition out of the famous "2001" opening passage (which passage in Kempe's performance is kind of "terraced" and yearning, not an at once flaring and sledgehammer-like demonstration of brass firepower) into the Von der Hinterweltlern section and onwards -- the killer perhaps being the Tanzlied, which in the hands of Kempe and the Dresden players borders on delirium, albeit a luscious one. By contrast, the '54 Reiner Zarathustra, brilliant as it is, feels rather sectional to me at times, and I don't think he has an emotional grasp on the Tanzlied, about which a lot of people have had doubts over the years, e.g. Norman Del Mar in Vol. One of his three-volume study of Strauss: "Of all the controversies started by this curious tone poem, none raged more furiously than those around the Dance of the Superman. For in it Strauss revealed the less-descriminating side of his genius as he had not done since his ill-fated use of 'Funiculi, Funicula' in Aus Italian: the great Nietzschean Tanzlied proves to be a Viennese waltz." Again, with Kempe, the Tanzlied eventually borders on delirium more or less; it's a Viennese waltz but one (a la Ravel's La Valse) that is dancing close to an abyss; IIRC Reiner's Tanzlied remains delicious, cool, and kind of amiable. (BTW, I wonder if anyone knows who Kempe's inspired solo violinist is.) Further, and in general, "Zarathustra" is a sectional work, musically and dramatically, but in Kempe's hands it doesn't seem to be.

For the first time the work as a whole makes sense to me (and I do have the vaunted and undeniably exciting '54 Reiner-CSO recording):

Don't remember the other choices on the "Jamestown" one, but IIRC none of them was even possible, a la "Who was the first African-American president: Barack Obama, John Nance Garner, Florence Nightingale, or Rosoce Conkling?"

I'll go back and check, but that's the way Lennie comps IIRC. A small price to pay if one even feels that way. For me, his comping, a kind of sonic-rhythmic "wall," is part of the total effect. A Tristano who comped like, say, Tommy Flanagan or Wynton Kelly would have been impossible.

29/30 ... missed the "sudden and violent thunderstorm" one.

Gor mine from there about a week ago.

Marc's a nice guy who does a good deal of nice work, but I learned early on in my days as a journalist how important it is to know when you don't know something. I've blown it along those lines a few times, and it was a bad feeling. Sorry, wasn't trying to nit-pick. Hell, I previously thought they were all recorded in CA Sorry -- I overstated the case there.

Issued-at-that-time Dial Parker recordings (if I'm counting correctly): made in Hollywood, 17; made in NYC, 18. As for "primary geographic impact" -- as John Burton said in post #2, Dial was a national label.