Larry Kart

Just picked at random. It's a corner on the Upper West Side where a friend of mine's apartment is. Could have said: "I've spent time in that institution. Decent food there when Warden Marsalis was in the mood -- gumbo."

"Guys and Dolls Like Jazz"? That's a good one -- "attentive responsive and clever" exactly.

I also like the goofy second sentence: 'With his signature “bebop” jazz sound and his diverse repertoire, younger jazz musicians looked up to him as a profound and prolific thinker about jazz music and its historic institution.' I remember that historic institution; it was at 81st and Broadway.

Listened to the rest of Aura. That Sibelian string chorale at the end of the fourth movement -- arrgh. Yes, it does create the sense of an ending, but some 35 minutes of fanfares and tangled "landscape," and this is the payoff?

Mr. Kart here: FWIW, I still love those Village Vanguard recordings and the two preceding albums (though not quite as much as the VV recordings), though I agree with Fasstrack about the frequent primacy of LaFaro in what's going on there. In the part of my book that deals with Evans, I speculate about the arguable artistic (and psychological-emotional?) fruitfulness of Evans' relative reticence in relation to LaFaro. In any case, I don't agree about the trios that followed LaFaro's death. LaFaro's boldness, one might say, allowed Evans to virtually disappear/hide behind the lace curtains (see the cover to "Explorations") -- quite beautifully so IMO and, I would guess, out of necessity (heroin anyone?) -- while the later trios of the early '60s where Evans had to take a more forthright role were not very successful by and large. Harder swinging, yes, in that that swing was more like what was commonly meant by "hard swinging" at the time, but the swing of the VV recordings is "stilted"? Anything but, at least by me. I'll check with the dictionary, but doesn't "stilted" mean or imply stiff and predictable? Whatever its flaws and limitations might have been, I don't think that the VV trio was that. Stilted: synonyms: strained, forced, contrived, constrained, labored, stiff, self-conscious, awkward, unnatural, wooden

Listened to the first two movements of Aura last night before I was interrupted by dinner. Will return for the next two today, but my impression this time to this (middle?) period of Lindberg -- middle, I assume, because it's a good deal less in your face than Kraft and not as soft-centered (or if you prefer, ingratiating) as the Clarinet Concerto -- is that it's mostly ramps, vamps, and fanfares. There's a near continuous sense of, to perhaps coin a term, "adventing" -- of attempts to create an aura (right) of nervous, even intensely anxious, expectation -- but through the first two movements I hear no particular accumulation of dramatic effect or sense of "language," just a lot of "over here, over there, where did I leave that last ostinato"? effects, like a large pile of urgent-in-tone but non-functional, at least in any way I can detect, road signs. And believe me, I've listened to lots of modern music of many sorts over the years and am pretty good, I think, at grasping all sorts of fairly novel language principles, whether I end up hugging them to my chest or not. I am puzzled, though, by how many of those who have commented on Lindberg's music (e.g. Alex Ross on Aura, for one), get a terrific sense of evolving, accumulating drama from his music, at least of this period (I certainly hear what's happening that-a-way in the Clarinet Concerto, even it threatens to leave me throwing up in my mouth). But if there's an evolving, accumulating aura of neo-symphonic drama in Aura, where is it and/or why am I missing it? I will press on, though. Ross on Lindberg: http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/07/aldeburgh_1995.html

I need to listen again to Aura and the other Lindberg I have. I'm afraid I got hung up on the Cello Concerto at one point several years ago because I was using it rather obsessively in attempt to re-adjust my sound system, listening to maybe the first 10 minutes or so of the work over and over again as I fiddled with speaker placement and the like (there's a good deal of varied sonic info in those first 10 minutes of the Cello Concerto), and in the process the work became quite grating to me. Not a fair way to listen to anything.

I dig Koechlin (almost entirely) and Messiaen (mostly); Villa-Lobos's orchestral music, mostly no -- for me, it's just one thing and then another and another. V-L's chamber music (what I've heard of it) and guitar music and what I've heard of the piano music, mostly yes. Aho's "Minea" sounds like a f---ing film score, and for a movie I wouldn't want to watch. A fair amount of Lindberg (as I said above) gives me a similar feeling, though the non-existent films involved in his case and Aho's would be quite different. Few things feel creepier to me than music that seems more or less programmatic but refers to no program. But maybe "Minea" does? BTW, I've got a lot of modern (from the '20s on to today) Scandinavian classical music because someone used to get comps of everything from those state-supported labels and sell them to the Jazz Record Mart, where I'd buy anything from those batches that looked interesting. Thus, I think I've got a decent fix on the evolution of modern classical music in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, etc. (let us not forget Iceland and the mighty madman Liefs). It's a varied and interesting story that allowed room for a fair amount of genuine albeit non-cutting-edge (by the standards of European modernism in, say, Germany, France, and Italy) creativity (e.g. Holmboe, Larsson, Carlstedt, Sven-Erik Back, and many more), but I get the feeling that with Aho, and Saariaho, and Lindberg something has at once broken free in terms of reach and ambition and broken down musically (not that those three composers are of a piece).

Neither Wilber nor Davern has ever done much for me. As evidence though that the real thing (at least IMO) can crop up at just about any time in just about any place, here is the red-hot French so-called revival (though I think they're far more than that) band Charquet & Co. from 1978. I love the whole feel of the performance and especially the solos by tenor saxophonist Michael Bescont and clarinetist Alain Marquet. This is not "within quotation marks" playing: Leader Jean-Pierre Morel eventually went on to found Le Petit Jazz Band and Les Rois de Foxtrot. Worthy CDs by both bands are on the Stomp Off label. If you see anything there or elsewhere by Charquet & Co. (originally Sharkey & Co.) don't hesitate.

A performance of "The Second Race" by the Thad-Mel band from a Zurich (IIRC) concert from 1977, played for me by a friend (and a former reed section sub with the band in in the '70s) who a while back was given by a friend of his 17 (!) CDs worth of Thad-Mel concert material. Sound quality was great, and the rhythm section (Mel, Harold Danko, and Rufus Reid) was in terrific form. Soloist was a young Dick Oatts, on tenor.

What he said. This is the sort of discussion that runs in circles and does not really lead anywhere anymore. I can understand the above statement (certainly also aimed at the Marsalis faction ) but (admittedly because I certainly am far from "all avantgarde" in my own tastes ) it seems to me there is another side of this very coin: For every one at whom the above statement is aimed there has been at least another one who goes all overboard when it comes to free, avantgarde, post-"you name it" and considers this beginning and end of ALL jazz in a kind of "If you don't dig avantgarde you are nowhere in jazz" attitude to justify the limits of HIS taste. No, I am not referring to key forumists here, but if you look around and observe closely, those of you who feel concerned by my assertion, isn't it so that in all the decades since the avantgardish late 60s/early 70s there have also been more than enough of those to whom anything that came before hard bop is old hat (there even was a time when even anything that came before fusion, etc. was lumped into that bag, with the possible exception of some fashionable Trane etc.). To this circle of the jazz audience Bird generates maybe some fleeting interest but is not in the center of their radar at all, and whatever styles of jazz existed before bop were definitely considered "moldy figs", and even some listening to Pops or Duke could hardly offset their somewhat unbalanced perception of jazz and their lack of interest in the wider fields of the more "traditional" styles of jazz, regardless of the fact that the evolution of jazz has not only progressed towards free, avantgarde, post-whatever but has evolved concurrently in different directions ever since. In short, Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché etc. have always been just as much a legitimate part of a LIVING evolution of jazz as Ayler, Brötzmann et al. It takes both streams to jazz to form a whole, and while it is understandable that not everybody can and wishes to embrace ALL forms of jazz, each faction ought to be very, very careful when it comes to dismissing as irrelevant or inexistent whatever one doesn't like. Just my 2c. Can't speak for others among those who have responded positively to so-called "free jazz" in the various "nows" of the '60s until the present, but I can say that my own positive responses to what I liked/have been moved by there over time was inseparable from my pre-existing and still fervent love of the entire range of jazz, from Harlem Stride piano to Jelly Roll Morton on up through the Swing era and Bop, Cool, Hard Bop, you name it, not that I don't have my favorites and a few bete noirs (sp?). Further, I've found that among a fair number of "tradition huggers" -- sorry for that sarcastic term, but it just popped into my head -- the tradition that they often have in mind is a quite artistically worthy but somewhat narrow slice of the overall jazz tradition, namely the warmer, mellower side of the Swing Era up to the advent of Bop, or what Stanley Dance and Albert McCarthy dubbed "mainstream jazz." In particular, Dance and McCarthy came up with the term in an at once defensive and aggressive mode, in an attempt to both protect and celebrate worthy figures (Vic Dickinson, Buddy Tate, and many others) in a jazz climate (circa 1955) that in their view, in both critical and economic terms, was riddled by various forms of musical harshness, preciousness, and "progressivism," though the avant garde was yet to come to be (this was before Ornette and the Coltrane we came to know). Now I love much so-called mainstream jazz, though I don't accept the term for reasons I alluded to above -- that is, it's a real "stream" in jazz but not the main one; there are too many other real ones, and earlier real ones in particular; "mainstream jazz" I believe is a more or less rhetorical, cultural-political device. (I wrote about all this at length in my book FWIW.) Finally, if I love, say, Don Byas or Lucky Thompson or Ike Quebec, as I do, that love and (I hope) understanding of their music does not allow me to regard Scott Hamilton as a wholly "legitimate" (to use your term) artistic continuation of the impulses that flow through their music. Hamilton does have his moments IMO (I particularly like the album he did with Gerry Mulligan some ways back), but for me too much of his music too often takes place between quotation marks. Vache, however, I've come to feel differently about for some reason I can't quantify -- perhaps it's that there seems to me to be a fairly distinct, evolving Vache-ness to him, despite his legitimate (if you will) fondness for his early models, while with Hamilton the models have been virtually omnipresent from the first and, again for me, usually override much sense of who Hamilton is. Likewise, perhaps, a player like Eric Alexander strikes me as beside the point musically, while a Grant Stewart, who certainly has his models and is in some sense "in the tradition," also feels quite vital and fresh, and in the "now." Just my 2c

I'm no expert on Orchestra Hall, but I don't much like it now and recall that back in the late '50s early '60s it was much better. There have been several renovations, none I believe for the better. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-06-20/entertainment/ct-ent-0621-muti-interview-20130621_1_muti-cso-music-director-rachelle-roe Been to one concert years ago at Boston's Symphony Hall and recall that the acoustics were marvelous.

A pretty good line from Richard Brody's piece in the New Yorker that could apply to a lot of people besides Geoff Dyer: 'He asserts the centrality of “tradition” in jazz—as if it needed his defense—and relies on this principle to justify the limits of his taste.'

Some early to mid Lindberg -- e.g. Kraft, Engine, Aura -- struck me as ideal music for a space opera where "Star Wars"-like planet-destroying battleships crash into each other, break up, etc. The sheer sonic snarliness of all this was novel and impressive for a while but only for a while -- no particular sense of "language" accumulated that I could detect. Somewhat later works like the Cello Concerto were less snarly but seemed to me to amount to a lot of noodling. By the time he got to the Clarinet Concerto, with its "Rhapsody in Blue" allusions, I began to lose interest.

No, I like (or still find interesting) a lot of recent latter-day Wayne, but that quartet in concert stuff struck me as a whole other thing, almost, a la the pirate in the joke, left me saying "It's driving me nuts."

Hello, what? I hope tell the whole story of the evening's odyssey someday -- a story that is not to Thad's discredit but has much more to do with my semi-naivete, plus a whole host of off-the-wall events, at least one of which I probably would not regard as plausible if I had read it in a work of fiction -- but it's a story that may take a lot of words to tell and that I need to get just right as a piece of writing, among other things.

If you're talking about the semi-recent Shorter quartet in concert CD (or maybe I mean or also mean a video of that group in concert) thought that was pretty close to drivel, too. Some of most annoyingly aimless stuff I've ever heard from a once major musician.

I saw the Basie band directed by Thad at the Henry Street Settlement that year. I don't think he played any of his arrangements. I know he didn't play any of his compositions. If it was the band's debut under Thad, that was the performance I was at, too. The band, virtually or totally unmiked IIRC, sounded fantastic in that wood-paneled auditorium; you could hear Freddie Green. Also, in a round-table backstage interview with several band members that was hastily set up between sets (I was supposed to interview Thad, but he was a no show (which was the beginning of the evening's odyssey for me), Green quite forcefully said, when some member of the band (maybe Tee Carson or Byron Stripling) said "Freddie doesn't want to heard, just felt, "Oh, I want to be heard." Then he added some quite specific details that I don't recall off the top of my head about the harmonic as well as rhythmic importance of his playing. Don't think I said or implied that the band played any of Thad's arrangements or compositions that night.

I bought this one a while back: http://www.amazon.com/Sym-2-7-K-Aho/dp/B00000G5QD/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1415592654&sr=1-1&keywords=aho+insect thought it was drivel and sold it.

I spent some time with Thad one long, very interesting (at least to me) and also semi-goofy night in NYC in 1985, just after he briefly took over leadership of the Basie Band. That there was a whole lot running through his mind at any one time was among the impressions I had; he noticed everything, and the fact that he did so somehow seemed to ensure that more stuff would be happening than otherwise would be the case. I plan to write about that night some time, as one of a series of jazz-related anecdotes that I was a part of and/or present for, many of them somewhat humorous (I hope). Names may have to be changed in some cases (though not this one) to protect the innocent.

I've always had the feeling that Thad, for all his intelligence and at times striking individuality as a player, especially early on (Mingus famously referred him as "Bartok with valves"), never quite realized his potential as a player. A fair number of times IMO there was something a bit studied about his solos, a certain lack of "blowing" feel compared to such figures as, say, Clifford Brown or Lee Morgan. OTOH, one could argue that a "blowing" feel is not everything nor is it an unimpeachable virtue in itself. Also, If I'm pointing to something that was in fact there, that thing probably was just a part of who Thad was and thus was not separable from the undeniable virtues of his playing. Thad as a writer probably is another whole story.

Here she is playing some of the Kodaly. Don't think you'll be disappointed. And some Bach:

Thanks, Deepak. I'll bet that's it, but as long as I can access posts and until Yahoo Groups go away altogether, I'm OK. The loss of the posts on the most important of those groups (to me) would be quite a loss to the field that group focuses on, though. Jim -- I looked at my settings, but what was there was bare bones stuff (who am I, what's my password and e-mail address, etc.).

Just picked up on LPs the Cleveland's RCA set of the late Beethoven quartets. Very impressed so far.

Yes, I've been buggered by AOL recently. Wait -- that's not what I meant. Leeway -- Did empty the cache, no change. But as long as the method I mentioned in post #4 keeps working, I'm cool.