Larry Kart

I spent some time with Davis in NYC a few years ago -- was there with a then (for a brief time) girlfriend whose cousin was Davis' wife. Terrific guy -- we all went to a Spanish restaurant in the Village, and did he ever do some damage to an order of paella. Then we went to Smalls to catch IIRC Warren Vache. Davis' "Blue Gardenia" (2003), with Cedar Walton, Peter Washington and Joe Farnsworth, is a gem.

About the altoists, I was listening the other day to Bud Shank on bari on "New Groove" and "Slippery When Wet." On bari all the foo-foo is gone, though Bud's alto work on those dates is also far less foo-foo-ish than it was a few years before, and without the IMO artificial, edgy hotness of latter-day Shank, where it kind of sounds like he's trying to be Phil Woods.. Also, there's a track or two on alto there (e.g. "The Awakening") where I'd bet that Bud had listened some in passing to Ornette's two Contemporary albums, especially the first one. About Gullin, I don't know what you mean by "it'll get you nowhere except right back there." That Gullin has no notable musical offspring? If so, so what? Where he was was gorgeous.

OK, David and Chuck -- I've done some looking around, and you're undoubtedly right: I should switch from AOL to a 21st Century ISP like Google. Problem is that right now, having downloaded OS Yosemite onto my Mac, I've found out today that Yosemite is not currently compatible with AOL's software, though AOL is trying to correct this; thus I can access my mail only by signing on to AOL mail through my browser (Safari), as one would on a computer in a public library. What I'm wondering then is if, under those circumstances, I signed onto Google and tried to transfer all my old mail from AOL to Google, would the transfer process work, given that my current access to AOL is only through my browser, and I might not be able, through my browser, to access the drop down AOL menu or menus that it seems I would have to get to in order to make the transfer process take place. BTW, for the same Yosemite-AOL incompatibility reasons, I can't get into/do anything with AOL Desktop right now; it just disconnects. So should I wait until AOL and/or Apple solves this incompatibliity issue, or can I safely make the change to Google under current circumstances? OTOH, I just noticed that lots of Gmail people are having a hell of a lot of problems with Yosemite, too: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6615025

I suppose you would.

Just talked to someone at AOL. The problem is that the Yosemite OS and AOL software are currently not compatible, but "they're working on it"! Kind of amazing that two outfits of that size could have let something like this happen, affecting millions of people, but they did.

when I open an e-mail; clicking and dragging at corners of this full-screen image doesn't do a thing to reduce its size; dashboard icons are all covered up. Any ideas on what I can do? BTW, I have an IMAC and recently switched to the new Yosemite OS, if that has any bearing on things.

John Dean's "The Nixon Defense." Lots of new and very interesting detail about the whole seamy shebang.

Moms -- I like Kocsis' energy but think that Casadesus has a better grasp of the shapes and relationships of the piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY0arezQAEA

What reading of "the"?

From Dyer's piece: "Or perhaps it [the Temple recording] just makes evident what was harder to grasp in the intoxicating frenzy of the moment: that free jazz had run its course—come up against its limits—while the course was still being run and the limits breached. The fact that things fall apart does not mean that they can’t keep going, especially given the huge freight of history that the music and its revolutionary promptings and trappings is, at this point, obliged to bear. On that note, one wonders about Yeats’s claim that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Trane is as passionately intense as ever. Did he lack conviction? Maybe the Yeatsian opposition is false and passionate intensity covers up or disguises a deeper lack of conviction." That's not dismissive, bordering on disdainful? "The fact that things fall apart..."? In 1966? Hello, Art Ensemble, for one of many.

The vituperation is because Dyer used this one recording to build a IMO specious case that late Coltrane as a whole, and Free Jazz in general, had by 1966 more or less proved itself to be a musical train wreck.

Randy Sandke's "The Subway Ballet": http://www.amazon.com/Subway-Ballet-Randy-Sandke-Metatonal/dp/B000FDF7D2/ref=sr_1_13?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1413924642&sr=1-13&keywords=randy+sandke

Younger than Harrison and Alun Morgan, Jack Cooke was one of the mainstays of the Jazz Monthly crowd. His contributions to "Modern Jazz the Essential Records" are excellent. He had terrific insights into hard bop and never stopped listening.

Well, if you insist ... With all due respect, I beg to disagree about Jamil Nasser. He is one of those who have managed to mar my listening experience here and there, specifically as an accompanist to Al Haig ("Strings Attached"). What's all that droning, booming, resonating bass background that distracts from the lead voices and at times even tends to collide with Jimmy Raney's guitar lines? Not always very sympathetic IMO. Granted that times and styles have evolved since the 50s but what's all that busybody bassing around when, as an accompanist, a somewhat more subordinate role is called for. Where are Ray Brown, Red Callender, etc. when it is all about getting a steady pulse and swing going? There is a time and place for everything and all this droning and resonating may be fine and quite appropriate in other settings, but there?? Or is it all the fault of what recording mix was fashionable in those days? No doubt Al Haig himself felt differently as he used Jamil Nasser often, but still ... Gary Mazzaroppi (with Tal Farlow) is another one in the very same vein (even more so, sometimes crowding out the guitarist) who makes it a bit of a displeasure searching out latter-day recordings by artists who I like immensely. No harm and insult meant, but those bass players just "get in the way" IMO. BTW, talking about dropping names - no interest in Curtis Counce? I liked George Joyner on some Prestige dates from the late '50s, disliked him, for the same reasons you did, as Jamil Nasser later on. The way he had his pickup set up by then was pretty ugly, and he used it to play obtrusively as well. Likewise with Mazzaroppi. I like Counce's quintet recordings as a leader a lot but don't recall any instances where his own playing struck me as that special, though every rhythm section he was part of IIRC worked just fine or better than that. But then Counce came up in an era when unobtrusive support was the name of the game.

What particularly pissed me off when I looked again at Dyer's piece was this: "The fact that things fall apart does not mean that they can’t keep going, especially given the huge freight of history that the music and its revolutionary promptings and trappings is, at this point, obliged to bear. On that note, one wonders about Yeats’s claim that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Trane is as passionately intense as ever. Did he lack conviction? Maybe the Yeatsian opposition is false and passionate intensity covers up or disguises a deeper lack of conviction." [My emphasis] ​What a piece of "culture vulture" b.s. this is, as though dragging in that hoary Yeats quotation settles anything. Also, do you think that Dyer did actually "wonder" what he says he did? What he did instead, I think, was remember that Yeats quotation (easily done), see a way to work it into a faked-up discussion of late Coltrane and thus pin a "O, how literate a fellow am I" badge on his chest, that probably being the real goal of this little enterprise. Yuck.

Problem solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNfDArlDxcw#! Just ask a plain English question on Google, and you'll probably get an answer. I needed to set my browser so it showed website addresses. That used to be automatic; in Yosemite it isn't but is easily fixed.

For Wilbur Ware, plug in this (from the Johnny Griffin Sextet) on YouTube: "Johnny Griffin Woody n You" -- both the opening Ware solo and his later-in-the-track duet with JG. BTW, I downloaded OS Yosemite the other night, and now when I call something up on You Tube I don't get/see any http address anywhere whereby I can copy and paste a link to that video. Anyone know anything about this?

How could I have forgotten Albert Stinson?

Hmmm -- could be; they're spacey enough. But the details in my original post don't seem to fit, nor was there in the ad, or whatever it was, any mention of or allusion to the pleasures of Sonic foodstuffs. BTW, someone suggested that even though it cropped up on a national broadcast it could have been an ad aimed at a local market, like those weird GOP wedding dress spots, which are generic but have the name of that state's GOP gubernatorial candidate (E.g. Rick Scott in Florida, Bruce Rauner in Illinois) inserted. Go to YouTube and plug in "GOP wedding dress ads."

Interesting that AFAIK Milt Hinton hasn't been mentioned.

Undoubtedly so, if it's not some weird joke, but unless and until you've seen this thing, I can't convey how creepy it was.

I know this might border on a forbidden "politics" topic, and if so, feel free to complain and this post will be deleted. But I think this is mainly a request for information from someone (i.e. me) who saw something on national TV yesterday that left me bewildered. My original Facebook post, from yesterday afternoon, which so far has not generated any responses from anyone who saw what I did. "This went by very quickly about ten minutes ago while I was watching the Mississippi-Tennesse football game, but I think I saw the craziest and maybe the ugliest political ad of the season, though it may have been some-off-the-wall joke --but then people don't pay to put off-the-wall jokes up on ESPN during football broadcasts, do they? "The ad shows two middle-aged African-American guys in a coffee shop. They have near-identical scruffy beards and look rather scruffy in general. They've just ordered something that one ordinarily orders in a coffee shop -- pancakes or whatever -- but instead the waitress brings both of them plates on each of which sits an onion the size of a 16-inch softball, with a garnish of smaller onions. They turn quizzically to the waitress, who points to a nearby TV screen on which a newscaster is saying something like "The President [or the government] has ordered that today [or this week or this month] we only eat onions." Cut to the original two guys, who are now at what seems to be a drive in, sucking on onion milkshakes with much disgust. "Anyone else see this thing? Any thoughts on what the heck is going on here? If it wasn't some kind of joke -- I know, the onion and The Onion -- but a real political ad, the message seemed to be that even hard-core Obama supporters should be aware that he is or will be taking away our most basic freedoms, like the freedom to eat what we want to eat. "BTW, the way those guys looked, with their near identical, scruffy and in some way dated-in-style beards, made me think that they were supposed to stir semi-subliminal associations to Black Power revolutionaries of the '60s in a kind of cuts-both-ways manner -- as in 'That's who Obama's supporters are really like, and even those guys should be waking up to what's really going on.' "Please, tell me it's a joke that went by too fast for me to get it."

Dyer's piece is stupid and rather thuggish, but what does his being a white Englishman have to do it? Max Harrison is a white Englishman and, at his best, as brilliant a jazz critic as we have. Jack Cooke likewise. And two of the best jazz critics I know personally are Terry Martin, a white Australian, and our own John Litweiler, a white American.

Two perhaps similar guys, big-toned, great time -- Herbie Lewis and Carl Brown (only date of Brown's I know is the lovely Don Cherry-Steve Lacy album with "San Francisco Holiday" and "The Mystery Song").

I see I underestimated; top price is $300,000 or $350,000. http://www.musicstack.com/guide-to-collecting-vinyl-records/ten-most-expensive-turntables.html http://most-expensive.com/turntable-in-world http://www.higherfi.com/spkrlist/speakerlist.php?category=turntables