Larry Kart

from bassist Steve Wallace's blog: "Webster had the habit of sometimes tailing a note off to just a tiny puff of breath, finishing it with a miraculous sotto voce vibrato. It sounded like this – phuff-ffff-ff-fff-ff-ff-ff…f… He was living in Los Angeles in the late ’50s and work was scarce, but when he did work it was often with a marvelous band – Jimmy Rowles on piano, Jim Hall on guitar, Red Mitchell or Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Frank Butler on drums. They played at a club called The Rennaissance and one night Butler called the young Billy Higgins to sub for him on drums. Higgins, only about eighteen, was both excited and nervous about this chance to work with such a master and wanted to play as considerately as possible for the elder Ben - he decided he would use brushes almost exclusively. The first number was at a slow-medium tempo and Billy was stirring away with his brushes on the snare drum when, halfway through his first chorus, Ben turned around and gruffly barked“Sticks, kid!” out of the side of his mouth. Billy, a little startled, switched to sticks and the ride cymbal. The same thing happened whenever Ben played on the next couple of numbers, which were a little faster. Finally, Ben called a ballad and Billy figured he’d have to let him play brushes on this one. But no, eight bars into the melody, Ben leaned aside and snarled out “Sticks!” again, Billy couldn’t believe it. When the set was over, he was confused and a little hurt, he thought he’d played quite well. He decided to ask Ben about it and approached him. “Gee, Mr. Webster, don’t you like the way I play brushes?”. Ben answered, “Huh? Naah, it ain’t that, kid. You play just fine. But the shwoo, shwoo, shwoo from your brushes is gettin’ in the way of the foo, foo, ff-foo comin’ out my horn.”

Fine piece about the great trombonist from bassist Steve Wallace: http://wallacebass.com/?p=2565

More Marillo with the House Rockers:

Hey -- I just Googled "Joe San Diego alto saxophonist" and came up with the right guy, Joe Marillo: http://joemarillo.com Three albums are available with good players, e,g, Mike Wofford, but Marillo is on tenor, not alto. Clips sound darn good. And check out the video. And here is Marillo with Jimmy Cavallo and his House Rockers in 1956, from the movie "Rock, Rock, Rock." Marillo is on our right:

Joe Romano sure got around and was in and out of Vegas around that time, and certainly So. California also. I'm not sure about San Diego, though. No, not Romano. I would have known who he was.

This afternoon, pianist Marc Riordan and trumpeter Jacob Wick, a.k.a. Dos Hongos, at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Marvelous. Such clarity of thought and execution.

Anthony Ortega is surely the other San Diegan you heard. Yes, he and McPherson are both wonderful. Anthony is surely in his 80s now and I hope he's still playing. No -- it wasn't Ortega. I would have know who he was from previous encounters with his recorded work, dating back to the mid-1950s. The guy's first name, I'm pretty sure, began with "J" (probably "Joe"), and I'd never heard of him before, again because he'd been working in Vegas show bands for a good while. I bought a privately produced album of his that he was selling but sadly my copy was ruined several years later in a basement flood. Vegas show bands as a finanically stable refuge for good players is is a potentially interesting topic. One guy of many who ended up there was composer-tenor saxophonist Jack Montrose, originally from Detroit and a West Coast mainstay in the mid-1950s (he wrote the charts for Clifford Brown's Pacific Jazz album and led a band with the late baritone saxophonist Bob Gordon). Another was trumpeter and talented arranger Herbie Phillips, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbie_Phillips now deceased, whose work appears on a Carl Saunders big band CD: http://www.allmusic.com/album/be-bop-big-band-mw0000229638 I believe Carl Fontana spend a fair amount of time in Vegas, but of course he'd made a name for himself before that and then emerged to make some notable later recordings. I wonder, though, about the Vegas-based guys, like that San Diego altoist, who were known only to a few as the talented, distinctive players they were and who left little or no recorded evidence behind.

Luis Russell, Bob Crosby -- perhaps they could be combined.

Good points all, but the implication of Teachout's remark, it seemed to me, was that it was remarkable for a pianist to need only one take to record an admittedly difficult piece like the Rachmaninoff Mendelssohn transcription. Seems to me that a very difficult piece, if one had to play it through without flaw, would be no less difficult to get through on, say, the fourth take or the tenth, perhaps even more so the more flawed versions had accumulated. I'm reminded of the incident that ended the relationship between Arthur Rubinstein and Fritz Reiner, this by way of CSO oboist Ray Still. 'Reiner was conducting the Chicago Symphony in a recording of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto with pianist Arthur Rubenstein. We had been recording all day, and it had been a very long day. Reiner was annoyed that he was accompanying anybody, since he had a recording contract with RCA at the time, and only wanted to record the big orchestral pieces. Everything was finally finished when the first horn player, Phil Farkas, told Reiner that he had made a mistake, and he asked if we could redo that passage. Reiner said, ‘Oh, Phil, I didn’t hear it.’ But Farkas said the mistake was there and that he would not want other horn players to hear it. Then Rubenstein jumped up, too, with some things he wanted to rerecord. Rubenstein was famous for a lot of mistakes—he didn’t really start practicing until he was about sixty years old! Reiner shot back at Rubenstein with: ‘If we corrected everything you did wrong, we would be here all night!’ Reiner and Rubenstein never spoke again after that.'

"Home Cookin'" is on "The Stylings of Silver." Another fine one from that album is "Metamorphosis." Both have striking "interludes," so to speak. They're sort of Dameron-ish.

Our friend Terry Teachout in his blog today writes about Golden Era piano recordings: http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/ and says of Benno Moiseiwitsch’s 1939 recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s transcription of the scherzo from Mendelsson’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: "This performance was made in a single take,” as though this were remarkable. Please correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about, but In the pre-tape era were not virtually all recordings of pieces that would fit onto one side of a 78 made in single takes, with each take of a longer work coinciding in length with the amount of music that would fit onto one side of a 78? If so, how common would it have been for two or more takes of a performance to be joined together to make up what was heard on one side of a 78? I recall reading somewhere that while that was possible, joining together several partial or whole phonograph-recorded takes and transferring them to a master disc to make up a performance that seemed continuous but had not been continuously performed was not only tricky but also led to a rather noisy final product.

Thanks, Scott, but I think I'm just going to let things lie. Too complicated for me.

Absolutely. When I read almost anything, I semi-literally hear (or discover in it, or give it) a voice, and that voice then tells me a great deal about what the text is saying. For instance, sometimes the tone of that voice modifies the ostensible sense of the text to such a degree that it more or less contradicts it. Always go with the voice. Jazz is good training for this. So many distinct personal voices. The same notes from, say, Howard McGhee and from Fats Navarro are not the same notes.

I think now that my email might have been up to date anyhow because my MAC/Apple connection kept updating it. Thanks anyway.

"Squirm", rhymed with "worm", not "world". "She gets you to squirm"..and it might be "world", but that's one of those blues words that sounds like what it sound like, don't worry about it, you know what it means, no matter, the sounds tells you what it means, and if it really needed a "word", it would be there. He shoots, he scores! I'm more than willing to give up "world" for "worm."

I've heard that.

I've been using AOL as my e-mail on my MAC (version 10.9.3) for many years and feel like sticking with it just because my AOL e-mail address is the one I've given out for years. In any case, I recently noticed that my AOL version is 7.3, which has to be ancient. Is there a simple way to upgrade to a better newer version without messing up all the e-mails I've got stored way? Or is there something else I can be/should be doing?

I particularly like this line from Big Joe's "Delta Blues": Juanita's got ways like a rattlesnake, Oh, man, she gets to the (indecipherable), Once she starts to loving you, It's too bad for the world. I'd be grateful if anyone can fill in the word that ends the second line. Plainly it rhymes or half-rhymes (or less) with "world," but I can't make it out. The passage begins around the 1:18 mark in "Delta Blues" above.

Yes, but it that's the dimension that your team (e.g. the Bulls) desperately needs, and you've got a defensive genius as coach and three or four tough defenders on the floor (three if you're not counting D. Rose, and you shouldn't)? It's all academic because we're not going to get Melo, but still I think we'd be better with him, through maybe not good enough.

Wisecrack of the week!!!! MG Lots of truth in that.

Zoot Sims -- "He quit high school after one year and began performing with Ken Baker in Los Angeles in 1940. Baker had a habit of placing funny nicknames behind the player’s music stands, and young John stood behind the one titled "Zoot." Pepper Adams -- 'Adams attained his lifelong nickname of "Pepper" due to former St. Louis Cardinals star Pepper Martin signing on to manage and play for the hometown minor league team, theRochester Red Wings. Adams' classmates saw a resemblance between the two, and the nickname stuck.'

Lucky Thompson -- "The nickname allegedly came from the embroidery on a jersey given to young Eli by his father."

Lou Levy was "The Silver Fox" because he had white-silver hair while still fairly young and was such a fine/harmonically sophisticated (i.e. foxy) accompanist. Conte Candoli was The Count because ... Elmo Hope liked to tickle. Illinois Jacquet's actual middle name was Illinois. Shorty Rogers was no giant.

No, I was (kind of) putting him down for that -- in the sense that if that was his chief claim to fame (aside from orchestrating some things for Ellington), then why was he named a jazz master?