Larry Kart

Picked up a playable used LP today of Manny Albam's "The Blues Is Everybody's Business" (Coral). What a time capsule that is. Interesting, somewhat odd aspect is the presence almost throughout of Vinnie Burke as a featured soloist, this while Milt Hinton plays in the rhythm section. I like Burke, but why put him out in front of a 19-piece big band that includes all the usual circa 1957 NYC suspects? Not as odd but also interesting is the choice of Nick Travis as the other featured soloist and main "character" in Albam's moderately programmatic score. I'm no Travis expert (probably heard his RCA album "The Panic Is On" way back when but don't have a copy and don't recall how he sounded on it), but he is fairly personal and inventive at times here.

in today's NYT: "Mr. Walton has played funny, fast-talking bad boys before, notably on short-lived series like “Bent” and “Perfect Couples.” A bit like Custer losing horses at Pickett’s Charge, Mr. Walton keeps getting sitcoms shot out from under him, only to be recast as a likable cad in the next." Well, Custer was at Gettysburg, but he and Pickett were on opposite sides. Further, it was Union general Alexander Hays, not Custer, who "encouraged his men by riding back and forth just behind the battle line, shouting 'Hurrah! Boys, we're giving them hell!' even though two horses were shot out from under him." Anyhow, why the heck does Stanley not only get this wrong but also even chose to mention such a thing in the first place? It's not like that aspect of the battle of Gettysburg rests prominently enough in the public consciousness in 2014 for it to be shoehorned into a review of a new sitcom.

Easy -- Wilbur Campbell. He was pretty much the house drummer at the various incarnations of the Jazz Showcase from about 1968 (when he got out of Stateville, where he had been imprisoned on a drugs charge) until his death in 2000 at age 73. I also heard him a good many times before that, beginning in 1957. Thanks be, he was a great drummer, too.

Don't know that piece, but I likes me some Karel Husa. It's a good one -- at once very Bartokian and quite individual. Won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, FWIW. Based on the Husa I know, when he wrote something, he really meant it.

Karel Husa, String Quartet No. 3, Fine Arts Quartet (Everest) Byron Janis, Rachmaninov Concerto 3, Munch (Victrola) and Dorati (Mercury) Mozart Oboe Quartet, Ray Still and friends (Angel) Brahms Violin Concerto, Francescatti, Bernstein, NYPO (Columbia)

and freezing overnite. Yup

Melting ... and leaking.

Scanned from the inner sleeve - not complete (I remember a Toch Piano Concerto). You should read Steuermann's wiki bio and try to find his Schoenberg lp. Will look at that, thanks. What do we get with the Vernon Duke stuff? FWIW, Stravinsky and Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky in his Russian days; at one point he was a Diaghilev protege) were not on good terms to say the least. Duke on Stravinsky: "Stravinsky is basically insecure, having traveled for many years with the slimmest musical baggage on the grandest scale but with the falsest possible pretences." Can't cite them right now, but I believe that Stravinsky had similar things to say about Duke.

Sir Charles in excelsis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puLDAOYDRf0

Stereophonic: Another track of the same vintage and feel as Lee and Warne's "Topsy" (but cheating a bit because it includes Basie, Walter Page, Freddie Greene, and Jo Jones themselves) is "Shoe Shine Boy" from the Vanguard album "The Jo Jones Special." Unfortunately, it's not on YouTube.

"And I don't suppose you meant to say a rendering of the old Basis tunes as done in the mid-50s should not have gone beyond what one of the Nat Pierce-led bands would have done at that time?" But what does "gone beyond" mean? Merely going to a different place musically, as would be true of "Shorty Courts the Count," versus(as you say) trying to reproduce that vintage Basie feel, a la those big bands and small groups with Nat Pierce in the rhythm section? Or going to a place that was beholden to vintage Basie but that also was a somewhat novel, artistically meaningful extension of that linear "near invisible" swing feel? One group that didn't exactly go beyond that vintage Basie but certainly came up with a subtle variation on it IMO was the Lee Konitz-Warne Marsh group, with Billy Bauer, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke that recorded "Topsy" for Atlantic. The time-feeling on that track is so beautiful, like the ticking of a cosmic clock. BTW, I once found out IIRC that Klook played two dates on that day -- the one with Lee and Warne and another with Carmen McRae. Clarke and Pettiford -- what a team. BTW, I've never found Pierce's Basie-isms that convincing, except on the first of those two Prestige albums with Shad Collins and Quinichette -- that I think mostly because of the inestimable presence of Walter Page (his final recording, I think). For comping and solo work that's somewhat in the Basie vein but more effective, I'll take Sir Charles Thompson. Also, the recording of "Stereophonic" is a blast in both senses IIRC, but hearing that sucker from a tenth row seat in the Chicago Opera House was something else. People tend to have forgotten (at least I think they have) what the visceral impact of an on-stage big band could be like, especially in the era before amplification became the norm.

What I meant was that the '30s Basie band had a particular mellow, gliding, laid-back, in-the-groove feel, and while I agree that the band on "Shorty Courts the Count" was not that much more blustery or high-note-inclined than many big bands of the mid-1950s -- I still cherish the first time I heard the mid-'50s Basie band in person and was almost blown out of my seat by their first number "Stereophonic" -- it was not IMO akin to the old Basie groove (and by "old" I certainly don't mean outmoded; one could argue that the feel of the vintage Basie rhythm section was hipper and/or more "advanced" than that of all but a few circa 1955 rhythm sections). In any case, the difference between "Shorty Courts the Count" and vintage Basie struck me at the time in part because a good deal of mid-'50s small group recordings from both coasts, including a number from Rogers, got into that late-'30s Basie groove quite effectively. A nice example that comes to mind is the Cy Touff-Richie Kamuca Pacific Jazz date; the band sounds like it's on ball-bearings.

Though not without its charm, the cuteness/coyness of Shorty's own trumpet playing (and his flugelhorn playing) can wear out its welcome for me fairly soon, but I wonder if anyone has any thoughts about what its stylistic sources might be. Sure, it's possible that Shorty came up with own thing entirely on his own hook, but I think that's unlikely. In terms of basic "coolness" of timbre and accentuation, I hear links to "Birth of the Cool" Miles, but I think that Shorty's primary model was Harry Edison, even though the crucial "sting" of vintage Sweets was not part of Shorty's repertoire.

Recomendation seconded, plus the album called, I think, Courts the Count. IIRC, "Shorty Courts the Count" is fun in a kind of vulgar, guilty pleasures way, in that the '30s Basie pieces are arranged so that Shorty's trumpet section, which I believe included Maynard Ferguson, sounded like a crew of neo-Kenton bulldozers, with Maynard at times screaming an octave above the rest.

I like that this is the only post from "HomageToDonByas." Listened to the Atlantic recording today. Tom Dowd panned Hasaan's piano far left — right on top of Art Davis's bass. Max gets (pretty much) the whole right channel to himself. The record (not the recording) itself is killer. Though Hasaan was mentored by Elmo Hope, I hear quite a bit of Herbie Nichols in his playing. Almost a missing link between Monk and Nichols. Anyone else hear this? There's some common ground between him and Nichols. but I think that direct influence by Nichols on Hassan was highly unlikely. Just about the only chance that Nichols got to do his thing was on those Blue Note recordings, and I would imagine that Hasaan was Hasaan well before then, if indeed he ever got to hear them.

The physical and emotional violence of Caesar, as in this great scene -- that was unique. As I think Mel Brooks said, "Sid was so strong he could kill a Buick."

I borrowed them and sort of skimmed them. I basically agree with the reviews that the first 3 sets are pretty good and the last one goes downhill pretty fast. Partly because some of the events in the downfall of Widmerpool just seem ludicrous when put on screen, but more critically some of the actors involved were replaced between these series. At least that's what I recall. Hated as much of it as I could bear to watch. While the actor who played the young Nick at school was nicely cast, James Purefoy as the adult Nick was a disaster IMO. The same qualities that made Purefoy such an enjoyable Marc Antony in "Rome" -- the muscular, simmering eroticism, the indefatigable air of recklessness and potentially extreme self-indulgence -- all of these are as anti-Nick as could be and are not really traits that Purefoy can significantly alter or suppress (especially if one has seen him in "Rome"), anymore than, say, Russell Crowe could significantly alter or suppress his inherent aura of threatening explosiveness.

Below zero this morning. More snow cover and for a longer time than I can recall. When the thaw comes, watch out.

When my late wife was a curly-haired little girl in a small town in Kansas in the early 1940s, she got big props singing "S-H-I-N-E" a la Shirley at the local Elks club. There is photographic evidence of this. From abbreviated latter-day renditions she could be coaxed into, I gather she was quite good.

A piece by Holloway: I also recommend, on Spotify, his Third Concerto for Orchestra.

Powell's my favorite novelist of the 20th Century. I belong to the Anthony Powell Discussion List: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/aplist/info and had the great pleasure of doing a long telephone interview with him in 1984. Talking to him was like dancing with Fred Astaire.

Have a fair amount of Weinberg. By and large, I prefer him to Shostakovich. There's somewhat less "profile" to Weinberg's music, I would say, but he mostly lacks those negative traits that talented English composer Robin Holloway, for one, finds in Shostakovich's symphonic output: "battleship-gray in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion, exercises or instructions in communal lament and celebration, rendered by portentous slow music and mirthless fast music, nearly identical from work to work, coarsely if effectively scored, executed with horrifying fluency and competence, kept unflaggingly going long after its natural cut-off point has passed; music to rouse rabbles, to be seen from far away like slogans in letters 30 feet high, music without inner musical necessity.... "But what about the string quartets?.... Here the horrors are different: a rapid degeneration from innocent cheerfulness via terse grimness to the long-drawn-out torture by excruciation and vacancy of the final works. Astonishing that this cycle is now as a matter of routine compared with Beethoven's.... "In fact the fifteen symphonies, for all that they contain the worst of him (outside copious commercial/functional jobs) are far more various in range as well as quality.... "The terrible nature of Shostakovich's circumstances mustn't prevent a balanced response to his actual notes. If it does, emotional blackmail is committed ... a flattering identification with suffering heroism, a holier-than-though priggishness in the rush to empathise with oppression. To deplore this is to risk appearing stony-hearted. But what else is there to go on, in works of art, but their artistic workmanship -- in music, the actual notes? All human experience can be encompassed in music's actual notes, when they show themselves to be capable of containing what's entrusted to them. Chez Shostakovich I submit that the intrinsic quality of most of the oeuvre is not strong enough to carry the weight currently put on it -- which suggests in turn that what is required of it is lightweight too, underneath the heavy appearance to the contrary." Agree or not, that's quite a rant.

FWIW: "The Indianapolis Colts, for whom Tom Moore served as an offensive coordinator since 1998, won Super Bowl XLI in February 2007. Moore coached the offense under head coaches Jim Mora, Dungy and Jim Caldwell. He oversaw the development of quarterback Peyton Manning for Manning's entire career." A detailed account of the Moore-Manning offense. The guy says that it's basically simple, and in one sense it is -- many branches off of a basic tree -- but it sure doesn't sound simple to execute properly: http://smartfootball.com/offense/peyton-manning-and-tom-moores-indianapolis-colts-offense#sthash.t3Fk2NET.dpbs BTW, a classic example of a genuine system QB (IMO) would be Josh McCown with the Bears last season. An aged intelligent journeyman with moderate skills, McCown took over Marc Trestman's highly systematized offense when Jay Cutler went down and had much success simply because he read every "read" as he was supposed to in Trestman's scheme. Could he have prevailed against a Seattle-level defense? Almost certainly not. But a lot of fans thought that the Bears should dump the clearly more talented Cutler and keep McCown. If McCown plays anywhere next season (he might retire), I doubt that he'll ever have as much success again. He was a system QB in the right system with enough of the right offensive talent around him. He could take you so far but no farther.

No, I don't think that Dungy or Fox "loosened the reins" when it came to Manning because the system that both Dungy and Fox were using was devised by Indy's former OC Tom Moore in order to utilize Manning's specific gifts, and Manning almost certainly had lots of input into Moore's thinking. No reins needed to be loosened because the system was custom fitted by Moore and Manning to Manning's desires/needs/style/capabilities. I don't see how Young's mediocre record with a mediocre Tampa Bay team 'damns him as a "system" QB, going by the standards you and I have set here' -- though I'm not sure what you mean by 'damns him as a "system" QB.' That Young wasn't one at all ever? That he wasn't one in Tampa Bay? I don't get it. I think Young was a system QB in SF to the considerable degree that he ran Walsh's already in place system, but that he also gave Walsh and then Seifert further options that at times may have involved more freelancing/deviations from the system because Young was so mobile and had such skills as a runner. Tampa Bay's system, such as it was, sure wasn't SF's, nor were there enough good players on the Tampa Bay roster to make any system work that well. Just as Montana was mediocre in KC not only because of his age but also because the rest of their roster was mediocre. BTW, if what you meant was that Young was a systems QB in Tampa Bay but a lousy one -- I doubt that Tampa Bay at the time had an offensive system that was at all like Walsh's in effectiveness or complexity, and besides, again, it was a team of mediocre players; they would have been mediocre if they had been running any system imaginable.

I don't mean at all that "less mobile QB's are simply system QB's. As though the more athletically gifted QB's play in a less stringent/complex/whathaveyou system." Some athletically gifted QBs can and do play in fairly systematized settings (Steve Young would be a good example) and have great success doing so, other such QBs play in less systematized settings. OTOH, if you've got an athletically gifted QB who also has a taste for freelancing, a la Favre, you the coach might decide that loosening the reins some is your best option because your QB is going to freelance a fair bit no matter what and probably have success doing so. As for Young versus Montana, here's a fairly thorough analysis that pretty much concludes that it's very close between them. Only problem I have with it is that, unless I'm mistaken, it throws Young's two years with Tampa into the hopper; I would think that one should compare only their abundant SF stats because Tampa was a dog team when Young was there: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/155771-joe-montana-vs-steve-young-an-extensive-look-inside-the-numbers The guy's rather equivocal conclusion: "Both two quarterbacks had exceptionally brilliant careers but when it's all said and done, I feel that Joe Montana is the greater of the two. At the same time, I've also decided that Steve Young may have been the better of the two quarterbacks." Say what?