Larry Kart

Charpentier, DeLalande, Leclair, Marais, Gaultier, De Visee, St. Colombe, Forqueray, Gilles, and, of course, Couperin and Rameau. Let me know if you want recommendations on specific recordings.

At the dawn of the Baroque -- Frescobaldi. Very performance-dependent, though, IMO. In particular, Frescobaldi's injunction that his keyboard music be played "without measure" continues to stir controversy. Best solution, from my subjective point of view, is that what are commonly labeled "rhetorical emphases" should be detected and heeded (but one interpreter's "detected and heeded" may not be another's). In any case, again from my point of view, "without measure" doesn't mean that one ought to turn things into a taffy pull. When someone gets it right, though -- wow. Froberger likewise. Richard Egarr (on Globe) is very good there. I've got a promising new Frescobaldi recording on the way, so I'll hold off on recommendations there.

For Weiss's Lute Suites, I like Robert Barto on Naxos, have maybe six volumes worth. And the price is right. Also like the French lutenists, De Visse et al.

Obvious recommendation: Handel Concerto Grossi Op. 6. My favorite version is Harnoncourt's on Telefunken/Teldec.

Thanks for that reminder. Don't know him at all well but I've picked up a few discs in the last couple of years. Always enjoy them without having yet got a sense of his particular 'voice' (I can hear that in Handel, Bach, Purcell and, I think, Rameau now). That says more about my perception or experience than about his music. Have my copy of 'Tafelmusik' ready to roll. Did enjoy the alternative 'Water Music' today. Ideal exam marking music. No -- it says a lot about Telemann's music, which is one of more different stylistic "voices" than perhaps any other composer of arguably high rank.

Great performance of a great piece: Likewise:

I agree with David Ayers and A.A. about specific performances often mattering a good deal in the Baroque realm but won't weigh in that way unless A Lark Ascending wants me to. Well, just one -- for the Vivaldi Bassoon Concerti (remarkable works) try one of the several volumes by Sergio Azzolini and L'aura Soave Cremona on Naive. Also, for the Biber Mystery Sonatas: http://www.amazon.com/Heinrich-Ignaz-Franz-Biber-Rosenkranzes/dp/B00005B674

Biber: Mystery Sonatas Carissimi: "Jephte" Charpentier: Te Deum Corelli: Concerti grossi op. 6 Weiss: Lute Suites Vivaldi: Bassoon Concerti

I once caught the MJQ at the Plugged Nickel on a very crowded night that found me wedged in a seat half-behind Lewis and at his right hand. Hearing the balance between his comping and Jackson's solo work on a two-thirds Lewis, one-third Jackson basis was very interesting.

Snopes on the canard that Jews and/or Israelis stayed home from the WTC on 9/11: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/israel.asp In fact, at least 400 Jews died at the WTC on 9/11.

On Wagner and the Jews, anti-Semitic themes are abundant in his writing; he did after all gives us the ferocious pamphlet "Judaism in Music." About his own music, many have claimed to find the same themes there, particularly in "Parsifal" and "Meistersinger," but I feel that the Wagner's music and libretti are too complex to be treated in such a reductionist manner. On the other hand and FWIW, in 1940 no less a figure than Thomas Mann wrote: 'I find an element of Nazism , not only in Wagner's questionable literature: I find it also in his "music", in his [creative] work, similarly questionable, though in a loftier sense -- albeit I have so loved that work that even today I am deeply stirred whenever a few bars of music from this world impinge upon my ear. .. The Ring emerges from the bourgeois-humanist epoch in the same manner as Hitlerism. With its...mixture of roots-in-the-soil and eyes-toward-the-future, its appeal for a classless society, its mythical-revolutionism it is the exact spiritual forerunner of the "metapolitical" movement today terrorizing the world.'

Ishmael Reed on Baraka: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/01/12/ishmael-reed-on-the-life-and-death-of-amiri-baraka/ Interesting, but it includes what strikes me as quite a non sequitur: 'Even though the obituaries refer to him as an antisemite because of the controversy around his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” he has two brilliant daughters whose mother is Jewish, the author Hettie Cohen.'

Well, Jews have been on the receiving end of that sort of "analysis" for many hundreds (thousands?) of years now, usually with genocidal results. Thanks, but I do prefer to be on the lookout for these sorts of sentiments, and to judge him accordingly. Maybe others have the luxury of judging him by other criteria, but I don't think we do. Sorry, but that line of reasoning is as spurious as the line in Baraka's poem. But Baraka didn't say in the poem (or did he?) that the intelligence services of the world knew about 9/11 in advance. What he did say in the poem was that the Israelis who worked at the WTC stayed home that day (because I guess, according to Baraka, they were forewarned by their government to do so). Is there any evidence out there in the real world that a lot of Israelis worked at the WTC and didn't show up for work that day? Yes, I know it's a poem, not a news report, but it's not like that portion of the poem were some sort of lyrical effusion that only a fool would take at face value. In any case, that poem and other instances of Baraka going over the top or around the bend along these lines do not make him a figure I need to or want to despise. Rather, I think of these instances as ... I don't know, "acts" (though they're not an act) in which Baraka, being who he is, was compelled to engage at those times in order to state and further -- and again, I don't know about the term -- his ongoing political/emotional "identity."

I think Sonny, even before Coltrane's death, realized that he had his own problems/barriers/what have you, that they were not nor would be Coltrane's problems/barriers/what have you, and that the best way for him to deal with his problems/barriers/what have you were to just keep playing and to keep living long enough to do so. I'm sure it seemed simple at the time, and it still does in theory, but I think we all know that that is in no way a simple proposition. Apart from that, the music found a way to move on past its own problems/barriers/what have you, at first by actually doing so, and then by carpet-bombing the world with do-overs, so we'd never have to be bothered by all that again. And yet, still (nothing lasts forever), Sonny Rollins. When he is dead...there will be no do-over for any of that. I'll shed some whole lots of tears, but not because Sonny Rollins ever stopped being Sonny Rollins. He might have stopped making earth-shattering records, but that's just a marketing concern. All (or most of) what I was saying/trying to explain is that you might have felt somewhat differently (as some of us did) if you had been there at the time. Not that we were necessarily right in feeling that way back then but that our puzzlement/disappointment -- again, at the time -- was not I think a matter of mere arrogance or ignorance or lack of human feeling on our part. We'd been stunned and enlightened by Sonny and wanted and needed more, especially given a musical landscape that clearly was in the midst of considerable upheaval. BTW, "just a marketing concern"? Whew. P.S. A possible oblique link to the emotional stance outlined above was the impact in 1956 of the death of Clifford Brown, a break in would-be continuity that seemed near unimaginable at the time. And then the death of Booker Little in 1961 at age 23.

When he was writing jazz reviews for Kulchur, he came up with some gems. I recall in particular his insightful praise for Ellington's "'All American' Jazz." Only a real listener could have come up with that one. In the same issue, maybe it was the same review, he did the same thing with Tadd Dameron's "The Magic Touch."

Bought a 10-cup Krups about three weeks ago, on sale for about $40 (from about $75 IIRC). Looks good, relatively compact, does the job just fine.

You're being ironic, right, with "I know this isn't jazz"? Great ST.

The decline, or whatever one wants to call it, of Sonny Rollins (as I saw it at the time) was far more than a matter of "[He] stopped putting out records that I liked, so i stopped buying them." It was, or seemed like, a major shift in the ongoing sensibility of the music. One's belief that an undeniably major and (if you will) inherently questing figure would almost inevitably continue along that path or paths came (or seemed to come) to an end. You can say that we were naive to have put that much arguably romantic weight on the idea of Rollins the heroic artist, but the impact of the music he'd made was of that sort and dimension. It was as though T.S. Eliot had followed up "The Waste Land" with "Ol' Possum's Book of Practical Cats" (I'm exaggerating here) and then said, "Do you have a problem with that?" Further, running alongside all of this, there was the fact and the example of Coltrane's musical evolution, which of course had some effect (maybe a considerable effect) on what Rollins did and didn't do. A few of us had thought that Rollins' possible solutions to some of the daunting conceptual problems/barriers/what have you that Coltrane faced and would go on to face might have been of great importance to the music as a whole, but instead it was as though Sonny stepped back and away from what one might call "the front lines." And while in human terms I now can see why he did, it felt different for some of us at the time. We were, as Rodney Dangerfield, said, "a tough crowd," but then Rollins' music more or less had taught us to be one.

As long as there aren't vocals, I've enjoyed just about every Silver album I've heard, including several of the late ones. Per what Jim said in post #40, Hearing Rollins' evolution in tandem (or so I felt) with the course of my own youngish life and would-be understanding of what the world at large was like was crucial. The impact of "Worktime" in real time! This after Sonny's "woodshed" period in Chicago, which we'd heard a bit about (and of course we knew a good deal of his pre-woodshed work). But this! I and my friends spontaneously felt awestruck and enlightened. It was the advent of a new way of knowing and being. And it continued that way for a good stretch of time.

Maybe not everyone was "over it," but it's not like the audience at a 1953 Berlin jazz concert would have included any flag-waving Nazis. Also, if the band's next gig happens to be in Berlin, what exactly are you going to do, tell Stan, "I'll see you when we get to Denmark?"

Me, too -- and I once felt that Rollins probably was the most important living artist in any field.

Can't imagine that would have been a problem for anyone on the band. It's not like Berlin in '53 wasn't a Western democracy. As for Lee in particular, at that point FWIW he was among the key influences on several prominent German jazz musicians, e.g. tenor saxophonist Hans Koller. Then, of course, there's always the fallback hipster position, as in Chet Baker's remark to pianist Romano Mussolini: "Sorry about your old man."

-12 F, windchill -39.

Yeah -- I wondered about Bagley, too. And kudos to Rosolino.

Saunders is very talented, and I have several of his albums (including one not mentioned above with Phil Urso, playing Chet Baker- associated material), but at times he strikes me as a bit too facile and fluid for his own good.