Larry Kart

... and it swings:

At some point -- was it the early '80s? -- all or almost all the emotional conviction seemed to vanish from Jackie McLean's playing. The external aspects of his style remained much the same, but the music just seemed uninhabited, and uninhabited McLean is a weird thing to experience. I decided I didn't want that experience anymore.

Some Gozzo (perhaps not all to our taste):

Bernie Glow has been mentioned on this thread as another top-notch post-war lead player, but what about Conrad Gozzo?

Max and Sol Weiss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Records

Post with Headman's questions has been merged into this thread.

My memory of the Galaxy-era Garland albums was that they weren't so good, largely because they were recorded in a very late-'70s manner -- instruments fairly isolated from each other, bass (the instrument, not the register) too prominent.

But didn't Sinatra more or less sing it that way (for the first time?) in the 1957 film version of "Pal Joey," where the dramatic setting (who is singing the song to whom and why) and thus the interpretation would have been largely determined by the script and the film's director, not by Sinatra's own predilictions?

Previews looked grating to me, and the word of mouth I've heard agrees. I recommend "American Hustle."

From Gerald Asher's book "A Vineyard in My Glass": "In California the ocean plays a more significant role in determining climate than do points of the compass; people with fixed ideas of north as cold and south as hot find California an enigma.... Before writing those memorable words ' hate California, it's cold and it's damp' .... Lorenz Hart must have been traumatized by a particularly gloomy summer weekend on the Santa Barbara coast."

About the California line, see Medjuck's post #2, though I'm not entirely certain that it covers all the possible bases. OTOH, it's almost certainly speculation in the right direction.

Not omniscient, just Google-adept. The passage is mostly a quote from something I found via Google and corroborated; I added 'and is singing humorously of herself and her down-to-earth "Hobohemia" lifestyle.'

THE LADY IS A TRAMP was introduced in the Broadway musical BABES IN ARMS in 1937 by Mitzi Green. Early film of the song shows it as a semi-comedy hobo number: the young leading lady has vanquished her sophisticated rival and is singing humorously of herself and her down-to-earth "Hobohemia" lifestyle. The song did not make it to the Garland /Rooney screen version, but Lena Horne sang it in 1942's WORDS AND MUSIC. Frank Sinatra's male sophisticate version from PAL JOEY bears little contextual resemblance to the original.

If Art didn't have talent in the generally accepted sense, one wonders why Stan Kenton, whose band played a lot of complicated music, would have had Art in his reed section for some time. I don't think that being a "natural" would have helped you get through a Bob Graettinger or Pete Rugolo piece.

From the above-mentioned Geller interview: "Art [Pepper] never had that much talent but put enormous personality into that horn." How, I wonder, did Geller define talent?

The Coltrane album of the so-called "sheets of sound" era that blew my mind at the time (it still does) is a sideman date, Wilbur Harden's "Mainstream 1958" (Savoy). The relationship between the way Trane was playing then rhythmically and the glassy smooth, gliding, almost impossibly even feel of Louis Hayes' drumming was really something.

If harmonic interest is what you want, the first choice from that general group of players probably would be Lennie Niehaus. Hey, Andre Hodeir thought that, so it must be true. BTW, Niehaus (b. 1929) is still with us.

And I'm sawing away at that limb. BTW, Geller said in an interview somewhere that Pepper in his mid-to-late-'50s prime was no great shakes in his opinion, although I don't recall whether Geller also said that he himself was a much better player. Don't get me wrong, I like Geller, although his solos do seem rather same-y after a while; and when it comes to rhythmic variety, tonal flexibility, long-range logic of construction, you name it, prime Pepper was in another realm altogether. Also, BTW, check out if you can Gene Quill's solo on "I Feel Pretty" on Manny Albam's "West Side Story" album. Remarkably loose, wild, and fluid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Forrest "Soon, Helen's mother and stepfather turned the family's home into a brothel. Whew! 'Helen was born Helen Fogel in Atlantic City, New Jersey on April 12, 1917. Her parents, Louis and Rebecca Fogel, were Russian-born Jews. 'While she was still an infant, Helen's father died from influenza. Helen was raised by her mother, who often blamed her husband's death on the birth of Helen. She believed that God had taken her husband because she had wished so much for a baby girl.[1] Helen had three older brothers: Harry, Ed, and Sam. The family relocated to Brooklyn when Helen was in her early teenage years. Her mother married a house painter, a man that Helen disliked. Soon, Helen's mother and stepfather turned the family's home into a brothel.[1] At age 14, Helen was nearly raped by her stepfather. Helen defended herself with a kitchen knife, injuring him. Following this, she was permitted by her mother to live with her piano teacher, Honey Silverman, and her family.[1] While learning piano, Honey noticed Helen's singing ability and encouraged her to focus on singing instead. Anxious to find a career in singing, Helen dropped out of high school to pursue her dream.[1] ' And so forth. P.S. I have an album of Forrest mid-1940s airchecks on my I-Pod. Heart and soul, heart and soul.

"...plays a larger variety of jazz than does WDCB." You can say that again. Also, even within the rather narrow stylistic boundaries that WDCB favors, they're often playing stuff that's fairly lame. This is at once distressing and bewildering -- because within those boundaries a fair amount of lively music still can be found. Can't tell you the number of times I've turned on 'DCB in the car, been treated to several tracks in a row of musical tedium and then turned to sports radio for relief..

In the past the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has come fiercely to Gopnik's defense: http://www.mhpbooks.com/new-yorker-editor-praises-adam-gopnik-thinks-all-critics-bullshit/ Takeaway quote: ""The day any of these people write anything even remotely as fine and intelligent as Adam Gopnik will be a cold day in hell." As a friend commented: "Are there any grown-ups we can talk to?"

The revelation with which Gopnik leaves us: "A Beatles-Duke playlist, folded together, has a common quality (which took me by surprise, but shouldn't have) and that is excitement. The most obvious thing is the most easily overlooked, or mis-heard. The drummer drives the band. The performers sound exhilarated by the act of making music. Go from 'Please, Please Me' to 'Take the A Train,' and you hear the shared fervor of musicians not just making a new sound but listening to themselves as they do. It's the sound of self-discovery. That must be why American music became the soundtrack of self-emancipation, East and West alike.... Most people would rather swing than march, and would rather rock than live a regimented life. That was a very big lesson of the sad century just past. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. It can't.' BTW, who in the heck ever "overlooked or mis-heard" the fact that the music of Ellington and the Beatles (and that of Basie, and Armstrong, and Parker, and the Stones, and Aretha Franklin, and James Brown et al.) was exciting? Gopnik reminds of the guy in the Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner "2000-Year-Old-Man" routine who wakes up one morning and tells the tribe "Hey -- dere's ladies here."

Are you perhaps thinking of Alex Ross, also at The New Yorker?

I don't think that Adam Gopnik is a critic. Rather, like David Brooks (and Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell for that matter), Gopnik is more or less an agglomerator, notorious for bouncing off of books and "studies" by other people in fields where he himself has no particular knowledge and then attempting to put his own stamp on the resulting pile of faux contrarian b.s.