Larry Kart

Listening to this album: Ben Webster -- Live in Hannover from Dec. 1972, less than a year before Webster's death, it suddenly occurred to me that there is a definite kinship -- in explosiveness of accents, abrupt whisper-to-a-shout dynamic shifts, airiness and graininess of timbre, and even, so it seems to me, some favorite melodic shapes -- between Webster and Pee Wee Russell. BTW, Peterson is in quite energetic form here, NHOP is excellent, and drummer Tony Inzalaco is an asset.

Loren Schoenberg put this up on Facebook tonight -- some fine playing here:

I agree with what Jim says and add: Stop this stuff or this thread almost certainly will be closed. Further, no matter how strongly one feels about these matters (or any matter), please take a step back and ask whether what one wants to say in one's next post adds anything to what one has said in previous posts. Even if overt name-calling is not involved, insistent repetition of the same points typically leads to flare ups and then to flames.

Interesting IMO thoughts from Joseph Kerman's book "Concerto Conversations" (1999): After talking about the supposed decline and fall of classical music -- orchestras and record labels tanking etc. -- he writes of the latter" "Let it not be forgotten ... that the important thing about music on records is that CDs are played, not that CDs are purchased -- consumption, not commodification. The Schwann Catalogue will doubtless shrink considerably, or shrink dramatically, and indeed it's likely that listening in the future will take place from a limitless online digital stockpile. "This strikes many older persons as very chilly, to say nothing of music professionals of all ages. Music mechanically reproduced is music without aura, in Walter Benjamin's endlessly repeated formula, an egregious casualty of Adorno's 'Regression of hearing.' Well, we are living in our world, not the world of Benjamin and Adorno. By now, several generations after the dissemination of sound recording, now a hundred years old, the conditions for music have -- changed. This change is comparable, I have argued, to another paradigm shift that happened or began to happen about a thousand years earlier in the history of Western music: the introduction of musical notation, the writing down of music. Musical notation made possible, as generation followed generation, first organum, then conductus, then motet and mass, madrigal and opera, symphony and concerto. "And certainly this was not accomplished without a 'regression of hearing.' As time went on, musicians found themselves singing from a book, singing by sight, not by ear -- singing something unknown to them and alien and transitory. This was disturbingly unlike the interiorizing of melodies that singers had communally learned by heart as choirboys, and summoned up repeatedly, yearly or daily, from a huge repertory of memorized ancient song. More troubling yet, the new music was no longer sung by the entire monastic community of Christendom. It was cultivated by a new literate elite increasingly associated with secular institutions. An incalculable loss of aura, a calculable gain in musical repertory.... "The paradigmatic figure in current music is not the unlettered clerical singer of Gregorian chant, nor the piano student sight-reading a new score, nor the affluent symphony subscriber, but the lone aficionado of historic recordings and surround sound. He or she has suffered another incalculable loss of aura, with again a calculable gain in repertory. As I think back on my former argument, I would add that today's solitary listening seems a return to or, rather, an apotheosis of the Romantic ideal of self-consciousness modeled in music... -- that absorption of music-in-itself, absolute music, that is so regretted by revisionist musicologists, regretted even more than the persistence of the classical music canon. History produces these ironic regressions. "Music -- classical music -- will survive under conditions more exiguous than Benjamin and Adorno imagined. Concertos will be heard when they are not played and not seen, or seldom played, or never played -- but the artists who once did play them will live on because of recorded sound.... Music will survive because it is needed and there is nothing to replace it. As Frank Kermode claimed years ago for literary fictions, music answers to 'a need to speak humanly of a life's importance in relation to time, a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and an end.'"

I second that. Excellent. Fine warm singer.

http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Ovcacikova-Hlobilova-Wysoczanska-Chalabala/dp/B0007VY5JE/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1385397998&sr=1-3&keywords=rusalka+chalabala A magical performance. Bought it (original LPs) on Friday at an estate sale. There seem to be a lot of those these days near where I live. I find them to be rather creepy but also hard to resist -- this ever since I stopped by one this summer and bought two fantastic Tim Horton coffee mugs: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Tim-Hortons-Restaurant-Mug-Gold-and-Cream-No-number-on-bottom-EUC-/221321911388?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3387d05c5c

The performance you preferred took the Gold.

I deleted them because after I'd deleted the other posts there was nothing left for your posts to refer to, or so it seemed to me. If you were saying that this whole thread, minus the name-calling, is inherently troublesome/dangerous, I don't agree -- but again, with the name-calling posts removed, I think that you're sincere concern would have seemed a bit odd, as in "What is he referring to?" If I've stepped on your toes by doing what I did, I apologize. You certainly did nothing wrong; it just seemed to me that we should remove all traces of this particular episode and try to move on.

If by you "controlled by people who read the Torah" is an "ordinary mannerism," you must hang out in some interesting places. 'ordinary mannerism' is obviously a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes, not the racism inherent in the WORDS attributed to them (Marsalis/Crouch). As in -mannerism - in the manner of - or perhaps even an actual Jazz Mannerism as a specific movement, which it essentially was/is. Funny how this board is peppered with people who vehemently respond to the heightened racist tones of Black musicians and writers who transgress the 'brotherhood of man', when assertively claiming the music for their own or highlighting the unequal or exploitative practices of the past (and their current modes of White-out), yet fail to register that their own assertions or support for the reverse racism - or it's all a part of a whole' whinging of a bunch of peripheral self centred egotists are just as 'racially' vile as the shit they are outraged by. "'ordinary mannerism' is obviously a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes, not the racism inherent in the WORDS attributed to them (Marsalis/Crouch). "As in -mannerism - in the manner of - or perhaps even an actual Jazz Mannerism as a specific movement, which it essentially was/is." Sorry -- but it sure wasn't obvious to me that "ordinary Mannerism" was "a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes" rather than to the relative ordinariness among black musicians and the black community as a whole of anger against white society. In any case, though, do you mean something like "Marsalis' music is traditionally inclined in manner, i.e. in style"? I'm genuinely at a loss here. Also, what then are you referring to by "the greater truth [that Marsalis and Crouch] express," which is also a "universal Black truth"? I thought that you meant "the greater truth they express" and the "universal Black truth" to refer to anger against white oppressors. No? Well obviously the Marsalis movement was a way to make In The Tradition a 'classical' or canonical music. The rise of Jazz education faculties across the world has aided that. Surely you're familiar with 'mannered' or 'mannerist' - when an artistic expression attempts to replicate the formal characteristics of a previous moment but fails to grasp its essence. So maybe 'In The Manner of" as opposed to in the tradition. Failing to grasp the essence may not be a failure to grasp the language - just a difference in time and place. I like the fact that Marsalis and co claimed the music back as a Black Classical Music even if I never really want to listen to their outputs. With regard to universal Black and Indigenous truth, well the words Marsalis uses in the highlighted paragraphs are all fairly matter of fact to anyone that has a politicised identity. Obviously the specifics of his anti-semiticism are particular to an American or New York context. It seems to me, from reading the Marsalis quotes, that he is conflating the White Supremacy of the US fathers, with the modern equivalent concerning Jazz and Jewish people controlling the production, distribution and economy of Black Music. And then he equates this with the 'ever increasing decline of the musics negroidery and purpose'. And he also says that because Jews were outsiders and marginalised people in Europe, they were able to come to America and exploit an even more marginalised and dehumanised peoples. When we talk about some aspects of universal truths, this is equivalent to an Australian Indigenous reality, because essentially the most marginalised and mistreated people of English speaking Europe (convicts and low class 'adventure capitalists'), came here and stole, exploited and controlled Aboriginal people and lands. Because Aboriginal people were considered nothing more than savages and apes, even the convicts were re-invested with a degree of 'culture'. It seems that this 'conflating' of White Supremacy and 20thC Jewish exploitation of Black communities seems to be a common denominator amongst Black Intellectuals across the board, from Politics to Culture. Are there any Black intellectuals that write specifically about the causes and symptoms of this? Has Tavis Smiley and Cornell West ever done a show about this? Democracy Now? I remember Eddie Murphy taking the piss out of Jesse Jackson! Don't Let Me Down Hymie Town! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNz5XnvZHhk Thanks, Freelancer -- now I understand what you meant.

Just deleted a batch of name-calling/personal attacks on this thread, including responses to name-calling that may not be quite name-calling but quote/refer to the original name-calling. You know who you are and what you're doing. Stop.

Talk about flexibility:

The Delmore Brothers

Thanks for the tip.

Lost my wife of 36 years in 2007, no hope of any remedy from the time of diagnosis in 1998. Took me about three years to recover, if that's the right word. As vocalist Jackie Cain said of the death of her 23-year-old daughter in a car crash, "You never get over it; you get past it." Take care of yourself.

The Hi-Los singing Clare Fischer compositions and arrangements from the 1958 album "The Hi-Lo's and All That Jazz" with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette. Solos by Herb Geller, Jack Sheldon, Bill Perkins, and Bob Enevoldson: Herbie Hancock's tribute to Fischer: http://jazztimes.com/articles/76522-herbie-hancock-remembers-clare-fischer

Swan Silvertones Dig the passage that begins at about 1:12.

On a selective basis, and as different as they are, I like Richter and Pollini.

Love Irene Kral. Dig her here on "Forgetful' (the nutty/knotty song is by the nutty/knotty George Handy -- first sung by the great David Allyn with Boyd Raeburn): The above is a version from the late 1950s (Allyn with Johnny Mandel, I think). As for Ann Burton's Dutch-accented English, it just tickles me -- perhaps a la Marlene Dietrich's German accent. I dig Van Dyke on "It Never Entered My Mind," but his in-your-face funky licks on "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" don't seem to me to be doing Burton any favors.

I like this one better... My mom had this album. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj_nMmOTb_E A gem, though I wish the pianist were less obtrusive. There's a lot of fine Burton out there.

Anita Gravine (great Mike Abene chart on "Road to Morocco," impressive tenor solo by Frank Vicari):

:tup OTOH -- sorry Phil -- I don't get Kristen Slipp at all.

Sue Raney Sadly no longer with us, but Ann Burton (dig that Dutch accent): Also no longer with us, Teri Thornton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSXnP3NXnI

If by you "controlled by people who read the Torah" is an "ordinary mannerism," you must hang out in some interesting places. 'ordinary mannerism' is obviously a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes, not the racism inherent in the WORDS attributed to them (Marsalis/Crouch). As in -mannerism - in the manner of - or perhaps even an actual Jazz Mannerism as a specific movement, which it essentially was/is. Funny how this board is peppered with people who vehemently respond to the heightened racist tones of Black musicians and writers who transgress the 'brotherhood of man', when assertively claiming the music for their own or highlighting the unequal or exploitative practices of the past (and their current modes of White-out), yet fail to register that their own assertions or support for the reverse racism - or it's all a part of a whole' whinging of a bunch of peripheral self centred egotists are just as 'racially' vile as the shit they are outraged by. "'ordinary mannerism' is obviously a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes, not the racism inherent in the WORDS attributed to them (Marsalis/Crouch). "As in -mannerism - in the manner of - or perhaps even an actual Jazz Mannerism as a specific movement, which it essentially was/is." Sorry -- but it sure wasn't obvious to me that "ordinary Mannerism" was "a reference to the MUSIC Marsalis makes" rather than to the relative ordinariness among black musicians and the black community as a whole of anger against white society. In any case, though, do you mean something like "Marsalis' music is traditionally inclined in manner, i.e. in style"? I'm genuinely at a loss here. Also, what then are you referring to by "the greater truth [that Marsalis and Crouch] express," which is also a "universal Black truth"? I thought that you meant "the greater truth they express" and the "universal Black truth" to refer to anger against white oppressors. No?

If Wynton had said "Blacks have been held back by people, because the music business is controlled by money-grubbing Jews," that statement, ugly as it is, would have been an "ordinary" expression in many quarters. (BTW, what's with that distancing term "mannerism"? Makes it sound like something that's more or less beyond or below control -- like , "Hey, it's just a mannerism.") In any case, with "controlled by people who read the Torah," one enters a whole new world IMO, for several reasons. First, while "money-grubbing Jews" or the like certainly implies that all Jews are that way, it could be taken to mean that it's only Jews of that sort -- perhaps they are even taught to be that way and thus are not expressing their innate inner nature? -- who are the problem. Again, ugly enough. But "controlled by people who read the Torah" links the supposed vileness of the Jews with their reading of the religion's sacred book, which is Judaism's regular essential act. It is thus IMO not another ordinary or familiar complaint or expression of anger against Jews but a novel (at least in my fairly extensive experience) act of would-be defilement. It says, in effect, that what is sacred to the Jews is inseparable from (even the source of?) what is worst in them. I'm hard-pressed to think of an equivalent act of defilement that could be aimed at another religion. Perhaps if the supposed blanket bad guys were Catholics, some statement about the Virgin Mary that I leave to your imagination.

If by you "controlled by people who read the Torah" is an "ordinary mannerism," you must hang out in some interesting places.