Larry Kart

I always thought of "Joey, Joey" as his signature tune. If the whole world didn't know that in the way the whole world associated Tony Bennett and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," why would it have? It's like Reich is saying that Frank wasn't as popular as he would have been if he had been more popular.

Baltimore-based Jarrett Gilgore: http://jarrettgilgore.blogspot.com/p/media.html

Bennett is on "the Ratpack side of things"? I've never heard the least bit of ring-a-ding-ding from him. The Bennett album for skeptics to hear IMO is this one, with Ruby Braff and George Barnes: http://www.amazon.com/Tony-Bennett-Sings-Rodgers-Songbook/dp/B0009IW8XU/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1381155106&sr=1-1&keywords=bennett+rodgers This performance in particular:

OK. I like both Dearie (much of the time) and Bennett (almost always) and don't think of either of them as vanilla.

Just curious -- what by you would not be "vanilla"? IMO, Frank is a lot less "vanilla" than, say, Mel Torme FWTW. But if the standard of non-vanilla-ness is, say, Bobby Blue Bland that would mean or be one thing, and if it's, say, Billy Eckstine that would mean or be another. And if it's, say, Mark Murphy, I'm looking for the exit.

No, there was a 2 LP set called The Third World that came out in 1975. Although...I see now that Roswell Rudd did those notes! But...Crouch did the liners to some album in that series...and I remember them being pretty good. Right -- I had that set myself. I also had (bless me) the three original BN LPs, including the two 10-inchers -- bought them about when they came out after I listened to them in a booth in my local record store, Paul's Recorded Music, and thought they were terrific. IIRC, the first track that really caught my young attention was "Shuffle Montgomery." As Roswell Rudd later said: "One of the greatest riff tunes ever dreamed up by anybody!"

Jim -- I'm pretty sure that the first real re-presentation of Nichols music was the Mosaic set of 1987, with Roswell Rudd's magnificent notes, plus lots of fascinating reminiscences from figures such as Patti Bown, Gil Melle, Steve Swallow, Sheila Jordan, Max Roach, etc. The BN set that Crouch wrote notes for came out ten years later, in 1997.

Redemption of sorts, perhaps. Before Crouch turned stooge, I recall him having some interesting things to say...his notes to the Herbie Nichols BN LP two-fer talked about the overtones of a drum kit, and I was like whoa...NOBODY talks about how drummers tune, and yes, that is of critical importance, and hey, thanks for bringing that up, what else have you got to say? And he was cool about the early-ish "loft" music, he got it, he heard it, he was not stupid. Loud, perhaps, but not stupid. Until he was, and then he got all kinds of stupid, and then I was like, really dude? REALLY? And it only got worse, right? The awfulness kept gaining momentum, and I'm not thinking, you know what you're doing, right? You know you're being a total ignowhormus, right? But you do have your redemption stashed away for play when you absolutely ultimately finally have no further down underneath you, right? Well, you do, don't you? Now, I've not started this book (still enjoying my quite leisurely stroll through Mojo Snake Minuet), but it sounds like, no, maybe not. Maybe it got lost at the cleaners. But still - who in the "jazz critical community" brings drum tunings to a conversation, not in a Max Roach "pitched" digression, but as a matter of timbre, resonance, and, yes, overtones that blend/compliment to the momentum of the music? Nobody I've known about. So...what a waste. What a self-imposed soul-suck. And ain't no ambulances for no self-imposed soul-sucks tonight. Don't know Crouch's notes for the BN Nichols set, but that point about drum overtones was eloquently made at some length (four paragraphs worth) by Nichols himself in his notes to "The Herbie Nichols Trio" (BN 1519), reproduced in the Mosaic set booklet. I would guess that whatever Crouch wrote was a paraphrase of what Nichols said. If so, one hopes that he acknowledged that Nichols was the source.

Fixed it.

Mark -- I'm sure it exists (I wrote about Frank a good deal), but if it's before 1985, that part of the Chicago Tribune archive is behind a pay wall. Otherwise: A review I wrote of Frank in 1987: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-12-10/news/8704010919_1_final-note-jazz-singing First of a three-part Marc Meyers interview with Frank (from it you can get to the other parts): http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/03/interview-frank-drone-part-1.html Frank scatting to/with his guitar on "Four": "Body and Soul":

Two tastes of Johnny Janis, in reverse chronological order. The pianist on the first track is Billy Wallace, who took Richie Powell's place with Max Roach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNxXfa3ko7s If you ever run across his album "Once in a Blue Moon," don't hesitate. He's in the same class as David Allyn.

Wonderful singer and a great guy. Fine guitarist, too -- never heard anyone who could scat sing in unison (and in harmony, too, when he felt like it) with his own interesting solo guitar lines the way Frank could. Not sure there's anything on record that captures how electrifying he could be in a club. In some ways (but only in musical terms, thanks be) he reminded me of another Frank -- Rosolino. The inventiveness just seemed to bubble up. Another fine Chicago singer-guitarist who came up in the '50s was Johnny Janis, who made a killer album, unreleased at the time (c. 1962), with Dodo Marmarosa, Ira Sullivan, bassist Jerry Friedman, and drummer Guy Viveros. Dodo's comping is superb. Janis eventually put out the album himself under the title "Jazz Up Your Life" (Starwell). Don't know if it's still available.

Also, on p. 353, a contribution from Wynton on Parker's use of the upper intervals of chords: "Louis Armstong, Coleman, Hawkins, Art Tatum and others [also] played on the upper intervals of chords. What Charlie Parker did has happened perhaps only once in Western music. After figuring out how to double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm, which no one before him had done, he heard his improvised melodies at high speed and was able to hear Tatumesque harmonies at that velocity on a single instrument! This can be heard in Chopin and Liszt, but they are considered light composers. Bird aspired to make melody on a heavyweight level....." "...double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm" -- what "shuffle rhythm"? I thought that shuffle rhythm was the compulsive doubled-up but arguably mechanical time feel popularized by the Jan Savitt band, not anything that had to do with Charlie Parker: And who the heck considers Chopin and Liszt to be "light composers"?

Another effusion: "Eldridge's playing combined ease with urgency, lending the motion of his lines a fresh, shimmering energy. His work echoed the industrial confidence of the culture, the disdain for heights that led to the skyscrapers, the energy that laid the railroad tracks, that dug the subways, that rolled car after car off the assembly lines, that lit the American night." BTW, "disdain for heights"? The skyscrapers arose from an aesthetic and economically driven taste FOR tall buildings. I think what Crouch meant by "disdain for heights" was a relative lack of fear of heights on the part of the iron workers who actually built those buildings, but writers do need to be careful when they say X and it can readily be taken as Y.

You made that up, didn't you. I'm not nearly that inventive.

As I said before, I especially like the extensive interview material with Parker’s first wife Rebecca Ruffin, though I think it amounts more to an interesting, touching portrait of her than of the young Charlie Parker. And some of the other interviews are nice, though again I don’t recall any of the interview subjects saying anything about Parker that one didn’t already know. Otherwise the book strikes me as heavily padded, a pile of sludge -- full of repetitive, windy disquisitions about the Machine Age and such, some of them hardly to be believed, and oodles of what strikes me as worked-up atmosphere (for examples of both, see the highly selective list below -- I could have typed out entire pages). (p. 45): “They [Parker and his childhood acquaintances] played mumblety-peg; they rolled hoops removed from the wheels of old wagons; they shot marbles; they rode sleds in the winter. There were railroad tracks, a box factory, and coal yards in walking distance, which allowed for playing in boxcars, climbing in the box factory’s bins, and getting filthy with coal dust. But their bib overalls were strong enough to stand up to the pressure of boys out for squealing joy.” That last sentence is semi-goofy, no? p. 61: “First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulled them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust.” Speaking of kicking up dust. Also, why “purported to” (i.e. “professed,” “be intended to seem”) instead of just “soothed” etc.? As for the soaked bloomers of those “listening girls,” YMMV. p. 67: “Everybody was looking for fun, for a vacation from Depressions conditions, for a thrill and a laugh. Many went in search of distractions -- tranquilizer or stimulants, spiritual or chemical -- until the country seemed slowly to become dependent on them. Especially so when faced with unpleasant realities, such as feature films, cartoons, and other entertainments that relied on the century-old tenets of minstrelsy as away to tell the truth and create laughter at the same time.” This passage is quite tangled up IMO. That is, “unpleasant realities, such as” is followed by “feature films, cartoons, and other entertainments that relied on the century-old tenets of minstrelsy” etc., but those things are not in apposition to “unpleasant realities,” as the structure of the sentence dictates, but are some of the “distractions” referred to in the previous sentence. Or am I missing something? p.147: “For Charlie Parker, confronting Simpson’s death [Robert Simpson, a close childhood friend] was like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades.” Oh, those razor blades again. p. 151: “Basie’s music traced the roller-coaster fate of the human heart: rising, high, falling low, singing, joking, sobbing, reminiscing, dreaming, cursing, bragging, praying. Everything was IN THERE.” (Italics in original for “in there.”) p. 187: [buster Smith] had the sound of the Southwest in his quick speech, a swift way of talking that almost duplicated the zip of his saxophone playing, and that was punctuated by the gallows wit and Olympian laughter so often heard from those Negroes closest to the tragi-comic sensibility of the culture, a perfect human mirror of the democratic soul of American life.” p. 189: “You had to be able [to become successful as a musician] to soothe the people or insinuate them into reverie; you had to be able to make them rise up, stomp, kick, spin, and caress; you had to remind them that the sandpaper facts of human life could be smoothed over if met in the close quarters of courtship or celebration, where the sun going down at the arrival of evening promised recognition of something far inside the soul and right under the skin.” Whew. Also, while “sandpaper facts” are obviously rough, isn’t it careless to use that phrase when you say in the next breath that those sandpaper facts “could be smoothed over”?After all, sandpaper is commonly used to make things smoother. p. 196-7: Too long to quote, but there’s an oddly obtuse passage about arranging, and the contrast between New Orleans polyphony and the stock band arrangements that Buster Smith encountered in the ‘20s. E.g.: “In these professional arrangments [i.e. the stock arrangements that Buster Smith studied], the horns were not only playing different lines they were also playing different notes.” Uh-huh. p. 199: One of several passages quoted from Ralph Ellison about Southwestern jazz. Ellison is clearly one of Crouch’s models, but what a difference there is. (From an unnumbered page, a passage that begins on the second page of the italicized intro to Part IV, as Parker was riding the rails to Chicago: “These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.” Perhaps my favorite paragraph in the book. Holy chow mein! The bathos is remarkable. How all that I’ve quoted above will strike others, I can’t say. To me, again, it’s a pile of sludge.

Having finished the book the other day, I've got a good deal to say, but I need time to type it all up. Lots of passages that need to be quoted at length, so it seems to me.

So far (p.99) my reaction is about the same as that of Face of the Bass -- "kind of standard and predictable," plus a few oddities of writing by my perhaps picky standards, and no social historical views/insights with which I, for one, am unfamiliar. The contrast with the passages quoted from Ralph Ellison ... to my mind, there's quite a gulf there. The extensive interview material with Parker's adolescent girlfriend and eventual first wife Rebecca Ruffin is nice but so far doesn't tell me anything that links up in some pointed way with the Parker to come. She might be almost any woman recalling an intense youthful infatuation. Onwards...

Have a great time. You two deserve it. Signed, God

Have started the book; nothing awful so far (p. 45). Pluses are some colorful interview material with Jay McShann Orchestra veterans, minuses are some of Crouch's "Hey, Ma -- I'm writing!" touches, but to this point he seems to be staying this side of self-indulgence for the most part. Other than the interview material, though, I don't recall encountering anything that I didn't already know. Onwards...

I have four albums with Iyer -- two as a leader or co-leader, two as a sideman with Rudresh Mahanthappa -- and Allen may be pleased to know that at times Iyer reminds me of Brubeck. OTOH, I don't hear amateurishness, just conceptual choices/emphases that after a while don't quite work for me -- or, better, don't do enough work over the course of a particular piece but instead more or less state and restate what I've already heard. In that general vein --- combining jazz elements with elements from the subcontinent, if that is an accurate way to put it -- I prefer the work of Boulder, Co.-based altoist-composer Aakash Mittal, who I believe has studied with Mahanthappa and also is a friend of his. Mittal and his bandmates are more inclined to play with and off of the fairly elaborate rhythmic and melodic patterns they set up. The "clave" (to mix musics) is there and is felt, but it's not all that one hears. Some Mittal info and clips: http://www.aakashmittal.com/live/ I heard him live in Chicago about two months ago with his regular quartet and trumpeter Russ Johnson and was impressed. His most recent album "Ocean," featuring the same material from that gig but with Ron Miles on trumpet, is very good IMO.

We're not disagreeing; we're in agreement here, no? Yes, Fats is highly recognizable, and that's because in part "he put a good deal of individual/personal spice into his music." In any case, I was responding to your "So what about Fats Domino?" Seems I misunderstood what you meant by that, but then what did you mean by it? I thought you meant that Fats's music, while obviously of value, operated in ways that had little or nothing to do what the ways of making music I was talking about. Sure, there are differences, because Fats' music is essentially functional/social and not made for contemplation, so to speak, but to my mind its quality and individuality tell me that it was fueled to a considerable degree by a personal vision. No, It's I who misunderstood you, Larry. I thought you were saying that he didn't. Missed the question mark. Fats' work is obviously grounded in previous New Orleans music - most of which is as functional/social as Fats' is - but is obviously different from his predecessors and his successors, which to me makes him a (charming and joyful) part of a continuing movement forward, neither conservative nor radical. MG Agreed. I caught Fats once or twice in a Chicago-area supper club in a hotel near O'Hare Airport. He tore it up.

We're not disagreeing; we're in agreement here, no? Yes, Fats is highly recognizable, and that's because in part "he put a good deal of individual/personal spice into his music." In any case, I was responding to your "So what about Fats Domino?" Seems I misunderstood what you meant by that, but then what did you mean by it? I thought you meant that Fats's music, while obviously of value, operated in ways that had little or nothing to do what the ways of making music I was talking about. Sure, there are differences, because Fats' music is essentially functional/social and not made for contemplation, so to speak, but to my mind its quality and individuality tell me that it was fueled to a considerable degree by a personal vision.

Fats didn't put a good deal of individual/personal spice into his music? I thought that, and of course his talent, was why his music was memorable.

For me, the question, or the issue, aside from sheer talent or lack of same, is the composer's attitude toward his material. Take, for one example, Ravel, who certainly had very strong feelings/ideas/what have you about prior musical/social epochs and specific musical events from the past but who transmuted them into striking, highly individual works (e.g. Le Tombeau de Couperin, La Valse). The same might be said, up to a point, about Richard Strauss, though I'm less temperamentally attuned to the ways his undoubtedly major compositional skills/gifts trafficked with aspects of the musical/social past from "Rosenkavalier" on. Not that it's determinative in itself, or can be detected with infallible accuracy, but things get bothersome for me in this general area when I feel that a composer has a semi-predetermined notion of "What audiences already like' and/or "What, based on what audiences have liked in the past, they are likely to like in the future" and then proceeds to try to give that to audiences anew (or "anew") by re-combining elements of those, so to speak, audience-tested, audience-verified musical gestures. Here, by contrast, a figure like Robert Simpson comes to mind, often immersed in various aspects of the musical past but as inner-directed (and to my mind, often inspired) a composer as one could imagine. But when Simpson was immersed in Beethoven, for example, it was I think the workings of Beethoven's music, not that music's popularity or social prestige, that in part drove him to create what he then created.