Larry Kart

They're great as done by Mosaic but didn't have quite the same impact on me as they did when I encountered most of that material in those two old Columbia LP boxes.

Looks like Mr. Lobbyman ("I just wanted to share it with you") might be connected with this store. See his post re: a likely Tommy Flanagan bootleg.

Sorry -- but again this looks like a bootleg; see forum rule 7. Thus I'm removing the link in the first post.

Source for Schoenberg's C Major quote. Dika Newlin was there, I believe: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/832371?uid=3739656&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102678488113

Don't know the facts about Hersch's supposedly extremely wealthy family background (though the Do the Math interview has him playing on some expensive pianos as a boy), but as for him never having "had to work a day in his life," fact is he has quite literally worked a great deal over the years, i.e. been paid for playing music in public for people that AFAIK were not being paid off by Hersch in return for hiring him. Is your point then that, as someone who supposedly came from a very wealthy background, he should have played all those gigs for free? Also, the account of Hersch's life circumstances that he gives in passing in that interview hardly suggests that as an adult he has been living a life of great material ease, although I suppose he could have been playing things close to the vest financially in order to preserve the size of his supposed golden nest egg. But again, what do you want him to have done? Not play professionally at all? Further, if one feels as I do that Hersch on a good day is an interesting player, why should his supposed affluence make one think less of him as musician?

Glad you enjoy it.

Herbie Nichols set would be a strong contender, for the music of course and also for Roswell Rudd's epic liner notes. Konitz-Tristano-Marsh set. I like those liner notes, too. The Cecil Taylor set. Something of a guilty pleasure, the Shorty Rogers set.

Grant Green's "I Want To Hold Your Hand," with Mobley, Larry Young, and Elvin Jones.

What Paul said makes sense to me, especially "If you're looking to pick up a bootleg, it's simple enough to look elsewhere." Why should we have to spend time here being Solomonic about such matters? OTOH, yesterday I saw a great video that showed how you can balance ten nails on the head of a nail that's been hammered into a board. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/500585/nail_magic_trick_balance_10_nails_on_1_nail_head/

Sorry, but the above post would seem to be counter to forum rule 7: We do not allow sharing, trading, or linking copyrighted material that is being offered illegally, including bootlegs.

Excellent piece, John.

I like these two: http://www.allmusic.com/album/mcgann-mcgann-mw0000245135 http://www.allmusic.com/album/bundeena-mw0000419140

Seems about the right age for someone who heard Ornette and others of that vintage and before with sufficient freshness and was able to build that into his own powerful, personal music. You must understand I am surprised by my age too. Me by mine too, but I'm being forced by reality to get over that.

Seems about the right age for someone who heard Ornette and others of that vintage and before with sufficient freshness and was able to build that into his own powerful, personal music.

Comparing Priestley to Russell is grossly unfair on Priestley, and ignorant about the extent of Russell's fabrications (he's the main responsible for the Massey Hall legend, as I explained in my blog). What Brian did is to compile all solid biographical information available on Bird with some tidbits of his own, and added a very clear explanation of the music. IMHO it's a very good introduction to Bird. With two new biographies coming out shortly, Priestley's book can be found for very little cash. F "Comparing Priestley to Russell is grossly unfair on Priestley..." That's what I meant when I referred to Russell's "outright fabulations."

http://www.amazon.com/Cry-Lasha/dp/B00005OR8T/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1379428317&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=prince+lahsa

"Folk Songs for Far Out Folk" arrived today and so far is just as impressive as the tracks from it that I checked out on YouTube. Whatever "Third Stream Music" was in theory, in practice Katz nailed it in an intense and quite individual manner -- not a blending of this and that but something genuine and new. One question, though. "Folk Songs" is strikingly well-recorded, but the very full booklet of notes doesn't say who the original recording engineer was, though it credits the guy who remastered the material, Gary Hobish. Anyone know who the original engineer was?

The ability to "play a note themselves" didn't necessarily have much to do with it. Plenty of guys of that vintage who could play had similarly blinkered opinions, and plenty of writers who can't play have broad tastes and acute things to say about the music. One choice example of blinkered musicians on musicians are the blindfold test comments over the years on Pee Wee Russell. The undeniably talented reedman Dick Johnson, for one, chosen by Artie Shaw to lead his band of the mid-1980s, excoriated Russell as a ludicrous incompetent.

Mahones is in particularly fine form on Booker Ervin's (previously mentioned) "The Blues Book" and "Groovin' High." He has his own "tippin' light" thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfRQI2NTN8Y

It all comes down to taste, but I'm confident I would not have preferred Alabama Concerto with Coleman/Cherry. Not sure I would have either, given the success of the recording we have, but am curious about what Coleman and Cherry's response to that material would have been. All academic, though, because Ornette almost certainly wouldn't have been able to read/play those scores as written (i.e. working from Brooks' annotation), and there wouldn't have been time for Brooks to convey all those details to Ornette by ear, as Mingus famously did with members of his ensembles on occasion. Not that Ornettte was incapable of responding to/handling complex material (e.g that Gunther Schuller chamber work, "Abstraction" I think it was, that he recorded for Atlantic), but the length and level of detail in "Alabama Concerto" is a different thing.

Check will be in the mail today or tomorrow. You have no idea, or maybe you do, how important in a very broad sense this/your forum is to the well-being of many of us.

Ordered Katz's "Folk Songs etc." Brooks' "Folk Jazz U.S.A." has some fine solo work from the horns (Zoot Sims on alto, Al Cohn on baritone, Nick Travis trumpet), but I too prefer "Alabama Concerto," which is a pretty amazing job of writing/assemblage by Brooks and uses (for want of a better term) "hipper" material. The work of Cannonball, Art Farmer, Barry Galbraith, and Milt Hinton, is close to all one could wish for, though one wonders what the album would have been like if Ornette could have handled Brooks' score and had taken the place of Cannonball (and with Cherry in for Farmer).

Listening to Mate'ka" from "Folk Songs for Far Out Folk" on Spotify and am very impressed. Helluva of a committed performance by the top-level LA studio players Katz assembled. Must get this one.

Larry Did you read the Carl Woideck book on Parker? Yes. I recall feeling that it was solid but not quite as much so as the Priestley book. In particular, and I'm relying on imperfect memory here, Woideck, who certainly knows what's afoot musically, has the problem of a good many such writers (on jazz or any music) of essentially pointing to/explaining -- in musical notation and in words that more or less paraphrase what's notated -- things that one can already hear, and then he pretty much stops at the point, as though the job were done. Priestley by contrast, at his best, succeeds at/makes a good attempt at detecting underlying principles that are at work and their possible implications as well. I guess what I'm saying is that Woideck is more or less a musicologist, and Priestley is a musically well-versed critic. Not my favorite critic -- among those would be Jack Cooke, Terry Martin, John Litweiler, the late Michael James, and the professionally irascible Max Harrison on one of his good days, but Priestley has some of the virtues (e.g. the understanding that one is running alongside a living art that, in Val Wilmer's phrase, is "as important as your life") of the old Jazz Monthly crowd -- to which he and the others I've mentioned (except for Litweiler) all belonged at one time or another.