Larry Kart

You can check it out in Spotify, if you have access to it. Try the Symphony.

at Berkshire Record Outlet: http://www2.broinc.com/search.php?row=0&brocode=&stocknum=&submit=Find+Item&text=LA+PERI+fournet+netherlands&filter=all And Dukas' music is darn hard to get right.

Speaking as a former journalist, that's the best novel, maybe the best book period, about journalism I know. Sad, touching, hilarious. Every character in that book is damn close to a person I know or knew.

Lotsa rain.

Don't know if anyone has much tolerance for Cleo Laine, but figuring why the hell not? I picked up this 1994 album at a library sale today for $1: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000003FVO and so far am very impressed by the charts -- by Dankworth and in one striking instance, by Stan Tracey -- and also by the performance of the Mercer-led Ellington orchestra.

Last night Brötzmann/Adasiewicz/Drake at The Hideout were very fine. Brötzmann on alto, metal clarinet, and his taragot-like regular clarinet was, as usual, strong like bull; Drake was boldly and aptly/compositionally responsive, as was Adasiewicz. Only complaint, which could be made of many venues -- in the 40-odd minutes after the audience was seated and before the band played, one was subjected to pop music (albeit arguably good pop music) at an ear-splitting volume that made conversation impossible and literally made one's head hurt. As a friend said, "First time I ever looked forward to hearing Brötzmann as a sonic relief." Tonight: 9:00PM at Elastic, 2830 N Milwaukee, 2nd Fl, 773.772.3616 ($8) John Niekrasz Solo Percussion James Falzone, Nick Mazzarella, John Niekrasz

Years ago, maybe in the late 1970s, I heard McPherson at a Sunday afternoon jam session in San Diego, where I believe he was living at the time. What he played that day was not as Parker-like as usual and very beautiful. Perhaps he was stimulated by the presence of another San Diego-area altoist whose name I can't recall -- he had an Italian-American name, was about the same age as McPherson, had worked for years in Vegas show bands, and sounded like a descendent of Joe Maini with latter-day Trane-ish trimmings. Bought a privately produced album that guy had on sale, but if I still have it, I don't know where it is on the shelves because I don't recall his name. In any case, he and McPherson certainly stimulated each other to give of their best. Lots of fun for me, too. In town to interview Sammy Davis Jr., I didn't expect to find music this good in San Diego at all, let alone on a Sunday afternoon.

A bemused review I wrote of a 1982 Jarrett solo concert: KEITH JARRETT If the “human potential” movement (est, Scientology, and all the rest) develops a need for liturgical music, Keith Jarrett should be its Bach. Seated at the piano Saturday night at Orchestra Hall, Jarrett celebrated the self (not his own self as much as the self) with a neo-religious ecstasy that was both impressive and ... I was about to say appalling, but let’s leave it at “impressive” for the moment, and I’ll fill in the blank later on. Jarrett’s concerts typically consist of two completely improvised solo-piano ruminations, which on Saturday amounted to about seventy minutes of music, separated by an intermission. He began with (and often returned to) a rumbling bass pattern that sounded as though it had been abstracted from a spiritual. Transformed into a soft, graceful stomp, this motif traveled in the direction of gospel music (a short trip, to be sure) before branching off in two different directions--first a hint of bluegrass twang and then a solemn, deeply chorded hymn that resolved with a nutlike sweetness. At this point, the ten-minute mark or thereabouts, Jarrett stopped, bothered by some coughs from the audience. Still lingering in the air, that sweet cadence may have been the goal of Jarrett’s journey, as a friend later remarked; but now the pianist had to take a long detour in order to find it again. And this side trip was, for me, the most fascinating part of the concert. Picking up the hymn-tune feel again, Jarrett swiftly expanded it into a piano version of a Bach organ chorale. Increasingly chromatic and increasingly intense, this passage began to acquire some of the choked eroticism of Cèsar Franck, with the erotic aura highlighted by Jarrett’s passionate groans and moans, not to mention his standing pelvic thrusts at the keyboard. One already knew that extreme chromaticism and the physical side of romance have been closely associated since the days of Wagner’s Tristan. But as Jarrett pushed his musical odyssey toward early Schoenberg, it seemed he was out to give the audience a kind of Tubby the Tuba tour of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classical music. What made this both impressive and (I’ll fill in the blank now) weird, was that the sounds Jarrett produced apparently were directed at himself as much as at the audience. A pianist of great technical expertise, Jarrett is also, in some massively naïve way, his own audience--a man determined to forget all that he knows of the musical past each time he sits down at the keyboard, yet a man who, in the act of improvisation, tries to remember as much of that past as he can. Of course this leaves the rest of the audience at the mercy of Jarrett’s wayward memory, with our kicks depending on whether the things he “discovers” are, on any given night, discoveries for us, too. So if his music is to have its proper effect, it calls for an audience as naïve as he is--either that or an, audience that can will itself into naïveté, as Jarrett seems to do. In either case, a kind of romantic tampering with the self is the goal--an attempt to wipe the mind clean and then discover, with an innocent, newborn bliss, a “you” that’s better than the one you forgot.

Uther Pendragon -- you heard it here first.

Have a small bone to pick with Koester about his liner notes to one of the two recent Art Hodes sets of mostly unissued material that he acquired from Euphonic Sounds, "Art Hodes: Tribute To the Greats." The music is terrific and the the sound is, too, but Bob doesn't mention in the very general notes when the music was recorded (it is mentioned on the back of the disc, 1976 and '78) or where. Also, stating that Hodes "collected clarinetists" and "found a place for more obscure artists," Koester adds, "Would we remember clarinetists Bujie Centobie and Rod Cless ... if it werent for Art?" Don't know about Centobie, but Cless was a fairly prominent player who made more than a few recordings, e.g. with Muggsy Spanier's Ragtimers on RCA-Bluebird. Hey, Bob, that was a famous band of its kind and on a major label, and those were celebrated sides.

IMO, Kisor and Gisbert are rather faceless as soloists -- technically assured, stalwart big-band section guys who can nicely fill a solo role within a story-telling chart that's built around them (as Gisbert does, for example, on Anita Brown's "The Lighthouse" from her fine album "23 East") but who are again rather faceless IMO when they're leaders or sidemen in a "blowing" framework. Just don't hear much individual personality from either of them. They strike me as latter-day versions of, say, Nick Travis, and Travis actually did have his own thing pretty much.

Yes to Swana, though as with Wendholt I haven't heard him for a while.

Brötzmann/Adasiewicz/Drake on Wednesday at The Hideout.

Latter-day Paul Plummer, until he had to stop playing (teeth problems IIRC) was excellent and quite individual. Kiger's work with the Blue Wisp Big Band of Cincinnati was excellent, too.

Does "the *great* Billy Drummond" mean that he is great or that Drummond himself thinks or proclaims that he is or something like that? I've always liked his playing.

I've liked some Hargrove -- he has spunk and energy -- but have problems with his (at times) nanny-goat tone and the way some his lines kind of wander or peter out. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a "young lions" (so to speak) trumpet player who knocks me out, though I've heard a fair amount of OK or better work from Blanchard, Roney (though they both have an "under glass dome" quality), Nicholas Payton, Jeremy Pelt et al. OTOH, they all so far seem to be more or less diminished offshoots of their various models. More impressive and above all individual are IMO Russ Johnson, cornetist Josh Berman, and in a more abstract vein Jacob Wick. In that vein, too, Evans can be stunning, but he also, the one time I heard him in person, kind of wore me out after a while -- a bit too "samey." Also, don't forget our sometime Organissimo mate, the lyrical Phil Grenadier. Alex Sipiagin has his moments. Have been impressed in the past by Scott Wendholt but haven't heard anything by him in a good while. No doubt I'm forgetting a lot of players, but it's less than an hour since I woke up.

That's weird because I do recall that image and certainly recall Dan's remark, which was made to me and struck me as a bit odd. Was there perhaps another photo or photos connected to that album, maybe publicity material? Or am I blanking out entirely and it was a remark he made about some Chicago blues album of the time? In any case, I think that the thrust of Dan's remark was that the image itself was designed to convey an earthy, down home, "working-class" feeling, but that a real working man, etc. Was he perhaps thinking (though I have that milk carton remark stuck in my brain) of the disconnect on Von's album cover between his undershirt and the building rubble (those things being the choice of some art director) and Von's nice shoes?

Von Freeman's "Do It Right Now" I recall Dan Morgenstern objecting to the posed cover shot of Von as IIRC a ditch digger because Von's hands were covered in dirt and no genuine working man would hold an open milk carton he was drinking out of with dirt on his hands.

Finally watched Primack's video, and there is something a bit self-serving about it. OTOH, about the part where he talks about hanging around the kitchen of the Vanguard as a young man and learning from what he observed there how to separate the man from the music, there's a second book I may write -- personal-anecdotal, with some fictionalization around the edges and changing of names in order to protect the innocent -- that will deal with my sense that when a non-musican encounters a musician, especially a jazz musician, the possibilities for real human contact almost go out the window. Of, course, that depends on what one means by "real," and I'm still working on/thinking about that. First draft would be -- "real" as in what we've all experienced from/with good friends and from/with those whom we love and who love us, the relatively unfettered/unfiltered sense that I am I and you are you, and that is the sufficient human framework. With musicians, especially jazz musicians (perhaps the same is true of professional athletes), there is always the "clubhouse" of special knowledge/special experience and the fact that only those who belong to the club by virtue of their ability to do what those in the club can do really belong in the clubhouse. My response to this has always been -- OK, right you are if you think you are; I don't want to be in the clubhouse anyway. OTOH, over the course of the years, situations arise where one does engage in clubhouse-flavored contact, or in contact with musicians that somehow is not that conditioned by the clubhouse mentality. Many of those situations are kind of funny, others a bit odd or even sad, a few even fulfilling in purely human terms -- and one day I'll probably try to write about some that meant something to me and that I hope others will find amusing and/or enlightening. The last one, if I do write this, is different than most i(at least in my experience) in that it was IMO a real and arguably mutually fruitful, evenhanded, I/you human encounter. It happened when I was delegated to take a very infirm Coleman Hawkins to O'Hare Airport in late April 1969 after his grim final performances in Chicago with Roy Eldridge -- at a public television studio taping and then at a concert at the North Park Hotel. The story is told in John Chilton's Hawkins biography "The Song of the Hawk," but I remember it a bit differently and of course felt what I felt, which it was not Chilton's provenance to ask about or go into.

The same three guys recorded a fine album "Unicity" in 2006 and "Poesia," which I haven't heard, in 2009.

But they haven't jumped ship yet. Wonder why.

These stories seem to be based on/to accept without independent verification the claims of Spotify, Pandora as to how they do business, what their costs are, the amounts they pay in royalties, and how they apportion them. I'm not saying they're lying -- I don't know -- but why would one accept their version of the facts as sufficient? They're based on their publicly disclosed financial statements. And we know those can be trusted -- see recent behavior on Wall St. So, they're cooking the books to show they're losing money and hurt the value of the company....and the bottom line of those major investors, CEO, anyone else with shares? If a company is going to fix the books it's to make the stock value go up and make those doing it more money. No one fixes the books to get less money for themselves. P.S. I don't use either Pandora, or Spotify. I'm suggesting -- just suggesting, but again recent corporate behavior in general and the history of the music business in particular makes me suspicious -- that they have if not two actual sets of books a way of calculating/stating the bottom line that allows them to pay less in royalties that they otherwise might, and that savvy investors understand this and proceed accordingly. Given that royalty payments would seem to be the main cost of doing business for Spotify and the like (correct me if I'm wrong), cutting corners in this manner might be worth some risk. As for those in the firms who hold shares, I would assume that they are in it for long haul, and that once the royalties model that works for the firms is established/accepted, there will be time down the road for rewards to be reaped.

I should add that I use Spotify (don't have Pandora) more or less the way the artists (I think) would hope. I hear of a recording I might be interested in, I listen to enough of it to make up my mind, and then very often I buy the CD. "Listen to enough of it" is the key for me; the clips on Amazon and elsewhere usually aren't long enough for me to make up my mind. Further FWIW, I don't use Spotify for any other reasons -- listening to any music via computer for pleasure doesn't do it for me; the sound quality isn't good enough compared to what I've got elsewhere. These stories seem to be based on/to accept without independent verification the claims of Spotify, Pandora as to how they do business, what their costs are, the amounts they pay in royalties, and how they apportion them. I'm not saying they're lying -- I don't know -- but why would one accept their version of the facts as sufficient? They're based on their publicly disclosed financial statements. And we know those can be trusted -- see recent behavior on Wall St.

These stories seem to be based on/to accept without independent verification the claims of Spotify, Pandora as to how they do business, what their costs are, the amounts they pay in royalties, and how they apportion them. I'm not saying they're lying -- I don't know -- but why would one accept their version of the facts as sufficient?

Good (I think) primer on the tangled web of music royalties, with an emphasis on Spotify: http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/how-do-music-royalties-work-and-why-does-everyone-complain/ Those who know more, please weigh in; I/we need to know as much as possible.