Larry Kart

For those of you with access to the NY Times, I found this David Carr column today to be very interesting and pretty much true: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/business/media/britain-as-a-breeding-ground-for-media-leaders.html?ref=todayspaper Combine this with Russell Brand's recent episode on CNBC (scroll to about the 5:00 mark for the fireworks): http://eatlocalgrown.com/article/11679-russel-brand-discombobulates-cnbc-crew-on-live-tv.html which offers striking evidence of the divide in sense and sensibilities that Carr speaks of.

Me, too. Do you like Mostly Other People Do The Killing and the trio with Halverston and Weasel Walter Larry? Haven't listened to those yet but will -- I was going by a brief sample of the clip Chuck posted, plus my memories of Evans' performance at the Hideout a year or so ago. And by various encounters with Payton's music.

Me, too.

Craft wasn't speculating; he was stating what he believed to be fact, and he would seem to have been in a good position to know and/or determine that, as a close associate, or hanger on if you will, of IS and his widow Vera for some 60 years. As for the effect of the alleged relationship on IS's music, I'm not saying there was one. What I am interested in is Stravinsky the person -- always have been -- and this, given everything else one already knows about him (and thanks to Craft and many others, including Vera and IS himself, one probably knows as much about him as one does about any major artist of the 20th Century). That said, this to me was news -- in part, for example, given IS's previous on-the-record remarks about how off-putting he found the sexual ambience of Diaghlev and his circle and its associated power plays. I remember in particular a dismissive remark about Markevitch as a composer that implied that Markevitch was a Diaghlev favorite for a time only for non-musical reasons.

Great record.

I agree that it's some form of new Puritanism (not sure what kind, but it seems to take on a special point when the subject is major artists, viz. "so what?" "Why does this matter?" etc.), but don't agree that whatever it is stems from people who "are worried about their own latent tendencies." But maybe you were joking around there, as you've been known to do.

Two different versions of the same Sherr composition, "Birds of Omen," with the same performers (the second more clearly recorded, the first "live" and on video): Sherr's "Otherworld Music" album can be found on Spotify.

Tangential I know, but these three collections of David Sherr compositions and interpretations are excellent: http://www.belairjazz.org/id1.html http://www.belairjazz.org/id6.html http://www.belairjazz.org/id12.html

Heard him at The Hideout in Chicago a year or two ago. Very impressive (as in the clip) in terms of technique and imagination, but over the course of an entire set (which IIRC consisted of one unbroken stint) he began to wear me out some -- too unvaried, perhaps too "athletic." In the same general area of stunning trumpet chops/extended techniques, I've been more taken with Jacob Wick.

Looks promising. Minus Mehldau is a likely big plus IMO.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/06/21/supermoon-full-moon-saturday/2446079/ Anyone check it out? Where I live, in a Chicago suburb, it was spectacular last night and should be tonight as well.

A jaundiced view of Craft from classical and jazz reedman and composer David Sherr, longtime L.A.-based studio freelancer (he's now based in the NYC area) whom some of you may recall as the lead altoist on the Sonny Criss-Horace Tapscott album "Sonny's Dream." All the links on Sherr's website are worth a visit. He's a terrific guy and a fine player, played the best Berio Sequenza for flute I've ever heard, miles beyond the one of the Boulez DGG box. The Craft account: http://www.belairjazz.org/id29.html Lots of soulful stories/memories on Sherr's site (under the link "Inside Studio A") about Buddy Collette, Sonny Criss, Plas Johnson, and others. Here's one about harpist Veryle Mills, Sherr's colleague on the Carol Burnett Show band: 'Verlye Mills was a fantastic musician and a very nice person. Buddy Collette wrote a three movement piece for flute and harp and asked Verlye and me to record it, which we did one afternoon. Verlye spoke in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that included a lot of run-on sentences. I knew she had played on some of the Charlie Parker With Strings sessions and I asked her about them. “I never saw anyone that could drink like that, you know I’ve made two million dollars in my life and where is it now?” she said.'

OK -- you go first. As for myself, I don't think I'm a figure of much inherent interest, as I consider Stravinsky to be, but if enough people feel otherwise, I'll begin my account at the womb and move onwards from there.

Don't know his name, but he was well-hung ... by strings.

See my post #5 above on why it matters some to me and might matter some to some others. OTOH, I'm certainly not thinking of this myself in terms of denigrating IS in any way for whatever his sexual tastes might have been at any time. Further, given the sexual-ritual material of "Le Sacre," both in terms of the plot of the ballet (which IS certainly played a major role in shaping) and arguably of the music itself, it's not as though sexual themes flowing (so to speak) into art is an alien or somehow improper way of thinking about "Le Sacre" up to a certain point. Finally, I'm also interested in/curious about (in part because I once knew Robert Craft a bit and find him an interesting person in his own right) why Craft now -- at age 90 -- would decide to mention this in a public forum for the first time.

Well, he certainly was stepping out with his second wife to be Vera (to the point of their setting up a second household) while he was married to his first wife, Katerina, and Coco Chanel claimed that she and IS had a big thing going at one time. I believe there was a lot more of that through the years, but this (i.e. those episodes) are common knowledge.

Interesting how perspectives can be different. I was not at Vision Festival the night this band performed, but I read a facebook post of someone who felt just the opposite - that the other members of the band did not engage Tusques and instead basically shut him out. Actually, a friend who was at the concert with me, while reaching a similar conclusion about the music played, felt not only that the those who assembled this band but also Jordan were at fault -- Jordan because he gave little room to Sclavis and Tusques (especially Tusques) to do their thing.

I'm certainly not wringing my hands, but it was news to me, especially given IS's well-known track record of, as Craft puts it, "hyperactive heterosexual philandering." Guess I haven't been keeping up on the hinting. Does it matter? Well, all the knots and whorls of IS's personality are interesting to me, as are all the knots and whorls of Schoenberg's. Why? Because, I think, they were both such striking and unusual people as people, as well as being great artists.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1275660.ece "At one of the Firebird rehearsals, Ravel introduced the Russian to his pupil, the epicene Maurice Delage, who became Stravinskys lover as well as the surrogate parent for his young children during the composers frequent absences. These sojourns ... were in response to Diaghilev's order that Stravinsky supervise the corps de ballet, which was in desperate need of coaching for the forthcoming Rite of Spring premiere. During its composition, Delage was intimate in Stravinsky's life, even sharing his home in Clarens; a letter from him informs the unidentified recipient that Delage is with me every day. His affection for Stravinsky differed from Ravels. Delages letters to Stravinsky are embellished with kisses and hugs. When Delage refers to Stravinsky being in the arms of that fiend Diaghilev, the reader may understand it literally and wonder about those early years when Diaghilev treated Stravinsky as a minion on the way up. The Delage connection terminated with the Rite and Stravinsky's resumption of both his family life in Switzerland and his hyperactive heterosexual philandering."

Last night saw the French-American Peace Quartet (François Tusques, Louis Sclavis, William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Kidd Jordan) at Constellation in Chicago. What an ill-matched group, so it seemed to me, especially the soulful Jordan and the cold, uninteresting (at least IMO) Sclavis, who seemed on this night to be virtually an anti-interactive player. Likewise with Tusques. Parker and Drake did they best they could, but the souffle didn't rise (again IMO), if rising is what souffles are supposed to do. I've had better times in the dentist office.

That's what I thought. Couldn't understand why it wasn't mentioned on TV.

May have posted this before, but here FWIW is the Mobley chapter from my book. I'd probably change a few things if I were writing now rather than in 1982 and 1987, but let it be: HANK MOBLEY The first of these two pieces was the liner note for a reissue of Hank Mobley’s 1957 album Poppin’. (The reference there to Nietzsche supposedly commenting on Mobley’s style was a would-be serious joke. Nietzsche did write those words, in his essay “Contra-Wagner,” but he was referring to the music of Georges Bizet.) The second piece was a posthumous appreciation. [1982] In the mid-1950s the Blue Note label yielded momentarily to supersalesmanship, releasing such albums as The Amazing Bud Powell, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and The Incredible Jimmy Smith. That trend was dormant by the time Hank Mobley became a Blue Note regular and unfortunately so--a record titled The Enigmatic Hank Mobley would have been a natural. “To speak darkly, hence in riddles” is the root meaning of the Greek word from which “enigma” derives; and no player, with the possible exception of pianist Elmo Hope, has created a more melancholically quizzical musical universe than Mobley, one in which tab A is calmly inserted in slot D. Though he was influenced by Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and, perhaps, Lucky Thompson, Mobley has proceeded down his own path with a rare singlemindedness, relatively untouched by the stylistic upheavals that marked the work of his major contemporaries, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, not previously known for his interest in jazz, Mobley’s music is “without grimaces, without counterfeit, without the lie of the great style. It treats the listener as intelligent, as if he himself were a musician. I actually bury my ears under this music to hear its causes.” And that is the enigma of Mobley’s art: In order to hear its causes, the listener must bury his ears under it. In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line and very little sense of “profile” the quality that enables one to read a musical discourse as it unfolds. Not that high-profile players--Rollins and Dexter Gordon, for example—are necessarily unsubtle ones. But to understand Mobley the listener does have to come to terms with complexities that seem designed to resist resolution. First there is his tone. Always a bit lighter than that of most tenormen who worked in hard bop contexts, it was, when this album was made, a sound of feline obliqueness--as soft, at times, as Stan Getz’s but blue-gray, like a perpetually impending rain cloud. Or to put it another way, Mobley, in his choice of timbres, resembles a visual artist who makes use of chalk or watercolor to create designs that cry out for an etching tool. Harmonically and rhythmically, he could also seem at odds with himself. For proof that Mobley has a superb ear, one need listen only to his solo here on “Tune Up.” Mobley glides through the changes with ease, creating a line that breathes when he wants it to, one that that is full of graceful yet asymmetrical shapes. And yet no matter how novel his harmonic choices were--at this time he surely was as adventurous as Coltrane--Mobley’s music lacks the experimental fervor that would lead Coltrane into modality and beyond. Mobley’s decisions were always ad hoc; and from solo to solo, or even within a chorus, he could shift from the daring to the sober. What will serve at the moment is the hallmark of his style; and thus, though he is always himself, he has in the normal sense hardly any style at all. Even more paradoxical is Mobley’s sense of rhythm. His melodies float across bar lines with a freedom that recalls Lester Young and Charlie Parker; and he accents on weak beats so often (creating the effect known in verse as the “feminine ending”) that his solos seem at first to have been devised so as to baffle even their maker. That’s not the case, of course, but even though he has all the skills of a great improviser, Mobley simply refuses to perform the final act of integration; he will not sum up his harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral virtues and allow any one element to dominate for long. In that sense he is literally a pioneer, a man whose innate restlessness never permits him to plant a flag and say “here I stand.” Thus, to speak of a mature or immature Hank Mobley would be inappropriate. Once certain technical problems were worked out--say, by 1955--he was capable of producing striking music on any given day. New depths were discovered in the 1960s and the triumphs came more frequently; but in late 1957, when Poppin’ was recorded, he was as likely as ever to be on form. Much depended on his surroundings, and the band he works with here has some special virtues. The rhythm section is one of the great hard-bop trios, possessing secrets of swing that now seem beyond recall. Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers, partners, of course, in the Miles Davis Quintet, shared a unique conception of where “one” is--just a hair behind the beat but rigidly so, with the result that the time has a stiff-legged, compulsive quality. The beat doesn’t flow but jerks forward in a series of spasmodic leaps, creating a climate of nervous intensity that was peculiar to the era. Either the soloist jumps or he is fried to a crisp on the spot. As a leavening element there was Sonny Clark--equally intense but more generous and forgiving in his patterns of accompaniment. Clark leads the soloists with a grace that recalls Count Basie; and his own lines, with their heartbreakingly pure lyricism, make him the hard bop equivalent of Duke Jordan. The ensemble sound of the band, a relatively uncommon collection of timbres heard elsewhere on Coltrane’s and Johnny Griffin’s first dates under their own names, gives the album a distinctive, ominous flavor; but this is essentially a blowing date. Art Farmer, for my taste, never played as well as he did during this period, perhaps because the hard bop style was at war with his pervasive sense of neatness. Possessing a musical mind of dandaical suavity, Farmer at times sounded too nice to be true. But this rhythm section puts an edge on his style (as it did a few months later on Clark’s Cool Struttin’), and I know of no more satisfying Farmer solo than the one preserved here on “Getting Into Something,” where he teases motifs with a wit that almost turns nasty. Adams’s problem has always been how to give his lines some sense of overall design, and too often the weight of his huge tone hurtles him forward faster than he can think. But when the changes and the tempo lie right for him, Adams can put it all together; and here he does so twice, finding a stomping groove on “Getting Into Something” and bringing off an exhilarating doubletime passage on “East of Brooklyn.” As for the leader, rather than describing each of his solos, it might be useful to focus first on a small unit and then on a larger one. On the title track, Mobley’s second eight-bar exchange with Jones is one of the tenorman’s perfect microcosms, an example of how prodigal his inventiveness could be. A remarkable series of ideas, mostly rhythmic ones, are produced (one might almost say squandered) in approximately nine seconds. Both the relation of his accented notes to the beat and the overall pattern they form are dazzlingly oblique; and the final whiplike descent is typically paradoxical, the tone becoming softer and more dusty as the rhythmic content increases in urgency. In effect we are hearing a soloist and a rhythm player exchange roles, as Mobley turns his tenor saxophone into a drum. On “East of Brooklyn” Mobley gives us one of his macrocosms, a masterpiece of lyrical construction that stands alongside the solo he played on “Nica’s Dream” with the Jazz Messengers in 1956. “East of Brooklyn” is a Latin-tinged variant on “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise,” supported by Clark’s “Night in Tunisia” vamp. Mobley’s solo is a single, sweeping gesture, with each chorus linked surely to the next as though, with his final goal in view, he can proceed toward it in large, steady strides. And yet even here, as Mobley moves into a realm of freedom any musician would envy, one can feel the pressure of fate at his heels, the pathos of solved problems, and the force that compels him to abandon this newly cleared ground. In other words, to “appreciate” Hank Mobley, to look at him from a fixed position, may be an impossible task. He makes sense only when one is prepared to move with him, when one learns to share his restlessness and feel its necessity. Or, as composer Stefan Wolpe once said, “Don’t get backed too much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reliability , drop it. It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing.” [1987] “Ah, yes, The Hankenstein. He was s-o-o-o-o hip.” That was the response of Dexter Gordon when the late Hank Mobley’s name came up in conversation a while ago --“Hankenstein” identifying Mobley as a genuine “monster,” in the best sense of the term, while the slow-motion relish of “he was s-o-o-o-o hip” seemed to have both musical and extra-musical connotations. But then, like so many who came to know Mobley’s music, Gordon decided to qualify his praise, echoing critic Leonard Feather’s assessment that Mobley was “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone” whose approach to the instrument (according to Feather) lacked the “magniloquence” that Gordon, Sonny Rollins, and others had brought to it. But that is not the only way to estimate Mobley’s achievement. The middleweight champ, yes, if magniloquence and size of tone are what is involved, but never merely a middleweight--for Mobley, who died last May at age fifty-five, blazed his own trail and left behind a body of work that never ceases to fascinate. Indeed, when one examines the core of Mobley’s music (the twenty-four albums he recorded under his own name for Blue Note from 1955 to 1970), it seems clear that his poignantly intense lyricism could have flourished only if magniloquence was thrust aside. Mobley’s career as a recording artist falls into three rather distinct stages. The first ran from 1955 to 1958, when he made eight of his Blue Note albums, while working with the Jazz Messengers and groups led by Horace Silver and Max Roach. The second produced the magnificent Soul Station, Roll Call, Workout, and Another Workout albums in 1960 and 1961, when he was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet. And the third ran from No Room For Squares (1963) to Thinking Of Home (1970). Influenced initially by Sonny Stitt, but incorporating far more of Charlie Parker’s asymmetrical rhythmic thinking than Stitt chose to do, Mobley also was attuned to the lyrical sensitivities that Tadd Dameron brought to bop--an unlikely, even perilous, blend that gives Mobley’s stage-one solos their special flavor. Perhaps the first critic to pay close attention to him was an Englishman, Michael James, in the December 1962 issue of Jazz Monthly, and James’s account of the tenor saxophonist’s solo on “News”--from the 1957 album Hank Mobley (Blue Note )--is particularly apt. “His phrases grow more and more complex in shape,” James writes, “until . . . it seems that he is about to lose all sense of structural compactness. But he rescues the situation... and his last 12 bars, less prolix and tied more closely to the beat, imbue the whole improvisation with a unity of purpose that is paradoxically the more striking for its having tottered for a while, as it were, on the brink of incoherence.” Solos of that kind and quality can be found as early as 1955, when Mobley recorded his first album, Hank Mobley Quartet (Blue Note ). And, as James suggests, his best work of the period is so spontaneously ordered and so bristling with oblique rhythmic and harmonic details that its sheer adventurousness seems inseparable from the listener’s--and perhaps the soloist’s--burgeoning sense of doubt. That is, to make sense of Mobley’s lines, one must experience every note--for there are so many potential paths of development, each of which can inspire in Mobley an immediate response, that the ambiguities of choice become an integral part of the musical/ emotional discourse. And that leads to the genius of stage two, for as Mobley gained in rhythmic and timbral control, his music became at once more forceful and uncannily transparent--as though each move he made had its counterpart in a wider world that might not exist if Mobley weren’t compelled to explore it. Two fine examples of that urgently questing approach are “I Should Care” and “Gettin’ and Jettin’,” both from Another Workout (Blue Note). Rather than being a direct romantic statement, “I Should Care” becomes a song about the possible contexts of romance--not so much a tale of love but a search for a place where that emotion could be expressed. (Mobley does this by building his solo around “balladized” bop phrases whose angular tensions, here made more languid, serve to test the romantic dreaminess, which in turn tries to subdue those “realistic” intrusions.) Mobley’s sensitivity to context is present in a different way on “Gettin’ And Jettin,’ ” as he pares down his lines toward the end of his brilliant solo in order to invite the active participation of drummer Philly Joe Jones. (Mobley’s interaction with drummers is a story in itself--his exceptional taste for contrapuntal rhythmic comment bringing out the best that he and such masters as Jones, Art Blakey, and Billy Higgins had to offer.) Stage three of Mobley’s career has its virtues, too, and if such recordings as A Caddy ForDaddy (Blue Note ), Dippin’ (Blue Note ), and the first side of the recently issued Straight No Filter (Blue Note ) were all we had, Mobley still would be a major figure. But as John Litweiler has pointed out, Mobley “consciously abandoned some degree of high detail in favor of concentrating his rhythmic energies,” which gave his music a bolder profile but left less room for the jaw-dropping ambiguities of his stage one and stage two work. Above all, though--and to a degree that is matched by few jazz soloists--Mobley invites the listener to think and feel along with him. Indeed, his commitment is such that a commitment of the same sort is what Hank Mobley’s music demands.

I believe that "Nancy" is much more of a pop-soul effort. I also picked up an LP of Wilson's "Easy" from 1968, again with Jimmy Jones charts and Williams on bass I'm pretty sure. It's much more beat up than my copy of "The Sound of..." and thus Williams contribution is not as clear, but it's also a good one. On the LP of "The Sound of" Williams is well to left in a broad but realistic stereo spread and as clear as a bell. Further, prominent as he is, his sound is not amplified. It's like buttah. And his choice of notes! I say this BTW as someone who previously has felt that in latter days at least Williams' playing has become rather narcissistic at times. Not here.

Just picked up an LP of "The Sound of Nancy Wilson" (Capitol) from 1968 -- Jimmy Jones arrangements, played by a top-drawer LA studio big band (e.g. trumpets: John Audino, Bobby Bryant, Pete Candoli, Harry Edison, Clyde Reasinger). But what really got to me, aside from Wilson herself, who is in corruscating form, is the prominent-in-the-mix bass work of Buster Williams on most tracks; Carol Kaye steps in on electric bass for some semi-R&B tracks). Functioning more or less as a separate section of the ensemble, Williams is inspired. Here is "When the Sun Comes Out" -- a song Wilson was born to sing -- with obligato by Benny Carter. Williams is not as clearly heard in this clip as he is on the LP, but it's probably enough to give you the idea:

Mondragon was very good. I recall in particular his playing on Harry Edison's "Sweets" (Clef), with Ben Webster in superb form, as part of a lovely rhythm section: Jimmy Rowles, Barney Kessel, and Alvin Stoller, from Sept. 4, 1956. The same group backed Billie Holiday on a Clef album a few weeks before. Billie Holiday And Her Orchestra Harry Edison (trumpet) Ben Webster (tenor saxophone) Jimmy Rowles (piano) Barney Kessel (guitar) Joe Mondragon (bass) Alvin Stoller (drums) Billie Holiday (vocals) Los Angeles, CA, August 14, 1956 2914-3 Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me Verve MGV 8329, VE2 2529, V6 8808 2915-6 Cheek To Cheek Verve MGV 8329, VE2 2529 2916-4 Ill Wind - 2917-8 Speak Low - * Verve MGV 8329 Billie Holiday - All Or Nothing At All * Verve VE2 2529 Billie Holiday - All Or Nothing At All * Verve V6 8808 The Best Of Billie Holiday Billie Holiday And Her Orchestra same personnel Los Angeles, CA, August 18, 1956 2929-4 We'll Be Together Again Verve MGV 8329, VE2 2529, V6 8808 2930-3 All Or Nothing At All Verve MGV 8329, VE2 2529 2931-6 Sophisticated Lady - 2932-6 April In Paris - * Verve MGV 8329 Billie Holiday - All Or Nothing At All * Verve VE2 2529 Billie Holiday - All Or Nothing At All * Verve V6 8808 The Best Of Billie Holiday