Larry Kart

Yes, like Roscoe -- absolutely.

Well, the proof (up to a point and/or in a sense) is in the listening, and I haven't yet had a chance to re-listen to "The Hawk Relaxes." OTOH, I don't care that much one way or another about this, was just mentioning what I recall myself and recall being told about that date. Speaking of Hawkins of that period, though, do you know the stuff he played at the Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959, with IIRC Eddie Higgins, Bob Cranshaw, and Walter Perkins. Good God! http://www.amazon.com/COLEMAN-HAWKINS-QUARTET-CHICAGO-BLOWIN/dp/B00154KX48

I knew Roger a fair bit, though not much socially -- I went home after work when I wasn't going out to review a show, not to O'Rourke's and similar watering holes. Siskel I knew much better. I also in later years became very good friends with Tribune writer Monica Eng, whose divorced mother Ingrid was Roger's ... mistress, I suppose you'd say, for many years. Afterwards they remained good friends. She, Monica, and her sister Megan all lived with Roger during that time; he was Monica's virtual stepfather and an exceptionally kind and thoughtful one. Here's the heartfelt piece she wrote about him: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-0408-ebert-appreciation-eng-20130408,0,6681153.story

You're saying Cyrille gigged with Williams before that Hawkins recording date, which I believe was Cyrille's first? His bio says that his previous professional experience was backing singer Nellie Lutcher, and that he had met and then played with Cecil Taylor in 1958.

Yes, but if I'm recalling correctly what Dan said, Cyrille came into that date with a dismissive attitude. If so, it was not a matter of what he thought needed to be done musically but what he felt like doing socially -- i.e. demonstrate his indifference to/separate himself from these old farts and their musical ways by playing in a rather corny, near two-beat manner. Again, I'd have to listen again to be sure I'm not exaggerating, but I do recall thinking at the time something like "What the heck does he think he's doing?" P.S. This was 1962, and perhaps Cyrille (he was only 21) thought that if wasn't Trane or the like, it was a moldy fig thing.

Check out Siskel Ebert Outtakes on YouTube. Also this: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/03/siskel_and_ebert_an_oral_history_.html

Pretty sure I have "The Hawk Relaxes" and will check out that track. BTW, my memory of the album, corroborated IIRC by Dan Morgenstern, is that the young (age 21) Andrew Cyrille almost sabotaged the date, much to Hawkins' annoyance, by playing in a ricky-tick, hotel band manner, as though he thought that was what an "old guy" playing standards required. OTOH, in his bio of Hawkins, John Chilton writes: "...the unconventional punctuations from Cyrille preclude any displays of lethargy."

Just listened to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" from "Good Old Broadway." Far more than a mere reading of that tune IMO, though Hawkins only plays on the in and out choruses. Check out the stern, stiffening rhythmic gestures during the second eight bars of the first chorus. Leonine, magnificent. Monk would have dug it, I think; there was some kinship between Hawkins approach to this material and Monk's to standards on his solo recordings of this period, not in terms of influence but of affinities.

Some problem with that loudspeaker? If you have earphones, do you hear the same problem in that channel?

I heard Pres in Chicago in Oct. 1955 with JATP. He was not in good shape and was hospitalized that November for alcoholism and depression. He emerged, judging by the music he made in 1956, in very good shape. IIRC, the superb "Jazz Giants' 56," with Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickinson, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones, was the first album to proclaim his return. Yes, 1954-1955 was generally a down time for Pres. It was no accident that one of the tracks from his Verve session as a leader in 56 with Teddy Wilson was titled "Pres Returns." Still, lucky you to have seen Pres live in any condition! What I wrote about that concert in my book: 'The first live jazz performance I heard was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert that took place at the Chicago Opera House on October 2, 1955, with a lineup that included Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet , Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. Aware of the music for just five months, at age thirteen I knew the names of most of these musicians. And one of them, Eldridge, was a particular favorite because he seemed to speak so personally and openly through his horn, with such passion, genuineness, strength and grit. (By contrast, I thought that Jacquet and Phillips’s tenor saxophone battles were exciting but mostly for show, not to be taken at face value.) 'Lester Young, however, was only a name to me; I’d yet to hear a note of his music. And partly because of that lack of context, much of what he played that afternoon struck me as very strange. (As it happens, the concert was recorded, and eventually released on the album Blues in Chicago 1955, so I can place memories alongside what actually occurred.) Young was not in good shape on the1955 JATP tour, physically or emotionally . He would be hospitalized for several weeks that winter, suffering from alcoholism and depression, though he would recover sufficiently to make two of his best latter-day recordings, Jazz Giants ’56 and Pres and Teddy, in mid-January 1956. But in the gladiatorial arena of Jazz at the Philharmonic, the wan, watery-toned Young I heard seemed to speak mostly of weakness, even of an alarming inability or unwillingness to defend himself. And yet this state of being was undeniably, painfully being expressed, though at times perhaps only out of dire necessity; the brisk tempo Gillespie set for the piece the two of them shared was one that Young could barely make. 'Then toward the end came a ballad medley, which began with Young’s slow-motion restatement of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” That he seemed to be more in his element here was about all I realized at the time, though even that fact was provocative. And the recorded evidence confirms this, as Young bends a bare minimum of resources to the task --as though he were saying “This is all I have” and asking “Is this not enough?” Admittedly, that is largely an adult response to a performance that now seems remarkable to me. Yet something of that sort must have been crystallizing back then, because I was immediately eager to find out more about Lester Young.' Thanks, Larry. I recall also reading this in your book. I didn't realize that the 1955 Chicago concert was recorded. I have never heard it. One of the notorious Spanish boot labels did release a September Carnegie Hall JATP concert from that tour not long ago. Pres is featured on "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" at that concert as well. He sounds weak, but still manages to get off an absolutely gorgeous solo on that song. In fact, I think that it is my favorite Pres solo from 1954-1955 among those that I have heard. Not on CD AFAIK: http://www.allmusic.com/album/blues-in-chicago-1955-mw0000955309 http://www.amazon.com/Blues-Chicago-1955-Jazz-Philharmonic/dp/B003MXOTOK As to whether what's on "Blues in Chicago" is the exact concert I heard, even though it's labeled as such in the liner notes, I'm aware (from the recent Granz bio and elsewhere) that Granz could be quite capricious about what was recorded when and where -- e..g Peterson's "Live at the Concertgebouw," which was recorded somewhere else IIRC, and the stereo and mono material from the Getz-J.J. Johnson JATP sets, which again IIRC were recorded in Chicago and Los Angeles but were tagged on the 1980s LP reissue the wrong way around. Also, though it was corrected on the CD issue, which has room for all that material,, the LP reissue didn't have room for all of it and understandably in one sense chose the (different from the mono) stereo performances of the duplicate titles. But the liner notes, by no less a figure than Bob Porter, claimed that this was because the stereo performances were musically superior to the mono ones (which had been issued on the original mono LP), when in fact the mono performances were superb and the stereo ones were rather discombobulated --and that in part IMO because the arrangement of the band on the stage for the stereo tracks seemed to have placed the members of rhythm section and the horns so far apart from each other that group cohesion was almost impossible. BTW, it might be nice to have a list of all the Granz recordings that were recorded in places and at dates other than what the original albums claimed.

OK, but for some $48?

The "Don't do that" line was part of Smith and Dale's great "Dr. Kronkheit" routine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_%26_Dale By "risk and reward" I meant that on that R.T. Jones Jr. course I could see for the first time the living logic of a well-designed course, that if you hit it over here, where you knew you should, you would benefit from being in a better place to hit the next shot and if you hit it over there you would be at some disadvantage. About getting depressed and angry, that wasn't so much when I actually played but when I was practicing ... or rather obsessively fiddling with different and often contradictory ways to hit the damn ball properly when I would have better off just leaving things alone. But then, as Tiger Woods' career shows, even the best golfers can't resist the usually pernicious need to fiddle. I would guess that among the greats Nicklaus was relatively free from fiddling because of his temperament and because the principles his early teacher Jack Grout gave him were so sound and simple and so in tune with his skills and body type. Lee Trevino likewise, perhaps -- his self-taught method was rock-like in its simplicity I believe.

Just checked it out on Spotify, sounds great; Vernell is fabulous; bassist Ed Howard and pianist Kevin O'Connell, a new name to me, are really in there, too. Reaching for the credit card again.

I was a hardcore golf addict beginning in the mid-1980s and lasting until about 2006, when I developed tendonitis in my right shoulder, plus some pain in my right knee and hip, from practicing too obsessively (if you want to call it practicing rather than just hitting way too many golf balls) from a driving range rubber mat. It was the repeated shock of hitting the club against the mat that did it. The orthopedic guy I went to, also a golfer, gave me a cortisone shot and more or less said, "Don't do that [i.e. play golf] anymore." I do have pleasant memories of playing good courses all by myself in the early morning on a weekday, when a round could take a bit more than two hours. Playing in a foursome on crowded weekends was not much fun, unless you were with really nice people, and even then the time spent waiting behind the previous foursome was a drag. I got hooked when I played a handsome Robert Trent Jones resort course on Kuai. The risk-reward logic of the layout and the game suddenly was indelible and intoxicating. Another potent lure, but also a big potential drawback to the game, is that for many types of people (and I was one of them) your only real opponent on the course is yourself, or rather your sense of how you can and should be playing versus the way you actually are. Such a mindset, plus the fact that often I was not playing that well, can readily lead to depression and anger. Perhaps that bout of tendinitis was blessing.

I heard Pres in Chicago in Oct. 1955 with JATP. He was not in good shape and was hospitalized that November for alcoholism and depression. He emerged, judging by the music he made in 1956, in very good shape. IIRC, the superb "Jazz Giants' 56," with Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickinson, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones, was the first album to proclaim his return. Yes, 1954-1955 was generally a down time for Pres. It was no accident that one of the tracks from his Verve session as a leader in 56 with Teddy Wilson was titled "Pres Returns." Still, lucky you to have seen Pres live in any condition! What I wrote about that concert in my book: 'The first live jazz performance I heard was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert that took place at the Chicago Opera House on October 2, 1955, with a lineup that included Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet , Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. Aware of the music for just five months, at age thirteen I knew the names of most of these musicians. And one of them, Eldridge, was a particular favorite because he seemed to speak so personally and openly through his horn, with such passion, genuineness, strength and grit. (By contrast, I thought that Jacquet and Phillips’s tenor saxophone battles were exciting but mostly for show, not to be taken at face value.) 'Lester Young, however, was only a name to me; I’d yet to hear a note of his music. And partly because of that lack of context, much of what he played that afternoon struck me as very strange. (As it happens, the concert was recorded, and eventually released on the album Blues in Chicago 1955, so I can place memories alongside what actually occurred.) Young was not in good shape on the1955 JATP tour, physically or emotionally . He would be hospitalized for several weeks that winter, suffering from alcoholism and depression, though he would recover sufficiently to make two of his best latter-day recordings, Jazz Giants ’56 and Pres and Teddy, in mid-January 1956. But in the gladiatorial arena of Jazz at the Philharmonic, the wan, watery-toned Young I heard seemed to speak mostly of weakness, even of an alarming inability or unwillingness to defend himself. And yet this state of being was undeniably, painfully being expressed, though at times perhaps only out of dire necessity; the brisk tempo Gillespie set for the piece the two of them shared was one that Young could barely make. 'Then toward the end came a ballad medley, which began with Young’s slow-motion restatement of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” That he seemed to be more in his element here was about all I realized at the time, though even that fact was provocative. And the recorded evidence confirms this, as Young bends a bare minimum of resources to the task --as though he were saying “This is all I have” and asking “Is this not enough?” Admittedly, that is largely an adult response to a performance that now seems remarkable to me. Yet something of that sort must have been crystallizing back then, because I was immediately eager to find out more about Lester Young.'

I heard Pres in Chicago in Oct. 1955 with JATP. He was not in good shape and was hospitalized that November for alcoholism and depression. He emerged, judging by the music he made in 1956, in very good shape. IIRC, the superb "Jazz Giants' 56," with Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickinson, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones, was the first album to proclaim his return.

It was pianist Bill Potts, who played on the gig and IIRC also recorded it. Potts, as you probably know, also was a brilliant D.C.-based composer-arranger, best known for the album "The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess."

Step away from the credit card, sir! Actually some $19 of that total was from a four-album compilation of early 1960s Coleman Hawkins material: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BLQVKJM/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000040OHJ&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0JCHYBYABA1KXYMMZX7X that was spurred by this interesting set of recommendations from Grant Stewart: http://jazztimes.com/articles/76359-artist-s-choice-grant-stewart-on-big-tenor-sounds

Thanks to this thread, I've now ordered about $90 worth of Jordan as a leader, Jordan as a sideman dates. Help!

Great stuff.

Couldn't stand this book's p.c. tendentiousness. GDP's Amazon review of the book, which is somewhat favorable: http://www.amazon.com/A-History-Opera-Carolyn-Abbate/product-reviews/0393057216/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 explains why. The passages he/she quotes -- oy vey. Try Grout, or even better (though it of necessity doesn't talk about all one would want/need to know about opera and talks about much else beside) the late Carl Dahlhaus' brilliant "Nineteenth Century Music."

I didn't say that "everyone that used to go ... is now going to" etc. I was just responding to your "what happened to?" question. Do agree, though, that the Green Mill calendar doesn't make the heart go pitty-pat. Just meant that the place is still up and running and probably still drawing its regulars.

AFAIK, the Empty Bottle no longer books jazz; The Green Mill is going strong: http://greenmilljazz.com/

Some Caroline Davis links: Of those below, I've listened to "Blood Count" and "You Send Me," both interesting: http://carolinedavis.org/#f93/soundcloud