Larry Kart

I became friendly by chance with Dietz's widow, the celebrated costume designer Lucinda Ballard. Lucinda Ballard in 1940 Lucinda Ballard (April 3, 1906 – August 19, 1993) was an American costume designer who worked primarily in Broadway theatre. Born Lucinda Davis Goldsborough in New Orleans, Louisiana, Ballard studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Her first professional credits was as the scenic and costume designer for a 1937 production of As You Like It. In 1945, she won the Donaldson Award for the costumes she designed for I Remember Mama.[1] Two years later she was the first person to win the Tony Award for Best Costume Design, an acknowledgement of her contributions to Another Part of the Forest, Street Scene, and The Chocolate Soldier, among others. Her second Tony was for the 1961 musical The Gay Life. Additional theatre credits include Annie Get Your Gun, Allegro, A Streetcar Named Desire, Flahooley, The Fourposter, Carnival in Flanders, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and The Sound of Music. Ballard designed only two films, Portrait of Jennie and the 1951 screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Ballard and her first husband, William Fitz Randolph Ballard, divorced in 1938 after eight years of marriage. They had two children, Robert F. R. Ballard (b. 1933) and Lucinda Jenifer Ballard Ramberg (1934-1989). In 1951, she married lyricist Howard Dietz, and the couple resided in Sands Point, New York, until his death in 1983. Ballard died of cancer at the age of 87 in New York City. The " by chance"part was interesting. On some now forgotten journalistic mission I was at a performance by Michael Feinstein at New York City's Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence. Ballard had been invited, along with a lot of other people, and arrived with IIRC her 20-something niece in tow. They sat down next me on a couch, and we introduced ourselves and chatted a bit. Then as the afternoon went on I couldn't help but notice that Ballard's niece was behaving like an absolute jerk; she finally picked up her stuff and waltzed away like she had much better things to do. I continued to talk to Ballard in attempt to paper over the niece's patent rudeness, and when the performance was over Ballard invited me up to her apartment; she lived right across the street. She liked the fact that I was a great admirer of her late husband's work as a lyricist and knew a good deal about him (I'd read his entertaining autobiography). Among other things she played several very amusing party records Dietz made -- he was a very witty man-- and after a while she and I were as thick as thieves. We corresponded off and on for several years.

A pest has passed.

Bought Bill Charlap's second Criss Cross album "Distant Star" at a library sale this weekend, along with the Milt Jackson Quartet's (Cedar Walton, Ray Brown, Mickey Roker) "It Don't Mean a Thing If You Can't Pat Your Foot To It." The Milt album very together rhythmically, as one might expect -- Roker a key there. The Charlap quite tasty, as was his first on Criss Cross, but I was bothered by some of his succeeding Criss Cross efforts ("Stardust," with his eventual regular trio of Peter Washington and Kenny Washington was one IIRC) where it sounded like Charlap was willingly restricting his harmonic language to what would have been the norm at, say, the Hickory House circa 1954. What a strange and rather creepy development, I thought.

Mozart Haydn Quartets and String Quintets -- Guarneri Quartet (RCA)

Try the baritone-tenor-alto round robin on the opening track. Exciting serious playing from Mitchell Forman, Mario Rivera and Bobby Porcelli.

Roger Sessions, Piano Sonata No 1, Randall Hodgkinson (New World)

Also on three tracks from Quincy Jones' "Go West, Man' (ABC Paramount) Go West, Man! Studio album by Quincy Jones Released October 17, 1957 Recorded February 25, 1957 Studio Los Angeles Genre Jazz Length 42:56 Label ABC Paramount Producer Quincy Jones Quincy Jones chronology This Is How I Feel About Jazz (1956) Go West, Man! (1957) The Birth of a Band! (1959) Professional ratings Review scores Source Rating Allmusic [1] Go West, Man! is the second studio album by Quincy Jones.[2] It was released in 1957 by ABC Records. Track listing[edit] "Dancin' Pants" (Jimmy Giuffre) – 3:50 "Blues Day" (Giuffre) – 4:40 "Bright Moon" (Giuffre) – 5:20 "No Bones at All" (Johnny Mandel) – 3:58 "The Oom Is Blues" (Charlie Mariano) – 5:10 "Be My Guest" (Lennie Niehaus) – 4:29 Medley: "What's New?" - Bill Perkins solo (Bob Haggart, Johnny Burke) / "We'll Be Together Again" - Pepper Adams solo (Carl Fischer, Frankie Laine) / "Time on My Hands" - Buddy Collette solo (Vincent Youmans); / "You Go to My Head" - Carl Perkins solo (J. Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie); / "Laura" - Walter Benton solo (David Raksin / Johnny Mercer) – 6:17 "London Derriere" (Johnny Mandel) – 4:06 "Kings Road Blues" (Lennie Niehaus) – 5:06 Personnel[edit] Quincy Jones – conductor Conte Candoli (2, 4, 8) – trumpet Pete Candoli (2, 4, 8) – trumpet Harry Edison (2, 4, 8) – trumpet Jack Sheldon (2, 4, 8) – trumpet Benny Carter (1, 6, 9) – alto saxophone Herb Geller (1, 6, 9) – alto saxophone Charlie Mariano (1, 6, 9) – alto saxophone Art Pepper (1, 6, 9) – alto saxophone Pepper Adams (3, 5, 7) – baritone saxophone Walter Benton (3, 5, 7) – tenor saxophone Buddy Collette (3, 5, 7) – tenor saxophone Bill Perkins (3, 5, 7) – tenor saxophone Lou Levy (1, 6, 9) – piano Carl Perkins (2-5, 7-8) – piano Red Mitchell (1, 6, 9) – bass Leroy Vinnegar (2–5, 7–8) – bass Shelly Manne (1, 3, 5–7, 9) – drums Mel Lewis (2, 4, 8) – drums

Bonnie Herman!

That LP started my Skalkottas obsession, which has yet to end.

One of Stan's best of the period.

Why did it irritate you?

Yes, he definitely heard Shorty Rogers, for one. "On [Dec. 7 1957] violinist Sol Babitz took us (Stravinsky and Robert Craft] to a jazz club on Crenshaw Boulevard, where Stravinsky heard Shorty Rogers play the flugelhorn,. The next day he rewrote the trumpet part for that instrument in Threni." This from Craft's "An Improbable Life," p. 192. More on Rogers and Stravinsky from Stravinsky and Craft's "Conversations with Igor Stravinsky" p. 116-17: ""Jazz is a different kind of music making.... Improvisation has its own time world, necessarily a loose and large one since only in a imprecisely limited time could real improvisation be worked up to; the stage has to be set, and there must be heat. The percussion and bass serve as a central heating system. They must keep the temperature "cool," not cool. The point of interest is instrumental virtuosity, instrumental personality, not melody, not harmony, and certainly not rhythm. Instead of rhythm there is "beat." The players beat all the time merely to keep up and to know which side of the beat they are on. The ideas are instrumental.... Shorty Rogers' trumpet playing is an example of what I mean by instrumental derivation, though his trumpet [he means Rogers' flugelhorn] is really a deep-bored bugle-sounding instrument which reminds me of the keyed bugles I liked so much and wrote for in the first version of Les Noces. {Rogers'] patterns are instrumental: half-valve effects with lip glissandos, intervals and runs that derive from the fingers, "trills" on one note, for example, G to G on a B-flat instrument (between open and first-and third fingers,. etc. "As an example of what I said about timing, I can listen to Shorty Rogers' good style with its dotted-note tradition for stretches of fifteen minutes and more and not feel the time at all, whereas the weight of every serious [classical] virtuoso depresses me beyond the counter-action of equanil in about five. Has jazz infuenced me? Jazz patterns and especially jazz instrumental combinations did influence me forty years ago, of course, but not the idea of jazz. As I say, that is another world. I don't follow it, but I respect it. It can be an art of very touching dignity, as in the New Orleans jazz funerals. And at its best, it is certainly the best musical entertainment in the U.S." P.S. I like Shorty's playing, and Stravinsky's sense of it is shrewd, but it's a shame that Stravinsky never ran across prime Lester Young, for one.

Anyone familiar with this Swedish tenorman who sadly took his own life (drowned himself) at age 31 in 1968? He can be heard on "Fredriksson Special" (Dragon). Trane influenced but he had his own voice.

Based on a personal encounter with Appel, I wouldn't trust him about this or much of anything. It was at a party at John McDonough's house. Dan Morgenstern was there, and Appel, very full of himself and out to impress, was holding forth about a memorable event in jazz that he had allegedly experienced (it may have been the Bird-Stravinsky encounter), and some aspects of Appel's tale led Dan and myself to exchange WTF glances. Wish I could remember the details that made us dubious. Maybe they're in Appel's book, but I disposed of my copy.

The ones with Warne Marsh solos are essential IMO.

Would that be John Dentz?

Not a single one of many, I'm happy to say. Closest would be, though it's not really a boxed set, a 2-cd collection of four Sam Most albums from the '50s. I like Most's later work on Xanadu, but early Most is mostly twiddling, on flute or clarinet. Pretty damn annoying to tell the truth.

Got that one along with a fair amount of other Langgaard -- symphonies, violin sonatas, piano music, string quartets, plus a DVD of "AntiKrist" -- will listen. P.S. The work I posted about above is the first work of his that I really burrowed into and/or let burrow into me. Maybe I was just in the right mood. It broke over me like a wave.

Was Danish composer Rued Langgarrd (1893-1952), as someone once asked, crazy good or just crazy? After listening yesterday to to all 64:05 minutes of this obsessed with Theosophy multipart work for soloists chorus and orchestra, I vote for both.

Isn't there possible parallel between what Warne is doing and the extremely oblique way Pres often held his horn, the latter approach leading to/enabling audible shifts in timbre/sonic density? Albeit with Warne those shifts are more on a micro level.

DFD's approach -- like he's giving a lecture, with a pointer in hand and lots of underllined emphases -- is deplored by some, influential though he has been. You might want to try Aksel Schotz, Gerhard Husch, or Julius Patzak.

I think this may fit my previous speculation. Isn't Warne, like Jeffries, out to spontaneously alter/adjust the acoustic properties of his mouth/throat combo -- the resulting alterations/adjustments, in Warne's case, emerging from his horn?

Not being a saxophonist myself, what do you mean by bubblegum embouchure? I vaguely recall once speculating that Warne liked to his use mouth/throat as a resonating chamber as much as possible -- Is that something like it?

Yes, indeed,

Byrd went through one or more evolutions, from his somewhat/occasionally hesitant Prestige days to his technically assured Blue Note work and then into the more pop stuff. And all praise to Bill Hardman IMO.