Larry Kart

No, but they are bringing their urban know-how, plus a good deal of attitude.

I'm told that the displaced rats hitch rides to the Dallas-Ft.Worth area.

Salman Rushdie's "Joseph Anton"

I don't like much of Henze and am even repelled/baffled by the IMO note-to-note near arbitrariness (as in, "Why these pitches"?) of some of the later works (e.g. the "Six Arabian Songs" that Ian Bostridge recorded for EMI), but I was quite taken with this middle-period work: HENZE. Chamber Music 1958 (rev. 1963). Neil * Jenkins (ten); Timothy Walker (gtr); Berlin Scharoun Ensemble / Brynmoor Llewellyn Jones. Koch Schwann

I mean what do you think the "authorities" should or should not do in this situation? Go balls-out libertarian, every man for himself, and let's pick up the pieces afterwards? Now if you're talking about jumbo soft drinks...

Couldn't agree more, Chris -- stupid and dumb.

Really sad there seemed to be no recognition of this. It was 44 years ago. I recognized its source and pertinence, just didn't feel I needed to acknowledge this -- Dave Flexingbergstein (of Jism magazine)

Really stupid article, for many of the reasons mentioned by many above -- and this comes from a guy (i.e. me) who wrote a piece titled "The Death of Jazz?" back in 1986 or so (my premise was different I think/hope than Mr. Schwarz's). In particular, the equation of the life of jazz and the existence or non-existence of new GAS or GAS-like material flies on the face of, among other things, what jazz musicians have actually done with that material since there was anything called jazz. Does anyone believe that, say, Bird's "Embraceable You" is great because he's playing a solo that takes off on (in some respects) "Embraceable You." Hell, I imagine that a whole lot of people have listened to that solo and been legitimately thrilled/moved by it without being all that aware, if at all, of what changes/melody lie in the background there. Nor do I think that almost anyone who has a deep fondness for Gershwin's admirable original song hears Bird's "EY" and goes, "How lovely a variation on 'EY' that is; I like it for just that reason." And examples of that sort in jazz are almost f---ing endless, so much so as to be more or less the norm. I mean, "Bugle Call Rag" is cool, but alongside Duke's "The Sergeant Was Shy" (even though the latter does allude ironically/comically to the former)?

Chris -- I see the smiley, but the above is just silly (if JSngry posted it, you'd probably be all over him). As BeBop said above, there is no double standard at work here because drug use in music does not reliably and measurably enhance performance. Further, of course, music is not an athletic competition -- specifically, as strict/measured a competition as a bicycle or a swimming race or a track and field event. OTOH, I do believe that Bird traveled 100 meters in less than a second ... in his mind.

What kh1958 and Chuck said. The small group tracks, along with some of "Bird Boston 1952" with Twardzik, Mingus, and Haynes on Uptown (e.g. "Groovin' High"), probably are the best Bird I know. In Boston he's sublime and relatively relaxed, in D.C. he's incredibly fierce/on fire.

Avant-garde Azerbaijanis

Happy (belated) Birthday, Chris. :party: And I like Deena DeRose, Jim, especially the way she sings "I Thought About You."

Don't know about Esperanza's education efforts, but if Wynton's teaching is along the lines of his numerous pronouncements/strictures over the years about how jazz has to be played and how it should not be played, more's the pity. BTW, Wynton has been out there encouraging and inspiring the youth for some time now, no? How many notable youngish players can one name who owe a significant debt to his example/tutelage? I may be blanking on this, but I can't think of a single one outside of the guys who have played in his small groups or the LCJO. And I don't think of any of them as particularly notable figures artistically, certainly not compared to other players of their general age group who came up elsewhere and otherwise. You could add James Carter and Rodney Whitaker to the list, but, really, the education activities are not about a list of other pros who have come up under his wing. It's about the thousands upon thousands of kids he's reached through clinics and encouraged in many other ways (paying for instruments, sending music, etc) the Essentially Ellington initiative, the JaLC school curriculums that get jazz into classrooms in ways that non-music teachers can use and more. I've seen all of this at work in Detroit and environs, including seeing him take time in the poorest neighborhoods you can imagine for elementary school kids. I've also seen him bend the ear of administrators, politicians and philanthropists stumping for music education in ways that do in fact make a difference on the front lines, or at least they have here. I'm not entering the debate here on aesthetic issues, the future of jazz questions or the is-WM-good-for-jazz argument or anything else. Leaving all of that aside, on the education front, my own view is that there is no argument to be had. If more powerful artists across the spectrum -- I'm talking classical, jazz, theater, visual artists, writers, etc. -- put their money and time into these kind of endeavors that way he has, we'd be better off. Mark Stryker speaks the truth, y'all!! you guys better listen up and get educated to what Wynton has been doing and continues to do! thanks, Mark, for being far more specific than i could be. OK -- point made.

Don't know about Esperanza's education efforts, but if Wynton's teaching is along the lines of his numerous pronouncements/strictures over the years about how jazz has to be played and how it should not be played, more's the pity. BTW, Wynton has been out there encouraging and inspiring the youth for some time now, no? How many notable youngish players can one name who owe a significant debt to his example/tutelage? I may be blanking on this, but I can't think of a single one outside of the guys who have played in his small groups or the LCJO. And I don't think of any of them as particularly notable figures artistically, certainly not compared to other players of their general age group who came up elsewhere and otherwise.

Don't care for Haydn too much, but Kasman is an excellent pianist, love his Prokofiev. Funny -- Liking Kasman's Haydn I tried his Prokofiev 8th, a work I love, and found that he hustled it virtually to death, especially the final movement, which IMO needs both motoric energy and a certain pathos/yearning. Kasman there is utterly brusque; compare him to Richter, for one. I also like Tedd Joselson's way with the 8th (on an old RCA LP).

Non-English speaking vocalists singing in English (especially Brazilians). Sing in your own language. I like the mystery of being clueless about what you are saying. Even if they're making fun of all the stiff upper lips in the audience? Can't understand them so they can be singing about what they like. Actually, it tends to be worse when the translate lyrics from the native language into English! I'm sure Stacey Kent singing in French sounds awful to the French. I love the late Ann Burton's accented English.

Listened to Kasman.

Tunes dedicated to people other than, say, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Florence Mills, or Willie "The Lion" Smith, especially those dedicated to "high class" avant-garde literary artists. I do have a soft spot, though, for Manny Albam's "Poor Dr. Millmoss."

At the Confucius Restaurant? I didn't work on that book, only was one of the people interviewed for it.

Soprano saxophones (with rare exceptions)

Some of the likely players: Barney Kessel Ted Nash Alvin Stoller Stu Williamson Conrad Gozzo (there's your lead trumpeter) Al Hendrickson Manny Klein Nick Fatool WIlbur Schwartz Chuck Gentry Uan Rasey Tommy Pederson Bob Hardaway Joe Howard Skeets Herfurt Heine Beau Joe Triscari Ray Sims An older group of guys by and large than, say, the Terry Gibbs band crowd.

It was LA and the band was led by Van Alexander, who was a Capitol Records guy, so it probably was the same basic body of players who cropped up on Billy May's Capitol albums.

About "Well sure it did. America did, and these guys were getting paid to Sound Like America, or at least some peoples' versions of it," I think you're painting with a rather broad brush here in the implicit externality of your "getting paid to Sound Like America" formulation. (I'm reminded of the Paul Desmond line, "Where do I go to sell out?") I think that a lot of this stuff was generated by the players and arrangers themselves. Shifting coasts, I'm reminded of Shorty Rogers Basie-material album of circa 1956-7, where the pieces of the '30s Decca-Okeh Basie band were recast for a band that included IIRC five trumpets, with Maynard Ferguson often playing an octave above everyone else. Exciting to some degree, as you might imagine, but the lilt and charm of the likes of "Topsy" et al. went into the trash bin. Was Roger taking orders here? Not likely. Was he expressing his own vulgarity/lack of understanding of what what he supposedly was honoring/interpreting was really like? Yes, I suppose, but that's too harsh and not quite accurate IMO. Rather, it's that Shorty (and his East Coast equivalents) were handling material they genuinely admired from their youth and adolescence, but feeling that they wanted to do something with/"update" it, they thought not in terms of how to extend that music's deeper language elements (e.g. the no-hands glide of the rhythm section, the fourth-dimension songfulness of Lester Young, the plasticity and wit of Dickie Wells, the biting tartness of Sweets Edison, etc.) but rather of how to project its external aspects with greater physical force, Basie a la Kenton perhaps.

About Oliver Nelson, while Thad may have maintained a higher overall standard, and Nelson had his cheesy moments, I'll take Nelson's superb "Afro-American Sketches" over anything that Thad did. About "New York-studio muscular" and " that whole scene [producing] an unimaginably large portion of Music America Heard for the better part of at least two decades," that "whole scene" was not one scene musically, and the nature of "New York-studio muscular" got a fair bit more sweaty-muscular between, say, 1954 and 1964 (or 1975). Early on in that evolution, I recall the 1957 album "Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements," in which a band of the better NY studio players of that time was assembled to play the charts that Mulligan had written for Lawrence's working band some ten years before that. Mulligan was indignant about the way they were performed at the recording session, feeling that much of the nuance of his charts (probably not unlike that of his "Birth of the Cool" pieces) had been turned into something generically neo-Basie. Though I myself pretty much like "Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements," I can certainly hear what Mulligan meant there. Those NY studio guys had and/or developed a "default mode," and it seems to have gotten more sweaty-muscular as time went on.

The "big lie"of WM is not so much anything that he himself has said but the promotion and widespread public acceptance of him (the latter on the part of many prominent people in th world of jazz whom I know know better -- see the anecdote I mentioned in my previous post) as a remarkable jazz trumpeter and composer who will lead jazz out of the darkness in which it supposedly was languishing until WM came along. Yes, he is or can be a remarkable trumpeter technically, but otherwise.... As for his compositions, oy vey. An important footnote to this "big lie" was WM's Stanley Crouch/Albert Murray fueled-stance that the jazz avant garde was more or less a fraud and that its very existence is what had brought jazz down to the sorry state that required the princely WM to ride in and rescue it. Two passages about aspects of this from my book "Jazz In Search of Itself" (Yale University Press, 2004): 1) Transforming tradition into an immediate aesthetic virtue has been the goal of Wynton Marsalis and others of his ilk; and the pieces gathered here under the heading “The Neo-Con Game” argue that, except in the realm of publicity, this attempt has failed. Not because the jazz past is or should be a closed book; the possibility always exists that living musicians will be driven to make contact with what has come before them and make something vital and new out of it. But when tradition is being brandished in the name of order, stability, or status, direct language-level contact with the music tends drastically to diminish--or so the course of Marsalis’s career suggests. 2) Almost twenty years have passed [since WM's advent -- at the time I wrote this piece], and it now seems clear that despite the prominence that the engines of cultural politics and publicity have given to Wynton Marsalis, his music (especially his latter-day orchestral work) is a non-issue aesthetically and has been for some time. Such Marsalis pastiches as the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite In This House, On This Morning (1993) and the ballets Citi Movement (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come from a strange alternate universe --one in which some of the surface gestures of Duke Ellington have been filtered through the toylike sensibility of Raymond Scott. Marsalis remains a skilled instrumentalist, but he has never been a strikingly individual soloist. As for his orchestral works, their relative poverty of invention becomes clear when they are placed alongside the likes of George Russell’s Chromatic Universe and Living Time, Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches, Bill Holman’s Further Adventures, Muhal Richard Abrams’s The Hearinga Suite, Bob Brookmeyer’s Celebration, John Carter’s Roots and Folklore, and, of course, the more successful orchestral works of Ellington himself. A brief comparison between one of the major vocal episodes in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and the opening vocal movement of Ellington’s otherwise instrumental Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler), might be revealing. The works are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned by the West African republic of Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847--and both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which lasts nine minutes) and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative semi-laments in which hope, pain, frustration, and doubt are meant to joust with each other. The melody of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace (climbing in pitch toward a point of harmonic release it cannot reach, it expressively stalls out on the words “raised up high, far out of sight”), while the key turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” (my emphasis) is commented upon and deepened by a tapestry of orchestral and solo voices (particularly those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast, the three verses of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere in twice the span of time. The melody itself, despite Wilson’s attempts to shape it, is hardly a melody at all but a lumpy recitative that sounds as though it had been assembled bar by bar, while the ensemble’s instrumental interventions and the solos of pianist Eric Reed merely distend things further. It could be argued that within the overall dramatic scheme of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant to be an episode of near-paralysis, and that the music ought to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself how often you have heard nine minutes of music pass this uneventfully. Why, then, the Marsalis phenomenon, such as it has been and perhaps still is? One struggles to think of another figure in the history of jazz who was a significant cultural presence but not a significant musical one. Dave Brubeck? Perhaps, but there is no counterpart in Marsalis’s music to the lyrical grace of Paul Desmond or to those moments when Brubeck himself was genuinely inspired. Paul Whiteman? Yes, in terms of the ability to marshal media attention, but if we credit Whiteman with all the music that was produced under his aegis, the comparison probably would be in his favor. Think again of Whiteman and Marsalis, though, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled. In both the 1920s and the 1980s (when Marsalis arose) the popularity and respectability of jazz were felt to be key issues--the difference being that in the twenties some part of the culture found it necessary and/or titillating to link a popular but not yet “respectable” music to the conventions of the concert hall, while in the eighties jazz had come to be regarded as a music of fading popular appeal that needed the imprimatur of respectability in order to survive--and to be subsidized, like the opera, the symphony orchestra, and the ballet. Thus the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini; thus Marsalis the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop. But while the byplay between notions of what is lively and what is respectable may be an unavoidable part of the cultural landscape, a music that springs from such premises, as Marsalis’s so often seems to do, eventually stands revealed as a form of packaged status whose relationship to the actual making of music always was incidental.