Larry Kart

I like the band myself sometimes, but some of Miles' points seem sound to me. The band was too "New York-studio muscular" for my tastes, like the atmosphere of an athletic team's locker room. Lots of "proud" biceps and sweat. Among possibly comparable roughly contemporary big bands, I preferred Gerald Wilson's, for one. By contrast to Wilson, some of Thad's very clever writing was IMO too clever for its own good at times.

Miles Davis 1968 Blindfold Test 2. Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Bachafillen (Live at the Village Vanguard, Solid State) Jones, flugelhorn; Garnett Brown, trombone, composer; Joe Farrell, tenor saxophone; Roland Hanna, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Lewis, drums. It's got to be Thad's big band. . . . I don't understand why guys have to push themselves and say "wow! wee!" and all that during an arrangement to make somebody think it's more than what it is, when it ain't nothing. I like the way Thad writes, but I also like the way he plays when he writes. I like when he plays his tunes, without all that stuff - no solos, you know. It's nothing to play off of. Feather: There was a long tenor solo on that. Davis: Yes, but it was nothing; they didn't need that, and the trombone player should be shot. Feather: Well, who do you think wrote that? Davis: I don't really know, but I don't like those kind of arrangements. You don't write arrangements like that for white guys . . . [humming]. That ain't nothing. In the first place, a band with that instrumentation fucks up an arrangement - the saxophones particularly. They could play other instruments, but you only get one sound like that. On that arrangement, the only one that rates is the piano player. He's something else. And Richard Davis. The drummer just plays straight, no shading. I couldn't stand a band like that for myself. It makes me feel like I'm broke and wearing a slip that doesn't belong to me, and my hair's combed the wrong way; it makes me feel funny, even as a listener. Those guys don't have a musical mind - just playing what's written. They don't know what the notes mean. Feather: Have you heard that band much in person? Davis: Yes, I've heard them, but I don't like them. I like Thad's arrangements, but I don't like the guys pushing the arrangements, and shouting, because there's nothing happening. It would be better if they recorded the shouts at the end - or at least shout in tune!

Try this: Or this:

The movie star Ann-Margret? I've always liked her. So sexy. She must have been a knock out back in 59'-60'. Yup. She was something else in high school, like vintage Rita Hayworth. In the school variety show she sang a number (I think it was "Steam Heat" or something like that) in a tight red dress that was slit up one side -- way up. There were fathers of students who came to every performance.

Brimfield was a key soloist in our unofficial high school jazz band back in 1959-60, made up of students from New Trier and Evanston high schools, led by bassist Bruce Anderson. Drummer was the late Steve Bagby, succeeded by my longtime friend Doug Mitchell. Vocalist, until she was let go, was Ann Margret. She was a good enough singer but too much the chanteuse in manner. Years later wrote a favorable review for the Chicago Tribune of a band with Brimfield in it at a Hyde Park restaurant. He wrote or called to say thanks but in a manner that implied (or so I thought) that I was being kind to him for old times sake. I wasn't at all; he sounded excellent, a bit like Bill Hardman.

In addition to whatever else might be involved, the initial marketing of WM and all that came in its wake was perhaps the most remarkable piece of social engineering I've ever witnessed directly and in an area that I care about a great deal. Further, it involved a number of people whom I respected, even loved, saying and doing things that I knew and they knew they did not in their own knowledgable hearts and minds believe to be true. In particular, I still can't forget the time one of WM's more prominent defenders in the jazz community told me, "Wynton is not a jazz musician" -- and he then said, "Don't ever tell anyone that I said that." I still find this disturbing and, as I do about what I mentioned in the first sentence, ominous. In effect, then, while there is an actual WM, a "him" who produces actual music, etc., and can be liked or disliked on that basis, in my view it's the underlying pattern involved here -- that what is IMO a "big lie" has become a generally accepted part of (as Jim Sangrey might say) our CULTURE -- that still bothers the heck of out me, still has not been adequately understood, and is the kind of thing that has cropped and probably will continue to crop up all over the map, far far away from J@LC.

Jacob Wick!

I'm not nearly concerned as much with what happens while it's being made or who's making it as I am with what happens to it after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does). Because then the creators aren't around to fight back even subversively. That's when you end up with Culture. Make mine fluid, please. By any means necessary. Make mine fluid, too. But as for 'what happens to [art] after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does),' as I see it, "ownership" more often than not, and in the ways that matter most, significantly belongs to/devolves onto the music itself, to its course and meaningful evolution over time. To take one example among many possible, you're aware of the brilliant take that Air did back in the mid-1970s on the music of Joplin and other ragtime and early jazz figures -- this initially IIRC because they were asked to provide music for a Chicago theater company's stage play that had events of that era as its subject. As it happened, of course, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall had in their musical-emotional-expressive sensibilities just what it took to run with this material and make something that was at once beautiful and new and full of deep fluid insights into what the original music was about. So it can happen -- if you've got someone like Threadgill involved and he's really interested. Was that an act of Culture or not, by your standards? In any case, I think I'll trust, until proven otherwise, that enough Threadgills will arrive periodically to keep the ball rolling. Also -- and again in any case -- I see no significant remedy for the ownership problem/issue that is not finally a matter of artistic expression being allowed to take place with the requisite degree of freedom, and I can imagine a lot of more or less political remedies for the ownership problem/issue that would turn those essential acts of artistic expression into poor relations/tails of the dog, etc.

Jim -- I believe that the history of art is essentially the history of artistic expression. Kings, popes, commissars, businessmen, democratically elected governments, etc. all can have their say and, they can encourage, suppress, dictate, etc. up to a point, but they cannot generate art without the need/desire to express in particular various ways on the part of those who actually make it. Check out, for example, the Council of Trent, when the 16th Century Roman Cartholic Church tried to suppress all liturgical polyphonic music because it obscured the clarity of the liturgical text. Suppress they could, up to a point, but they could not then generate the creation of any artistically meaningful body of non-polyphonic liturgical music. http://www.hoasm.org/IVF/Palestrina.html There's some myth-making involved in this story (see above), but its core remains sound IMO.

Again, jazz and classical music are different here. Classical repertory performances are worthwhile because otherwise one only has recordings or individuals reading scores to go by, and a good or better "live" performance of a worthwhile repertory classical work is a different animal than a good or better recording of that work. In jazz, the value of repertory performances is different and arguably less essential, in part because the distance (in a good many ways) between original performances and repertory ones tends to be so great in jazz -- much more so than is typically the case in classical music, where the rubric "original performance" denotes something that is again typically quite different than it does in jazz. Further, of course, the means of giving repertory jazz performances sufficient "life" are so much more chancy than is the case with classical music IMO.

Factoring in the very real impact of technology on information dissemination, my point is that a natural evolution such as this is part and parcel of "the human spirit" - but so is an enforced conformity/anti-evolution (aka "consistency") in the service of interests other than those of the immediate participants, one that is put into place to ensure control of both input and output. At some point, resistance becomes futile and volunteered slavery sets in, which is all well and good as long as we know it for what it is. It's when it reaches the point where we think it's something other than that that fucks people up. That's what I'm seeing in LCJO, and that's what I've experienced in waaaay to much "classical" music. Too bad, because there's some "fine music" there. But it's over as far as being relevant as anything other than an "institution", and jazz is irrevocably headed the same way. Watch it happen and ask yourself does history repeat itself, and if so, what can we learn from watching it do so. But don't worry - there will come a time when Wise People speak of Ellington as Wise People Today speak of Mozart. The Tale shall be told, and believed, for All The Same Reasons too! I hope I'm dead by then. I know the music will be. The "issues" involved in preserving/presenting just about any jazz work after its initial presentation/performance are different than those involved in presenting just about any classical work after its initial presentation/performance. Sure, politics and economic/social control stuff of various sorts play roles here, but I believe that they're less important than the inherently different natures of the two musics. Yes, both musics may be going to hell in a handbasket, but even then, I think they'll still be going to hell by different routes and for different reasons.

I would have thought that the most recorded jazz standard of all time was "I Got Rhythm." As for great recordings of "Body and Soul," aside from Hawkins', two that come to mind are the Chu Berry-Roy Eldridge version and Serge Chaloff's.

So, you're saying that the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries has been a more-or-less naturally occurring phenomenon not particularly influenced by "outside considerations"? Hmmm...not sure but that I'd not be suspicious about that...music created for (figuratively and literally) the court and/or church and/or patron and used to sustain same...and there's never been any times where people wanted to do it differently in either the composing or interpretation only to be smacked down by those powers, net/cumulative result being that don't even bother any more, this is "the way it is" now and forevermore? For every heroic defiant "rebel" we've heard about, how many not-quite-as-willful-beatdowns have there been that we haven't heard about? Or was that some sort of Golden Age where no outside influence was never imposed? The way they do it now is the way they did it then, and the way they did it then was because they wanted to do it that way, exactly? From what I know of the courts and churches (and many patorns) of those times, I find that juuuuuussssst a little hard to accept, never mind believe. And from my experience in contemporary equivalents of same, I find it impossible to accept. And to believe. Them that pays the piper tend to buy the tobacco as well. Smoke it as offered or go get your own. Truthfully, I think that LCJO is more or less a con. But I don't think it's any kind of a new con. Hardly! But I do think they're succeeding in turning jazz into "America's Classical Music", and more's the pity - and the con. Re: Side comment. OK -- not in some portions of the contemporary jazz world but certainly in others. My point was in particular that styles of jazz drumming had changed enough for that LCJO guy, assuming he could very well play in any style, to have virtually no clue as to how to play on "D&C in Blue." As for your 'So, you're saying that the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries has been a more-or-less naturally occurring phenomenon not particularly influenced by "outside considerations"?' No -- I'm not necessarily saying that at all: I'm saying what I said: That 'the relative consistency of "classical" performance practice over how-many-ever centuries' is greater, for whatever reasons (and I mentioned some), than the relative consistency or continuity (or lack of continuity) of styles of jazz performance over the course of that music's very rapid (arguably up to a point) development. I mean, could any member of Morton's Red Hot Peppers have played on Bird's recording of "Klactoveedsedstene"? Or vice versa? Bird, maybe, if he was in the mood, because he was Bird -- but otherwise? And the gap there is only about 20 years.

A number of Les Rois du Fox-Trot videos can be found on YouTube, but they can't be linked to: I particularly recommend "The Terror."

We '"accept" the principles and practices of so much "classical" music without some similar suspicion' because that suspicion by and large isn't warranted -- certainly not as much as it is in jazz. For one thing, the relationship between jazz performance practices and classical performance practices (as varied as the latter have been over the course of however many centuries one wants to place under the umbrella) is nowhere near the same. In particular, jazz "works" (many of which were not created with repeated performances in mind, as many classical works significantly were after a certain point in musical history) tend to rely far more than most classical works on close-to-non-notable details of rhythmic articulation and timbre. Further, styles of jazz performance continually change, and at a far greater rate, than styles of classical performance do. For example, that LCJO drummer is separated from Sam Woodyard by only about 50 years, but I would bet that his normal style of drumming is far removed from Woodyard's; certainly, what he comes up with on that performance, which I assume amounts to an attempt on his part to modify his normal style and come up with something "older" that fits, is way off ... I was going to say "the mark," but it's also off any mark I could imagine, a beat expressive only of the man's lack of imagination/knowledge and (probably) his resulting sheer discomfort. Again, only 50 years, and the tree of knowledge/empathy/continuity/you name it has pretty much withered away -- perhaps inevitably so, given the nature of jazz, though there are some (a few?) re-creative-minded jazz people who do really know and care how, say, Morton's Red Hot Peppers played and how to bring that music to life again, to the degree that's possible. Safe to say, though, that they don't have anything to do with J@LC. . But about the classical comparison, I'm hear to tell you that, say, a mid-1950s Isaac Stern performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto would not be alien to a Szgeti or Huberman one from 1925 or a Midori one from today -- not the way those two "D&C in Blue" performances were. P.S. Oddly, or not so oddly, the jazz re-creators today who really are doing it (and doing something more than that, at best) are not in the U.S. for the most part. Check out Jean-Pierre Morel's Les Petit Jazz Band and its bib band offshot, Les Rous Du Fox-Trot. Here are some videos of the superb IMO late '70s predecessor of Les Petit JB, Charquet & Co.: Dig Michael Bescont's tenor solo, Marc Bresdin's bari solo, and Alain Marquet on clarinet!)

I get that, but I still don't hear a lot of "good carpenter" instrumental proficiency from these guys -- e.g. that drummer? Though he does sound a fair bit like a carpenter.

Speaking in terms of instrumental proficiency, yes, great players. I will respect that if I don't anything else (which I pretty much don't...). Instrumental proficiency? At what? Saint-Saens? Guy Lombardo? And how can you tell based on this IMO f---ed up performance? I mean, if they can't play this score decently, it's kind of like saying of a baseball player that he's athletically proficient because he's in great physical shape, has excellent bat speed, oodles of quick-twitch muscles, and can run like a deer, even though he still can't catch a fly or put his bat on the ball.

I don't know about "great players." That LCJO performance is just terrible IMO, especially rhythmically (so darn stiff) but timbrally as well. OTOH, I can imagine a "relevant" contemporary performance of "D&C in Blue" with players other than those LCJO zombies. Paying reasonable attention to/understanding how the music ought to go would help a bunch.

A comment on McCabe's Haydn from a knowledgable fellow on Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings: "I think it's terrible -- he irons out dynamic contrasts and accents, narrows Haydn's rather wide range of tempi to a sort of moderato ma non troppo; they all end up sounding pretty much the same, in a bad way."

As someone said on YouTube of Hamelin's Sonata No. 50 first movement, "It sounds like he's playing an etude."

But then there's Glenn Gould's stop and start No. 50 on Spotify -- a hoot as one might perhaps expect; at times he sounds like he's playing a toy piano. I have maybe four LPs of Gilbert Kalish's Haydn on Nonesuch, never transferred to CD. A bit precious at times, IIRC, but definitely in the game.

I know what you mean about Jando recording so much raising doubts, but often I find that he's very good or even better; e.g. his fine Bartok piano concerti. As for his Haydn versus Bavouzet's, compare Jando and Bavouzet's approach to Sonata No. 50, first movement -- the latter IMO diddly and mincing -- all "articulation," little sense of the music's harmonic meaning/movement -- the former right on the money in that last IMO crucial realm. Rangell's performance of that movement likewise, although it's also different than Jando's, more "shaped," which might not be to everyone's taste. Rangell's Sonata No. 50 can be found on Spotify.

The Ring Cycle? Immensely powerful to be sure, but IMO not wise the way "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are. In fact, I'd say, going a fair bit over the top, that The Ring Cycle is a dramatically enacted disease and that "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are, as much as this is possible, cures and/or at the least very good medicine. Of course you could say that that is the point, that The Ring Cycle more or less says that the world or universe is profoundly, fatally diseased, take it from there. But I find balm in Mozart, and not, I think, evasively so.

I shouldn't, I, whatever you think of JALC it EXISTS-and in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world. I'd like to see any of US pull THAT off, raise untold funds, not to mention the political legerdermain (sp?) required. Did you ever stop to enquire about/question several things? One -- what does "it exists" mean, beyond the fact that JALC exists like, say, Seventh Ave. exists? Two -- what is the relationship, both in terms of how JALC got there and what it is doing there, i.e. between that existence in the first sense and its existence "in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world"? This is incidental? What interests are served by this cozy relationship? What was/is going on behind the scenes there? As for "raising "untold funds," where do those funds go? To what ends? What purposes are served? As for "political legerdermain," I have it on high authority that Rahm Emmanuel will take over from Wynton at JALC.

For my money, "Cosi Fan Tutti" and "The Magic Flute" are two of the greatest works there are, regardless of medium. "Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," too. As perpetually hip, wise, and, if performed well, as moving as Shakespeare.