Larry Kart

I'm there with you.

Wow, Jim! What a great book!

Mike Schwartz -- Your post was deleted because it was an entire column of copyrighted material. That's against forum rules. Please quote a little bit and post a link to the rest.

She doesn't look real happy to me in that lingerie, though I suppose she could have been told to took "pensive."

Agree completely about that DVD.

Guy Viveros Bubba Brooks Anyone (or almost anyone, in case there's a dud I'm forgetting) with the title "Sir" Also, isn't Earl Swope a great name for a trombonist? Especially one who played like Earl Swope

Damn

Jason Adasiewicz (that's pronounced "Featherstonehaugh").

Speaking of kings, even though he's not a jazz man, Roger King Mozian is a hell of a name for a trumpet player.

Yes I do have some reservations, but no, I don't feel like elaborating right now. Maybe some other time. Nothing dire, though, just that basically I didn't get the feel that Kelley fully grasped the continuing musical power and specialness of Monk's music at its roots. Rather, I felt that Kelley was writing the biography of a Great Black Jazz Artist, so to speak, which is certainly worth doing, but .., well, my ideal biography of, say, Beethoven or Bach would have to build outwards from the still-stunning and seemingly inexhaustible musical implications of their music. BTW, that last thought is in my head because the other night I heard Midori play in concert some of the Bach sonata and partitas for solo violin. It was a reminder that Bach remains, one might say, astonishingly hip. Monk likewise.

Edmund Gregory

About Blakey and Caucasian musicians only being able to swing from a rope, I forget to mention that Dave Schnitter auditioned in blackface.

From Art Taylor's interview with Blakey in "Notes and Tones": "You should be given credit if the sun comes up and something happens and you’re discovering something. Cats like Beethoven and Bach went through that. They really knew what they were doing. This was their field. The black musician has nothing to do with that. His thing is to swing. Well, the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope." FWIW and IMO "The black musician has nothing to do with that" is no less annoying in its implicit and explicit assumptions than "the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope." For the former, talk to George Lewis, Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell et al. about the fact that the "black musician" can have "to do" with whatever music he can and wishes to have to do with. For the latter, talk to the various Caucasian musicians who were members of Jazz Messengers, from Ira Sullivan on. The list while not endless is extensive.

I'm with him, too, until my car breaks down in the desert. Then I want some of that shaped by information stuff.

It "requires" neither, Larry, just as it is not "required" to get all scoldy about the weirdnesses. If I'm in a business meeting or a classroom learning situation, I expect to be corrected at every appropriate juncture. If I'm standing out in the front yard listening to my neighbor tell me stories about their summer vacation, I don't really give a damn if they think the Grand Canyon was in New Mexico, I can still get the gist of the matter from their tone and the overall coherency of the narrative. If the author of the Green bio were telling me stories about her summer vacation, I'd have no problem with the book. But it may be the only Green bio were going to get, and it does sit there on the shelves of libraries, where people who aren't as hip to what's up with Green and jazz in general as you and Freelancer are will or may take it for the simple truth. Again if I feel, as I get further into the book, that it's soulfulness and its sloppiness are inseparable, then so be it -- life can be like that. But I'm saying, again, that you and Freelancer are protected against its sloppiness/weirdnesses because of what you already know; that one of the reasons, or so it seems to me, to get "all scoldy" about such matters is that are lots of other readers without such knowledge who will be confused or misled; and, finally, that it just ain't that hard to get the whole fish in the boat if you take the trouble to try. P.S. I very vaguely recall some of the stuff that Chuck was referring to in the Radano book about Braxton. A different sort of case but really insidious because where do you go to get a piece of your life back when it's down in the books backwards, upside down or even not at all when it damn well should be.

Well if you made it to page 24, Bob Porter is quoted as saying, "you could go and hear him play the funk all night long, and he'd simply sit back and play impressions of something and knock everybody on their ass". So probably it was meant to be, 'play Impressions or something' - or perhaps even - "play Impressions instead of Something" So maybe it was hard to transcribe the interviews from one of those old hand held cassette tape recorders, and hard to hear Pee Wee Russell for Stevie, when you don't have the genre knowledge to fill in the gaps. I still think with regard to the wealth of information the biography contributes - to what was not presently in the public record - these oversights are like complaining about piffling minutia. Freelancer -- You are in effect protected from the author's errors and gaps in knowledge because you yourself by and large possess the knowledge she does not, thus you notice most of the errors and gaps, and usually are able to make the right corrections. But how is this a good thing, and how necessarily (as you and Jim seem to imply) is it related to the book's soulful virtues? About the "is this a good thing?" part, imagine that the author is writing about a subject in which you don't have much of a background (say, the invasion of Normandy in WW II or the history of the space program) but are interested in. If the author of such a book proceeded as the author of this one did, and you yourself didn't have the background to notice errors and fill in gaps, you'd be seriously screwed, as would anyone else in your shoes who took what the author said as reliable. Backtracking a bit -- that's the virtue of scholarship when it deserves the name; no, it's not laboratory science, a world of repeatable, verifiable experiments, but it's a discipline/method that asks that would-be "facts" be tested and verified insofar as that's possible and aspires not to be half-assed when getting the whole fish in the boat is something that almost certainly can be accomplished. And I don't see why getting the whole fish in the boat would do damage to the author's "soulfulness." BTW, in case you think this is a black writer versus white writer problem, check out Nick Catalano's execrable bio of Clifford Brown (Oxford U. Press, 2000). Mike Fitzgerald, no less, compiled a list of its gross errors of fact and emphasis that ran about 10 pages. And yet there the book sits on the shelves of how many libraries, filling the minds of those who don't/can't know any better with cornucopias of misinformation. Finaliy, about the "impresssions" thing. Good catch, and it's funny too, but that's one of the side effects of reading an unnecessarily half-assed book -- you notice the things that leap out at you (as "Stevie Russell" did for me) and don't notice other goofs that probably you would have noticed otherwise. Again, I'm not saying that the Green book doesn't have some genuinely soulful virtues; I just don't see why those virtues require that one sit still for or even celebrate its sloppiness. It's not like we're asking Don Cherry to be Adolph Herseth, or worse, assuming that Don Cherry's art was something that he just picked off a tree and didn't work at like a M.F.

Actually, Nat meant Stevie Ray Beiderbecke.

Moving on through the Grant Green bio today, I was nonplussed by this, from p. 21: "'Well that's it. Pain is universal, [Nat Hentoff] agrees. 'There have been white players with great inventiveness. One of my favorites is Stevie Russell." Pee Wee Russell?

Wallace Stevens obviously never had car trouble in the desert. That seems to have been Frank O'Hara's verdict in his "Biotherm": ...JOUR DE FETE 'jai compose mon "Glorification" hommage au poete Americain lyrique et profond, Wallace Stevens but one of your American tourists told me he was a banker quel delices I would like tell you what I think of bankers but . . . except W.C. Fields What do you want from a bank but love ouch but I don't get any love from Wallace Stevens no I don't I think delices is a lot of horseshit and that comes from one who infinitely prefers bullshit and the bank rolled on and Stevens strolled on an ordinary evening alone with a lot of people...

Wallace Stevens reflecting upon Bird's "Klactoveedsedstene" solo in his "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds Not often realized, the lighter words In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea, Flickings from finikin to fine finikin And the general fidget from busts of Constantine To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank, These are the edgings and inchings of final form, The swanning activities of the formulae Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at, Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet, A philosopher practicing scales on his piano, A woman writing a note and tearing it up. It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Be bop. But how do you pronounce "Klactoveedsedstene"?

No way; no sir.

It's pronounced ""So-lar" because of "Jor-du."

It's not "Moon" changes, but not bad for a 21 year old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azyk7_pgceU

I don't know. It plays OK for me F For me, too.