Larry Kart

More angular, pedal-pointy at times, but also a bit tentative at some points, as one might expect given that he was subbing on short notice. What I noticed as much as note choice was the springy time feel. If I'm not mistaken, Monk seemed to dig that, at least as a change of pace. Rouse, as I said above, also seems stimulated, but at times he pauses uncharacteristically, perhaps in response to Swallow not voice-leading in ways he's come to expect from I guess it would have been Larry Ridley at the time. In the notes, Swallow says that he later (early '70s?) was asked to join the group but had to refuse because he'd been playing electric bass exclusively and no longer owned a string bass.

See that this has been mentioned before upon its release, but I don't see an estimate of its quality. Just got it, and I think it's top-drawer for Monk's Quartet -- this is the Ben Riley version, with Steve Swallow sitting in on bass at the last moment (he was on the bill with Art Farmer). Rouse and Monk are in very lively form, and Swallow's contribution is interesting -- he adds a different spring to the time feel. The last two tracks add a Buddy Collette-led ensemble and are quite effective -- Bobby Bryant solos with considerable boldness and zest, certainly unintimidated by Monk's presence, and Collette play a fine alto solo on "Straight, No Chaser." Only drawback is that the sound breaks up a bit at times, but I'm OK with it.

Returning (in case he or anyone else cares) to the friendly tussle between Jim and me over his "words are toys" remark and what underlay and led up to it, I just ran across this in a current New York Review of Books essay by Charles Rosen that more or less supports/justifies Jim's point of view: 'In his discussion of humor, Sigmund Freud ... after treating at length the kind of humor that allows a safe and neutralized outlet for the taboo expression of sexual desire and of social aggression, arrives finally at “pure” humor, the jokes that are innocent of repressive fantasies, but just simple word games, silly puns that are only a form of play. (I can remember a superannuated example from my junior high school days: “Why do radio announcers have such small hands? Wee paws [we pause] for station identification.”) 'To explain our delight in such foolishness, Freud invokes the lallation of very small children, who sit and repeat long strings of nonsense syllables (“ba, da, ma…mow, bow, wow…etc.) at great length for their own amusement. Learning a language, being forced to attach a meaning to a sound, is a burden to the child, who, in reaction, strings together senseless rhyming noises as a form of escape. Even for adults understanding speech is not devoid of effort, and can be a source of fatigue. With a silly play on words, there is a split second when a word suspended between two incompatible senses briefly loses all meaning and becomes pure sound, and for a lovely moment we revert to the delighted state of the child freed from the tyranny of language. Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know. [My emphasis] The whole thing (haven't read it yet myself, but I will right now): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/freedom-and-art/

Allen -- When you actually see people who are doing things right/changing things for the better, as has been the case on much of the Chicago scene for more than a decade, the difference can be breathtaking. OTOH, it does call for there to be a good many musicians around who can really play and want to do things in one of the right ways, but it's also fairly circular -- gpod new people arrive and get into the swim because they know about/have heard about what's happening, and the sensible-communal aura is hard to resist once you get a good taste of it.

I got to see the Doris Duke Foundation people do their thing at a big conference in Chicago several years ago about how to help the jazz scene there (there were hundreds of us invited), and the amounts of pernicious b.s. that were served up was beyond anything I could have imagined. Further, the "conclusions" that we all supposedly reached (e.g. to build a big brick-and-mortar downtown jazz venue cum museum) were the conclusions they had reached beforehand and were ooched into place by some blatant engineering that would have done credit to the Politburo under Stalin. Fortunately, nothing concrete seems to have come from this nonsense so far, no doubt thanks to the recession. In any case, it seemed clear to me that what they had in mind would have served only themselves (all those executives need to be paid, and board members must get their perks) and/or some property interests, a la Jazz @ Lincoln Center. Finally, someone in the know told me how much dough had been spent to mount this conference, some $300,000. He said, Imagine if that money had been given to existing and arguably already flourishing local jazz instiutions to mount concerts, commission works, bring in musicians from other cities and countries, etc. And so it goes.

IIRC what happened to Quill (I think this account was from an interview with Woods) was this: Gene was an extremely feisty, fiery guy, quick to take offense and quick to put his dukes up, and while working in Atlantic City he got into with some guy (or guys) of the sort one shouldn't get into it with and was beaten to within the proverbial inch of his life. He lived on for a while after that (for how long I don't know) but never came close to recovering. Alcohol and drug problems he may have had, but I think this is the story.

It wasn't Woods' "edge" that drew to his playing up to 1957 or so; in fact, it's the IMO often put-on hot "edge" of his later work that gave me the willies. Rather, it was the shapeliness and lucidity of his lines, the way he could conjure up almost literal shapes and play them off against each other, that I admired in his early work. That can be heard in a whole lot of Woods' recordings as a leader and a sideman from back then. Two of my favorites for him are Quincy Jones' "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" and Jon Eardley's "Pot Pie," but he was playing at a consistently high level.

According to the Bruyninckx discography Sugan (July 19, 1957) was a Phil Woods date; Ruppli's Prestige discography lists Garland as co-leader. FWIW, the album cover says "Phil Woods with Red Garland," both names in the same size type. I'd say they were co-leaders.

Just to be clear, I'm a big Phil Woods fan up to a point (probably his sideman appearance on Red Garland's "Sugan" from, I think, 1957), but after that not much at all.

I seem to remember that Ronnie was also a Joe Henderson man. I suspect that his prime formative model was Wardell Gray, though I know he admired Mobley.

Don't miss the "Three Bones and a Quill" album. The bones (Jimmy Cleveland, Jim Dahl, and Frank Rehak) and Quill were all members of Johnny Richards orchestra, and the togetherness shows. Haven't sat down and studied this, but on the whole I like Quill best when he was apart from Phil Woods; together, things seemed to get a bit too "athletic" for my tastes for both of them, though the time of their partnership was still before Woods came to be rather artificially "hot" IMO. But we've been down that road before; sorry for mentioning it.

Recently picked up a set that combines two Jazz Couriers albums, a Hayes Quartet album, and the Hayes tracks from Jimmy Deuchar's "Pub Crawling." Mostly unfamiliar with vintage Scott (I know him best from the Clarke-Boland Band) I was surprised to find him (IMO at least) to be a somewhat more interesting player than Hayes in their Jazz Couriers days. Not that Hayes was any slouch, but Scott's lines are longer and tend to have more continuity, and his phrase lengths are usefully less regular.

Speaking of dictionaries, how about that other great Clare Fischer album, Thesaurus!!! Aside from Warne's solos, I'm not a big fan of "Thesaurus," though it sounds much better in its later LP version (Discovery?) than it did on Atlantic. I much prefer "Extensions."

Toys are fine, as are words, but though they can be played with, words aren't toys.

Words are toys -- oh boy.

Jim -- OK, I don't like "advocacy" either as part of ordinary speech. But "pimp" and "hype" are better off in any context I can think of if they still retain some sting instead of being more or less neutral. For one thing, if you do want your "pimp" or "hype" to have some sting to it, how then do you convey this? Through intonation and rhythm? If so, give me a hint of how that might sound. Or do you say, "You're a f------ pimp," or "That's f------ hype."

Jim -- You've got a sister. Someone asks if you'd suggest that he ask her out on a date. You say, "Sure -- you're a nice guy, she's a nice girl: I think you'd like each other; have a good time." If I said that you had just advocated that the guy ask out your sister, that would be a fair description? If I said that you had just pimped your sister, would that be a fair description, too? I would think that in a fair number of informal dialects, saying that "You just pimped your sister" might get you in a good deal of trouble.

Another dictionary definition of "hype": "excessive or misleading publicity or advertising." Again, I don't think that JLH is delivering either of those, nor does Jim's "proactively pimping your wares" seem right to me. (My emphasis) I think Jim's later "advocacy" fills the bill.

Yes, but what it is is not "hype." And if you're going to retreat to the "or extensive publicity" part of the dictionary definition of the word, I don't think it's been extensive here in the sense that JLH keeps harping on stuff annoyingly, like a carnival barker or pitchman. Rather, he's keeping us informed about the progress of matters that a good many of us seem to care about.

No big deal, perhaps, but, a post up above referred to JLH's "hype." To me, and I know to some other copy editor types, "hype" is a disparaging term that implies one is exaggerating to serve one's interests. JLH hasn't done that IMO; rather he's saying exactly what he thinks; his enthusiasms are genuine.

About the "always be of service" goal, as opposed to (if indeed it is) Pete C's "the only question an artist needs to ask is, 'Am I making something that would please me if somebody else had made it.''" "Always be of service" would seem to call for one of two things (and maybe more): that the artist be able to read the audience's mind, or that he regard applause, ticket and recorded music sales, back-patting, etc. as the primary determinants of what he or she should be doing. And a secondary question: if the artist could read the audience's minds, how does he balance out, say, nine people who thought the results were so-so and one who thought they were life-changingly brilliant versus ten people who thought the results were good. Also, in that first sample, who is this tenth person? Is he Jim Sangrey? Chuck Nessa? Me? Charlie Parker? Duke Ellington? And who are the nine others?

It's Copland.

Email I sent to friend: Bought a copy of this 2-CD set: http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-At-Philharmonic-Seattle-1956/dp/B005EN4JKK/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1329508816&sr=1-2 after I saw it extolled by Dan Morgenstern and others, and so far am pleasantly surprised. Both the Swing and Modern sets are very good (Roy is both excitable and often on fire in the former, and Jo Jones takes a long interesting solo; Dizzy is in stunning form on the latter, with Stitt [on alto] and Getz also quite intense). The MJO set, very well recorded, as is the whole concert, is not routine. The Krupa set is a loss IMO aside from Dave McKenna (can't stand Eddie Shu, couldn't back then either), haven't yet heard the Peterson and Ella sets. Side one is worth the price.

Line from an old Second City parody of "Family Feud" -- one member of a family that has lost turns on another family member (the one who was the inept final contestant) and screams: "'Blue' is not a fruit!"

I have the Bolcom too on LP but haven't compared them.