Larry Kart

Off the top of my head, and thinking of young Chicagoans I hear all the time, cornetist Josh Berman, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, and tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson. Good examples of their work can be found on YouTube. Alto saxophonist Greg Ward, too. I'm very drawn to Grant Stewart, too, but I wouldn't say that sheer distinctiveness of sound is his hallmark (more overt Rollins echoes sound-wise than I would prefer). What I like about Stewart is his "in the moment" melodic freshness, logic, and swing.

You've got a point there. Unless Jim says otherwise, I have no problem then.

Sorry, Fasstrack, but this thread is beginning to border on self-indulgence on your part. Closing time? If not, tell me why.

The cover is copyrighted material; asking for a copy is a violation of forum rule 7.

Gentlemen, I think it's time to close this one up. If there's some reason why not, tell me why. And sooner rather than later.

The sad irony IMO is that in the end Lenny Bruce took himself much more seriously. I agree about Lenny after his legal troubles started, for the most part, but even toward the end he was still capable of remarkable things on the right night.

Don Rickles alway gave me the creeps, except for for his nice work playing a thief on an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show. To even mention him in the same breath as Lenny Bruce is mind-boggling to me. Even in Rickles' salad days, a vein of ass-kissing sentimentality was visible in him. I know -- I had to review the m.f., and I saw Bruce in his prime.

More on the Wynton-Larry Ochs affair: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/blog/2009/dec/21/jazz-purist-found-wynton-marsalis An act of multiple serio-comic ugliness on W.M.'s part.

Joel -- I'm Jewish, and to me it seems self-indulgent. One is who one is and wouldn't want to deny it, but would you want to be around someone from Scotland who reminds you ten times a day that he's Scottish and sees the world from a Scottish perspective?

Heard Hodes a lot in his later years. By then, at least with his own band, he sounded a good deal like Basie.

He was a year behind me in junior high. Here's a story that involves Bloomfield, as I told it last October to former junior-high classmates who were about to gather for our 50th high school reunion (we had a junior-high reunion the same weekend): Anyone remember, from the class behind us at Central [school], Mike Bloomfield and Bob Greenspan? Bloomfield, of course, became a renowned blues-rock guitarist before coming to a sad end; Greenspan sang with Mike; both of them were working hard on a "rebel" aura (Greenspan IIRC was rather tall and good-looking and had cultivated an impressive greaser pompadour). I recall once going over to Greenspan's house with my parents and sister for dinner; I was in eighth grade. Afterwards, Mike and Bob and I were in the basement rec room, sort of at a loss for what to do next (we didn't really know each other that well) when Bob said, in a kind of sullen, neo-Brando manner, "Let's go into town and see if we can find some action." At this, I almost cracked up -- the idea that there might be "action" of the melodramatic sort implied (or action of any sort, other than changing stoplights) at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday night in downtown Glencoe, Il., in 1955-56 seemed absurd. But perhaps I just didn't know the right places to look, and they did. P.S. Glencoe (pop. then about 8,000) was an affluent bedroom suburb north of Chicago. There was literally one stoplight and maybe three business streets in town and NO possible "action" at that time on a Sunday night. And they couldn't have meant Chicago, which was some 25 miles to the south, rather a long ways to walk (we were in 7th and 8th grade and had no access to a car). It was all posing. I wondered after telling that story last year what it was that brought me and my parents to Greenspan's house that one and only night. Near as I can guess, on the one hand it was because Greenspan's father -- to quote from the Bloomfield book -- "was one of the major political pollsters in Chicago, a behind-the-scenes political figure, one of those smoke-filled backroom guys," while my father was a politically connected in some ways real estate tax attorney, so they knew or knew of each other. On the other hand, I think that I might have been one of the reasons for the invitation (it may even have been a "summons," if Greenspan's father was that much of a power) because I was a seemingly ordinary kid who got good grades, and both the Greenspan and Bloomfield families were very concerned that their rebellious and/or goofy sons (Bloomfield was overweight, clumsy, a target of bullies, and often in trouble) were dangerously out of kilter and could use a more "normal" new friend to straighten them out by association or example. Sounds crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised. Certainly my sister, then age 9 or 10, and I had never before accompanied my folks to any dinner party before at the home of anyone but relatives or family friends. BTW, Bloomfield's family was quite well off -- more so than Greenspan's and certainly more so than mine. For instance, they had a live-in maid, whose husband also lived in as the family handy man, and this maid, who was close to Mike, a virtual second mother, became his initial entree to black Chicago and its music scene. The grandfather was a by-his-bootstraps entrepreneur who made and lost several fortunes, finally cashing in for good with some bright restaurant supply ideas for which he bought the patents -- e.g. the plastic cases where they display pies on counters and the glass sugar containers with the little metal flap. One son was in charge of manufacturing these and other items, the other son was in charge of selling them. Says Mike's younger brother Allen: "The work ethic was something that was given [in the family].... My dad, when he was 14, had a gas station. If you didn't have the ability to add and calculate quickly and find the leverage point, that was regrettable." By all accounts, his father despised Mike.

As the interesting/disturbing oral history book about Bloomfield -- "Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues" -- makes clear, he was a notorious, free-form (if arguably often playful) liar.

Interesting how swiftly things changed. Listen to tenorman Bob Mabane on "Lady Be Good" with Jay McShann in 1940 -- and of course there's Bird's solo!

FWIW, Kelly (b. 1906) was almost 15 years older than Anderson (b. 1919) Quite likely, Eldridge (b. 1911), though younger than Kelly, was the middle term in the equation.

From the sample Larry posted, it sounds a lot more clarinet-ish than most, in both tone & execution. Yes, but doesn't he barrel through and/or past the changes at times in a very melodic-linear Pres-like manner?

This is a great swinging side: There sure is something to Whitby, but I was also impressed by trumpeter Guy Kelly.

Reference to an article about him here: http://books.google.com/books?id=FTGkHSCVwMYC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=francis+doc+whitby&source=bl&ots=Y_PX8uASil&sig=Qtaba9gAohEKHIRIANdWZXiJ0Bw&hl=en&ei=z7lwTvX1LIaKsQLs9eH4CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=francis%20doc%20whitby&f=false This citation is from the bibliography of Lewis Porter's book on Pres, so Lewis may know more about this.

When I was in Arkansas in the summer of 1962 with a friend who was signing up artists for that winter's U. of Chicago Folk Festival, I met a fiddler, a friend of singer Almeda Riddle: http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=609 who was over 100. Don't recall his name, but he said that his grandfather when in his early teens had fought at the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. I worked this out, and saw that this was quite possible. So I shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who fought at the Battle of New Orleans.

Really? Ewell is OK, and those GTJ albums are very nice (though IMO mostly for Ewell's partners), but as a solo pianist in that idiom I much prefer Paul Lingle (1902-62): http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_srch_drd_B000UBJBS6?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=digital-music&field-keywords=Paul%20Lingle http://www.amazon.com/They-Tore-My-Playhouse-Down/dp/B000000XPE/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1315960908&sr=1-4 http://ragpiano.com/comps/plingle.shtml Nice Lingle story: 'That Lingle truly loved the material of the ragtime era and just beyond was quite clear. On V-J Day in 1945, Lingle told his wife Betty, "I'm glad the war is over." She was a little surprised he even knew of the event since Paul was often in his own world. "Why, Paul?" she asked. "Because now I can play 'Japanese Sandman' again."'

Very interesting, Hot Ptah. I did an interview with Wynton at about the same time, and while he seemed less nervous to me, he did go on about the supposed weaknesses of own band (this in a rather confidential tone, because bassist Lonnie Plaixco, for one, was standing nearby) and about the AEC and "Destiny's Dance." That anti-AEC polemic was, I would guess, a direct transplant from Stanley Crouch, because a while later on, in a conversation I had with Crouch, he made the same points and cited the same examples, e.g. Lester Bowie's "failure" to play the correct changes on "Well, You Needn't" -- when of course the changes Lester played were a simplification that Miles had introduced decades before and that many players had adopted since then. The only bit of angst came when I played for Wynton a cassette tape I'd made of the title track of Coleman Hawkins' "Hawk Eyes," because I thought that Charlie Shavers' brilliant solo there, and the staggering exchanges between Shavers and Hawkins, might be of interest to him. I played it without first saying who it was, in Blindfold Test fashion, but without intending it as such a test at all, but Wynton took it that way and got very uptight/upset, as though I were trying to trick him in some way. We smoothed things over IIRC, but in light of your encounter with him, it fits. Larry, I find this fascinating that he said basically the same things to you, down to the details of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and "Destiny's Dance." Were these things that meant a great deal to him and were part of all of his conversations, or was he already being dominated by Crouch and others and merely repeating what they had told him? Whether or not Crouch was involved in the AEC stuff, as I'm pretty sure he was, I'm not that surprised that Wynton would say much the same things to both you and me. In any given stretch of time what I have on my mind in one week on a particular subject often is not too far from what I have in mind on that subject a week or a month later.

According to Brian Priestley's "Chasin' the Bird," "it's a song ["Mes Souliers De Daim"} from the French Caribbean that Charlie picked up in Paris."

According to what standards, though? For one thing, it's hard to gauge where individual expressivity ends and the articulation of an accumulated lexicon of techniques, ideas, etc. begins. Even if the "truest" blues prioritizes any number of elements above virtuosity--and maybe we are talking traditional Western virtuosity, which emphasizes control, precision, and tonal/timbral cleanness (none mutually exclusive)--the most well developed music that gets categorized under the blues genre is extremely technically advanced on its own terms--or, at least, music of that ilk requires the development of some serious physical and intellectual muscles to replicate. Obviously, "replication" is not the point--unless you're a re-creationist, which even guys like Green, Bloomfield, and SRV are, to various extents (which would explain why any number of Bluesbreakers guitarists could be considered virtuosic in a "classic" sense, since they've mastered things that have already existed). So even if virtuosity is not necessarily the aim in creating something as unheralded and intrinsically expressive as Blind Willie Johnson, that music becomes virtuosic after the fact by virtue of defining the idiom. I mean, it's all really occidental, but it's true. Not sure I follow all of the above -- and I certainly don't have, merely because of lack of interest on my part, a great deal of experience with latter-day blues-guitar virtuosity, regardless of the race or background of the players -- but by my empirical standard, the last notable blues guitarist who really worked for me was T-Bone Walker. In addition to all the other factors that might be brought to bear, it's kind of a foreground-background thing. In all music, but in the blues in particular IMO, foreground and background should be knitted together. When foreground virtuosity becomes paramount in the blues, when foreground and background aren't actively "talking" to each other -- and this is hard to avoid once virtuosity comes to the fore because the literal musical "background" material of the blues is perforce fairly simple, however complex/subtle the interactions between foreground and background might be -- then for me the whole shebang threatens to break down. BTW, oddly enough (or not so oddly), Allen Lowe is among the few modern blues guitarists who don't give me the feeling that the language of the blues is splitting apart in front of me. I think that's because a strong useful sense of antagonism/questioning (plus love of and even combat about) the blues has long been at work in Allen, and that the actual musical results embody this. It's like it's already split apart inside him, and this then emerges as an active musical-emotional whole.

Very interesting, Hot Ptah. I did an interview with Wynton at about the same time, and while he seemed less nervous to me, he did go on about the supposed weaknesses of own band (this in a rather confidential tone, because bassist Lonnie Plaixco, for one, was standing nearby) and about the AEC and "Destiny's Dance." That anti-AEC polemic was, I would guess, a direct transplant from Stanley Crouch, because a while later on, in a conversation I had with Crouch, he made the same points and cited the same examples, e.g. Lester Bowie's "failure" to play the correct changes on "Well, You Needn't" -- when of course the changes Lester played were a simplification that Miles had introduced decades before and that many players had adopted since then. The only bit of angst came when I played for Wynton a cassette tape I'd made of the title track of Coleman Hawkins' "Hawk Eyes," because I thought that Charlie Shavers' brilliant solo there, and the staggering exchanges between Shavers and Hawkins, might be of interest to him. I played it without first saying who it was, in Blindfold Test fashion, but without intending it as such a test at all, but Wynton took it that way and got very uptight/upset, as though I were trying to trick him in some way. We smoothed things over IIRC, but in light of your encounter with him, it fits.

Feel like a Puritan in saying this, but for me the blues and guitar virtuosity are virtually contra-indicated.

IMO Sleepy John tends to support Chuck's point that '"the blues" [is] a vocal music with instrumental "commentary."' Or that if it isn't always, it was at one time.