Larry Kart

I know, "pink" has an ugly and specific history, but I still lean toward sheer sloppiness, in part because Genarri's own attitudes, if one can infer them from the way he treats other figures in his rogue's gallery of critics -- e.g. Gene Lees and the bizarre characterization of Dan. M. in the passage we've been talking about -- seem to be firmly in the progressive camp, with an emphasis on totaling up racial injuries whenever possible. OTOH, it may be an instance of a kind of semi-conscious "I'm in the catbird seat" shpritzing, a tendency to lay "attitude" on just about anyone in a free-and-easy manner.

Right. Much as I don't want to, I may need to re-read Gennari's book. I do remember the part about Martin Williams' mother.

It's a bit of 1) but mostly 3), though that dumbness may in part be new-fashioned. If nothing else, to say "pink-shaded" when you likely just mean coming from somewhere over on the Left (with of course a strong civil rights movement overtone) is so loose as to be ugly and (I assume inadvertently) akin to Nixonian name-calling.

I agree with the first paragraph, don't agree with the second. "Blowin' Hot and Cool" is a very specific book and part of a very specific movement, the so-called "New Jazz Studies." The problems I have with the book and with much of this movement seem to me to have little do with criticism in general or even (gulp!) with academics in general. But what the hell -- party at Jim's house! Just to perhaps clarify my second point. I see no problem with arguing that the book represents academic overreach of a special kind connected to "New Jazz Studies." What's disingenuous to me is basing a complaint on the presumption of a power grab when -- in what others might term a similar action -- a person puts himself in a position of deciding what is and what is not a proper line of inquiry based on a self-proclaimed deeper understanding of jazz values. Which is not to say that board members here do not in fact have that deeper understanding ... What "others might term [this] a similar action"? It all (or mostly) comes down to people. I know who John is, I know (this sounds pretentious) what his values and understanding are, as does anyone who has read his good-sized body of work, which has been available to the public over a long period of time. Whether or not he proclaims it himself, he does have that deeper understanding, has shown that he does many times over. If there are "others" who think that he has to start over from square one and prove who he is anew because they don't know who he is, that's their problem; they need to do some homework. I'm not questioning John's authority or credentials by any means. The work speaks for itself and I've been a great admirer for many years. I was just trying to get at the issue of who, if anyone, should have the power of prior restraint to put some topics off limits. My answer is no one, because you start to run into "Free speech for me but not for thee." I don't agree with John here that the nature and history of jazz criticism is irrelevant to jazz and jazz appreciation. It was/is a music that reached and moved (reaches and moves) a broad audience in important ways; and who wrote what about the music when and (within reasonable limits of investigation/speculation) why is part of the story -- peripheral perhaps, but not without interest. But while no one should have the power of prior restraint about what topics are worth talking about, that doesn't absolve us from the task of recognizing b.s. and power operations for what they are when, as sometimes happens, they become egregious. Free speech in the don't stop him/her from speaking sense is one thing; but some people (not you) seem to think that free speech means that all speech is or ought to be equal in value.

I agree with the first paragraph, don't agree with the second. "Blowin' Hot and Cool" is a very specific book and part of a very specific movement, the so-called "New Jazz Studies." The problems I have with the book and with much of this movement seem to me to have little do with criticism in general or even (gulp!) with academics in general. But what the hell -- party at Jim's house! Just to perhaps clarify my second point. I see no problem with arguing that the book represents academic overreach of a special kind connected to "New Jazz Studies." What's disingenuous to me is basing a complaint on the presumption of a power grab when -- in what others might term a similar action -- a person puts himself in a position of deciding what is and what is not a proper line of inquiry based on a self-proclaimed deeper understanding of jazz values. Which is not to say that board members here do not in fact have that deeper understanding ... What "others might term [this] a similar action"? It all (or mostly) comes down to people. I know who John is, I know (this sounds pretentious) what his values and understanding are, as does anyone who has read his good-sized body of work, which has been available to the public over a long period of time. Whether or not he proclaims it himself, he does have that deeper understanding, has shown that he does many times over. If there are "others" who think that he has to start over from square one and prove who he is anew because they don't know who he is, that's their problem; they need to do some homework.

Chuck -- Wait until someone writes something grossly inaccurate if not mean-spirited about, say, your role in recording Roscoe and others (if that hasn't already happened). If I know you, your response won't be to relax and listen to some music. Over the last 40+ years I have been attacked by white folks saying I'd been duped by black musicians and by black folks saying I was screwing black musicians. I think your recent thread about that AAJ review of Sonny Rollins Impulse "double" reissue of On Impulse / There Will Never Be Another You is a mild example of what I had in mind. You don't suffer fools gladly; no reason (depending on one's temperament and the social situation) that anyone should.

Mind if I serve meat and alcohol and play loud music? Tofu, carrot juice, and George Winston for me.

I agree with the first paragraph, don't agree with the second. "Blowin' Hot and Cool" is a very specific book and part of a very specific movement, the so-called "New Jazz Studies." The problems I have with the book and with much of this movement seem to me to have little do with criticism in general or even (gulp!) with academics in general. But what the hell -- party at Jim's house!

Chuck -- Wait until someone writes something grossly inaccurate if not mean-spirited about, say, your role in recording Roscoe and others (if that hasn't already happened). If I know you, your response won't be to relax and listen to some music. Over the last 40+ years I have been attacked by white folks saying I'd been duped by black musicians and by black folks saying I was screwing black musicians. Yes, I've heard you compared to Herman Lubinsky.

Chuck -- Wait until someone writes something grossly inaccurate if not mean-spirited about, say, your role in recording Roscoe and others (if that hasn't already happened). If I know you, your response won't be to relax and listen to some music.

Well, there you go - people trying to own the dead so they can rule a kingdom of zombies. For real. I don't know 'bout y'all, but I just don't/won't/can't fuck with this shit. It's not right, it's not healthy, and there's no happy endings involved in any way in trying to engage it. Just...walk away. Let the zombies eat their own, and go find a good party somewhere. But knowing what I know or think I know about the jazz past (particularly the good-sized chunks of it that I've actually lived through), I can't walk away from it for several reasons. First, because in general (and I don't recall who came up with the phrase), I think of history as "the queen of disciplines." To sit still while stuff is erased or rewritten for what seem to me to be essentially venal reasons ... not while I have a breath left. Second, it still seems to me to be a living art -- very much so -- and a good party, too. No doubt there are good parties, and bigger good parties, elsewhere (I've certainly attended a few), but at age 69 I don't feel much like switching, and not because I'm prone to nostalgia. To me, both Jelly Roll Morton and Cecil Taylor (and many other people, right on up to this moment) are still among the living.

Well, they're funded up to a point or in some sense by the academic institutions for which they work, but I don't think they do this kind of stuff for the money, which is minimal (at least as far as books like these are concerned), but for power and/or the sensations and aura thereof -- to inflate the goiters of their own self-esteem, their sense that they are properly reshaping a "discipline," revising/rewriting the history of a living (or once living) art.

Not all tyrannies are murderous in deed, but most tyrannical thinking/feeling is murderous at heart. That's why stupidity alone doesn't seem (at least to me) to fit the cases we've been talking about on this thread (e.g. Hersch and Gennari). These are people who in the name of power or control or some such are out to more or less expunge the life out of specific human beings -- and vividly alive human beings, too.

At the risk of offending Hans, the two major tyrannies of the 20th Century that I had in mind were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, both of which craved/needed both the bodies and souls of their victims, and neither of which was inclined to stop what they were up to once they got their hands on their victims' money or other assets. Instead, that those victims had any such assets was further proof of the ideological seamlessness/righteousness of those regimes' drive to victimize their chosen targets. A circle of malign and, so some shrewd historians believe (and I agree with them), essentially "redemptive" fantasies. That is, without the belief that destroying those whom those regimes chose to destroy was a transformative, utopian policy, the legitimacy of the whole shebang was gravely in doubt.

Some will settle for that, but the hardcore ones of recent times (the 20th Century is still recent time to me) definitely wanted both soul and body -- soul as much as body or more so.

Because today's battles are about ownership, and ownership is all about defining, not spotlighting and encouraging. This is what happens when enough people die. Pretty soon critical mass is reached and even the still-living are up for grabs. Exactly. One of the most awful things about tyrannies, I reckon, is not only that one has to submit by and large to the sheer power of those in power but also that one must accept (if and when this becomes an issue) the tyranny's typically detailed false supporting claims that the power the tyrant has come to exercise is rational and righteous. They want both your bodies and your souls.

Oh, you've got to read the Gennari; it's a hoot, though no doubt dangerous as hell if it becomes the version of things that gets passed down through time, as might well be the case. So would you say the Gennari book would be an entertaining read, assuming that I consider myself able to take things (historical or factual) with a dose of salt where needed and have derived a certain amount of pleasure out of reading several of Hugues Panassié's books too (by taking them not at all as the Gospel but as a source of what one MIGHT think about this or that musical development without the reader having to agree with it at all)? If I recall it correctly, the Gennari book at once amused, appalled, and frightened me because of its drive to cast just about every jazz writer of note before the advent of the so-called New Jazz Studies movement (of which Gennari is a part) as an openly or inherently exploitive and/or gravely blinkered figure. My copy of the book is littered with angry/incredulous responses in the margins, and while I don't have the time to go through the thing and reproduce the highlights here, this is one of my favorites, in part because I know Dan Morgenstern. Dealing with Morgenstern's background and political evolution, Gennari writes: "Morgenstern -- whose Polish-born Austrian father was an anti-Nazi journalist blackballed by the Third Reich -- grew up in a Scandinavian social-democratic environment [i.e. Denmark, but could Denmark during WWII under Nazi occupation, which is when the young Dan lived there, be accurately described as a social-democratic environment?], supported Henry Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948 and flirted with early 1950s Leftist organizations. After attending Brandeis University in the mid-1950s ... he settled on on a Left-leaning liberalism shared by [Gene] Leees, [ira] Gitler, and many others in jazz circles, splitting the difference between the bedrock businessmen conservatism of a Stan Kenton and the pink-shaded dissent of a Dizzy Gillespie or a Jon Hendricks." I hardly know where to begin, but the implicit snottiness of "settled on" is nice (the enlightened likes of Gennari clearly know better about these things), while the final "splitting the difference between the bedrock businessman's conservatism of a Stan Kenton and the pink-shaded dissent of a Dizzy Gillespie or a Jon Hendricks" is just nuts, both in terms of whatever Stan Kenton's overt or implicit political-social beliefs actually were (a tricky subject to be sure, but "bedrock businessman's conservatism" doesn't come close IMO) and also to the degree that it implies that Dan, caring about where Kenton stood in those respects, somehow split 'the difference" between that stance "and the pink-shaded dissent of a Dizzy Gillespie or a Jon Hendricks." I see in the margins that I wrote at this point, "Is he [Gennari] writing about a man or a bug?" That is, why isn't Dan -- a man of great intelligence and broad experience, etc. -- given credit for having lived his own life and having reached his own conclusions.

Oh, you've got to read the Gennari; it's a hoot, though no doubt dangerous as hell if it becomes the version of things that gets passed down through time, as might well be the case.

Well, I see in the acknowledgements that among the people that Hersch thanks for their encouragement and advice are Sherrie Tucker (oy!) and Robin D.G. Kelley (hmm), while one of the two readers for the U. of C. Press whose advice was of particular value to Hersch was John Gennari, author of "Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics," a book (also from the U. of C. Press) that often made smoke come out of my ears. Finally, the acquisitions editor at the press who, natch, acquired the book is one of my oldest friends. I've gone around the maypole with him before about such things, especially about the Gennari book. Believe me, it would do neither me nor him much good to do so with this "probing" tome.

Yes, indeed.

But just a bit of Lucky Thompson makes all this shit irrelevant. Vocalese for me is a minor and more or less boring subject, and I'm sorry now that I said one word about it.

To quote from Chuck's book of wisdom: WHATEVER. I'm done.

The implication there is that nobody was vocally mimicking/undertaking bebop solos until somebody had the notion to put words to them, and...that does not compute. That vocalese led to bebop-based scat singing is not at all what I said or, I think, implied, because it's certainly not what I believe. First, I think we can agree that there was scat singing (Armstrong anyone?) long before there was bebop scatting or any bebop to scat to or in the style of. Second, I don't think there's a whole lot of reason to divide pre-bop scat singing from bebop scatting, except perhaps for the coloration that placing the familiar "bop language" sounds in the foreground gives to bebop scat singing -- and I assume that those syllables/sounds and the actual music arose synergistically and simultaneously. All I I'm saying is that the specific discipline/skill/style/whatever of vocalese -- the placing of words to a recorded solo in as mirror-like a manner as possible -- tended to have a significant affect on the scat singing of those who got into vocalese and also engaged in scat singing.

Unfortunately, the Leo Watson clips on YouTube aren't representative. He got better and far more far out in the '40s. There's a good Watson album, but its pricey. Jim -- My vocalese/scat point was both conceptual and historical, though I think your vocalese definition does need some refinement; it's "putting words to an improvised recorded jazz solo." The "recorded" part is important because a key part of the pleasure of listening to a vocalese performance, if you respond at all, is that you already know the solo to which the words have been set. In any case, there was scat singing long before there was vocalese, but once vocalese emerged, the singers who got into it, like Ross and Hendricks, tended to be touched by their vocalese experiences when they sang scat, for better or for worse. By contrast, a scat singer who seemingly wasn't touched by vocalese, e.g. Sarah Vaughan, did not to my mind attempt to mirror instrumental licks but improvised with and from her vocal instrument. That Watson album: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Scat-Man-Leo-Watson/dp/B00000JQL1/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1314396106&sr=1-1

That's what most instrumentalists (the overwhelming majority, actually) do too. But most vocalists don't have the skills to do it this fluently. Would that they did, or at least that they'd recognize that they don't and either stop trying or else go to the skills store and get some. As for the whole vocalese thing in general, I'm less interested as time goes on. But this clip ain't about vocalese, it's about scatting, and how most of the nonsense that passes for scatting is eitehr some degree of inept and/or quite basic. What Hendricks and Lambert are doing here makes neither concession or excuses about dealing with the tempo and the idiom. Whatever Walter Johnson told Connee Boswell about female dogs preaching on their hind legs is really not relevant to that, although it certainly is a clever tale of Old World fascinations of wand with both gender and species. But these days, women regularly preach (and quite well), and dogs now routinely walk on their hind legs, at least if they want to do the laundry or work a chainsaw. To both Jim and Mark: Yes, that's what most instrumentalists do, but to me Hendricks sounds like he's basically imitating some very licks-based saxophonists; and because he doesn't have much of a voice by jazz vocalists' standards, let alone much of a "voice" by the standards of a good jazz tenorman, the results seem to me to be interesting mostly because it can be done at all, a la you know what. Lambert OTOH seems to me to invent from and with his voice -- I particularly like the way he gets that back and forth rhythmic and timbral phrasing thing going from, so it seems, the back and front of his chest and belly. This is kind of Pres-like, or better maybe Wardell-like, but to me the difference between Lambert and Hendricks is that Lambert's "instrument" is his voice plus his hipness and Hendricks' is almost entirely his hipness. As for the vocalese thing, as I may have implied (and in fact believe), the way L-H-R sing here springs historically and conceptually from the vocalese concept (fitting words to recorded jazz solos), whether not they're actually scat singing. I am willing to listen to contrary evidence. BTW, speaking of scat singing that's almost beyond belief, check out the great Leo Watson.