Larry Kart

I'm still waiting on a UK order I placed through Amazon on Dec. 21 and got the same e-mail Chuck did when I asked the seller about this.

Really good game for all the usual reasons, plus the relatively unusual in my experience injuries-to-key- players factor (this fortunately without guys being carried off on gurneys). For a while there, it looked like GB not might have a defensive backfield left. Terrific play by Matthews to cause that fumble, but I'd say that 99 percent of the backs in the NFL would have lost their grip when someone puts their helmet right on the ball with that much force. The real culprits there were the nameless Steelers who failed to block Matthews and the other Packer on that play, and let's not forget the play call there on both sides -- Mendenhall after all was hit three yards behind the line, deep in GB territory, when the Steelers had been rolling.

Thanks. They were fun to write and IIRC came in a rush, as though the music were dictating them. I knew I was on a roll when I came up with "Mitchell has picked the lock of the imaginary museum and begun jitterbugging with the artifacts."

Second half of the Braxton-McDonough is as fine as the first. Braxton sure was in great form when he recorded this. Sounds very happy, too. Listened again to "Old" and "Quartet No. 2." Phillip Wilson is just fantastic. Was struck this time, more than I recall from the other times I've heard this music over more years than seems possible, by how much Lester and Roscoe were into a kind of hand-clapping "Shortnin' Bread" groove, melodically and rhythmically. (Of course, on the second disc, there's "Oh Susanna" to bear out that strain, and I recall at least one marvelous live performance back then that was based on "The Streets of Laredo.") Not that it's news, but among the many things at work there was a very deep link to the pre-jazz past -- as in (to not coin a phrase) "Ancient To The Future." But where did that come from? Church in part, plus Lester's tent-show experience, but the way Roscoe sort of of holds that material up the light, turns it this way and that and regards it -- what (for want of a better term) a sensibility. In the booklet photos, Roscoe looks so young.

Express an impression? Halfway through the Braxton-McDonough, I'm kind of stunned. Such lovely, lucid, "balanced" music. Braxton is in great form, and why is the first time I've heard of McDonough? He's got big ears and a lot to say.

CDs arrived today. Many thanks. Will listen (again and for the first time) and report. Well, "report" suddenly sounds pretentious. Respond?

Or it's a cat fighting with Madame Schumann-Heink (continue to the part where she starts to yodel):

Wait a minute -- Morgana King did the Beatles? (I'll be here all week.) P.S. What's going on at or about the 2:35 minute mark of "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a soundtrack for Purgatory.

"Elis and Tom"!

Is there not software that can do that? If not, there should be! A name index perhaps, but a really useful, thorough index -- no way. There are too many judgment calls involved. See this index for example, from a general-interest book I'm reading, "Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy At Guadalcanal" (and this index is far from as complex as some top-drawer indexes are): http://www.amazon.com/Neptunes-Inferno-U-S-Navy-Guadalcanal/dp/055380670X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296511617&sr=1-1#reader_055380670X

Yup. On my book I also had to pay someone out of my own pocket a not inconsiderable sum to copy edit the manuscript. Most publishers don't do that anymore. OTOH, the publisher did recommend a freelance copy editor who was very good and who found several errors that would have been annoying or worse if they'd made it into print. He even said that he enjoyed reading the manuscript. The book should have had an index, but I felt sure that I couldn't do that myself -- compiling a really good one is a special craft and very time-consuming, and I didn't have the time or the energy to teach myself how to do it right the first time out of the box. And I damn well wasn't going to pay someone to do it, mostly because I felt pretty sure that to do it right one would not only have to be a trained compiler of indexes but a jazz person as well; and such people may not even exist.

The late Chicago stalwart Lucy Reed (with Bill Evans): I'm also very fond of the work of Chicagoan Audrey Morris, who is on the cusp between jazz and cabaret. Her latter-day recordings are superb (though samples are not available on the 'Net), but these samples of her early work are nice: Three from 1954 (she's the pianist too): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrsFWPQSYG4&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PORCCndmvdk&feature=related And two from 1956: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ZqTMuLaF8&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAFiZkbuyMM Morris' home page, where her records can be found. A great lady, too: http://www.audreymorris.com/

Completely new to me, and I do know of a lot of fairly obscure but talented singers of that '50s vintage.

More from Phillips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IYvviGxYr0

Wow. More elastic time, for sure. The way she sings "...that I may kiss"! This is she, right? http://annephillips.com/apcmspages/performer.asp

Allen! Do I have to reveal your cover, too?

Yes -- it was hardcore Right Wing outfit from the first and for many years but was at that time making a transition to a mainstream publishing firm and would eventually drop the Regnery name and become Contemporary Books. I think descendents of the original Henry Regnery later bought the old name from Contemporary and re-started Regnery with its old agenda. Some of those old Regnery titles were scary. Strange little family drama was involved IIRC. A fellow named Harvey Plotnick had married Regnery's daughter, Susie, who probably was his heir and it was Plotnick who took the firm mainstream, over daddy's considerable objections, but Susie sided with her husband. Harvey was mainstream with a vengeance. He once told his staff that the maximum amount of time that could be spent on editing a manuscript was one day. That some vintage Regnery titles were borderline anti-Semitic perhaps lent sauce to the Plotnick-Regnery drama.

Seems like it was yesterday, too. 5404 N. Kimball, right? Can still see those large speakers on the street side of the living room.

Both. I had a friend who was an editor at Henry Regnery, and the would-be author was essentially a collector of old photographs. He'd done a previous book for them of photos of the Old West, and I think that also was subject he knew a good deal about, but he didn't know much about baseball. My friend suspected as much from the text he'd handed in but asked me to take a look at it to be sure -- she probably asked whether I thought it could be saved through editing. I told her that what little text was there was so off base that she'd be better off asking someone to do it all over from scratch; and she asked of I would/could do that (honestly, that hadn't been in my mind). Thinking that this might be fun, I asked when she needed it -- she said four weeks! And it would be for a flat fee -- I think $400 -- and I'd get a credit on the cover. So I placed the photos in chronological units, wrote several pages of introductory material for each chapter, and, probably most important, wrote lengthy captions whenever I could. For instance, the author might have a lovely photo of Christy Mathewson, and in his manuscript it would just say "Christy Mathewson," while I'd assemble everything about Mathewson that I thought was interesting and that would fit on that page. I was, of course, relying on secondary sources for most of the information, but I knew where to look and already knew enough about the subject (I'd been a fan since age nine and liked to read about the baseball past) to sift through that material with care and reshape it in a sufficiently personal manner. The book got a lot of reviews -- people like books on baseball -- and in all those reviews IIRC only two mistakes were pointed out. I only remember one of them: I said that the 1906 Cubs held the record for most wins in the regular season -- 106. They did hold that record for many years, but the Indians surpassed it in 1954 with (I think it was) 116 wins. And those were 154-game seasons! Probably my best caption was the page-long one about the famous "Bonehead Merkle" Giants-Cubs game of 1908 -- a thorough and fair-minded account of that incident if I do say so myself.

Why not try Fresh Sound? Used copies of the book seem to be available here and no doubt elsewhere: http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=bY2mlEBOj0ERxVePNUQIDRAKCio_3826995343_1:13:635&bq=author%3Ddavid%2520r.%2520%28compiled%2520by%2520with%2520text%2520by%2520lawrence%2520kart%29%2520phillips%26title%3Dthat%2520old%2520ball%2520game%2520rare%2520photographs%2520from%2520baseball%27s%2520glorious%2520past

I do have a jock strap once owned by Pee Wee Marquette. Never been used.

And I just discovered that there's a copy of it in the library of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia: http://207.56.175.212/Books_K/That_old_ball_game_rare_photograp.html http://www.kfupm.edu.sa/

A friend of my son who is the book buyer at 57th St. Books in Hyde Park just told me that today he bought a bunch of Bill Veeck's books from his widow Mary Frances Veeck, and among them was the picture book about old-time baseball that I wrote the text for back in 1975, "That Old Ball Game" (Regnery). Nice feeling to know that Veeck had it. Not a bad book, too -- some great vintage photos, including one of Charles Comiskey (when he was player-manager of the St, Louis Browns) in a uniform that looks like it had been designed by Coco Chanel.

I remember once hearing him work Gene Quill's name into a routine.

Yes, I'm here. Hard for me to say right now, because I bought the book, started to read it and soon just didn't feel like continuing. Thought I'd posted something here about what my feelings were at that time, though. Basically, IIRC, it was that Kelley didn't give me enough of a sense that he knew what Monk's music was really like/amounted to, so what then was all of Kelley's work built around/attached to? Not that a book of this sort needs to be, or perhaps even should be, marked by an intense effort to grasp what its subject's music is up to, but Monk was a unique figure and one whose importance is still being registered in the music quite actively and perhaps even urgently, which may be why I began to get the feeling that Kelley's Monk was a figure he meant to encase in amber and/or place on a pedestal, as though the goal were to add another great man to the historical jazz pantheon. Not that Monk doesn't belong there in one sense, but ... well, I now recall that I said back then that while one could imagine a reasonable biography of Beethoven being written by a man who didn't grasp that LvB's music was at once historical and still radically alive, ideally one would very much want the author to have a sure grip on both of those things.