Larry Kart

So it's "My Yiddishe Free Jazz"?

In that case, Oliver Lake?

Does Joe McPhee qualify?

Another little gem from "The Jazz Loft Project," p. 231: "But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." "...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed. OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

Links to a 2009 NPR-WYNC radio series om the 6th Ave. Jazz Loft: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/fishko/jazzloft/ So far, to my tastes, of course, I found episode four, which focuses on Hall Overton, to be the most interesting and effective -- not only because Overton is interesting in himself but also because it has less of that "celebration of randomness," "here's a zoo of far-out bohemians" feel than the other episodes do. The passage toward the end of this episode where Lee Konitz speaks of how he visited the dying Overton in the hospital just to hold his hand is very moving.

Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up.

P.S. I believe that Dylan also was not present when the Versailles Treaty was signed.

More odd, dubious moments from Sam Stephenson's "The Jazz Loft Project": p. xii: "Among the tunes played is 'I Got Rhythm,' composed in 1930 by George Gershwin." How helpful. p, xvi: "Among the tunes played is is the 1926 composition by Ray Henderson 'Bye, Bye Blackbird'"... See above (such instances are present throughout; won't mention them again). p. 3: "Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idosyncratic Steinway B piano...." "beat-up," yes, but how so "idiosyncratic"? p. 43-4: A matter of taste and strategy, I suppose, but here, as in many other places in the book, several large-format pages are devoted to an account (with substantial quotations from the tape) of what Smith recorded on a particular reel -- in this case a World Series broadcast, a reading on a radio show of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a bit of an opera, and a newsman reporting on the results of the presidential election. Probably we do need to be told with specificity at some point what Smith's taping habits were, but once that's been established, why do we have page after page of this? One suspects that those numerous passages are there essentially to fill out the book, to set off the photographs with text of some sort. P. 167-8: "Late September 1961 "Suddenly someone on the sidewalk ... whistles a distinctive, piercing call from his lips. "Smith: 'Frank [Amoss], there's a chuck-will's-widow out there. "There is the whistle call again. It's a near perfect mimic of the chuck-will's-widow, a nocturnal bird ... that inhabits the swamps of the South in the summer. [Reasonable speculation follows that Smith knew this call from his youth in Wichita, Ks.].... "Frank Amoss: 'That was Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt trying to get in here [i.e. one of them was the whistler]. "Davis and Hewitt were both African-American pianists....Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, and Hewitt in New York. Davis probably whistled the bird call, given his Southern childhood, but Hewitt could have visited Southern relatives as kid, too. [OK --NOW GET THIS, WHICH FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE ABOVE.] Ironically, on September 29 Robert Shelton published in the New York Times the first-ever notice of a young new artist named Bob Dylan, who performed at Gerde's Folk City that same week. Shelton wrote: 'He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.' Surely, Minnesota native Dylan wouldn't have known firsthand the call of a chuck-will's-widow." Surely...

Borrowing a line from S.J. Perelman, I should set myself up as a reverse weather vane, to show which way the wind isn't blowing.

That's why we were all told by our parents, "Don't jump on the bed!"

I just merged these two recent Clark and Clark-related threads; sorry if that causes any confusion, but it seemed like the thing to do.

OK -- I've read through "The Jazz Loft Project" again, and one of the first things I noticed was this (p. 5): "From [W. Eugene Smith's] photos and tapes and from interviews with participants, we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college." This struck me as an extremely odd assertion, but how to check it myself, as author Sam Stephenson surely must have done, otherwise why say such a thing? I wasn't going to write down every name in the book as I went along -- that way lies madness (although some might think I'm halfway there already) -- but then at the back of the book I saw there was a list of those 589 people, many of whom I had heard of. So with the aid of Google and the like, I began to check and discovered that (conservatively) -- because many of these people I didn't know of, and there was a limit to my patience -- at least 61 one of those 589 people had gone to college. I'll print their names below, but first, why would someone take the trouble to say "only a dozen or so" when they either hadn't checked or had checked in such a way that their answer was so wide of the mark? Makes me wonder. Those sometime habitues of the Smith's jazz loft who went to college: Toshiko Akiyoshi Mose Allison David Amram David Baker Warren Bernhardt Donald Byrd Teddy Charles Harold Danko Dennis Russell Davies Miles Davis Richard Davis Bob Dorough Don Ellis Bill Evans Don Friedman Lee Friedlander Dave Frishberg Jimmy Giuffre John Glasel Eddie Gomez Gigi Gryce Jim Hall Don Heckman Nat Hentoff Joe Hunt Chuck Israels David Izenson Lincoln Kirstein Nathan Kline Joel Krosnick Yusef Lateef Barbara Lea Mark Levine Mark Longo John Lewis Alex Leiberman Teo Macero Norman Mailer Ron McClure Mike Nock Bob Northern Hank O'Neal Hall Overton Ray Parker Paul Plummer Steve Reich Perry Robinson Robert Rossen Roswell Rudd George Russell Lalo Schifrin Gunther Schuller Peter Serkin Dick Sudhalter Steve Swallow Billy Taylor Francis Thorne Mal Waldron Martin Williams Phil Woods Denny Zeitlin I'll probably have more to say later on, though I'm willing to be told to just shut up on this subject. I'm getting tired of it myself. P.S. Not every name on the list is a jazz person, obviously. Some are just people who went by the place.

I'm going on the basis of the book (as I recall it) and aspects of the article that match my recollections of the book. I'll get my hands on the book again and try to cite chapter and verse, if indeed I can do so.

Fixed throughout. (My post, too -- Ye Gods!)

Yes -- they were caught up in a mad, passionate love affair. In the forthcoming movie "D.O.A. In The Desert," Gray will be played by Will Smith and Lansky by Richard Dreyfus.

Chris -- As you've no doubt been told many times, your "Bessie" is a model of how things should be done.

It is a primary piece of info when no one else has ever bothered to talk to his relatives and friends in his hometown, or at least none of them ever volunteered their suspicion/fear. And yes, it is a sort of short-hand for how society treated a certain segment of society then. I think its also affecting, for fans like ourselves to consider that not only did Sonny piss away his life and music on dope but that in the end, its possible or even likely that he's not buried in the grave for which Nica graciously paid. OK -- If and when Stephenson comes out with a Sonnny Clark biography, we shall see, according to our own tastes, of course. But until shown otherwise, I'll stick by intuition that Stephenson is a somewhat exploitive neo-hipster type. For one thing, can you imagine a not particularly jazz-oriented freelance writer setting out to write, with any hope of getting it published by a major firm like his current publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, a book on Sonny Clark unless it were focused on Clark as an exemplary hardbop junkie? It's the "romance" that's thought to sell, especially the dark, tragic romance (as in the Clark-Halliday episode that W. Eugene Smith captured on tape). That someone also was a brilliant musician is just icing on the cake.

While I agree with your take on the Jazz Loft book, I don't remotely understand where you find a creepy, vampire-like tone in the article. You may be right that this author doesn't have the jazz knowledge to do a Sonny Clark bio justice (at least as rabid fans like us think it should be done) but then again there's no one else out there even conceiving of one, is there? I think we should just be hopeful that his research sees some sort of release and we learn more about Sonny Clark. The creepy tone I refer to stems from several things. First, the focus on whether the body that was buried as Sonny Clark's actually was his. Either it was or it wasn't, and if it wasn't it may well be a sign of social-racial indifference or worse on the part of the relevant authorities, but this is a primary piece of info about Sonny Clark? Second, the fact that Stephenson says he may write a biography of Clark. I know -- not creepy in itself perhaps, but given the junky-life associations he understandably leans on, I sense, as I said in my previous post, a neo-hipster orientation in Stephenson, which IIRC was also present in "The Jazz Loft Project," and I almost always find that creepy, though YMMV. I'm thinking he'll give us, if he gets around to it, something along the lines of James Gavin's Chet Baker bio, "Deep In A Dream." Finally, there's something about Stephenson's account here that doesn't quite track; and if so, that gives me a queasy feeling. He says that he heard Clark's music for the first time by chance in a Raleigh, N.C., coffee shop in 1999, but he also says that at this time he had been working on what seems to be what eventually would become "The Jazz Loft Project." Then, some unspecified but apparently short time later, Stephenson discovers that the Sonny Clark whose music he had heard and been moved by in North Carolina not only was a habitue of Smith's jazz loft but was also at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes that Smith captured on tape -- almost dying from an overdose in the company of Lin Halliday. Maybe I'm pushing this too hard, but that seems to leave us with two options: 1) Stephenson not only had never heard Clark's music until he just happened to encounter it in that N.C. coffee shop in 1999, but he also at that point had never heard of him at all; or 2) he was already aware of Clark's name from his work on the Smith material but hadn't yet bothered to check out his music. Option 1) is not impossible -- it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe -- but unless I've misunderstood what Stephenson says, it seems like a whopping big coincidence to me that he would be entranced by Sonny Clark's music out of the blue and then discover that Clark not only was a habitue of the place he'd been researching but also was at the center of one of the more sadly dramatic events that took place there and that W. Eugene Smith would capture on tape. Option 2) seems a tad more likely and also seems to me to fit the rather loose way the music and the musicians are treated in "The Jazz Loft Project" IMO, but I don't like that sort of looseness; it feels exploitive to me. And if option 2) is the case, what does that do to the N.C. coffee bar story?

My take (posted on Facebook a few minutes ago in response to Cliffford Allen's line there) seems to make me the odd man out here: 'Rather creepy, almost vampire-like-in-tone article IMO. I would hope that Stephenson passes on the material on Clark that he has gathered to someone with a different, less neo-hipster-rides-again sensibility. Also IMO, "The Jazz Loft Project" book fell between two stools. One was the desire to capture the jittery, relatively random texture of the life [W. Eugene] Smith was leading at the time; and this the book did accomplish -- by more or less imitating that texture. But if one were interested in the actual musicians who played at Smith's loft and the actual music they played there -- lots of luck. IIRC, little or no knowledgeable sorting out of the material from that perspective was done.'

Larry, John Williams, the film composer, did indeed go by "Johnny." Several of his early soundtracks, such as "Diamond Head," list the name "Johnny" on the credits. I believe he is listed as Johnny on some Mancini sessions also. OK.

Born with weak sight, Tristano was completely blind by age 9-10.

Also, as I said above, AFAIK neither John Williams nor John Towner Williams was ever referred to in print as "Johnny." IIRC John Towner Williams certainly had chops as a pianist, but that was about it from a jazz perspective. Now Roger Williams...

John (Towner) Williams wrote the music (based on his score for the TV Series "Checkmate") for this very nice Shelly Manne album of the same name: http://www.amazon.com/Checkmate-Shelly-Manne/dp/B00006J3TR but IIRC it's the band that mostly makes it so. Any Richie Kamuca from that period is worthwhile IMO, and there is some very fine Kamuca here.

John Williams: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Master-Works-1954-1955-Williams/dp/B000E1YX9Y John Towner: http://www.parisjazzcorner.com/en/dis_fiche.php?ArtNum=86640

Yes -- and that's kind of dumb on their part. Anyone who knows that period knows the one John Williams (the Getz sideman who also recorded as a leader for EmArcy -- a fine individual player) from John Towner Williams, who recorded initially under the name John Towner and went on to become the film composer. Also, AFAIK, neither of them was known as "Johnny" Williams.