Larry Kart

I understand. Just did it this way because I couldn't remember how to merge threads (sorry -- it's been too long), and there didn't seem to be much if any content on the second thread that called for merging.

Nudged to let Jostber and others know that there's a link on this thread to today's NY Times piece about Brown and the current liveliness of the Tristano school, plus some talk about the piece.

Already a thread on this in Miscellaneous Music.

It would be nice too if the article had mentioned the author of the excellent book about Tristano it mentions, "Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music." It's Eunmi Shim. How much trouble would it have been to do that? It's both common decency and SOP.

Some interesting twisty stuff there, including this harrumph from Ethan Iverson: "I really disapprove of the way [Tristano] separated his scene from other cats who could play.” "Really disapprove"? Ethan, get over yourself. Nice that at the very end of the piece there's a comment from a young player that at last focuses on what the hell it is about Ted Brown's playing that's so appealing.

It's been a long time, but I have fond memories of Nicolas Freeling's Inspector Van Der Valk mysteries. Freeling and the Sjowall-Wahloo team were functioning at about the same time IIRC.

Screenwriter Timothy Harris wrote two top-notch novels in the late 1970s about L.A.-based private investigator Thomas Kyd -- "Kyd for Hire," and "Goodnight and Goodbye." They're the best of their kind since Ross McDonald IMO -- "Goodnight and Goodbye" especially. Here's an interview with Harris: http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/tharris.html Harris' third Kyd novel "Unfaithful Servant" (2004) was something of a disappointment, I thought, but he had set a very high standard. The opening of "Goodnight and Goodbye": "The first time I saw Laura Cassidy it was four in the morning and she was trying to drive a fire-engine red Volkswagen out of the underground garage of a Harper Avenue apartment building. She nearly sideswiped the stone entrance, knocked over a garbage can at the end of the driveway, and turned right up the hill toward Sunset Boulevard. What held me rooted to the pavement wasn't her driving; it was the man spread-eagled on the hood of her car."

Charles Willeford. In addition to his Hoke Mosely novels (the best known is "Miami Blues"), don't miss the exceptional and exceptionally dark "The Shark-Infested Custard." Also (never read it myself but knew a friend of Willeford's who had read the manuscript) there is a completed but suppressed Hoke Mosely novel in which Hoke gets drunk and kills his two teenage daughters. Long time since I've read them, and I lost my copy of this omnibus paperback in a basement flood, but John Franklin Bardin's three novels, "The Deadly Percheron," "The Last of Philip Banter," and "Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly," are like nothing else. Have just begun to scratch the surface with the late Peter Rabe (Donald Westlake was a great admirer of his) but can definitely recommend Rabe's "Murder Me For Nickels" and "A Shroud For Jesso." Started to read Rabe's "The Box" once, but while it was very powerful, it was way too creepy for my state of mind at the time.

Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels. Hard-boiled, they're also mysteries.

Helen Tursten (the best of the Scandinavians IMO). If we expand the "mystery" category to include crime novels, Richard Stark (a pseudonym of Donald Westlake) writing about the professional criminal Parker. Amazing stuff. Many more.

Mmm -- yes.

Sorry -- I was reacting to "Bernie's Tune." Will listen to the other now.

Thanks. Good stuff and lots of fun, too. Art Blake-y.

I vaguely recall a DB Blindfold Test where Max Roach's response to a track from "Two Horns, Two Rhythm" was, "Some of things KD plays are so abstract." Spot on IMO.

Ronnie Lang is credited in the liner notes, but that's it. Muted trumpet sounds like Sweets, natch, but I'm curious about the pianist and the powerful open trumpet on "I Can't Get Started" (sounds like someone from a ways back, maybe Mannie Klein?) -- and everyone else if possible. Ella was in great voice here, very relaxed.

That's certainly a winner on the basis of rhythm, sound, and sense.

Or a condom to a...? Bris. I wince at the vulgarity, but I would have said "a blow job."

Or a condom to a...?

"Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" (1887) (uncredited) Music by Anthony J. Showalter Text by Elisha A. Hoffman Sung a cappella by Robert Mitchum often Also sung a cappella by Lillian Gish That it's sung in TNOTH both by Mitchum and Gish encapsulates the movie's equivocal power.

"Leaning On The Everlasting Arms" figures prominently -- if perhaps ironically, given that Robert Mitchum's villainous psychopath is a fake preacher -- in "The Night Of The Hunter." That movie never fails to reduce me to a puddle of goo.

Certainly not as dark as "The Unforgiven" IMO but dark enough, if you can take the plucky, ornery girl at the heart of it. I can because she's really quite a piece of work in nicely specific ways, as I tried to point out in my initial post. Also, without giving anything away, the woman she is in the epilogue is satisfyingly in tune with her "quite a piece of work" young self. The only possible sentimentalized moments come at the end of the main action, but I took them in terms of similar moments in "The Night of the Hunter," which these moments specifically echo. To me they don't seem sentimentalized, as in imposed by the filmmakers in order to soft-soap us, but rather are expressions of certain pools of sentiment that reasonably would lie within these characters (i.e. semi-noble fictions or beliefs that they would, under certain conditions, be moved by and act upon).

Geez -- it's a period Western, and Cogburn was not only of his time but also was far from a nice guy (and at that point in the film I think we needed to be reminded of that by those acts of casual inhumanity, in case we were beginning to sentimentalize him). He should have patted them on the head/chucked them under the chin? Also IIRC, the household those kids were part of was under the aegis of a bad guy who probably had aided the very bad guys Cogburn and Mattie were in pursuit of. As far as the other wantonly cruel scenes you're probably thinking of, to me they all seemed very much of a piece with the rest of what was going on. In fact, the movie as a whole seemed a lot less cruel and violent than I expected it might be, certainly less so IIRC than Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" (which admittedly was a movie that set out to be much darker in tone).

Am I not asking the question correctly? It's not that but that I saw the new "True Grit" and don't recall any song at all, just some discreet background music, but I wouldn't want to swear that the song from the original "True Grit" is'nt there in some form or other. Actually, my recollection is that the new "True Grit" was so gripping that even that discreet background music, when I noticed it, seemed a tad artificial and intrusive. Music credit for the new one is Carter Burwell.

Right. Stupid of me. The other guy in that scene was Cole Younger.

Very good — a virtually flawless pastiche, and “pastiche” might not be fair. The use of the novel’s rather studied diction (so I’m told, haven’t read the book myself) was a fine idea; the dialogue doesn’t come across as arch at all IMO, nor do the actors deliver it that way; it just fits. About the pastiche feeling, seems to me that there are some definite but unobtrusive echoes of “The Night of the Hunter” — Mattie is a character who is soberly and shrewdly living out, or living inside, a righteous fable, and you’d better not get between her and her goal because she’s wearing chain-mail underwear. Also, in emotional terms, she’s essentially a person who is exasperated at the foolishness and weakness of the world and the people around her (this is what gives her much of her power). Also she is at once keyed up and somewhat saddened by the fact that at age 14 she’s not only the most grown-up person in her family (including her late father) but also, probably, the only grown-up person she’s ever going to meet. In effect, as the epilogue suggests, Mattie was an orphan from the moment she saw what the world was like, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. She even tells Jesse James to go —- himself. Mattie reminds me of Lillian Gish’s character in TNOTH (and Frances McDormand’s in “FARGO” for that matter); the girl who plays her is excellent. I can see that some might think that Bridges is playing a character he’s played many times before, but it worked for me. Matt Damon is quite good too. About what all this says about the Coens, I’m still thinking, just as I’m still thinking about how much of a pastiche their TRUE GRIT is.