Larry Kart

Decided to sample my set by going to the final disc because it includes one of my favorite Ellington recordings "The Sergeant Was Shy." Sound is great, but Steve Lasker's liner notes are a big disappointment IMO -- not for what Lasker does say (a good deal of nuts-and-bolts info, albeit much of it sifted from other sources, all carefully cited) but for what he doesn't deal with. So many opportunities for insightful responses to this incredibly subtle, endlessly fascinating music, and from what I can see so far, there's very little if anything of that sort here.

Probably doesn't fit the boundaries of jazz noir as it's been talked about on this thread, but a nice example for me would be "Help" from "Jackie McLean and Co." Don't see how you can't get more genuinely noir than that.

Remember the Konitz track "Hugo's Head" from the album "Spirits" (Milestone), on the changes of "You Go To My Head"?

OK -- I listened again with earphones and I think I hear what Brubeck was talking about. If so, it was a very hip/quick-witted move by Desmond, though again the recording of the orchestra is pretty murky (the wrong-note trombonist, if in fact I do hear him, also is tightly muted, I think). Putting a symphony orchestra on stage, or in a studio, with a jazz drummer is asking for a lot of trouble. I'm sure there are possible solutions, but first one needs to be aware that there is a problem to be solved. Doesn't sound in this case like there was much awareness of that. Perhaps the project was kind of a sop to Brubeck, and no one in charge gave much of a hoot about how it all would sound.

Not so hot, but not flat out awful -- rather faceless. A better recording job (or a stereo copy, mine is mono) might have helped a bit. In Doug Ramsey's Desmond bio, Brubeck is quoted as follows: "In the fourth bar of Paul's solo [in the Andante-Ballad movement], a Philharmonic trombone player misses a note. It was supposed to be a B-flat and he plays a B-natural. And at the beginning of the fifth bar -- a split second later -- Paul weaves it right into the solo, so quick that you hardly know somebody made a mistake." First time through, I heard virtually no orchestral work behind Desmond's solo on that track. I'll listen again, but either Brubeck's memory was a bit off, or the recording job was not what it should have been. In general, it's a bit murky on the orchestra, clear enough on the quartet.

No, you're not.

A lot of LPs flow through my local Half-Price Books store, all of them sold to the store by local citizens and usually priced at 50 cents. A good deal of junk, of course, and much that's in bad shape, but it's fun to poke through because you never know what you'll find. The other day I picked up three Columbia albums from 1960 -- Leonard Bernstein's NY Phil. "Daphnis and Chloe," an Eileen Farrell recital, and "Bernstein Plays Brubeck Plays Bernstein" -- and discovered when I got home that all three discs were sealed in their original plastic sleeves. Weird feeling to open them up after 50 years, perhaps something like entering King Tut's tomb. FWIW, the Bernstein "Daphnis" is rather blatant; the Farrell recital is terrific (the power of the voice goes without saying, but I had no idea she was such a stylist in Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, and Poulenc, and could shade things so nicely -- her version of Schubert's near-Wagnerian "Der Umendlichen" calls for all the power she has; I can't imagine a better performance); and the combo side of the ""Bernstein Plays Brubeck Plays Bernstein" is what I thought it would be -- Desmond was born to play "I Feel Pretty" and "Somewhere."

Yes, Chris, I get it -- "tits" are a kind of bird and a slang term for breasts. You find that amusing? I know a guy named Dick who... I'll be here all week.

Chris: Jim can speak for himself or not respond, if he chooses, but did you really think that album cover was funny in itself? If so, I'm baffled. Or were you trying to make some sort of oblique comment about other album-cover threads (IIRC you've expressed your displeasure about them the past) -- starting that new new thread with that post as another way of saying that you found those other threads to be, so to speak, pointless?

...than the ominous beginning of this story: MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — PGA golfer John Daly has been awarded custody of his 7-year-old son, Little John Daly.... That's the child's given name? But then the rest also makes one uneasy, especially the final two paragraphs: ... by a Tennessee circuit court judge at Memphis. Judge Donna Fields also found Daly's 35-year-old ex-wife, Sherrie Daly, in contempt of court and ordered her to spend three days in jail, beginning this weekend. The judge concluded that Sherrie Daly, awarded custody of the boy after the couple's February divorce, had interfered with court-ordered visitation privileges. The 44-year-old Daly, a Russellville, Ark., native and a former Razorback golfer, challenged the previous custody award by citing Little John's excessive absences from school, lack of needed speech therapy and his visitation problems. Daly said he would take his son on tour with him and arrange for tutors and online schooling.

FWIW, I think of Wilson as kind of the female vocal equivalent of the Jazztet. No, she's not the artist that Farmer, Golson, and Fuller were, but the gliding, finger-popping zone of things like "Killer Joe."

BTW, Wilson's signature song was not, as I wrote, "You Can Have Him" but "Guess Who I Saw Today" -- similar though they are. Multi-part simpatico interview with Wilson by Marc Myers: http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-nancy-wilson-part-1.html

That Fontana solo is ridiculous! Notice the trumpeter behind him digging it.

Many thanks.

Just picked an LP copy and probably am enjoying it more than I should, given that I'm not normally a big Nancy Wilson fan. In any case, impressed not only by much of Wilson's work here, but also by Jimmy Jones' arrangments, and by the work of the band -- e.g. the lovely two-guitar passages by John Gray and Al Hendrickson on what would become Wilson's signature tune, "You Can Have Him" -- I began to wonder who the tasty bass player was. No bassist is named in the only online personnel roster I could find: John Michael Gray, Al Hendrickson (guitar); Paul Horn (reeds); Bill Perkins, Justin Gordon, Bill Hood, Buddy Collette (saxophone); Don Fagerquist (trumpet); Lew McCreary (trombone); Lou Levy (piano); Shelly Manne, Kenny Dennis (drums); Emil Richards (percussion). Anyone know the answer? P.S. Wilson's phrasing on "I Believe In You" is very hip.

There are scenes in "A Shot in the Dark" that never fail to make me laugh, at times to the point of tears -- especially Clouseau in the English country house, the sequence that begins with him on the parallel bars, after which he quizzes everyone while becoming entangled in a suit of armor. And leave us not forget the genius of Herbert Lom as Inspector Dreyfus. Farewell, Mr. Edwards.

That chick is burning.

http://www.wbez.org/blog/jim-derogatis/chicagos-department-cultural-affairs-dismantled-29-are-laid

Would have voted for the Threadgill and Ellington Mosaics under reissues, but they hadn't arrived when I cast my V. Voice ballot -- that poll of necessity has a Thanksgiving-to-Thanksgiving time frame. Wait till next year.

I only know the one John McDonough; boy is he different. Also you might (or might not) be astonished at how much like this he already was in high school. As I think he may have written once, though probably not in these terms, at age 16 he wanted nothing more than to be a comfortable middle-aged denizen of the mid-1930s. Follow your dream.

Also, that Ferguson piece is a remarkable piece of writing -- the rhythms of the sentences/thinking/everything.

Jelly Roll Morton and Lauren Bacall? I can die happy now.

That how his stuff strikes me, but his father, also John, was a good violinist, onetime concertmaster of the NY Phil. I know Corigliano Sr. from an excellent recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto with the NY Phil from 1959, conducted by Bruno Walter, with Leonard Rose and Walter Hendl (a tasty pianist -- didn't even know he played the piano professionally until I heard this recording).

A post of mine from 3/27/06 that led to some amusing and perhaps enlightening talk back and forth: 'This came up a while ago, when someone referred to Whitney Balliett's being "broad-minded" in his tastes, but I wasn't able to cite chapter and verse. Back in 1956 or '57, Balliett wrote the liner notes for the Pacific Jazz album "Grand Encounter -- 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West," with John Lewis, Bill Perkins, Jim Hall, Percy Heath, and Chico Hamilton. In the course of praising the certainly praiseworthy Perkins for his gentle lyricism, Balliett went on to say this: "There is [in Perkins' playing] none of the hair-pulling, the bad tone, or the ugliness that is now a growing mode, largely in New York, among the work of the hard-bopsters like Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, and JR Monterose."' 'Actually, I kind of like "the hair-pulling" -- in one way, it's completely out of left field; in another way, it reveals exactly where Whitney was coming from.' Added now: Also, as Jim Sangrey pointed out on that 2006 thread [Lord, we've been at this for that long], linking Rollins and Mobley in terms of their tone suggests that Whitney wasn't listening very carefully.

Me? Eleven.