Larry Kart

Likewise.

The point seems to be, in almost the whole long entry about McCorkle, to view her career from the vantage point of her suicide -- as in "Why did she do it?," "Does her music foreshadow her death in ways we ought to have recognized?" etc. For example, Friedwald writes: "...in the light of what happened on May 2001, it's difficult to listen to those final two albums and resist the temptation of finding new meaning in songs like 'Something To Live For' and 'Down'...." But such curiosity, if that's the right term for it, boils down in this entry IMO to Friedwald saying, "Hey -- when my phone rang, it wasn't unusual for Susannah McCorkle to be on the line."

I know, but to me there's something about the rhythm and tone of Friedwald's prose here that makes it all about him. And he does claim to have been a close friend of McCorkle. I should add that in the continuation of this passage, Friedwald states or implies that he was listening in large part not to memorialize her or to ease his sense of loss but to see if he could find hints in her music of why McCorkle killed herself. Oddly perhaps, that doesn't strike me as creepy as the sentences I quoted do, which again my say more about me than about him. I guess it's "When the phone rang ... it wasn't Susannah herself..." He sounds like a vampire, a soul-sucker.

Don't think I ever heard the LP, but the CD was almost unlistenable. Sounded like it had been recorded in an anachonic (sp?) chamber.

I was just watching.

About Susannah McCorkle's suicide, Friedwald writes: "When the phone rang on the morning of Saturday, May 19, 2001, it wasn't Susannah herself, but news about her. When I learned that a few hours earlier she had jumped out of her sixteenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, I, like most of her friends and fans, immediately started playing all my Susannah CDs."

Hey, I was there.

Hey, I didn't say anything about or in defense of standards, did I, other than to say that was Mathis' repertoire on this album? No way (at least IMO) that Gene Puerling's territory was akin to Mathis' in the sense we're talking about (though wasn't it Clark Burroughs who sang the upper-register passages that Puerling wrote for The Hi-Los?) The Hi-Los'"affect" there was kind of hip-giggly giggling at its own hipness; Mathis' was, again IMO, deeply nakedly emotional/romantic. Also, I didn't say it was a matter of sexual orientation per se, or only of that, but of his stepping-into-another-world dreaminess. To put it another way, Mathis' ascents here feel like acts of transformation/revelation. Or if you prefer, sort of a St. Sebastian thing. Of course, it's not a "secret" about Mathis -- that sometimes jerk or worse Sinatra would refer to him onstage in later years as "The African Queen" (jeez, a two-for-one shot) -- but I think that in 1959 there were a lot of young female Mathis fans who either didn't know or chose not to know. And without being a Mathis scholar, I would guess that this album might have stood out in that respect, to a degree that Mathis himself might have been aware of. Thus the possible bravery.

Brave how? Vocally? Coming-out-of-the-closetly? Mary Martin-ly? Just wondering. Yes, it answers my question. I asked because you've been kind of edgy lately, albeit edgy based on long-held principles of yours. Brave mostly in the coming-out-of-the-closet sense, though that's not quite what, or all that, he's doing. I guess it's that his ascents to the upper register here are not just way up there but also (as I said in the thread title) so figuratively "naked" in emotional terms, as though he were swooning or stepping into a dream world. I'll have to go back and check, but IIRC it's a whole different feel from, say, Little Jimmy Scott.

http://www.amazon.com/Open-Fire-Guitars-Johnny-Mathis/dp/B0012GMY3W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1293483537&sr=1-1 Mathis' vocal chops may be at their peak here (1959); accompaniment is just Al Caiola, Tony Mottola, and either Frank Carroll or Milt Hinton on bass; songs are standards except for a perhaps crafted-for-Mathis ballad from Leiber-Stoller (the title track); Mathis does a lot of personal reshaping of the given melodies and in general brings to mind Charlie Parker's affectionate reference to Johnny Hodges as the Lily Pons of the alto. When Mathis ascends to his topmost register (and he goes way up), it's hard not to take the undeniably androgynous results as an act of some bravery on his part, e.g. "I'm Just a Boy In Love," "(This Is My First Affair) Please Be Kind,"and the verse to "My Funny Valentine" ... but I wonder what JSngry thinks.

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson

http://www.amazon.com/Brubeck-Rushing-Reis-Dave/dp/B00000DFSD ... and Desmond is in fine form, too. Rushing's reshapings of "Evenin'" and "Ain't Misbehavin'"(very nice Desmond here) are remarkably spontaneous, even by his standards. What a jazz singer he was.

As Papsrus said, it wasn't conditions at the stadium that led them to cancel tonight's game but the fact that a lot of people couldn't get there or might have killed themselves and other people trying to get there.

Manny Albam wrote a piece based on a Thurber cartoon, "Poor Dr. Millmoss": http://www.cartoonbank.com/1930s/what-have-you-done-with-dr-millmoss/invt/117291/ and I think he or Al Cohn wrote one that takes off on a Perelman story, but if so, I can't remember the title.

JSngry? Still? Really?

Julian Bream (lute, not guitar) and George Malcolm http://www.amazon.com/Bach-Lute-Suites-Trio-Sonatas/dp/B000003FG2

In the liner notes to his 2009 album “Chill Morn He Climb Jenny” (Sunnyside), McNeil wrote this about the Burke-Van Heusen tune “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?”: “This song is from the film ‘The Bells of St. Marys,’ starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. Bing played a priest and Ingrid a nun, a tribute to their acting skills.” Also, of Russ Freeman's "Batter Up": "Russ Freeman loved baseball, and wrote tunes with baseball-type titles, like 'Fungo' and 'Safe At Home.' He even recorded a jazz baseball record with Andre Previn titled 'Double Play.' The album cover had a naked woman wearing a baseball cap, an image that really speaks to jazz musicians everywhere."

No, never saw him, only reporting what Dan Morgenstern said about how Wen Shih was commonly regarded at the time.

The last time this came up with Dan, he said that no one knows for sure what happened to him, but that the common speculation is that Wen Shih met with a dark end of some sort. Even when he was around, he was felt to be a mysterious, secretive guy.

Re: Jack Tracy, here's a multi-part interview with him: http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2009/04/jack-tracy-part-2.html http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2009/04/jack-tracy-part-3.html http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2009/05/jack-tracy-part-4.html An excerpt: For decades [Woody Herman] had an East Coast friend, still alive at this writing [2009], named Jack Seifert. They were tight buddies, and Woody would spend as much time as possible with Jack whenever he was in the vicinity of Philadelphia. One night he called his dad, by then a senile widower in Milwaukee, from Seifert's home and listened patiently as the old man rambled on and on. When he finally hung up, Jack said something like, "Woody, I know this is none of my business, but sometimes I wonder why you spend so much time and money calling your dad. These days he doesn't even know who you are." Woody looked at Seifert. "But I know who HE is," he said. That was Woody Herman.

Damn. In addition to everything else, his posts of recent times on the Jazz West Coast site made it clear that he remained as clear-headed and feisty (if that's the right term) as ever.

I enjoy playing still-sealed LPs because then they all sound the same.

I forgot, but I wrote two different pieces about "The Sergeant Was Shy. Both are in my book; here they are: [1984] Jazz used to be, and in many ways still is, a form of popular entertainment--a music so linked to the expectations of its audience it may seem unlikely that any performance would deserve the close attention given to masterworks of the classical repertoire. But quite a few jazz artists have managed to have it both ways, entertaining the public while satisfying their own imaginations and meeting the highest standards of musical creativity. Chief among them was the late Duke Ellington, “the most masterful of all blues idiom arranger-composers,” in the words of critic Albert Murray, who went on to say that “a literary equivalent [of Ellington] would be beyond Melville, Henry James and Faulkner.” If that claim sounds extreme, it is backed up by any number of Ellington performances; for within his best pieces the sheer density of events and the emotional richness of the whole are a never-ending joy to contemplate--even though, until the advent of the long-playing record, most Ellington recordings lasted less than three minutes. One of those Ellington masterworks, recorded on August 28, 1939, is “The Sergeant Was Shy,” a portrait, according to the composer, of a “tough fighting man” who is “real shy in private life.” “The Sergeant Was Shy” is a variation on “Bugle Call Rag,” which Elmer Schoebel com¬posed in 1923 for the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Not a genuine rag, “Bugle Call” is a series of twelve-bar blues choruses, each of which begins with a four-bar, bugle-call “break,” a passage during which the rest of the ensemble remains silent while the soloist soars on his own. “Reveille,” the bugle call that originally began the piece, soon was replaced by “Assembly,” an equally familiar but more musically attractive bugle call; and a strain from W.C. Handy’s “Ole Miss” (sixteen bars in length and without breaks) is added to most performances of “Bugle Call Rag” for the sake of variety. With those materials to work with, Ellington could have given his audience a straightforward version of the piece, which is what he did when he recorded “Bugle Call Rag” in 1932, and which is what Benny Goodman did when he made a very popular recording of “Bugle Call” in 1937. “The Sergeant Was Shy,” however, is a remarkably oblique, subtle work--a fantasy-variation on “Bugle Call Rag” that is so full of fascinating musical detail and so rich in dramatic wit that one hardly can believe it lasts only two minutes, thirty-six seconds. Ellington begins not with the familiar bugle-call break but with a sixteen-bar introduction, dividing the orchestra into four separate instrumental units (five if we count the rhythm section) that enter at four-bar intervals, with one layer of sound placed atop another until one feels that the entire rhythmic-tonal canvas has been charged with meaning. First, we hear either two or three woodsy-toned, lower-register clarinets playing a figure whose rhythmic shape, rendered onomatopoeically, is “Dee-doodle-doo …dee-doodle-doo.”After four bars pass, three trombones (one of them Juan Tizol’s valve trombone ) enter with “Bop…boo-bop, boo-bop-boo-bop,” fol¬lowed four bars later by three cup muted trumpets play “Boop-bee-doodly-boop-boop, boop-bee-doodly-boop- boop.” And in the next four bars, clarinetist Barney Bigard adds to all this an upper-register trill that sounds like a continuous “Wheeeeee!” Perfectly lucid to the ear, this passage is remarkable from a rhythmic point of view, for as “Dee-doodle-doo” and the rest should indicate, the figures played by each of the four layers of instruments emphasizes a different beat (or subdivision of the beat) within the four-beats-to-the-bar pulse--perhaps, as one critic has suggested, to evoke the sounds of four different military drill teams passing in review. The instrumentation itself is a typically Ellingtonian tapestry of tone colors, although the sensuous appeal of each layer of sound is inseparable from the rest of its musical meaning. The tango-like glide of the trombone figures, for instance, would have a very different impact if played on a different group of instruments. Clearly this is not a brass-saxophone-and-rhythm dance band, although the Ellington orchestra could function in that way, but a flexible, fourteen-man “instrument” from which Ellington was able to summon up just about any combination of sounds that came to mind. But back to “The Sergeant Was Shy,” for almost nine-tenths of the piece lies ahead, including that obligatory bugle call, which surely ought to arrive rather soon. When it comes, though, Ellington has tucked it away slyly--at the end, not at the beginning, of the next chorus. Played by four saxophones instead of by the solo trumpet one expects, and without a “break” feeling, the familiar melody sounds dogged and trudging, without the aura of exuberant release the bugle call normally evokes. Exuberance emerges at the beginning of the third chorus, however, which is launched by four bars of chattering muted trumpets -- a coy, almost rickety-tick sound that is answered four bars later by a suave saxophone-section countermelody, which continues for sixteen bars while the trumpets stick to their pattern. Here is a fine example of Ellington’s musical-dramatic counterpoint, for in addition to the perfect rhythmic fit between the trumpets’ brisk but essentially static figures and the saxophones’s sinuous glides, the trumpet line seems mocking and puckish, while the saxophone counter-melody has a stately aristocratic aura to it that, in effect, chastens the trumpets’ nose-thumbing sprightliness. Now, from the fourth chorus through the eighth chorus, Ellington launches into the stand¬ard twelve-bar “Bugle Call Rag” pattern, with the breaks being played in succession by Bigard, cornetist Rex Stewart, the saxophones, the trombones, and unmuted trumpets. Chorus six is very intense, with Stewart insisting on repeated high notes until his relationship to the shifting saxophone harmonies beneath him becomes quite dissonant. Then at the beginning of chorus eight there is a moment of pure glory, as the golden-toned trumpets play a break that is all celebration and joyful release. But there is one further act to this drama. (By this time, one has no doubt that Ellington is thinking in dramatic terms.) The rest of the eighth chorus finds the trumpets returning to their sassy, mocking mode, and, as before, this cannot remain unchallenged. The “elder” chosen to wag his musical finger at the trumpets in the ninth and final chorus is trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton, but in the marvelous sixteen bars that end “The Sergeant Was Shy,” no one really gets the upper hand. Darting in and out of the orchestral texture, Nanton’s “wah-wah/yah-yah” figures swing so hard that he and the irrepressible trumpets finally inhabit the same emotional world, and his final talking phrase seems to say, “Oh yeah, you were right,” just before baritone saxophonist Harry Carney seals off the performance with a virile, thudding “Whomp.” In purely musical terms, much more could be said about ‘The Sergeant Was Shy.” There is, for example, another striking dissonance in chorus nine, as the end of Nanton’s break clashes with the trumpets’ flaring figures in a passage that brings to mind the reaction of the young Charles Mingus to his first live Ellington performance: “Someplace, something he did, I screamed.” But if the piece is so dramatic, what is it about, in addition to that “tough fighting man” who is “shy in private life”? And where, aside from “Bugle Call Rag,” did it come from? One guess would be that “The Sergeant Was Shy” is a celebration of one of the many ways in which black Americans have transformed the “givens” of American life--in this case, the military drill patterns that were taught to many black high school students of Ellington’s age by black instructors who had served in the Spanish-American War. The idea, as novelist Ralph Ellison once said, was to make those drill patterns swing, to infuse the jazz spirit into every corner of experience. But perhaps that is just another way of saying that “The Sergeant Was Shy” is a joyfully triumphant celebration of itself. The above piece was written to coincide with a conference on Ellington’s music that was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I returned to “The Sergeant Was Shy” thirteen years later for a Village Voice jazz supplement--the task being to describe a favorite Ellington recording in 200 words or less. (I made it a point to write exactly 200.) [1997] Knowing the emotional etymology of almost every sound a man could make and what those sounds said about the men who made them, Ellington built into some of his best works (and, of course, into the orchestra that co-created them) a special sort of musical self-awareness. “The Sergeant Was Shy,” from August 1939, is lovely that way, a kind of glorious, golden jest about how many ways there might be to feel about bits and pieces of “Bugle Call Rag”--marchingly mysterioso, Frenchified tangoish, parade-ground earnest, and “Here comes the band!” gleeful (all in the first sixteen bars alone). And yes, this two-minute, thirty-six second kaleidoscope of moods is about being such a kaleidoscope, about the ways we inevitably place ourselves by the way we sound. In fact, I think that among the most central points of celebration that Ellington ever allowed himself is the blaze-of-sunlight break with which the trumpet section begins chorus eight, after which the master chastens their sassiness with the finger-wagging of Tricky Sam Nanton (this leads to fierce dissonance) and then asks Harry Carney to smack his basso seal of sobriety on a seriocomic masterpiece.

I think I know what you are saying, his notes are factual and historical. Were you wanting more of a track by track analysis on musical value? aka Loren Schoenberg? Schoenberg is an experienced musician/historian whereas Lasker (not that I know for sure) appears to be a historian/collector. I think Lasker's liner notes are certainly a change from what we are all used to, however this allows the listener/reader to judge the music for themselves. With that said, of any artist/composer, Ellington gives SO many opportunities for insightful commentaries to his "beyond category" music. I think if there could be a balance between a subjective Schoenberg and the objective Lasker that would be the best. BTW, Schoenberg, in the Lionel Hampton Mosaic set misidentifies Marshal Royal for another altoist Ray Perry. The song is "Bouncing at the Beacon" it's clearly early 40s Marshal Royal. I haven't come across any mistakes like that in the Ellington 30s big band set. Yes, Schoenberg's notes to the Woody Herman set were particularly excellent and enlightening. I don't think of his work there as subjective so much, though his responses are of course his own; they typically discuss those specific musical details that make a difference. His account of Dave Tough's drum work is a splendid example. I'm not blaming Tasker for being who he is; rather, I wish that he had been asked to do his thing to some extent, and someone else had been asked to do the other. When I think of what Larry Gushee did for those two Smithonsian Ellington sets....! To me such commentary doesn't at all get in the way of my judging for myself; it hones and stimulates my responses.

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.