Larry Kart

You'll hate me now but thank me tomorrow -- "disinterested" doesn't mean that you don't care about something (i.e. are "uninterested") but that you are impartial (think "disinterested observer"). For instance, all baseball umpires should be disinterested but not uninterested.

I'll look for it at the local library (it's a good one).

Not the NEA panel, but here's the jury for the 1997 music Pulitzer, awarded to "Blood On The Fields": Robert Ward*, composer, Mary Duke Biddle professor of music emeritus, Duke University (chair) John Harbison*, professor of humanities, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA John Lewis, composer, musician, New York Howard Reich, jazz critic, Chicago Tribune Joseph Schwantner*, professor of music, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY * past Pulitzer Prize winner

So every post on the thread other than the most recent one is "dead?"

The Johnny Griffin Sextet (Riverside) -- with Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware, and Philly Joe Jones.

OK -- I'll try again. First Clifford Jordan album -- "Cliff Craft" (Blue Note), with Art Farmer, Sonny Clark, George Tucker, and Louis Hayes.

NEW YORK, N.Y. - America's first family of jazz can now claim the nation's highest jazz honor. The National Endowment for the Arts announced Thursday that the Marsalis family is among its 2011 Jazz Masters Award recipients. It's the first time in the program's 29-year history that the NEA is presenting a group award. The Marsalis family includes patriarch Ellis, a pianist and educator, and his four sons: trumpeter Wynton, saxophonist Branford, trombonist Delfeayo, and percussionist Jason. The other 2011 Jazz Masters are flutist Hubert Laws, saxophonist David Liebman, composer and arranger Johnny Mandel, and record producer and author Orrin Keepnews. The awards ceremony will be held in January in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center. _____

Why are you posting these after acknowledging that you didn't follow the rules and that it was "my" thread? If you want to start a thread for anyone to post any "first recording" then do so. Other people are enjoying this thread idea and you are only confusing things. Sorry, Dan -- This hasn't been my best day. I'll delete my previous post.

Dizzy Gillespie - In the Beginning (Prestige 24030) (My first purchase of a record including John Lewis and Milt Jackson, but it's a 2-record set with lots of different sidemen on all those tracks so there should be plenty of directions to go on from ) This still isn't kosher. Out of the MJQ record, one could post a different MJQ as your "first" or a "first" recording led by Milt Jackson, John Lewis, Percy Heath or Connie Kay. I realize I didn't make that clear I presumed it was implied. If we go by records that one of the musicians appeared on, I think its too wide-ranging. The idea is your first exposure to leader dates. Is Tony Scott on the Dizzy LP Steve posted? If not, this isn't kosher either. To repeat the rules: You may post a different "first" recording by the same artist as the prior post. You may post a different "first" recording by any member of the group on that previously posted recording, so long as he is the leader of the new recording. Thanks for your attention. Sorry -- I misunderstood/misread. OTOH the rules feel too complicated to me. All I was trying to do was recall some of my own "first" encounters with various artists, not bounce off of the "firsts" of someone else. But it's your thread.

Tony Scott Quartet -- Music After Midnight (Brunswick), 1953 Scott, Dick Katz, Milt Hinton, Philly Joe Jones This ten-inch LP, recorded live at Mintons, was a first for me for all but especially Philly Joe -- hadn't heard a drummer like that before. Jazztone ten-inch anthology that included Red Norvo's "Congo Blues," with Parker and Gillespie, and Max Kaminsky's "Stuyvesant Blues," with Pee Wee Russell and Joe Sullivan. Firsts for me all around.

See here: And please heed the injunction (relayed by Chuck Nessa in his 6/15 post on this thread) to sit tight.

Bouncing off the literal meaning of the term, to do nip-ups over something would be to express one's enthusiasm for it in a highly demonstrative manner -- as I recall David Denby did with "The Secret in Their Eyes."

In the midst of a four-day power outage, not having enough light to read by after the sun went down, I went out to see "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Secrets of their Eyes" on consecutive hot muggy nights to eat up time. I expected to not much like the former, not having cared for the almost pornographic grimness of much recent Scandinavian crime fiction, but it had some moments, though it was much too long and there were several scenes of (IMO) gratuitous sexual violence. "Secrets," which I thought I would like (David Denby did nip-ups over it in The New Yorker), also was much too long and a near-static pretentious snooze. Also, it came close to boiling down into a 25-year-long meet-cute fantasy -- "Sleepless in Seattle" or "The Shop Around the Corner" set in Fascist Argentina, which was kind of outrageous.

Thanks guys -- writing that passage back when it happened was sort of an out-of-body experience, and I've never known how much to trust it.

A bit off-topic though perhaps not, here (later in that "Oxford Jazz Companion" chapter) I probably go well around the bend about Cecil Taylor: Pre-Coleman jazz was marked by a steady increase in harmonic complexity . And that took place against the backdrop of this century’s western concert music, in which an increase in harmonic complexity not only had led to a drastic loosening of tonal function but also to Arnold Schoenberg’s invention/discovery of a way of organizing music that did not depend on tonal function at all. Thus Taylor’s early recordings -- “Jazz Advance “(Transition/Blue Note, 1955) and “Looking Ahead!” (Contemporary/OJC, 1958) led composer-critic Gunther Schuller to conclude that the extremely high level of disssonance in Taylor’s music meant that his work must be related to that of the “small minority of jazz composer- performers” whose music “often spills over into areas so removed from any center of tonal gravity that it can be thought of as ‘atonal.’” But while dissonance for Taylor would come to play almost no tonally functional role, that was not because he had a need to stretch or weaken tonal functions. Rather, what he was trying to do was collapse all elements onto the level of what might be called melodicized rhythm -- into a line of leaps, attacks and their resulting /accumulating shapes in which dissonance plays an accent/dynamics/attack role, not an harmonic one. That is, the more dissonant the chord or cluster that Taylor strikes, the greater the perceived force with which the blow has been struck, the more obliquely (in terms of perceived rhythm) it has been delivered. Also put to rhythmic use are the residual directional meanings of Taylor’s by now non-functional harmonic gestures, which become a further, extravagantly detailed means of speed control, a way of altering the rate at which the music proceeds by altering the angles at which we perceive it. Taylor’s early partner, bassist Buell Neidlinger, has said that despite its apparently formidable level of complexity, he found from the first that Taylor’s music “was clear. I could see it as well as feel it....” Consider, for instance, the accelerating burst of notes with which Taylor emerges from the ensemble on “Mixed” (Impulse, 1961) . While the passage does not take place within the boundaries of the piece’s already loose metrical framework, except in the sense that Taylor’s outburst and that framework coexist, the melodic-rhythmic shape of this outburst is almost tangible -- largely because Taylor’s gestures at once generate and are heard against the musical equivalent of the picture plane of a non-illusionistic painting. (The “picture plane” for Taylor is the piano keyboard; and -- like Earl Hines, but unlike many post-Chopin composers for the piano -- he chooses to highlight rather than disguise the fact of fingers striking specific keys; every sound proclaims its actual location within space.) He reserves the right to make harmony do some work on the level of local drama, but if we listen well, it is his skein of melodicized beats that is the story. Thus, the materials of Taylor’s music are, to an alarming or thrilling degree, unencoded; as the poet Frank O’Hara wrote of the “things” in Jackson Pollock’s work: “They were left intact, and given back. Paint is paint, shells and wire are shells and wire, glass is glass, canvas is canvas.... [O]ne is present at the problem and at the solution simultaneously.” The above is slightly edited; in the second paragraph in two spots I added the word "perceived," which I think clarifies what I had in mind.

Like Lennie at a few points but mostly not IMO. Harmonically Herbie more or less "floats" (and thus also tends to float in his intentionally evanescent relationship to harmonic rhythm), while Lennie gets a lot of his virtually omnipresent rhythmic drive by pushing ahead/through/against a harmonic force field whose strength, in the process, he intensifies. For instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQZxUwpVQPo&feature=related

And leave us not forget Ahmad Jamal. In the liner notes to "Somethin' Else," Davis says to Leonard Feather: "I got the idea for this treatment of 'Autumn Leaves' from him."

? Sorry -- I was thinking of the modal-ness of the title track on "Milestones," which of course is a different piece from the "Milestones" Davis recorded with Charlie Parker in 1947. In any case, I can assure you that at the time a host of young musicians where I lived (in the Chicago area) were virtually hypnotized by the latter-day "Milestones" (indeed, by that whole gripping album) and did their best to follow its lead as best they could. The sheer prestige of Miles and Coltrane among many musicians and fans of a certain age at that time (if "prestige" is the way to put it) was quite something. Also significant here in the run-up to "Kind of Blue" (though perhaps not so much in terms of influence as the title track of "Milestones") was Miles' modal-ish recasting of "Autumn Leaves" on Cannonball Adderley's "Somethin' Else" (recorded March 9, 1958, a month before "Milestones" and a year before the first tracks on "Kind of Blue").

"Changed the whole drift" -- I wouldn't say that, though the extent to which the language of this album has remained a part of jazz practice ever since is certainly notable. Here's a bit of would-be context from my chapter on the avant-garde in "The Oxford Companion To Jazz" (yes -- it begins elsewhere, with Ornette and George Russell, but bear with me): Reacting to the music of Ornette Coleman, who had arrived on the national scene less than a year before, composer George Russell explained in the course of a June 1960 dialogue with critic Martin Williams that “if there weren’t new things happening in jazz since Charlie Parker, jazz wouldn’t be ready to accept Ornette.... The way has been paved and the ear prepared by rather startling, though isolated, developments in jazz since the ’forties.” Russell knew what he was talking about, for he himself had created some of those pre-Coleman “new things.” And when he went on to say that he believed jazz was “ready to accept other innovators as convincing as [Coleman] ,’’ he knew that at least two of them, Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy, were already hard at work . But perhaps, in 1960, only a prophet could have foreseen the advent of a figure as iconoclastic as Albert Ayler or have anticipated all the places John Coltrane was going to take his own music in the seven years that remained before his death.... Russell’s focus in that dialogue was on specific musical issues, especially on the “war on the chord ” that he felt had been going on in jazz since the bop era and that Coleman had taken up in his own way, liberating himself , in Russell’s view, “from tonal centers’’ in order “to sing his own song ... without having to meet the deadline of any particular chord.... {Longish account of jazz avant-gardism prior to Ornette] Ornette Coleman’s “daring simplifications” (the term is Max Harrison’s) seem to come from a different world from that of all the avant-garde jazz that preceded it. Coleman was a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and his early music sounds as though the techniques of Charlie Parker were being read backwards until they trailed away into the jazz, folk, and pop music pasts of the American Southwest—from the loping swing of Charlie Christian and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys to the blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Coleman made pitch a flexible, speech-like entity (you can, he famously said, play flat in tune and sharp in tune ), while the irregular length and shape of his phrases, and their relation to his no-less plastic sense of harmonic rhythm, took on a freedom that seemed to violate jazz’s norms of craft professionalism. Much has been, and should be, made of Coleman’s initial misunderstanding of a basic musical fact: When he acquired his first alto saxophone at age 14 or 15 and taught himself to play by ear, he thought that “the first seven letters of the alphabet were the first seven letters of music, ABCDEFG” (rather than what is the standard concert scale, CDEFGAB) -- which meant that Coleman thought that the C he was playing on the alto was A. One can only imagine the resulting confusion as he tried to reconcile the information he encountered over the years about standard musical terminology with all the things that his ear was telling him in unique, homemade detail. Thus, accidentally led to separate the names of pitches and their meanings, Coleman entered a homemade world of vivid harmonic relativism. And yet harmony for him would remain an area of intense potential meaning; in virtually every Coleman performance, powerful cadential events can occur. For that reason, his music should not be thought of as modal in the sense that modality was used to describe the music that Miles Davis and Bill Evans began to make in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Modality for these men, and the host of musicians they influenced , essentially was a means of protecting from disturbance a potentially fragile lyrical growth -- witness Davis’ remark that “When you go that way [radically decrease the frequency of chord changes and increase their ambiguity] you can go on forever ... [and] do more with the [melodic] line.” But Coleman’s melodic drive and his appetite for cadence were equally vigorous; there was no need for him to curtail the latter in order to bolster the former. What he and his partners wanted was to be cadential when and where they wanted.

The whole eventually pervasive modal thing had other sources too -- "So What" on Miles "Milestones" album, the Bill Evans Trio recordings -- but "Kind of Blue" was ground zero for this, no?

Here's Bishop's website: http://www.jebbishop.com/ Apparently the album is not yet released, but info will be posted there soon.

Trombonist Bishop's "2009" (Better Animal Recordings) is the first from him as a leader in ten years -- its predecessor was "Afternoons" (Okkadisk). Fine as Bishop has always been -- with his burry tone and penchant for mutes, he might be described as a somewhat "out" cross between Bill Harris and Tricky Sam Nanton -- he's been getting better and better IMO, thinking more melodically than in terms of "effects" (the latter must be a great temptation for him), and this record is SO damn good. One lovely, wry, gnarly piece after another, and the logic of his melodic thinking just sweeps me away. He's joined by bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly. Also, the presence and clarity of the recording is exceptional. Bishop, Roebke, and drummer Noritaka Tanaka join tenor saxophonist-bass clarinetist Jackson on his "Seeing You See" (Clean Feed). Almost certainly it's not a case of direct influence in the first case, but Jackson on tenor has always reminded me a bit of vintage Kalaparusha, also of Ornette on tenor -- at once guttily shaggy/lyrical and quite abstract and always spontaneous; no licks here. His swifter pieces often "jump," akin to the way some Ornette pieces do, but Jackson is himself. I've dug him from the first time I heard him, some nine years ago, and he keeps getting better/doesn't stay in the same place. Caught him last night with Bishop and Roebke, playing many of the pieces from the album, which was recorded in April 2008, and he was in a mostly unabstract "tough tenor" mood; at times it sounded like Griffin and Lockjaw were dueling inside his horn.

Probably: 10:00PM at the Hungry Brain, 2319 W Belmont, 773.709.1401 Kyle Bruckmann's WRACK, with Jen Clare Paulson, Jason Stein, Anton Hatwich, Tim Daisy Last night at Heaven Gallery, two fine sets: the Keefe Jackson Trio (with Jason Roebke and Jeb Bishop) and the drum duo of Frank Rosaly and Marc Riordan. BTW, I'm going to (or should) post shortly about Jackson and Bishop's recent albums, both excellent.

Mine, too.

from playwright-poet Robert Patrick -- "Kennedy's Children," etc. (don't know if it has music, but one can pretty much imagine how that music would go): JUDY'S LAST SONG (written by me long before Stonewall) I'm gonna try to kill myself with this song, baby. I'll bust a gut if I just hit the right note wrong, baby. I've listened to Doris Day, Hoping to clog up my veins. Sung the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe But that last out-of-breath note Wasn't my death note. I've read lots of Charles Schulz, but I'm living still, baby. I've gotten no results from pill after pill, baby. You've broken a hole in my heart. Fay Wray has turned into King Kong. And I can't any longer thrill myself, I'm feeling a little bit ill myself, So I'm crying And trying To kill myself with this sooooooong!