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Larry Kart

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Everything posted by Larry Kart

  1. In the producer's note at the end of Mosaic set, Cuscuna speaks of Malcom Addey's remixing of the master tapes as "eliminating a lot of ... tape hiss, compression, and artificial echo." Chuck's "show biz gloss" is how I recall the sound of SS releases I heard.
  2. Just want to say thanks to Moms. I listened today to two of those Dufay discs he recommended (the Binchois Consort and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois) with his account of "the aesthetic core of Dufay's music [being] the passage of Time; one hears it 'horizontally' - in the flow of Time captured as immediate sensual perceptions, etc." in mind, and damned if it didn't at last begin to work for me, as I began to focus on the music's "leading edge," so to speak, and more or less let the vertical aspects take care of themselves (not that this is what they do; the vertical info, which is considerable, instead serves to subtly color/alter the horizontal flow.
  3. That's what I thought, but I didn't want to say so for fear of scaring Moms away. BTW, check out Moms' numerous Amazon.com reviews: http://www.amazon.co...ef=cm_cr_dp_pdp That's also what I thought as I read his post. Do we know for sure that he's not? I don't. But, again, I wouldn't make a big deal of this. If it is Clem and he wants to come back in this form, fine with me. Let's just react to what Moms says, if we feel like it.
  4. That's what I thought, but I didn't want to say so for fear of scaring Moms away. BTW, check out Moms' numerous Amazon.com reviews: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2PR6NXG0PA3KY/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
  5. BTW, in my previous post the longish second paragraph that begins "Music in Europe did CHANGE..." is Moms', not mine. I forget to place quote marks there. But "my emphasis" is me.
  6. Also, Moms, working my way through your numerous Amazon reviews, I really like this: "The history of music ... suffers from a discourse of 'development'. Perceptive listeners can still be trapped in the notion that the imitative counterpoint of Josquin is more 'advanced' than the seldom-imitative polytextual polyphony of Dufay. Quatsch! Nobody has ever written more 'advanced' music than Dufay... not Josquin, not Bach, not Beethoven, not Wagner, not even Brian Wilson.... Music in Europe did CHANGE rather dramatically in the short span of time between Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474) and Josquin Desprez (1455-1521). The most easily quantifiable change was the shift in 'prolations', from preponderantly "perfect" (triple) tempi to "imperfect" (duple) tempi. You can hear that change by comparing any performance you have of Dufay to any of Josquin's disciples like Mouton or Willaert. That change was symptomatic of a change in the most basic mode of "hearing" music, which I can describe as a change from Time to Space. The aesthetic core of Dufay's music is the passage of Time; one hears it 'horizontally' - in the flow of Time captured as immediate sensual perceptions. The consummate craft of Dufay's music is its rhythmic inventiveness. By comparison, Josquin's music is 'all about' melody, which is a sort of derived experience based on Memory. No memory, no melody! Thus Josquin's music is less about Time and more about Space, or Spaces ... music conceived architecturally and heard as much vertically as horizontally. (My emphasis.) And in fact what I don't get in most of the Dufay recordings I've heard (either because I just don't get it, which I think is unlikely, or because the performers don't have a good enough understanding of/grasp on it) is his, as you say, crucial, based on "immediate sensual perceptions ... rhythmic inventiveness."
  7. Thanks for the advice. I do have that OOP Ensemble Gilles Binchois recording of Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini and the Binchois Consort's Missa Puisque je vis. My memory of both of them is of being beaten to death at times by male altos/counter tenors (or as a friend once put it, "bargain-counter tenors"), but I'll listen again to those and check out the DIM disc.
  8. I see that "After You've Gone" is on the Herman Jazz Icons DVD. Also, do you know who the bass player is?
  9. But what led Lou and Fred to weigh in so boldly alongside Jake? Those passages are just a joy.
  10. I was there, wrote the liner notes, but never asked -- those wonderful three-way rhythm section improvs on the album are unlike anything I've heard before or since, with Hanna, Lou Levy, and Fred Atwood seemingly reading each other's minds. Where the heck did that come from? Was it something (though this seems unlikely) they'd been doing in Supersax? Did it just happen in the studio? Was it Warne's idea? In any case, what Jake plays there is just great; can't imagine many other drummers doing that.
  11. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    I should add this from Wikipedia's Maury Wills entry: "Day denied this in her autobiography 'Doris Day: Her Own Story,' and said it was probably advanced by the Dodgers organization for publicity purposes." I have no knowledge one way or the other here, but if "probably advanced by the Dodgers organization for publicity purposes" is an accurate account of what Day says about this rumor in her autobiography, that seems a fairly odd claim and/or explanation, a la Jon Lovitz's old Saturday Night Live tagline, "Yeah, that's the ticket!"
  12. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    In a recent biography of Day, author David Kaufman says that Day had an affair with Maury Wills in 1962: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-07-09-dorisday_N.htm
  13. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    This video, Larry, the one you posted. Is that Tony Oliva in there? All I see here are stills of Doris, in one of which she's holding a curly-haired little dog.
  14. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    I know who "Tough Tony" is, but which video do you mean? The guy with Doris in the one you posted is Louis Jourdan, no? And that's not a video, I think, just a static image or images?
  15. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    You lost me there. But, seriously, I'd guess Pete Candoli.
  16. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    On the other hand, somewhat girlish though it may be, this 1959 version of "The Way You Look Tonight" reveals that Day's laidback time and phrasing could still be damn fine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34t8i74pow&feature=related Orchestra is Frank DeVol's, wonder who the muted trumpet is. Not Sweets, I think.
  17. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    Not that I'm a scholar on this subject, but I agree with Allen that prime Day time might have begun to end by the early '50s. Listen, for instance, to these two versions of "It's Magic," the first from her first film, "Romance on the High Seas" (1948) -- the recording was a big hit --the second from 1952: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVoTPSLDgPE&feature=related An impressive piece of singing, I suppose, the '52 version is also very "presentational" and kind of bravura blowsy at times, while the '48 one is IMO wonderfully warm and intimate. Also, the placement of her voice has clearly changed by '52, been pushed (forced?) upwards. Again, I'm not a Day scholar, but the upwards push I think I hear will lead to an overall thinning out of timbre, much less sustaining of tone, and choppier phrasing -- plus there's a perhaps related, perhaps unrelated advent of post-blowsy coyness in how the stories of the songs are presented (the thing Allen aptly describes as "kind of girlish"). I suppose we should be grateful that the young Day was so fine, but she was only 28 in 1952 and seemed on the basis of her earlier work to be a very technically secure vocalist. I wonder if there is some extramusical story behind these shifts.
  18. Larry Kart

    DORIS DAY

    Those two sides she did in 1950 with Harry James and a small group in conjunction with "Young Man With A Horn" -- "Too Marvelous For Words" and "The Very Thought Of You"! She phrased so gracefully at very slow tempos and was so sexy. Here's "Too Marvelous": Dig the note she hits on "that" in the phrase "'and that old standby amorous."
  19. The complete text of the Mosaic booklet (minus personnel info, track listings, etc.) also can be found in my book "Jazz In Search of Itself," along with a lot of other stuff. A good many remainder and used copies seem to be available through Amazon at lowish prices.
  20. The Rhino set omits the most important track from "The New Tristano," "C Minor Complex."
  21. I have a fair amount of stuff myself but find that most recordings leave me baffled -- as in, I guess I don't know how to listen to this music. And it's not just that its really old and really different music; I don't have the same problem with such Medieval and late-Medieval masters as Leonin, Perotin, and Machaut, which is older than Dufay's music, at least as complex, and probably more different from how we've typically come to make and understand music. (I should add here that all this may be as much performance/interpretation dependent as anything else, because Leonin and Perotin didn't really click for me until I'd heard them performed by the group Red Byrd, which handles the music quite differently than performers on previous recordings of that repertoire that I know.) In any case, the problem I have with Dufay (and/or most Dufay performances) is a "how to listen" one. One reads that in many of his works there is a cantus firmus in the tenor, and one would assume that a likely way to make sense of all that's going on is to find that cantus firmus and hear everything else (and there always is a great deal else) in terms of variations, though damn it I've found no critic/commentator/annotater/musicologist/historian etc. who will just come out and say that or offer any other sort of "how to listen" guidance. Further, in most recordings I can't hear/find that cantus firmus and thus pretty much can't test that out, which may just be my problem, though I suspect again that it's performance-related -- in particular, thanks in part to church acoustics (most recordings of this repertoire are made in stone churches) and in part to the prominence given to male altos in most of the ensembles that perform this music, the male-alto (or counter-tenor) top line typically tends to be excruciatingly dominant, and what the tenor and bass voices are singing sounds quite subsidiary. If this is how this music is supposed to go, then maybe I just don't, and probably never will, get it. But I have a few recordings that don't sound that way -- by the largish male-female ensemble Pomerium (no male altos), by the four-man Orlando Consort, and an older (late '60s) recording of a Dufay mass led by the late David Munrow. Both Pomerium and Munrow pretty much "shape" things; ones know which "voice" among all that may be present in the music at any one time is meant to be (at least in the view of these performers) the most prominent, and it's seldom the top one. The Orlando Consort "shapes" much less if it at all; with them it's the equality of their four voices (and very good voices, too) that one hears; at least it's not a matter of an insistent male-alto top line beating your brains out. So these are my dilemmas here. Any thoughts/answers?
  22. Barrett Deems
  23. Yes, but when cancer is progressive and incurable, as it often is, people often still talk about "fighting" or "battling" it -- which, again, can really fuck with the minds of the parties involved.
  24. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/01/etta-james One of my earliest heroes. MG It may seem like it's just a language thing, but I wish people wouldn't say that someone is "fighting" or "battling" Alzheimer's or cancer or whatever. Those terms make it sound like the course of illnesses that may well lead to death are significantly a matter of the will, of a person's "fighting spirit," of his or her ability to think positively, etc. I'm not saying that miracles, or what seem to be miracles, don't happen, or that emotional states have no effect on physical states, but by and large the "fighting" metaphor doesn't fit what happens, and it can really fuck with the minds of the parties involved -- the patient and his or her loved ones -- e.g. you died because you didn't fight hard enough, she died because you let her give up, etc. I know -- this is far from a novel complaint, but I wish...
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