Larry Kart

Some vintage Byas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUJGO4MC5Go...feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1CxHZQ3xFQ Was at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers early this month and saw Byas' latter-day "sexophone," with the spit key in the form of a snake.

Some pretty serious Gillespie here from Nice 1979, with Stan Getz, Arnie Lawrence, John Lewis, George Duvivier, and Shelly Manne:

Yes.

Don't know where Baraka found here are some of the idiots floating around America, but that's clearly his point of view on what he quotes above. Lloyd is speaking in both the previous sentences.

What Chris said is the impression I got from Dan. IIRC, his comments on the book and the Bird bio were made to me in conversation several times over the years, not in written form. His judgment in both cases was that it wasn't a matter of factual errors but of complete fabulations.

Don't have the info in front of me, but Dan Morgenstern has expounded at length on the numerous fabulations in both Ross Russell's Bird bio and his book on KC jazz.

To blow sexy, dangerous notes in out-of-the-way places is the goal of every jazz musician.

Paul Schroeder's two essays on this topic, "World War I as a Galloping Gertie" and "Embedded Contrafactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War," can be found in the book "Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe" http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Stability-St...4991&sr=1-1 Schroeder's quarrel with Ferguson is not on the grounds that German aggression was the primary cause of the war (this Ferguson denies). Rather, Schroeder feels that a key precipitating factor was Britain's' “encirclement" policy directed at Austria-Hungary, which led Germany to launch what it felt was a preventative war in the face of the impending break-up of the Austro-Hugarian state, Germany's ally. Schroeder's quarrel is with Ferguson's use of so-called contrafactual reasoning to demonstrate that World War I was readily avoidable. As the title of Schroder's "Galloping Gertie" essay suggests -- "Galloping Gertie" being the Tacoma, Wash. suspension bride that collapsed in 1941 when winds caused a fluttering effect in the span, and the amplitude of the motion produced by the fluttering increased beyond the strength of the suspender cables -- Schroeder believes that the forces that led to the outbreak of World War I were so structurally interdependent that no responsible historian could propose a plausible scenario in which what actually did occur did not.

After which she took up with Pee Wee Marquette.

The book is a potted for paperback bit of Ferguson's "The Pity of War," which was published in hardback. Bookmarked it once, though the link doesn't work anymore on the 'Net, but conservative historian Paul W. Schroeder -- "The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848_ -- (Oxford) wrote what I recall as a coolly devastating critique of Ferguson's fast-and-loose "contrafactual" approach in "The Pity of War."

I was getting worried when your wife had that fall, but all's well that ends well. Congratulations. The Alfredson clan is on the march!

About soft-rock ballads and the like, I think I've told this story before, but once in the course of an interview in I think the late '70s I suggested to Tony Bennett that he take a look at Boz Scaggs' "We're All Alone" as a possible piece of material. The next time we met, Bennett said that while he found the melody of "We're All Alone" attractive, "the song doesn't go anywhere," meaning that it's one mood, stated and restated. Thus, in terms of both music and lyrics, there's hardly any ABA shape to Scaggs' song and/or much contrast between A and B material. Quite apart from the merits of Bennett's judgment here, it's a useful reminder of how essential the storytelling chorus-bridge ABA (usually of course AABA) shape of most GAS material is -- take that away from the style and it doesn't work, like a watch without a mainspring.

One of the last gasp GAS songs was Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh's "Witchcraft" (1957) -- last gasp in that its three-ply flow of melody, harmony and rhythm arguably sounded organic (unlike all of Sondheim IMO), and also it's pretty darn good. Here's a nice version of it by the composer from "Playboy's Penthouse" (Coleman also composed that show's theme song): The off-screen trumpeter is Charlie Shavers. Dig the rarely heard extra lyrics.

Also -- and I'm sure many have had this experience -- the second movement of Bartok's for Music for Percussion, String, and Celeste made it clear to me fairly early on that classical music can swing.

My mother and father both listened to classical music (my mother with deep love and understanding); they went to some Chicago Symphony concerts, later on were subscribers; my mother's younger brother was a good amateur violinist who might have been better than an amateur if he could have stuck with it (one of his childhood pals/fellow music students was Leonard Sorkin, eventually the leader of the Fine Arts String Quartet). I resisted at first on the basis of negative associations to Mantovani, Kostelanetz, stuff like that, which led me to think that anything with violins was sentimental glop, while jazz by contrast (this at about age 13) was anti-glop (among many other things), and to be anti-glop felt important in 1955. Things began to change when I listened to a Vox Box set of the Mozart String Quintets that was in the house. I just got what the music was about immediately -- I remember being particularly intrigued by how different in approach/manner the last three String Quintets were from each other -- and from there on it was clear sailing. A few years later, thanks in part to a knowledgeable friend, I got into "Modern Music," Second Viennese School in particular. Classsical and jazz interests remain in tandem.

I find these amusing: http://oldjewstellingjokes.com/post/157004...neral-according ( the above a particular gem in the telling; this guy is a chapter in novel) http://oldjewstellingjokes.com/post/155469...sue#offset:16;0 (again, nicely told; the impish lilt in her voice) http://oldjewstellingjokes.com/post/167160...he-tailor-larry http://oldjewstellingjokes.com/post/178523...barnett-hoffman http://oldjewstellingjokes.com/post/160364...ccording-to-his

Doubleday Anchor Bible volume of Genesis -- translation and extensive notes and commentary by E.A. Speiser. Have read this Genesis before, and each time it's like veils are lifting. The relationship between the various authors or teams of authors (J., P., and E.) is quite clear, and Speiser's account of what those authors were "saying" (quotes are necessary here, for reasons Speiser explains lucidly and at some length) is convincing and enlightening, at least to me; but I'm no scholar here.

Ordered it last night.

In case anyone wonders why I'm not contributing to this discussion for a while, I'll be out of town for a while. In case any doesn't wonder ...

Ya gotta remember, in Jim's neck of the woods, road kill is a common item at the mini-mart.

Sometimes it was "Trinkle Tinkle," sometimes it was "Little Rootie Tootie," sometimes it was "Criss Cross," but the goal was always "Epistrophy."

Well, wait till you see (if we're lucky) Peter Pullman's Bud Powell bio. It's almost all "context," beyond what has ever been attempted in a jazz biography before AFAIK, and IMO it's amazing. As you say, it's the way hatcha do it, but some ways (or perhaps better styles) of doing it really put my back up (to the point where I think that the actual intelligence/savvy/etc. of the writer can't redeem things, may even make the fairly well-done results more dangerous -- at times Scott DeVeaux's "The Birth of Bebop" gave me that feeling ), while other ways that seem basically right to me can still yield up a mess if the writer just isn't up to the task.

I don't follow you. Adorno, like him or not (and I sure have mixed feelings), was able in part (if you believe what he says) to write what he did in this sphere because he became quite aware of and resisted the positivist habits that he describes here as being typical of American academia in the late 1930s/early 1940s, when he was in direct contact with it: "The intellect is unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them." If you mean that Robin Kelley actually or potentially believes and proceeds quite otherwise, why would his work and Adorno's be a much of a muchness? But on second thought, you probably mean that in the works by them that you mention above, both Adorno and Kelley donned significantly different sorts of intellectual "hats" in order to fit those particular tasks/situations. If that is what you meant, it seems to me that Adorno, for better or worse, only wore one such hat, though of course his thinking altered over time (as his head swelled?). About Kelley's work, I don't yet have enough info to have an opinion. In any case, here's an Adorno passage that may clarify this IMO potentially significant difference (paradoxically so, perhaps, because typically for Teddy it's a bit clotted): "Another ... already established scholar considered my analyses of light music as 'expert opinion.' He entered these [i.e. Adorno's "opinions"] on the side of reactions [to] rather than analysis of the actual object (i e., the music), which he wanted to exclude from analysis [because he thought of the music] as a mere stimulus." Note: What inside [] is mine; what's inside () is Adorno's.

Well, "closing [your] mother" would be painful. Sorry -- couldn't resist.

Yes, but that's a charge more properly levelled at the trad (i.e. non-'New') jazz scholarship that you laud above to the exclusion of more socio-cultural angled work! I don't see how you reach that conclusion. Certainly trad jazz scholarship was/is not without it flaws (these IMO mostly the result of the individual scholar or scholar-critic having less skill or information to work with than one might wish rather than being the result of methodological errors or prejudices). But what I see in much of the more socio-cultural angled work of the New Jazz Scholarship (often in the name of correcting the supposed methodological errors and prejudices of the past) is a lot of fairly blatant power-accumulating operations -- for their own sweet sake and also to nail down what look like to me like P.C. conclusions that have been reached up front. Further, and most important to the point Adorno was making and that you raise, the NJS exhibits little or no humility in the face of the art work itself (seldom, in fact, talks about music in musical terms), because said music is, from the NJS perspective, almost entirely "evidence" of the so readily decodable (by the right NJS guru) effects of social context (which is what the NJS cares most about anyhow -- and even there, as I've said above, I mistrust their motives). In any case, under such conditions, the "independence and autonomy" of the work that Adorno speaks of would seem to be far more out of reach than it ever was before.