Larry Kart

Your point about possible "limitations of the form itself" cuts right to the heart of it. See, the "learning process" and/or the "remembering process" never ends. My first thought is the blues, specifically the so-called Delta Blues. The style and its various musical moves and emotional/dramatic flavors would seem to be no less (maybe much more) limited than those of the Tango. Yet I find the best Delta Blues artists to be endlessly fascinating and quite individual in relation to the styistic waters in which they swim and the other artists who swim in them. So, just for the sake of argument, we have the Tango and Piazzolla over here and, say, the Delta Blues and Robert Johnson or Sleepy John Estes over here. My consuming interest in the latter and my relative lack of response to the former no doubt has a lot to do with me, but I still think that the pervasively spiced cuisine analogy of my previous post is suggestive. However limited the style of Johnson, Estes, et al. may be, it furthers the development of strikingly individual figures who speak to us in quite varied ways, emotionally and dramatically, beyond (an equivocal term, I know) the apparent boundaries of that style. However gifted AP may be, what I hear is a sophisticated (the degree that tangos and milongas permit sophistication) elaboration of the style itself. In fact, based on my memories of some recordings of music in that style that were recorded in the relatively distant past (can't recall the names), the whole genre for my tastes might have been in better shape artistically before AP and others arrived to sophisticate it. Not every style or form that has deep "folk" roots (again a loose term for the sake of argument) has an equivalent musical/emotional richness and/or can successfully bear the weight of expansion/sophistication. In that vein, my introduction a few years ago (via our old friend Clem) to Rembitekka (sp?) was a revelation -- akin to the blues in its ability to generate varied individuality and hair-raisingly intense dramatic impact within seemingly narrow stylistic boundaries. P.S, The Piazzolla recordings I encountered first and remember best are the ones on American Clave LPs.

Because the initial poster asked for recommendations, that's the only legit response? I think that any thread that brings up someone's music opens the door for free commentary on it. And I didn't only say that I "can't hear" the music, I offered (briefly) specific reasons why. On the other hand, contra Allen, while we all have track records, I don't think anyone should pay attention to what I say just because I said it. I'm only trying to talk here the way I'd talk to any group of friends/acquaintances who have common interests, and I'm always prepared to be told I'm wrong, if I'm told why. The learning process never ends.

I'm pretty sure that I have heard it, and by "wallpaper" I didn't that his music is without zest, pep, swoop, etc. but that it's so narrow in range and/or predictable harmonically and rhythmically that I tend to nod off because it seems to me to be all pretty much one kind of thing. It's like a cuisine where, this side of dessert, certain pungent spices pervade virtually every dish.

Argentinian wallpaper for the most part, IMO. Useful if you have trouble sleeping.

Check mailed Friday.

My father was one of group of investors that put some money into Westfall's first (and only?) film, "The Golden Gloves Story." I remember her show and its predeccesor, "The Bob and Kay Show." . Maybe I'm sick, but doncha want to just do her on that breakfast table? I mean, she's SO friendly.

Duane Tatro

Check is coming. Organissimo is cheap compared to other forms of psychotherapy and a lot more fun.

Check out, if you can still find it, Rosnes' Blue Note CD, IN THE MOMENT. She takes an absolutely terrific solo on the opening track, "Summer Night" that also features a marvelous solo by Joe Henderson. Ever since I heard that, I'm more interested in what she has to say than her hubby, Bill Charlap. Also preferable to Charlap is Rosnes' prior husband, drummer Billy Drummond, a latter-day Kenny Clarke. Charlap has his moments, but his "Written on the Stars" album from a few years back is really strange -- sounds like an attempt to limit his vocabulary (harmonic vocabulary in particular) to what might have been played at the Hickory House in 1955. Producing this neo-dinner music seems to place Charlap under much strain, as though he had to consciously restrict himself from bar to bar. Anxious blandness.

Probably vocalists should be ruled out to keep this theme less apples and oranges, but Billie Holiday is one of the top ten jazz artists for me, and Bessie Smith and Sarah Vaughan are not that far behind. Also, whatever happened to drummer Dottie Dodgion? And how could one forget hard-working Chicago bassist Betty Dupree, in her skin-tight dress? Wouldn't mind knowing about the latter-day music of pianist Jane Getz, if there is some available. She was very nice on Pharoah Sanders ESP album, though not a good match with Sanders.

I was wrong about Dodo. Frank Davenport is/ was a real person.

Boyd Raeburn: http://www.hepjazz.com/bios/boydr.html One possible problem, because you mentioned "Kenton in Hi-Fi," is that Raeburn's band was from the pre-LP era and thus its recordings are 78s, radio transcriptions, or airchecks. Sound quality, then, will be akin to early Kenton, not Kenton's latter-day Capitol recordings, which were often pretty spectacular sonically. Raeburn had two fine vocalists, Ginny Powell (eventually his wife) and the great David Allyn.

That should be Jeff Brillinger, right?

... bit of fiddle playing I've ever heard (start of the final Allegro con fuoco -- "con fuoco" indeed!): http://www.amazon.com/Sarah-Chang-Lalo-Sym...1539&sr=1-1 I've ordered the album.

Guys like Howard Alden, and Alden in particular, drive me nuts with their IMO dumpy complacency within the style they favor and have every right to favor if they'd would or could do more than, for the most part, just present it to us. The best corrective, I think, if corrective there be, is comparison/contrast. Leaving aside a unique genius like Jimmy Raney (that wouldn't be fair to most of the guitarists on the planet), here is a track by the late Joe Puma, who stylistically is in about the same place Alden is or would like to be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpJz7eTZ85E A world of difference, I think, in terms of liveliness and inventiveness within, again, a similar stylistic framework. BTW, when Puma recorded that track he was 37 -- younger than Alden is now.

Damn. He's great in "Kill Bill."

Strange that I've heard Josh so many times since the time I first heard him (spring 2001), yet I've never tried to write a word about him IIRC, here or anywhere else. In part that's because I went to hear him that first time because we'd become friends, not the other way around, and I've never quite lost the feeling I had as I drove to that gig -- "What am I going to say to him if I don't think he's good." As it turned out, he was good -- and in much the same fairly unusual way that Margasak's piece accurately describes: You could tell that he already had a really clear idea of what he wanted to get to, but he hadn't yet mastered the horn and the materials/details of the kind of music-making he was aiming it to get that music out. On the other hand, in this early-intermediate stage, he already was an interesting player -- in part because his (in effect, to some degree) conception-before-the-horse stance was (so it seemed/seems to me) so unusual, in part because that conception was so attractive in itself (at least to me) and one of a kind. Probably the first and last thing to be said about that conception and how it's ripened as Josh has mastered what he knew he needed to master back then, is his almost unprecedented (in the modern era) timbral shaping of most every note. Usually (but not always) falling somewhere short of what most of us would call actual note-bending (i.e. where notes are not only shaded timbrally but also attacked from above or below), this approach seems to me to be both the emotional and musical core of Josh's thing (and why the whole thing began to come together when he switched from trumpet to cornet, which lends itself to this approach). Also, his sound itself -- though he now can sprint to upper-register peaks like a mountain goat -- is based in the lower- and middle- registers, a la two of his favorites, Ruby Braff and Tony Fruscella (and there's Bobby Bradford and Don Cherry there too, and good knows how many other fondly regarded figures; Josh is one of the world's champion record hounds, and then he pores over in his head and on his horn what attracts him, probably doing more of that taking apart and putting back together thing early on than today, though). Back in 2001, phrases tended to be fragmentary or splintered, a la up-tempo Cherry with Ornette, but I mostly thought that this is how he was hearing things; they made sense, though I could also tell, after he switched to cornet, that he wanted to link things up much more than he had been and had been able to -- to think and play really long singing lines. And that's what began to happen. But, again -- and this is obvious when you actually hear Josh but hard to point to because it's so one-of-a-kind -- that sensuous timbral shaping of most every note is kind of the "language" principle in his music. Initially, as one might expect, this created a air of actual or striven-for lyricism, a literally songful quality. Now, with the chops aspect of his playing having grown well beyond the point I thought it might get to (though Josh obviously had his goals clear from the start), facility in terms of speed and upper-register ease has kind of fed back into the conception (or what one thought, from the outside, the conception mostly was) and filled it with passages that are much or more rhythmic in impulse as they are lyrical. I mean, I thought for a moment at one particularly and literally hot point, that I has hearing Charlie Shavers -- that kind of almost ridiculously playful, doubling and tripling back on itself zest. Quite a player. Haven't heard the album yet, though I bought a copy. Last night, everyone played great. About Shevitz's vibes on that Luminescene disc (which I think I have but can't find right now) and elsewhere, there have been times when I haven't been able to take it all in, but listening to him last Sunday leading a trio, I suddenly realized that though there is a top-line above/ decoration below feeling to his four-mallet work, that's not how it goes; rather, it's from the bottom up and.or the inside out. There's a LOT going on there harmonically (though some of that usefully works back and across the line between harmonic events that function linearally and harmonic events that are as much acts of rhythm and "sound" (if you know what I mean -- these guys know their Morton Feldman). I don't hear confusion. BTW, Shevitz has mentione that one of his chief inspirations is Hasaan Ibn-Ali. He often plays (and plays the heck out of) one of Hasaan's pieces, though which one escapes me right now.

Are you going to go early and see Toumani Diabate as well? I was sorely tempted, though domestic duties call. I did manage to see Diabate at Millenium Park last summer. I'll be eating at about 8, so probably not.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=...zq-g&ref=mf I'll be at The Hideout show tonight and will try to report.

I disagree. Geography/isolation is not relevant. We [at least I) are talking about something else. Location don't matter to the "music". FWIW, that's not Terry's point of view in his chapter on jazz in Australia and Canada in "The Oxford Companion To Jazz." Don't have it to hand right now, but I'll look for it and quote/summarize some unless you already know it because his POV makes sense to me. In particular, his argument is that Australia's geographical and cultural distance from the U.S. and relative lack of contact with recordings and visiting U.S. musicians in the '30s, then explosive contact with U.S. military personnel in the war years (which were in any case a time of much stress/upheaval in Australian society), plus pre-existing oddities in Australian culture ("oddities" is not the right word, but I'm tired), stoked the development of a music that was Revivalist in one sense but quite new in another -- and not really similar in P.O.V. or musical quality to the Revivalist movement in the U.S., in part because in Australia in the '40s this music became part of the society's "cutting edge," culturally, artistically, even politically, in much the same way bop was in the U.S. To be, say, Ade Monsborough and transmorgrify Tesch, Dodds, et al. into something rich and strange was to express who Ade was in his world in ways that were not open to any U.S. trad player of the time in his world, as far as I know. Was Ade more talented than, say, Ellis Horne? Yes, but it's more than that. Was Ade more talented than Bob Wilber or, later on, Kenny Davern? Maybe not, maybe so, but Ade was almost unavoidably playing his life by playing the way he did, and the reason he was had a lot to do with the cultural situation he was in. You can see it at work the other way around too, as quite striking/quirky (when young) Aussie figures like trumpeter Bob Barnard move to Sydney to become bland recording industry "pros," sounding like maybe Rusty Dedrick. As for Canada, its geographical and cultural proximity to the U.S. virtually precluded the development there of any distinctively different from the U.S. ways of playing jazz. When talented Canadian players arose (Oscar Peterson, Maynard Ferguson, etc.), they soon become (in most cases) part of a U.S. scene that they already in effect belonged to.

And there's a fourth different thing (or maybe it would be a special case under Chuck's "growing a living music") -- a la Dallwitz and some others of that generation of Australians, falling in love with an older style or styles and inventing some music that's kind of in the style of but is essentially new, expressive of your own reality, and as rich in purely musical terms as, say, the best of Morton. Sounds damn unlikely, but it happened. May never happen again, not until and if we colonize other planets or galaxies (or vice versa). Now you are talking about developments within "playing within a style". This is not too far removed from the "HIP" classical movement. If you want to be kind, you can call it "neo-something" but it is still a sort of nostalgia thing. I don't think of Dallwitz's "Ern Malley Suite" that way, for one, and it's not the only such thing from those vintage Down Under people. Isolated stuff, arguably (it has its day and goes away), and also the product of a certain kind of geographical/cultural isolation (and thus at least potentially free from the trappings of nostalgia) that may not exist on the planet anymore. The best of what they created is not imitative, though, or so it seems to me. I agree about the HIP analogy -- if you believe, as many do, that one of the semi-hidden goals of the HIP movement (semi-hidden even from many of its practitioners) was to create in effect a new "old" music as much as it was to discover how that old music really was (and thus ought to be) played, which was the cover story. But I can think of so many annoying or boring HIP performances and nothing from that realm that's as musically creative as Dallwitz or Ade Monsborough or Bill Munro. Also, the HIP performances that really work for me pretty much work in about the same ways as really good non-HIP performances do. They get "informed," and then they still have to just play.

I think Braxton's cooking something up for that eventuality. ... But then Sun Ra came here from there.

And there's a fourth different thing (or maybe it would be a special case under Chuck's "growing a living music") -- a la Dallwitz and some others of that generation of Australians, falling in love with an older style or styles and inventing some music that's kind of in the style of but is essentially new, expressive of your own reality, and as rich in purely musical terms as, say, the best of Morton. Sounds damn unlikely, but it happened. May never happen again, not until and if we colonize other planets or galaxies (or vice versa).

Over time (a lot of time, in my case -- spring 1954 to the present) I've come to feel that understanding and enjoying what is going on in such transition periods is the beginning of historical/aesthetic wisdom in jazz. While "progressivism" among musicians and among listeners is not the same thing, it has pitfalls for both groups, especially for the latter, and there are overlaps. One thinks of all the talented modern and/or mainstream clarinetists who not only can't abide but also can't even begin to understand Pee Wee Russell or Johnny Dodds (not that Russell and Dodds are the same thing). A postscript about musicians: up to a certain point in his life (maybe until the end) Coleman Hawkins essentially was a progressive: I recall a Blindfold Test where he was played either "One Hour Tonight" or "Hello, Lola," and his response was that the music (including his own work) was essentially primitive and unlistenable. Primitive, yes, in one limited but important sense -- the drive toward certain sorts of technical refinement and sophistication (or "sophistication") will never cease, nor should it; but otherwise (on a case by case basis and being careful not to confuse certain kinds of roughness or lack of "sheen" with lack of skill), hell, no! I'm reminded of a passage from the liner notes of the 1978 album "Everybody Stomp" by the fine French revivalist band Charquet and Co., lead by cornetist-arranger Jean-Pierre Morel (who after a a gap of a decade or more has returned as the leader of Le Petit Jazz Band and Les Rois de Fox Trot -- search the board under my name for links to terrific YouTube clips of Charquet and Co.). I should add that in their case (and the case of the great Australians like Dave Dallwitz), "revivalist" isn't really the right term; it's new music born from the "old." In any case, the liner notes say: "Morel felt French traditional jazz in the 1960s was often a 'fake and a cheat,'' and he preferred to work with the arranged music that preceded the Swing Era, from hot and sweet groups which produced highly imaginative scores and projected (in Morel's phrase) 'richness, contrasts in sonorities, picturesqueness and vital rhythmic discoveries that totally disappear in Swing.'" The proof is in the listening, but without doubt IMO some vital things got (and always do get) plowed under as "progressivisms" do their business, and there is much to be learned (and much pleasure to be had) by accurately perceiving how specific nodes of the past worked and felt before they became "The Past." Among other things, it almost certainly will enlighten you about the relationship between the present and the possible future(s).

http://people-vs-drchilledair.blogspot.com/ Sublime IMO.