Larry Kart

No, music is not quite a language in the way that verbal languages are (as I've tried to explain above -- assuming I know what I'm talking about). About your "We can hear something we've never heard before and understand it right away, no codification involved. Then as more people get hold of it and use it to represent at least as much as to present, it gets codified" -- focusing on your "as more people get hold of it and use it to represent at least as much as to present" (which fits some but certainly not all of what happens; there'd be, for one, no Ben Webster without Coleman Hawkins, but was Webster representing at least as much presenting? no way), our immediate understanding of something we've never heard before becomes over time, under circumstances that frequently occur, a different understanding. Think of codification not as finger-wagging but as an organic elaboration of what's potentially, often irresistibly there. I know, "codification" can be and has been both, but ... as that old commercial says, it's a life form AND a disease.

Surely language doesn't exist UNTIL it's codified. MG Not sure I agree with that... Surely (and don't call me "Shirley") the truth lies somewhere in between -- that is, if we're talking about literal (spoken, then in most cases written-down) verbal languages. The most "expressive" (in itself) sound or series of would-be communicative sounds doesn't really work until others get and agree that that sound or series of sounds means whatever it means or is supposed to mean. In particular, such codification means that, say, what "take my chair" indicates doesn't depend that heavily on my "performance" of "take my chair." Now, if you're talking analogously, and want to bring into the tent other non-verbal languages, like music, their "languageness" is a good deal looser and different than that of verbal languages. We are, at least in my experience, prepared to deal with pleasure and interest with large swatches of music whose principles of order we don't readily detect. Nor is the language of any music that I'm aware of -- even the simplest, most direct, and most familiar -- as enclosed by the "this means that" process as is the case with verbal languages. Musical sounds can always be taken as "just sounds," while the sounds that make up words can always be understood as words, which accumulate into discourse, unless one consciously or inadvertently disguises those sounds, or one is not engaging in discourse (i.e. words are being used but one has no intent to shape them into sentences), or the auditor doesn't know the language. I'm reminded BTW of the brutal running battle in language affairs between prescriptivists (that would be, among others, people who write usage guides and who say that there are right and wrong ways to use the language), and descriptivists (that would be most professional linguists, who say that there are no right and wrong usages, only usages -- e.g. "Descriptive grammar has nothing to do with telling people what they should say." "Languages are self-regulating systems that can be left to take care of themselves"). A wise man on the prescriptive side notes that no descriptivist linguist writes or publicly speaks other than in some version of standard English (or whatever language the linguist is using).

James P's 1944 tribute-to-Waller recordings for Decca are very moving.

Haven't heard this one yet, but I have heard Mr. Melito before with Grant Stewart; he's a good drummer.

A link (Hi there, 7/4) to a New Republic article on the 7 versus 11 problem: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=...59-2dfa3a3211bf

More than that from a somewhat different perspective from Peter Cohan but saying more about Chapter 7 versus Chapter 11; they are not at all the same): Will GM file for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11? Posted Nov 12th 2008 9:00AM by Peter Cohan Filed under: General Motors (GM) On Monday I told a TV interviewer that General Motors (NYSE: GM) would probably not last the week. It is looking more like that prediction will come true. With $16.2 billion in cash, GM needs $10 billion to pay its bills. But it will go through that by the end of 2008 since it is probably in default on $6 billion worth of credit agreements which would require GM to pay back those loans immediately. And GM has already been bankrupt in an accounting sense for years -- its liabilities exceed its assets by $58 billion ($12 billion more than in 2007). This raises many questions: Why is GM in this condition? What are its options? Should the U.S. government step in? Does it matter? Where do the bailouts end? GM's basic problem is that it spent decades making excuses for why it could not give customers superior value rather than building better vehicles. With 2.5 million jobs on the line, Chapter 7 -- a complete liquidation of its assets -- could throw all these people out of work. Who are these people? Auto companies are big buyers of manufactured steel, aluminum, iron, copper, plastics, rubber and electronics -- and their dealers are people too. One study estimates that the workers in these companies could lose $125 billion in income. So the U.S. government could provide a financial guarantee and some money to encourage financial institutions to give debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing which would allow GM to operate in Chapter 11. As a condition of the deal, its top executives ranks should be replaced with strategists who can decide which parts of GM to close or sell, and which can operate profitably. A better solution would be a pre-packaged bankruptcy where new contracts with creditors would be negotiated before the filling -- but GM is probably too complex to accomplish this ahead of time. We will stop bailing out people when we run out of bailout money and lobbyists to fight for it. Starting with the bailout of Bear Stearns, the U.S. lost any logical basis for turning down anyone seeking taxpayer money. For example, why did the U.S. think it was OK to give $29 billion to keep Bear Stearns from going under but was quite comfortable letting Lehman Brothers file its $639 billion bankruptcy? Cat got your tongue Hank? The simple fact is that GM is big enough to hire the lobbyists it needs to make the case that what's bad for GM is bad for America. (And the average taxpayer is not.) The big economic crime is that GM's board kept supporting the CEO who presided over a 96% loss in shareholder value since he took over in June 2000. If GM had invested the profits from SUVs and vehicle financing that it made during the boom years into cars that customers were eager to buy, it would not be on the brink of bankruptcy. If President Bush resigns this week, President-Elect Obama could take over and make a terrible choice (GM in Chapter 11) to avoid a catastrophic one (GM in Chapter 7). Since that won't happen, it looks to me like GM could be in Chapter 7 very soon -- adding another remarkable "accomplishment" to a historic legacy. Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in GM securities.

From Brad DeLong's blog, quoting from Felix Salmon (the diference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcies is vast and crucial; they're as different as night from day): Felix Salmon Says: Not Bailout or Bankruptcy But Bailout and Bankruptcy for GM He writes: GM: The Bailout vs Bankruptcy Meme: At heart, this argument is simple. There's no available DIP financing for an orderly Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Chapter 7 liquidation would be disastrous, therefore we need a bailout which avoids any kind of bankruptcy at all. But I don't see why a government bailout must, ipso facto, avoid any kind of bankruptcy. GM alone has $35 billion in long-term debt, most of which is trading at about 20 cents on the dollar. That might only be a drop in the bucket compared to its total liabilities of $193 billion, but it's a good place to start: if bondholders took an 80% writedown while the government pitched in $12 billion of preferred equity in the post-restructuring entity, that's a $40 billion improvement to GM's balance sheet right there. And of course bankruptcy would give GM the opportunity to renegotiate onerous contracts with its dealers, as well as other real and contingent liabilities. This is what I've been referring to as a "bail-in", and it makes quite a lot of sense on its face. Let the government provide the necessary financing, but ensure that bondholders share some of the pain as well, especially since doing so would simply ratify the mark-to-market losses they've already taken. Such a plan would involve working out the details of a bankruptcy in advance: there are large dangers involved when a company the size of GM enters bankruptcy without any clear conception of how it might exit. So there would need to be serious negotiations between all of GM's stakeholders and the government -- negotiations which, I'll concede, would be all but impossible during this uncomfortable interregnum between the election and the inauguration. Even if GM can somehow muddle through until January, it can hardly expect such negotiations to be concluded in a matter of weeks. So there's a timing problem here, given that the present administration has demonstrated zero inclination to help out Detroit. But I still think that it would be useful to stop thinking of a bailout as an alternative to bankruptcy, and start thinking more imaginatively about the different mechanisms, including both government funds and bankruptcy, which could help put Detroit on a more sustainable footing. The government could, for one thing, provide DIP financing...

PLEASE don't tell me her Basin Street album is fake. See post #16 on the "Fake live albums" thread on "Discography."

I said you were right in your complaint and explained how it happened. What more do you want -- a pint of spinal fluid?

Sorry -- you're right. But I wasn't posting it, I think, in the same way you used to do. I was doing so in hot blood, in order to try to make a point about something else that I'd already begun to make and couldn't continue to make unless the review were in front of us. I won't do it again, though.

Good idea. Please pass the hemp.

quote name='Mark Stryker' date='Nov 15 2008, 03:45 PM' post='855231'] Larry, I'm surprised that two logical explanations seem to have eluded you as an old newspaper man -- either it was the damn copydesk that screwed it up or carelessness on the writer's part induced by deadline pressures, distractions or the many varieties of gremlins that have a way of getting between your brain and your best-intentioned copy. I'm guessing that Tony meant to write "composed in France" -- a factually accurate statement that makes sense to note in the context because Weill was on the move in those years -- but instead wrote "composed in French" and then never caught the slip, reading over it because we often don't notice our own typos. If that's the case, then 99 out of 100 copy editors would not have questioned the phrasing. Alternatively, Tony may have written something awkwardly (or not) and in making a change, the copy editor condensed it to "written in French" and introduced the problem. Of course, it is possible that Tony meant to write what he did, but we all have brain cramps. No harm, no foul.

Sure to all the above -- but however much the language one speaks, or the language in which your singers are singing (if you're writing for voices), matters, you don't say Wagner or Mahler composed "in German" or Ravel or Offenbach "in French." It's a usage error, not a conceptual thing. Tommasini should have said: "'Maria Galante,' in which Weill sets [or works with] a French text, etc." -- or something of the sort.

Today's NY Times has a review by Anthony Tommasini of Kurt Weill's little-known 1934 musical "Maria Galante," which Tommasini said Weill "composed in French." Well, the libretto is in French (and not even by Weill but by Jacques Deval), but the music was composed in ... music, no?

No, it's all real -- in a studio but with a friendly, well-lubricated audience.

This is the real "Peggy Lee at Basin Street East" show: http://www.peggylee.com/new/0206_basin_cc.html Don't remember the details, but the originally released album was, I think, a blend of some club performances and some studio takes with crowd sounds added, because the some things went awry in the recording process that night. The liner notes to the album linked to above tell the whole story.

I feel the same way about both Wilber and Kenny Davern. There's a certain packaged complacency about the way they use the pieces of the jazz past that attract them. That they're more "professional" players than a lot of revivalists somehow makes it more annoying.

Joe Goldberg's parodies of various jazz critics (especially Whitney Balliett) in a Jazz Review piece was right on target and damn funny. Thought I'd posted it here once but can't find by searching and don't feel like typing it all in again.

OK, Brute, it gets better. A great book, in fact, though it depends on what you're looking for. Only question -- and to my knowledge it's never been resolved -- is how much of it Bechet himself wrote. His editor was poet John Ciardi, and one has heard that Ciardi did a whole lot of work on it. Here's something I wrote about one aspect of the book: It is common for those who can recall their own earliest encounters with jazz to describe what took place then as an act of recognition--or as Bechet rather dramatically put it in his autobiography Treat It Gentle, “[T]hat’s what the music is…a lost thing finding itself.” In Bechet’s account, the advent of jazz is firmly linked to the aftermath of Emancipation: “All those people who had been slaves, they needed the music more than ever now; it was like they were trying to find out in this music what they were supposed to do with this freedom; playing the music and listening to it--waiting for it to express what they needed to learn….” The “lost thing” is said to be “like a man with no place of his own…a stranger right in the place where he was born” who eventually “finds a place, his place”--having been schooled to do so by the music’s journey “all the way up from what it had been in the beginning to the place where it could be itself.” If those remarks have an air of fable to them, they are at the very least a fable that one of jazz’s primal creators chose to entertain. Nor does it seem accidental that one of the music’s key mysteries is touched upon here with such precision. “[P]laying the music and listening to it,” Bechet says, “[the people were] waiting for it to express what they needed to learn.” Where, then, does the tutelage and the consciousness that underlies it reside? In a separate class of courageously individualistic, expressive artists? (Bechet describes his perhaps semi-mythical grandfather Omar in such terms, and he himself would seem to fit the model. ) Yet it is both listeners and players who “needed to learn” and who were, over time, taught. So is the music itself a third place or force? And is it there, or through its agency, that tutelage occurs? For the answer to those last questions, see "Jazz in Search of Itself" (Yale University Press), p. 6.

This girl can play!!! http://www.tinethinghelseth.com/en/ The third movement of the Hummel! And she's so relaxed, no tension in her facial muscles at all. On the other hand, she ain't that pretty.

Just name-calling going on.

The "Texas Moaner"/"Cake Walking Babies" dates from 1924/25, with both Bechet and Armstrong, suggest that Bechet was then further along than Armstrong was rhythmically -- "further along" not because it was a horse race but because they were working along pretty similar lines.

Short CD, even with the bonus tracks, (if that's a problem), but the music is excellent.

In a similar vein, I think, guitarist Jack Wilkins' "Reunion": http://www.jackwilkins.com/recordingsleader/?p=2 (clips there) with the Brecker brothers (Mike only on two tracks), Eddie Gomez, and Jack DeJohnette. Found it used a week or so ago, and somewhat surprisingly to me (not my favorite players by and large), it's just brimful of life. In part that's because it's very well-recorded -- Gomez, for once, doesn't sound like his instrument is made of cardboard, and a very interactive DeJohnette is right there. One of the tracks with Mike and Randy is Horace Silver's "Break City." Mmm.

A guy, I'm pretty sure. Something about the way the legs look and move -- also, the general stance, when you can make that out, is kind of wide from the waist down for a woman -- more like a linebacker or a defensive back.