Larry Kart

Sorry, make that 1978 or so. See, I still haven't recovered.

Ted Nugent at the Chicago Stadium in maybe 1968. I had to cover it, had not heard many rock acts, and didn't know from earplugs. Didn't regain normal hearing for several days.

Organissimo!

Let joy be unconfined!

I'll probably be there on Sat. night.

Yes, Earl Palmer. From the Earl Palmer discography: 1966 Ray Charles Let's Go Get Stoned, Jackie De Shannon I can Make it With You, Tim Hardin It'll Never Happen Again, Misty Roses, Neal Hefti Batman Theme, Marketts Batman Theme, Brenda Holloway Where Were You, PJ Proby Niki Hoeky, Righteous Bros. Soul & Inspiration, Ike & Tina Turner A Love Like Yours', River Deep - Mountain High.

I see/hear what you mean and take it all back. That thing is f------ insidious, and what you point out is a big reason why. I wonder who the drummer is. Earl Palmer? He's a big part of it all, IMHBO.

I saw Eager twice in the '80s in Chicago. The first time he was hopeless; the second time, with Al Cohn, was better. The feel of that second gig was strange; Al seemed to be angry/exasperated at Allen -- in part (my speculation) because Allen had squandered so much of his talent, in part because (my speculation again) Allen back in the early days had been so damn good and had made no bones about lording it over the other first generation Pres-based guys on that scene, like Al. In any case, Al played with remarkable ferocity that night, which seemed to boost the level of Allen's playing a fair bit. A strange evening. BTW, I can't be sure now, but I believe that my speculations above were based in part on some things that Ira Gitler told me afterwards when I described to him how that night had gone musically.

Unfortunately, we talked over the phone.

As others have said elsewhere, this account is baffling, perhaps even a put-on. Yes, the toy-like feel of the "Batman" theme is just right, but musically it could hardly be more simplistic, no?

Got one on the way.

Thanks. I enjoyed that set for reasons akin to yours and also enjoyed talking to Ahmet Ertegun back then. He definitely had an aura about him.

What about the intro riff/vamp? And isn't "Bag's Groove" in the minor and "Odd Couple" major? Certainly the former was the model for the latter, but the feel is different, no?

Also, in the vein of "Alone Together" and its companion, I much prefer the Konitz-Gil Evans duo CDs.

I agree. Sounds to me like Mehldau gets in the way at times. Lee doesn't care for pianists who are fond of fancy/elaborate substitute harmonies. Of the pianists he's worked with frequently in the last several decades, Harold Danko is one who really gets what Lee wants and needs.

I think I read that some years later Garment hired Al Haig to play at his son's Bar Mitzvah.

Other members of the boppish Henry Jerome Orchestra of 1944-5, along with Greenspan and Garment, were Al Cohn, Tiny Kahn, and Al Haig.

The question is whether Greenspan was better than Leonard Garment: "Two of the gentlemen in the Henry Jerome Orchestra also grappling with these [beboppish] arrangements [by the young Johnny Mandel et al.] were none other than Alan Greenspan -- future Chairman of the Federal Reserve -- on bass clarinet and saxophonist Leonard Garment, eventually to become an unfortunately overly busy counsel during the administration of Richard Nixon. Garment and Greenspan became great friends on the bandstand and it was this bond that led the former to put up the latter for the job of Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Nixon later naming Greenspan to his nearly infinite Federal Reserve stewardship."

Many eminently reasonable people feel that way, and I can see why.

A piece I wrote about the set (from my book -- hey, eventually I'm going to post the whole damn thing here in dribs and drabs): CABARET MUSIC [1988] We are, so it seems, in the midst of a modest but genuine revival of cabaret music--the always sophisticated, sometimes brash and campy style of entertainment that used to prevail in the smarter nightspots of New York, London, and Paris. Essentially an American phenomenon, cabaret music took shape in the mid-1930s. And it lasted until that indeterminate point in the late 1950s or early 1960s when the notion that there was such a thing as an aristocracy of taste, let alone a literal or figurative aristocracy to support it, finally began to seem out of date. In fact, the return of cabaret music, in the hands of such earnest young interpreters as singer-pianist Michael Feinstein, is based in large part on the music’s datedness. Able to evoke an era of elegance and romance that most of its current performers and fans were not around to experience firsthand, cabaret music now seems all the more attractive to some because we live in a world where such virtues are hard to come by. But re-creations are one thing and the originals are another--which is why The Erteguns’s New York Cabaret Music, a boxed set recently released on the Atlantic label, is a cultural-historical event of considerable importance. Produced by Atlantic’s legendary chairman of the board, Ahmet Ertegun--who founded the label in 1947 and who has through the years, along with his older brother, Nesuhi, played a major role in shaping America’s taste in popular music--New York Cabaret Music preserves some of the best work of the acknowledged heroine and hero of the cabaret style, Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short. But because, as Ahmet Ertegun explains, “we recorded this music as it showed up,” the set also includes the work of a number of equally intriguing but now almost-forgotten performers--among them vocalists Greta Keller and Mae Barnes, singer-pianists Ted Straeter and Hugh Shannon, and keyboard virtuosos Cy Walter and Goldie Hawkins. And it is this sense of the total scene that makes New York Cabaret Music so vital--for this was a style of entertainment that was so intimately tied to the emotional and social makeup of its audience that neither side of the equation can be grasped unless one has a good sense of the other. Encountered out of context, for instance, Mabel Mercer’s clipped, brittle singing can sound quite peculiar. Her “constant dignification of otherwise casual songs” (the apt phrase is composer Alec Wilder’s) erects a barrier of high-toned classiness between the listener and the music, until one begins to feel that exclusion, not communication, is the goal of Mercer’s art. But when the context of her work is sketched in, as it is by the rest of the performers who appear on New York Cabaret Music, it becomes clear that exclusion, but of a particular sort, is just what Mercer was communicating--an attitude toward popular music, and toward life in general, that only a certain group of “in the know” people was equipped to understand and share. “In my youth,” recalls Ertegun, who was very much a part of that scene, “a grand evening was to have dinner at a restaurant like Café Chambord, then go to El Morocco to dance and then travel up to Harlem or down to Greenwich Village and hear somebody like Mae Barnes. Mae’s songs, I think, are among the most delightful things on the set.” Indeed they are--ten cheerfully uproarious, urgently swinging performances, marked by glimmers of impish wit, from a singer-dancer who got her start in the all-black revues of the 1920s and then, in the 1940s, became a fixture at a Greenwich Village club, the Bon Soir. A favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Elsa Maxwell, Barnes might be described as a female Fats Waller. So exuberant that it could make the whole night seem like fun, Barnes’s music, like Waller’s, had a definite air of the put-on and the put-down to it--a rebellious impulse that was directed in part toward her smart, sophisticated audience but one with which that audience also was able to identify. Singing Irving Berlin’s “(I Ain’t Gonna Be No) Topsy,” a parodistic protest against the typecasting of black performers, Barnes delivers the song with a corruscating glee that borders on genuine rage at times--as Barnes plays the stereotypes that the lyric says she wishes to leave behind against her own impishly knowing “hot momma” mannerisms. But at whom was Barnes aiming this little whirlwind of wink-and-nod attitudes? Not at her fans, it would seem, though most of them belonged to the social and financial power elite. And not at herself either. Instead the joke, which she and her audience were able to share, lay in the link she drew between the song’s sendup of racial servitude and her well-heeled, well-connected audience’s desire to do whatever it damn-well pleased (without, of course, violating the prevailing norms of good manners and good taste). The link between Barnes’s ironic Harlem uproar and Mercer’s rigidly genteel restraint may seem tenuous at first, but it was, in fact, iron-clad. And its nature and strength can best be understood when one turns to yet another figure whose work is handsomely represented on New York Cabaret Music, singer-pianist Ted Straeter. Hired entertainers of black or racially mixed ethnic origins, Barnes and Mercer were, in several senses of the term, members of what used to be called “the servant class” or “the help.” But Mercer’s art depended on that role and her ability to transform it--for as she assumed a stance of such hauteur that she could look down upon anyone, she provided her admirers with an image of aristocracy that was, at once, more genuine than the bloodlines of the social register but not, in its fundamental gentility, at war with it. Straeter was a hired entertainer, too--the leader of a celebrated society band of the era—but he doesn’t seem like one at all. “Ted was a bit of a dandy,” Ertegun recalls, “a very urbane gentleman who was always very well-dressed. More than anybody, he typifies the elegant music that prevailed between the first and second world wars.” That estimate is confirmed by Straeter’s casual, sandy-voiced singing and his graceful yet seemingly artless piano work--which together create the feeling that he is part of the audience he has been paid to amuse and has agreed to perform only in order to amuse himself. Real or illusory, Straeter’s status as a gentleman--that is, a member of the class that doesn’t need to work--is evident in everything he sings and plays. And it emerges with particular force on his version of Cole Porter’s “All of You,” where he interprets Porter’s obliquely erotic lyric with an innocent leer that couldn’t be more unlike the earthy passion that marks Frank Sinatra’s famous recording of the song. There are a great many more pleasures to be found on New York Cabaret Music--some of the finest recordings made by Mercer, Short, and Sylvia Syms (whose version of “Tea for Two,” based on a solo by tenor saxophonist Lester Young, swings like crazy); Greta Keller’s medley of songs from Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, sung in the original German with an emotional insight that rivals the work of Lotte Lenya; the harmonic subtleties and ravishing technique of pianist Cy Walter; the almost delirious good cheer of another, very different pianist, Goldie Hawkins; the brisk, laidback perfection with which Joe Mooney handles “The Kid’s a Dreamer”; and a slow-motion Chris Connor recording of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Something To Live For” that sounds as though Connor had just flung herself from the balcony of the penthouse that figures in Cole Porter’s “Down In the Depths On the 90th Floor” (which Syms sings to perfection earlier on in the set). But as remarkable as these and a number of other performances are, the overriding fascination of New York Cabaret Music lies in its ability to reveal the nature of the lost world that these artists inhabited, a world whose anxious, fragile codes of sophistication they did so much to define. “I have always had an interest in what a lot of people call ‘good music,’” says Ahmet Ertegun, “as opposed to…well, I think that the music that’s being made today is great, but there’s always a segment of the population, the older generation, that feels its music has somehow been usurped, that the new music has wiped out what they love. “Now that’s not true. Musical tastes inevitably change as history goes on. Things don’t remain static; they evolve. And no music remains popular. But after its popularity is gone, the music that has been made still remains. And while the music of the cabaret era must be understood in order for it to be appreciated, that music still is, I believe, very beautiful.”

Right. I was going on my memory of the old LP. I'll try to listen to the CD with "Some Other Time" if it's not packed away.

Probably Bill Evans' "Peace Piece," which is based on "Some Other Time." My preferred version is the first one, on "Everybody Digs Bill Evans" (OJC).

Agree about Parker. Another strikingly good, highly individual Chicago guitarist is Matt Schneider. No recordings yet, I believe, except for one track on the "Document Chicago" CD, but he's something else and has been performing a good more recently with his new group, A Fox Can Be Hungry: Matt Schneider - guitar Jason Adasiewicz - vibes Anton Hatwich - bass John Herndon - drums He writes great/strange tunes, too, perhaps something like Dick Twardzik's originals.

Bought my copy at the same place. So far it strikes me as near-unreadable b.s., and this comes from someone who likes much of the music the book extols. A near certain sign of a book's b.s. quotient BTW is when it cites, as this one does, other texts to support virtually everything the author says, and these texts -- while typically quite heterogeneous in authority, historical point of origin, cultural context, you name it -- are all given equal weight. Thus (say) Eduard Hanslick, Frank Kofsky, Paul Henry Lang, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Ben Sidran might rest side by side. Revealing and amusing in its own small way is the citation of Hanslick's touchy response to the sound of Adolph Sax's saxophone; there Hanslick is identified solely as a "Czech-born, Viennese aesthetician." Clearly (or so it seems to me) the author doesn't really know who Hanslick was. To describe him that way is like describing Edmund Wilson as "a former Princeton University student who wrote about the U.S. Civil War."

Link on Heffley's website is no longer active. Just scan your mouse over the "Click here" line and the link should show up as active--I just went to it. For some reason, it doesn't look to be active when you first glance at it, but it is. Thanks, that works.