Larry Kart

Yeah --- I'm borderline psychotic about speaker placement since I was introduced to the general principles. My basement is in the process of being remodeled, and I can't wait to plunk the system back down there in a significantly new and better acoustic environment and then start fiddling. I would add that the best bang for the buck piece of a audio equipment I've bought recently is nice four-level equipment stand for about $350 (can't recall the name, but I could find the receipt on request) that is designed (as all such should be) to reduce vibration. The difference was pretty incredible.

I suppose that in classical music string tone and voices are a big giveway/sticking point for me. What string instruments and voices sound like, individually and collectively, is kind of programmed into me by experience, and when strings and voices sound the way I think they should, almost everything else is in a good place sound-wise. Allowing for differences in the way things are recorded in the first place, I think that the main thing I'm listening for there is some realistic (by my lights) sense of "grain," as in grain in a piece of wood -- the detail of overtones within a note. When I hear it, it's like you're in a movie theater and the picture suddenly comes into focus. In a few seconds you won't notice the difference anymore (you're just watching the movie, listening to the music -- as you should be), but you're dealing with more, and more accurate, information.

Yes and no. Yes, I pay attention to quality of sound reproduction and have taken what I think I are reasonable steps to make my playback system sound better over the years. No, those reasonable steps haven't led me to buy any crazy-ass expensive stuff, by my lights. I have used B&W speakers, a Cambridge 640C CD player, a Creek 5350 amp, Grado SR 125 headphones, and a 15-or-so-year-old B&O turntable and cartridge that are due to be replaced. The rest is relatively recent (except for the headphones), and I have no plans or desire to replace any of it.

No Pelt there, Mark -- would like to have heard him. Of his generation of "young lions" trumpeters, I like what I've heard from him, mostly as a sideman on Ralph Peterson albums on Criss Cross. Some of his own things struck me as a bit studied.

Related note: Lightcap is in metro Detroit for the next three nights with Gerald Cleaver's Violet Hour, also with two reeds, J.D. Allen and Andrew Bishop. Tonight in Ann Arbor at the Kerrytown Concert House and Friday and Saturday at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit. The band also played at last weekend's jazz festival here in Detroit, where they were smokin.' Heard them at The Hungry Brain in Chicago last Saturday night. A good deal of talent onstand (Bishop in particular IMO, though an aquaintance found him too slick), but after a few pieces Allen and Cleaver gave me a headache. Cleaver is f------- loud, while Allen's lines have a difficult-to-evade forcefulness but a good deal less rhythmic/melodic variety than I would wish. At times I felt like he was laying down strips of asphalt. How old is Allen? If he's no longer in his 20s, I'm not optimistic about future growth.

Thanks, Allen, but they have to be stories that I myself was a participant in because part of the deal is what I felt -- at the time and later on -- about what was going on. Not merely for reasons of ego, I hope, but because for example I need to know what it felt like to be temporarily responsible for and to try to help an apparently dying Coleman Hawkins. Not to give the game away, but basically it felt very good -- because for once at least I think I knew exactly what was at stake, did what I could/needed to do in human terms, and because what I did was acknowledged in the same way.

Thanks for the thought, CM, but I don't think I have the necessary sitzfleisch --or the money to acquire the sides I don't have or, at age 66, the time. If I do any more writing on jazz -- that is, other than what I do here -- it probably will be something personal, oblique, and semi-novelistic (as in "names changed to protect the innocent"). For example, the final chapter almost certainly would be about my taking Coleman Hawkins to O'Hare airport a month or so before his death, another would be about an afternoon and evening spent with Dexter Gordon in his hotel suite while Maxine Gregg raged, mostly out of sight, in the next room. The theme of all the episodes I have in mind would be the semi-comic dance that jazz musicians and their admirers more or less unknowingly engage in -- the ways in which this all-too-human music separates the actual humanity of its players and listeners by encouraging the latter parties to think that they know what they don't/can't know and by leaving the members of the former group significantly isolated because their own needs (as artists and human beings) are similarly divided internally.

Yeah, it's a 5 lb. 1700+ page book with a few paragraphs that would have better been left out or rewritten... We've all made errors -- e.g. assuming that we knew things what we did not in fact know them -- but this is a mistake of egregious, mean-spirited, I would even say poisonous, would-be-know-it-all commission. The question, then is how and why could the author(s) have made this mistake? -- or rather, because I believe that the passages I quoted are essentially their invention, why did they invent this stuff? It sure ain't misguided but received "wisdom" in any circles I've been around. My guess is that the chief strain in writing a book like this, aside from the sheer typing, is to generate opinion after opinion after opinion after opinion, all presumably (but perhaps we know better) with the same degree of commitment and alertness. One suspects that the opinion-forming/emitting process gets a bit mechanical and exhausting at times, and further that it can generate little fits of virtually free-form, seemingly crazed pontificating excess -- the way, say, someone whose job it is to masturbate in private as much as possible might get confused and/or carried away, pull out John Thomas, and spray his fellow commuters on the morning bus.

Just picked this up for reference purposes at a Half-Price Books sale as was astonished by this alternately tasteless and insane nonsense: "Woody Shaw's career judgment was almost as clouded as his actual vision. A classic under-achiever, his relatively lowly critical standing is a result partly of his music purism (which was thoroughgoing and admirable) but more largely of his refusal or inability to get his long-term act together...." OK, there's some truth there, but the errors ("lowly critical standing"?), the sneering, and the social-worker snottiness... But the worst is yet to come: "Like all imaginative Americans, Woody was violently stretched between opposites and inexorably drawn to the things and place that would destroy him." Cook and Morton do write "all imaginative Americans" here, so I guess that I am among the many Americans who are not imaginative enough or haven't yet found the things and gotten to the places that will destroy us. One suspects that Cook and Morton were themselves over-using controlled substances when they wrote this.

They've made the socks drinkable now? That might not work out too well... But the underwear?

What point would that be? Seriously. What I gleamed from his article is that Chicago should be spending more money on the festival. How to achieve that is open for debate, but I have to say I was underwhelmed by the festival when we played there (which is not to say I was ungrateful). I was expecting something much more grand from a city like Chicago. More money, sure. If how to achieve that is open to debate, I don't recall that Reich offered a single feasible suggestion, other than his "let's send it to the neighborhoods" notion. The underlying problem is that all the other Chicago music fests are either inherently more successful in that they draw more people and/or are connected to political/ethnic constituencies and the politicians that serve them. The jazz fest is not. The only answer I can think of is some corporate sponsor with very deep pockets who wants to improve things (as in, make things more professional in the good sense) but doesn't want to control things overmuch (as in, turn it into a pop/R&b fest under the "jazz" name). IMO, the Rollins concert last night was very boring, but based on recent recordings and accounts of other recent SR concerts, that's what I expected it to be. There were moments of, gestures toward, an interestingly complex, oblique-notey shagginess on Rollins' part, but these were just moments and gestures in the midst of pieces that, typically of SR of these times, more or less circled in place. And SR's sound, with that attached-to-the-bell mike, was (I'm sorry) virtually goat-like, though it might have sounded better if one were more close-up than I was. Gives me no pleasure to say the above; just my honest reaction.

Actually, Bruce, I'd read your post here before I made that post on Kehr's site and borrowed/took off from your thought about the revolving camera gimmick, though I did notice and was bothered by it in theater.

What point would that be? Seriously. Here's a case where the ideal is the enemy of the good. I don't think any of us would object to more money being spent on the Jazz Fest, and perhaps even coming up with more creative funding sources. However, what is the point of running down a festival that does quite a bit with the funding it has got? Going along with Reich and challenging the mayor in public is simply going to get the Jazz Fest shut down permanently. Period. Just to be clear, I don't think that "challenging the mayor in public" is Reich's current recommended strategy for the Jazz Fest; that was back in the day, when such a crusade would, he felt, suit his own needs/ego and that of the Tribune. His current recommended strategy is to generate more money for the fest out of Lord knows where, and to imitate the city's World Music Fest and set up venues in various neighborhoods rather than hold the fest in one central spot. I've explained why I think that last might be irrelevant and even counterproductive, but that's just my opinion.

OK -- sorry if I'm repeating myself.

What point would that be? Seriously.

This piece I wrote for Down Beat's Music '69 incorporates my experience along these lines (or a good bit of it), plus some other things in that it's focused on the '60s avant-garde. It's in my book. (Again this was written 39 years ago): NOTES AND MEMORIES OF THE NEW MUSIC (1969) “People put all these labels on the music, but actually all it is is cats playing.” Lester Bowie And cats listening, too. When Something Else, Ornette Coleman’s first record came out in early 1959, I was a seventeen-year-old high school student living in a Chicago suburb. I’d been listening to jazz for about four years. The first jazz record I’d bought, back in the spring of 1955, was an 45 EP by Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, entrancing not only for the music (its calculated rusticity sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard) but also for the liner notes (which proclaimed that this was “the only real jazz band in America.”) Early in the next school year, my eighth-grade home room teacher, hear¬ng that I was interested in jazz (he was a fan himself), recommended that I buy a Charlie Parker record and took me and a friend to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Chicago Opera House that featured Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet, among others. That was it. From then on, all the money I could spare went into records. I found others who shared my enthusiasm--that aforementioned friend, with whom I engineered what seemed to us monumental record trades (a ten-inch Ellington LP that contained “Ko-Ko” and “Concerto for Cootie” once brought ten less desirable albums in exchange), and, later on, an astonishingly good fifteen-year-old drummer, who had practiced for two years to Max Roach records in his attic before playing in public. I’m sure that his necessarily practical approach to listening--a quest to discover in other musicians virtues that he himself could put to use--helped to deepen and ground my own understanding. Eldridge, Young, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Roach, and Philly Joe Jones were my gods, and their records were the texts of a religion. We were still too young to hear these men in clubs unless we brought a parent along, so we went to off-night, all-ages-welcome sessions run by Joe Segal and discovered a host of local deities--multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, pianist Jodie Christian, bassists Victor Sproles and Donald Garrett, and drummer Wilbur Campbell. Then came John Coltrane’s Blue Train album, with the leader’s galvanic solo on the title track. This, to me, was the first sign that the music could and would change. Perhaps because I had come to jazz during a period of musical consolidation, it hadn’t oc¬curred to me that the music might once again undergo an upheaval comparable to that of the 1940s. But Coltrane’s playing made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, something new was happening. Listening to Blue Train again, I realize that, beyond Coltrane’s stylistic innovations, it was his music’s emotional aura of intense and unceasing search that was the clue. Today it appears that Sonny Rollins will have a deeper musical effect on the new music, but Coltrane was the herald for me. Fortunately, at about the same time, I heard Chico Hamilton’s quintet, and, amid the polite thumping, the group’s reed man picked up a strange-looking ebony horn and played a solo that sounded like Coltrane translated for the human voice. Of course this was Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, and now my belief that change was occurring had a second point of reference. Ornette Coleman was the third, and the leap in understanding that Something Else required was more than I could manage at first. In fact, Something Else remains a weird record. Pianist Walter Norris attempts to accompany Ornette with pertinent harmonies, creating “ad¬vanced” harmonic patterns that clash with Ornette’s homemade, and ultimately downhome, tonal, rhythmic, and melodic concerns. The record is a perfect example of Ornette’s distance from the conventions of the forties and fifties, but the emotional tone of the music is bizarre--as though Johnny Dodds had recorded with a Red Nichols group. The next Coleman record I heard, The Shape of Jazz to Come (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins), had a more homogeneous atmosphere. “Peace” and “Lonely Woman” were such direct and intense emotional statements that I found myself. listening to them constantly, even though I had little understanding of what Ornette was up to in purely musical terms. I felt that the music was beautiful, but my fifties-trained ears told me that it was exotic and “outside.” That barrier finally fell when I heard “R.P.D.D.” from the Ornette album under rather unusual circumstances. As I played it for the second time, late one night, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt that, in a pastoral setting, I was hearing a music more warmly human and natural than any I’d heard before. I awoke to discover that Coleman’s “R.P.D.D.” solo was what I’d been hearing in the dream, and that the quality I’d given it there was one it actually possessed. In no emotional sense was this music “far out” or abstract. Instead, I found that I had to turn to blues and early jazz to find music that conveyed human personality as directly. The next beneficent shock to my ears was administered by Coltrane (by this time, the summer of 1960, I was about to become a student the University of Chicago). Ever since Blue Train, my drummer friend and I had listened to every Coltrane recording we could find. The then most recent one, Giant Steps, sounded to us like it might be the end of the musical road he had been traveling for the past sev¬eral years. Still, when Coltrane came to the Sutherland Lounge in mid-August, we went ex¬pecting to hear those qualities which had marked most of Giant Steps (recorded in May 1959 and released early in 1960)--dense harmonic patterns negotiated with a brilliantly hard and even tone. Instead, we heard something quite different. This was the group with pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Pete LaRoca (the direct predecessor of the group that would record the album My Favorite Things two months later), and the difference between Giant Steps and the manner and matter of Coltrane’s current playing seemed immense. The tunes on tenor were mostly up-tempo blues with the harmonies stripped down toward modality, and the keening, granite-hard tone now exploded into growls and honks. The tunes on soprano saxophone, a horn we had some difficulty in recognizing, used harmonic change to form hypnotically circular rhythm patterns, over which Coltrane wailed like a blues-possessed snake charmer. To say the least, we were astonished and moved. As Coleman had done in his way, Coltrane unearthed a degree of passion rare in any music. [2004 P.S. I also recall Coltrane conversing between sets at the bar with the visiting Johnny Hodges, his former boss, and passing his soprano sax on to Hodges for examination. Hodges had played the instrument himself in the late twenties and early thirties.] From then on, Coltrane’s Chicago visits were essential experiences. I remember in particular an engagement at McKie’s Disc Jockey Show Lounge, during which a tune from Giant Steps, “Mr. P.C.,” became a nightly challenge. “My Favorite Things” and the other soprano tunes would be dealt with in the first two sets, and by one a.m. he would be playing “Mr. P.C.” on tenor with an intensity that seemed to demand in response all the volume Elvin Jones could muster. The tune would be played for at least forty minutes, and some performances lasted well over an hour. As novelist Jerry Figi wrote of a later Coltrane group: “What they did prove was just how hard they could try. That they could beat themselves bloody pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only their effort as an answer.” But there were other answers, or their beginnings, in the music of Coleman’s Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor. I see that, so far, my memories have centered on the emotional freedom that Coltrane and Coleman won for the individual improviser. The group settings seemed basically to be springboards for their solo efforts, although the wholeness of performances like “Lonely Woman” and “Ramblin’” should have been clues that Coleman, at least, had something else in mind. Free Jazz made it clear that the relative liberation of the soloist was only the beginning of this music. The discovery that one soloist, using emotion as a determining force to an unprecedented degree, could produce music of great power, led quickly to the thought of what might come from a group of musicians who simultaneously played in this way. The musical risks in such an approach are obvious. But Free Jazz overcame them to an amazing extent. Here were four hornmen, only two of them having much in common stylis¬tically (Coleman and Cherry), producing a collective music that multiplied the power of Ornette’s playing without sacrificing its order. I had heard Cecil Taylor’s music before this, but Free Jazz made me aware that he had an alternative and personal approach to the same situation. Taylor’s orchestral approach to the piano determined the nature of his groups’s creations. His recordings show that, given reasonably sympathetic musicians, he could enclose and order their playing from the keyboard, in one moment overseeing both rhythm section and front line. Still, as Taylor grew in solo power, or perhaps revealed more of what was always there, his virtuosity became overwhelming, and none of the hornmen he recorded with could function on a similar level. Taylor plays more brilliantly on Live at the Cafe Montmarte and Unit Structures than on Looking Ahead, but the group inter¬action on the earlier album is more satisfying. Perhaps, like Tatum, Taylor would fare best as a solo performer. But I seem to be getting ahead of myself, because by 1963 I had heard local musicians who were playing the new music. I’ve never been able to pinpoint the different effects produced by live and recorded music, but the difference is a real one. Therefore, hearing in person the bass playing of Russell Thorne with the Joe Daley Trio was a revelation. Thorne was the first bass player I know of who could create an instantaneous combination of passion and order out of the new music’s materials. The quality of his arco playing has not yet been approached in jazz, and, if the kind of order he created owed something to modern classical composition (he had symphony orchestra experience and knew his Boulez, Cage, and Barraque), it never had the sterility of so-called third-stream jazz. His music and his acquaintance also made me aware of a source for the new music that is gradually being acknowledged--the innovations of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh. I suspect that their music, with its unique rhythmic and harmonic qualities, and its emphasis on group creation, has already had an effect on a number of young musicians. Thorne no longer seems to be active as a musician (he works in a bookshop), but I doubt that music could ever be far from his mind. I hope that once again he will give some of it to us. The second Chicago-based player of the new music I heard was Roscoe Mitchell. Coltrane was in town, and Elvin Jones was appearing at an off-night session. As Jerry Figi once put it, Elvin was laying about “with a vengeance, one of those prehistoric movie-monsters crashing through a city…”--in the process wiping out a James Moody-like tenor player. Suddenly, in the middle of a tune, a young alto saxophonist climbed on the stand and played a solo that met Jones more than halfway. What he played, a version of the bird-like cries that Dolphy used, was inseparable from the way he played it. His raw, piercing sound was powerful enough to cut through the drums, and Elvin found himself playing with and against someone. When the saxophonist had finished, he climbed down and disappeared into the audience. Someone was able to answer my question with the name Roscoe Mitchell, and I filed it for future reference. Another in-person listening experience occurred during a New York visit in the spring of 1964, when I went to a loft session featuring the Roswell Rudd-John Tchicai group, with, as I recall, bassist Louis Worrell and drummer Milford Graves. They were playing well when one of those incidents happened that helps me understand the antagonism many older musicians and listeners feel toward the new music. A tenor player sat in and played the same note, spaced out with much “significant” silence, for about ten minutes. In between notes, he screwed up his face in dramatic indecision, as though he were considering and rejecting countless musical possibilities. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. After this performance, another man borrowed the tenor player’s horn, and joined Rudd and Tchicai. His remarkably broad sound bristled with overtones, and his melodies moved from a groaning, funereal lyricism to jaunty, anthem-like marches. The group fell into a joyous New Orleans polyphony (aided by Rudd’s Dixieland experience), but the effect was of the 1941 Ellington band in full flight--Rudd the whole trombone section, Tchicai the trumpets, and the tenorman capturing perfectly the overtone-rich sound of the Ellington reeds. As you may have guessed, he was Albert Ayler, whom I’d read about but never heard. That fall I returned to the University of Chicago after a two-year absence to discover that the Hyde Park-Woodlawn area in which the school is located was the scene of bur¬geoning new music activity. At first, my ears and my mind were in conflict, because I’d been trained to think that New York City must be the center of artistic endeavor in this country. These local musicians, both in conception and per¬formance, seemed to be going beyond anything I’d heard before, but surely this couldn’t be so. But a few months of listening to Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell et al. convinced me that my ears (and emotions) were correct. The first Roscoe Mitchell album, Sound, was probably all the evidence I needed; for here in three performances (“Ornette,” “Sound,” and “The Little Suite”) were the past, present, and future of the new music. “Ornette” was the new music’s past, i.e. Coleman to 1966. Over a dense but swinging pulse set up by drummer Alvin Fielder and bassist Malachi Favors, the horns played excellent solos (tenor saxophonist Maurice McIntyre, at once downhome and abstract, was es¬pecially impressive). But the jolly, Coleman-like theme that began and ended the performance was phrased with a savagery that implied that this kind of enclosure was no longer sufficient. “Sound” was the present answer-- a blank canvas upon which each solo¬ist in turn was free to determine melo¬dy and rhythm for himself, without reference to a stated theme or a steady pulse. Whether it was planned that way or not, the actual performance did have a constant point of reference--an evolv¬ing mood of melancholy that each soloist extended. While “Sound” was perhaps bolder in conception than “Ornette,” the latter’s mercurial leaps of energy were a more direct link to “The Little Suite” and the future. My first reaction to this piece was that it was primarily fun and games. The absence of separate solos, the use of harmonica, slide whistle, etc., and the overall tone of dramatic satire seemed unserious. After all, wasn’t solo prow¬ess the final test of a musicians worth? But as I relaxed and let the music work on me, I heard the beginnings of a new kind of musical form. In a sense, the piece was composed (there were prearranged sections, like the little march), but how such sections would be reached and where they would lead seemed as freely determined as the playing of any soloist. The form was dra¬matic, for, as in “Sound,” mood was the dominant force in every passage, but the shifts between moods were kaleidoscopic, and the opening theme’s return seemed spontaneous rather than preordained. Shortly after Sound appeared, I heard a live performance by Mitchell that confirmed and elaborated on the direction of “The Little Suite.” At the time, Mitchell’s regular group included trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Favors, and drummer Phillip Wilson, but Favors was absent for this miniature concert, held in a darkened lounge on the Chicago campus. In fact, for most of the evening the group was a duo of Mitchell and Wilson, because Bowie chose to offer only occasional comments. Perhaps it was the darkness of the room, the absence of a stage, or the quiet participation of the listeners, but for whatever reasons the music was relaxed and serene in a way that had been largely foreign to the new music. What had been lost with the disappear¬ance of swing was regained, for both sound and silence were filled with music. The feeling of a man moving through time with grace and power was once again as vivid as it had been in the music of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, and so many others. With this, the new music no longer seemed imprisoned in the intensities of the moment, like so much of modern, energy-determined art. The force of memory in music was rediscovered, both as procedure and historical reference, and the music “past” was now a living part of the present--e.g, Bowie’s statement which began this article. With the mention of memory, I find that I’ve come to the end of my own, since what I’ve heard in the past year feels as if it has all occurred yesterday. As Roscoe Mitchell has said, “Jazz is young, it’s not like other types of music.... It’s broad but not as broad as it’s going to be as it matures, as the musician matures.” It will happen.

This piece I wrote for Down Beat's Music '69 incorporates my experience along these lines (or a good bit of it), plus some other things in that it's focused on the '60s avant-garde. It's in my book. (Again this was written 39 years ago): NOTES AND MEMORIES OF THE NEW MUSIC (1969) “People put all these labels on the music, but actually all it is is cats playing.” Lester Bowie And cats listening, too. When Something Else, Ornette Coleman’s first record came out in early 1959, I was a seventeen-year-old high school student living in a Chicago suburb. I’d been listening to jazz for about four years. The first jazz record I’d bought, back in the spring of 1955, was an 45 EP by Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, entrancing not only for the music (its calculated rusticity sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard) but also for the liner notes (which proclaimed that this was “the only real jazz band in America.”) Early in the next school year, my eighth-grade home room teacher, hear¬ng that I was interested in jazz (he was a fan himself), recommended that I buy a Charlie Parker record and took me and a friend to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Chicago Opera House that featured Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet, among others. That was it. From then on, all the money I could spare went into records. I found others who shared my enthusiasm--that aforementioned friend, with whom I engineered what seemed to us monumental record trades (a ten-inch Ellington LP that contained “Ko-Ko” and “Concerto for Cootie” once brought ten less desirable albums in exchange), and, later on, an astonishingly good fifteen-year-old drummer, who had practiced for two years to Max Roach records in his attic before playing in public. I’m sure that his necessarily practical approach to listening--a quest to discover in other musicians virtues that he himself could put to use--helped to deepen and ground my own understanding. Eldridge, Young, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Roach, and Philly Joe Jones were my gods, and their records were the texts of a religion. We were still too young to hear these men in clubs unless we brought a parent along, so we went to off-night, all-ages-welcome sessions run by Joe Segal and discovered a host of local deities--multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, pianist Jodie Christian, bassists Victor Sproles and Donald Garrett, and drummer Wilbur Campbell. Then came John Coltrane’s Blue Train album, with the leader’s galvanic solo on the title track. This, to me, was the first sign that the music could and would change. Perhaps because I had come to jazz during a period of musical consolidation, it hadn’t oc¬curred to me that the music might once again undergo an upheaval comparable to that of the 1940s. But Coltrane’s playing made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, something new was happening. Listening to Blue Train again, I realize that, beyond Coltrane’s stylistic innovations, it was his music’s emotional aura of intense and unceasing search that was the clue. Today it appears that Sonny Rollins will have a deeper musical effect on the new music, but Coltrane was the herald for me. Fortunately, at about the same time, I heard Chico Hamilton’s quintet, and, amid the polite thumping, the group’s reed man picked up a strange-looking ebony horn and played a solo that sounded like Coltrane translated for the human voice. Of course this was Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, and now my belief that change was occurring had a second point of reference. Ornette Coleman was the third, and the leap in understanding that Something Else required was more than I could manage at first. In fact, Something Else remains a weird record. Pianist Walter Norris attempts to accompany Ornette with pertinent harmonies, creating “ad¬vanced” harmonic patterns that clash with Ornette’s homemade, and ultimately downhome, tonal, rhythmic, and melodic concerns. The record is a perfect example of Ornette’s distance from the conventions of the forties and fifties, but the emotional tone of the music is bizarre--as though Johnny Dodds had recorded with a Red Nichols group. The next Coleman record I heard, The Shape of Jazz to Come (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins), had a more homogeneous atmosphere. “Peace” and “Lonely Woman” were such direct and intense emotional statements that I found myself. listening to them constantly, even though I had little understanding of what Ornette was up to in purely musical terms. I felt that the music was beautiful, but my fifties-trained ears told me that it was exotic and “outside.” That barrier finally fell when I heard “R.P.D.D.” from the Ornette album under rather unusual circumstances. As I played it for the second time, late one night, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt that, in a pastoral setting, I was hearing a music more warmly human and natural than any I’d heard before. I awoke to discover that Coleman’s “R.P.D.D.” solo was what I’d been hearing in the dream, and that the quality I’d given it there was one it actually possessed. In no emotional sense was this music “far out” or abstract. Instead, I found that I had to turn to blues and early jazz to find music that conveyed human personality as directly. The next beneficent shock to my ears was administered by Coltrane (by this time, the summer of 1960, I was about to become a student the University of Chicago). Ever since Blue Train, my drummer friend and I had listened to every Coltrane recording we could find. The then most recent one, Giant Steps, sounded to us like it might be the end of the musical road he had been traveling for the past sev¬eral years. Still, when Coltrane came to the Sutherland Lounge in mid-August, we went ex¬pecting to hear those qualities which had marked most of Giant Steps (recorded in May 1959 and released early in 1960)--dense harmonic patterns negotiated with a brilliantly hard and even tone. Instead, we heard something quite different. This was the group with pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Pete LaRoca (the direct predecessor of the group that would record the album My Favorite Things two months later), and the difference between Giant Steps and the manner and matter of Coltrane’s current playing seemed immense. The tunes on tenor were mostly up-tempo blues with the harmonies stripped down toward modality, and the keening, granite-hard tone now exploded into growls and honks. The tunes on soprano saxophone, a horn we had some difficulty in recognizing, used harmonic change to form hypnotically circular rhythm patterns, over which Coltrane wailed like a blues-possessed snake charmer. To say the least, we were astonished and moved. As Coleman had done in his way, Coltrane unearthed a degree of passion rare in any music. [2004 P.S. I also recall Coltrane conversing between sets at the bar with the visiting Johnny Hodges, his former boss, and passing his soprano sax on to Hodges for examination. Hodges had played the instrument himself in the late twenties and early thirties.] From then on, Coltrane’s Chicago visits were essential experiences. I remember in particular an engagement at McKie’s Disc Jockey Show Lounge, during which a tune from Giant Steps, “Mr. P.C.,” became a nightly challenge. “My Favorite Things” and the other soprano tunes would be dealt with in the first two sets, and by one a.m. he would be playing “Mr. P.C.” on tenor with an intensity that seemed to demand in response all the volume Elvin Jones could muster. The tune would be played for at least forty minutes, and some performances lasted well over an hour. As novelist Jerry Figi wrote of a later Coltrane group: “What they did prove was just how hard they could try. That they could beat themselves bloody pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only their effort as an answer.” But there were other answers, or their beginnings, in the music of Coleman’s Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor. I see that, so far, my memories have centered on the emotional freedom that Coltrane and Coleman won for the individual improviser. The group settings seemed basically to be springboards for their solo efforts, although the wholeness of performances like “Lonely Woman” and “Ramblin’” should have been clues that Coleman, at least, had something else in mind. Free Jazz made it clear that the relative liberation of the soloist was only the beginning of this music. The discovery that one soloist, using emotion as a determining force to an unprecedented degree, could produce music of great power, led quickly to the thought of what might come from a group of musicians who simultaneously played in this way. The musical risks in such an approach are obvious. But Free Jazz overcame them to an amazing extent. Here were four hornmen, only two of them having much in common stylis¬tically (Coleman and Cherry), producing a collective music that multiplied the power of Ornette’s playing without sacrificing its order. I had heard Cecil Taylor’s music before this, but Free Jazz made me aware that he had an alternative and personal approach to the same situation. Taylor’s orchestral approach to the piano determined the nature of his groups’s creations. His recordings show that, given reasonably sympathetic musicians, he could enclose and order their playing from the keyboard, in one moment overseeing both rhythm section and front line. Still, as Taylor grew in solo power, or perhaps revealed more of what was always there, his virtuosity became overwhelming, and none of the hornmen he recorded with could function on a similar level. Taylor plays more brilliantly on Live at the Cafe Montmarte and Unit Structures than on Looking Ahead, but the group inter¬action on the earlier album is more satisfying. Perhaps, like Tatum, Taylor would fare best as a solo performer. But I seem to be getting ahead of myself, because by 1963 I had heard local musicians who were playing the new music. I’ve never been able to pinpoint the different effects produced by live and recorded music, but the difference is a real one. Therefore, hearing in person the bass playing of Russell Thorne with the Joe Daley Trio was a revelation. Thorne was the first bass player I know of who could create an instantaneous combination of passion and order out of the new music’s materials. The quality of his arco playing has not yet been approached in jazz, and, if the kind of order he created owed something to modern classical composition (he had symphony orchestra experience and knew his Boulez, Cage, and Barraque), it never had the sterility of so-called third-stream jazz. His music and his acquaintance also made me aware of a source for the new music that is gradually being acknowledged--the innovations of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh. I suspect that their music, with its unique rhythmic and harmonic qualities, and its emphasis on group creation, has already had an effect on a number of young musicians. Thorne no longer seems to be active as a musician (he works in a bookshop), but I doubt that music could ever be far from his mind. I hope that once again he will give some of it to us. The second Chicago-based player of the new music I heard was Roscoe Mitchell. Coltrane was in town, and Elvin Jones was appearing at an off-night session. As Jerry Figi once put it, Elvin was laying about “with a vengeance, one of those prehistoric movie-monsters crashing through a city…”--in the process wiping out a James Moody-like tenor player. Suddenly, in the middle of a tune, a young alto saxophonist climbed on the stand and played a solo that met Jones more than halfway. What he played, a version of the bird-like cries that Dolphy used, was inseparable from the way he played it. His raw, piercing sound was powerful enough to cut through the drums, and Elvin found himself playing with and against someone. When the saxophonist had finished, he climbed down and disappeared into the audience. Someone was able to answer my question with the name Roscoe Mitchell, and I filed it for future reference. Another in-person listening experience occurred during a New York visit in the spring of 1964, when I went to a loft session featuring the Roswell Rudd-John Tchicai group, with, as I recall, bassist Louis Worrell and drummer Milford Graves. They were playing well when one of those incidents happened that helps me understand the antagonism many older musicians and listeners feel toward the new music. A tenor player sat in and played the same note, spaced out with much “significant” silence, for about ten minutes. In between notes, he screwed up his face in dramatic indecision, as though he were considering and rejecting countless musical possibilities. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. After this performance, another man borrowed the tenor player’s horn, and joined Rudd and Tchicai. His remarkably broad sound bristled with overtones, and his melodies moved from a groaning, funereal lyricism to jaunty, anthem-like marches. The group fell into a joyous New Orleans polyphony (aided by Rudd’s Dixieland experience), but the effect was of the 1941 Ellington band in full flight--Rudd the whole trombone section, Tchicai the trumpets, and the tenorman capturing perfectly the overtone-rich sound of the Ellington reeds. As you may have guessed, he was Albert Ayler, whom I’d read about but never heard. That fall I returned to the University of Chicago after a two-year absence to discover that the Hyde Park-Woodlawn area in which the school is located was the scene of bur¬geoning new music activity. At first, my ears and my mind were in conflict, because I’d been trained to think that New York City must be the center of artistic endeavor in this country. These local musicians, both in conception and per¬formance, seemed to be going beyond anything I’d heard before, but surely this couldn’t be so. But a few months of listening to Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell et al. convinced me that my ears (and emotions) were correct. The first Roscoe Mitchell album, Sound, was probably all the evidence I needed; for here in three performances (“Ornette,” “Sound,” and “The Little Suite”) were the past, present, and future of the new music. “Ornette” was the new music’s past, i.e. Coleman to 1966. Over a dense but swinging pulse set up by drummer Alvin Fielder and bassist Malachi Favors, the horns played excellent solos (tenor saxophonist Maurice McIntyre, at once downhome and abstract, was es¬pecially impressive). But the jolly, Coleman-like theme that began and ended the performance was phrased with a savagery that implied that this kind of enclosure was no longer sufficient. “Sound” was the present answer-- a blank canvas upon which each solo¬ist in turn was free to determine melo¬dy and rhythm for himself, without reference to a stated theme or a steady pulse. Whether it was planned that way or not, the actual performance did have a constant point of reference--an evolv¬ing mood of melancholy that each soloist extended. While “Sound” was perhaps bolder in conception than “Ornette,” the latter’s mercurial leaps of energy were a more direct link to “The Little Suite” and the future. My first reaction to this piece was that it was primarily fun and games. The absence of separate solos, the use of harmonica, slide whistle, etc., and the overall tone of dramatic satire seemed unserious. After all, wasn’t solo prow¬ess the final test of a musicians worth? But as I relaxed and let the music work on me, I heard the beginnings of a new kind of musical form. In a sense, the piece was composed (there were prearranged sections, like the little march), but how such sections would be reached and where they would lead seemed as freely determined as the playing of any soloist. The form was dra¬matic, for, as in “Sound,” mood was the dominant force in every passage, but the shifts between moods were kaleidoscopic, and the opening theme’s return seemed spontaneous rather than preordained. Shortly after Sound appeared, I heard a live performance by Mitchell that confirmed and elaborated on the direction of “The Little Suite.” At the time, Mitchell’s regular group included trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Favors, and drummer Phillip Wilson, but Favors was absent for this miniature concert, held in a darkened lounge on the Chicago campus. In fact, for most of the evening the group was a duo of Mitchell and Wilson, because Bowie chose to offer only occasional comments. Perhaps it was the darkness of the room, the absence of a stage, or the quiet participation of the listeners, but for whatever reasons the music was relaxed and serene in a way that had been largely foreign to the new music. What had been lost with the disappear¬ance of swing was regained, for both sound and silence were filled with music. The feeling of a man moving through time with grace and power was once again as vivid as it had been in the music of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, and so many others. With this, the new music no longer seemed imprisoned in the intensities of the moment, like so much of modern, energy-determined art. The force of memory in music was rediscovered, both as procedure and historical reference, and the music “past” was now a living part of the present--e.g, Bowie’s statement which began this article. With the mention of memory, I find that I’ve come to the end of my own, since what I’ve heard in the past year feels as if it has all occurred yesterday. As Roscoe Mitchell has said, “Jazz is young, it’s not like other types of music.... It’s broad but not as broad as it’s going to be as it matures, as the musician matures.” It will happen.

He made so many nice records, especially in the '50s and early '60s -- under his own name, with Lucky Thompson, Seldon Powell, Quincy Jones' "This Is How I Feel About Jazz," a gorgeous "If You Could See Me Now" on "Gil Evans And Ten," and "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" on Gil's second Pacific Jazz album. Lord knows he was quick, and usually inventive-quick, but he got me to most on ballads, had a lovely, hauntingly diffuse tone on them, as though he were playing into a beret. There was a long interesting interview with Cleveland in Cadence a few years back.

Chicago Blues Fest budget was roughly $1 million in 2006; it attracts about 750,000 over four days, far more people than the Jazz Fest, but that's to be expected -- Chicago Blues is a brand a la Chicago Cubs, and many Blues Fest fans treat it like a "let's get smashed" sporting/groping event. My history of all this may not be precise -- Chuck or others can correct me -- but the Jazz Fest was launched near spontaneously and quite independent of city support by the Jazz Institute of Chicago in 1978; the city and corporate (mostly tobacco co. sponsors, this kind of sponsor longer feasible) climbing on board in following years when it became clear that the fest was a going thing. At some point, the Mayor's Office of Special Events began to see all this as semi-political plum -- let's add a Blues Fest (which will draw more; to no one's surprise it did and does), a Gospel Fest (to in part serve a constituency), and a World Music Fest (to serve in part other constituences of potential voters). The more fests, and the more clout they had, the smaller the Jazz Fest's wedge of the budgetary pie was and threatened to become -- remember, jazz fest was never the city's baby in the first place, as the other fests were/are, and its constituency in politcal/ethnic terms is utterly diffuse and therefore virtually without value in that regard. At one point (late '80s, maybe) Howard Reich tried to get the Jazz Fest (i.e. Jazz Institute people) people to attack the city/Mayor's Office of Special Events; he wanted them to demand more funds from the city or else, and he said that he and Tribune would support them in this crusade. The Jazz Institute people demurred; knowing the nature of Chicago's powers that be, they felt that this would be suicide (they'd end up with little or no budget and thus no fest). HR said directly, "Either you're with me in this, or I'll screw you," and since then, every year, he has from almost every imaginable point of view. Not that the fest is perfect, but HR's journalistic behavior in this has been unfair (because it sprang from the unfair proposition-threat I've just described), disingenuous, often simply uninformed about the nature and value of particular artists, and generally just vile.

I think a better comparison is Chicago and Detroit Jazz Fests. I've learned to my dismay that most years Detroit's Jazz Fest beats the Chicago one. This year looks to be an exception. OK, but three (I think) key questions: What is the Detroit fest's budget? Where does it get the money it spends? Are its concerts free to the public, as Chicago's are? One can argue that free-to-the-public concerts are an idea whose time has past, but any comparison between a fest of that type and a pay-to-listen fest is no comparison at all IMO.

Howard Reich's annual pissy think piece about the Chicago Jazz Fest: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainmen...42.story?page=1 The key paragraphs probably are these: "Counterparts such as the Montreal International Jazz Festival and the San Francisco Jazz Festival, for instance, spend fortunes on programming ($10.6 million for Montreal, $1 million for San Francisco). "The Chicago Jazz Festival—produced by the Mayor's Office of Special Events, which obtains funding from corporate and foundation sponsorships—musters an almost laughable $250,000.... "Consider the Montreal festival, where free outdoor events share the bill with handsomely produced, ticketed indoor concerts." One suspects apples versus oranges, and a fair amount of disingenuousness on Reich's part, but it would be nice to know in particular what accounts for the size of the Montreal fest's $10.6 million annual budget versus Chicago's $250,000. Are the tickets at Montreal's "handsomely produced, ticketed indoor concerts" that pricey? If it's mostly a matter of sponsorship, who are the sponsors in Montreal and where does their money come from and why? Also, in terms of acts, is the Montreal fest really a worthwhile jazz event by reasonable standards. I seem to recall complaints that it was not. In any case, HR excretes these little streams of piss at the Fest every year. Also, about his let's fill the neighborhoods with mini-fests idea. If that works for the city's World Music fest, it's because, I'm pretty sure, the World Music Fest's acts are matched to neighborhoods in ethnic terms, a stroking of constituencies. But the idea of the Chicago Jazz Fest -- noble in spirit, I think, and often in realization -- is to bring listeners of all stripes together, to expose fans of one sort of jazz to all sorts of jazz. It's ecumanical and educational. Otherwise, It seems, we're just sliding back toward the realm of sponsored club gigs, and Chicago doesn't need those I think.

There are meaningful, or at least deliberate, spacing things in that O'Hara poem (a number of lines that aren't flush left) that I can't reproduce. BTW, phrases from this poem are the text of Feldman's superb and mostly wordless "Three Voices."

Wind (to Morton Feldman) Who'd have thought that snow falls It always circled whirling like a thought in the glass ball around me and the bear Then it seemed beautiful containment snow whirled nothing ever fell Nor my little bear bad thoughts imprisoned in crystal beauty has replaced itself with evil And the snow whirls only in fatal winds briefly then falls it always loathed containment beasts I love evil -- Frank O'Hara

Yes. I'm just trying to kid around. But about Elgar and Ma Rainey.

From his website, Larry Ridley's rather dumbfounding curriculum vitae (though he was born in 1937): INTERNATIONAL CONCERTS, NIGHTCLUBS, RADIO, TELEVISION, RECORDINGS: with Pepper Adams; Toshiko Akiyoshi; Mousey Alexander Trio; Ernestine Anderson; "Killer" Ray Appleton; Harold Ashby; Dave Bailey; Chet Baker Quartet; Dave Baker Big Band and small groups; Bill Barron; Kenny Barron; Benny Barth; Gary Bartz; Edgar Bateman; Alvin Batiste; Marcus Belgrave; Louis Bellson; George Benson; Walter Benton; Leonard Bernstein; Eddie Bert; Gene Bertoncini; Skeeter Best; Walter Bishop Jr.; Art Blakey; Carla Bley; Ruby Braff; Buster Brown; Hallie "The Comet" Bryant; Darius Brubeck; Kenny Burrell; Jaki Byard; Charlie Byrd; Donald Byrd; George Cables; Jay Cameron; Conte Candoli Quartet (w/Slide Hampton, Benny Barth); Harry Carney; Joe Carroll; Benny Carter; Betty Carter; Nell Carter; Joe Chambers; Dennis Charles; Doc Cheatham; Ray Chew/Alicia Keys; Don Cherry; Jimmy Cobb; Al Cobine; Jimmy Coe; Al Cohn; Cozy Cole; Cy Coleman; George Coleman; Ornette Coleman; Junior Cook; Keith Copeland; Chick Corea; Hank Crawford; Harold Cumberbatch; Andrew Cyrille; Albert Dailey; "Dameronia" -- Leader-Philly Joe Jones, after Joe's death, drummer Kenny Washington played a few gigs with us, Walter Davis Jr., Johnny Coles, later Virgil Jones, Cecil Payne, Frank Wess, Charles Davis, later Clifford Jordan, Britt Woodman, later Benny Powell, Don Sickler- trumpet and Dameron music transcriber along with John Oddo; Charles Davis; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis; Walter Davis Jr.; Vic Dickenson; Roger Dickerson; Phyllis Diller; Sam Dockery; Eric Dolphy; Bobby Donaldson; Lou Donaldson; Dorothy Donegan; Kenny Dorham; Hobart Dotson; Kenny Drew; Ted Dunbar; Frankie Dunlop; Harry "Sweets" Edison; Duke Ellington & his Orchestra; Mercer Ellington; Herb Ellis; Booker Ervin; Tal Farlow; Art Farmer/Jim Hall Quartet,with Walter Perkins; Tommy Flanagan; Frank Foster; Panama Francis; Bud Freeman; Don Friedman; Curtis Fuller; Red Garland; Errol Garner; Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell; Stan Getz; "Giants of Jazz"--Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Curtis Fuller, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey & LR; Dizzy Gillespie; John Gilmore; Spaulding Givens; Benny Golson; Paul Gonsalves; "Babs" Gonzalez; Benny Goodman; Dexter Gordon; Lulu Gotsana; Stephane Grappelli; Benny Green (trombonist); Bunky Green; Chuck Green; Everett Greene; Freddie Green; Grant Green; Urbie Green; Charles "Majeed" Greenlee; Tiny Grimes; Sol Gubin; Bobby Hackett Quintet; Al Haig; Jim Hall; Chico Hamilton; Jimmy Hamilton; Lionel Hampton; Slide Hampton Octet and small groups; Herbie Hancock; Roland Hanna; Barry Harris; Lanny Hartley; Coleman Hawkins; Louis Hayes; Roy Haynes Quartet; Albert "Tootie" Heath; Jimmy Heath; Joe Henderson; Al Hibbler; John Hicks; Billy Higgins; Andrew Hill; Lonnie Hillyer; Milt Hinton; Johnny Hodges; Uncle Ben Holiman; Elmo Hope; Lex Humphries; Roger Humphries; Joe Hunt; Earmon Hubbard Jr.; Freddie Hubbard; Bobby Hutcherson; Milt Jackson; Oliver Jackson; Billy James; Clifford Jarvis; "Jazz Legacy Ensemble", Leader; Paul Jeffries; Alonzo "Pookie" Johnson; Gus Johnson; Sonny Johnson; Elvin Jones; Hank Jones; Papa Jo Jones; Philly Joe Jones; Thad Jones; Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra; Virgil Jones; Clifford Jordan; Duke Jordan; Connie Kay; Wynton Kelly; Barney Kessel; Joe Kennedy, Jr.; Alan Kiger; Willis Kirk; Lee Konitz; Gene Krupa; Steve Kuhn; Don Lamond; Cliff Lehman; Mel Lewis; John Lewis; Booker Little; Mundell Lowe; Harold Mabern; Shelly Manne; Albert Mangelsdorf; Lawrence Marable; Charlie Mariano; Hugh Masekela; Johnny Mathis; Stu Martin; Ronnie Mathews; Lenny McBrowne; Larry McClellan; Brownie McGee; Howard McGhee; Dave McKenna; Jackie McLean; Marian McPartland; Charles McPherson; Carmen McRae; Mabel Mercer; Don Michaels; Walt Miller; Harold Minerve; Charles Mingus; Al Minns/Leon James; Blue Mitchell; Hank Mobley; Grachan Moncur III; Thelonious Monk Quartet; James Moody; Danny Moore; Buddy Montgomery; Monk Montgomery; Wes Montgomery; Lee Morgan; Benny Morton; J.C. Moses; Ray Nance; Phineas Newborn; David "Fathead" Newman; Joe Newman; Newport Jazz Festival All-Stars; Herbie Nichols; "Big Nick" Nicholas; Red Norvo; Jimmy Nottingham; Anita O'Day; Jimmy Owens; Buddy Parker; Leo Parker; Paul Parker; Donald Patterson; Cecil Payne; Freda Payne; Walter Perkins; Coleridge Taylor Perkinson; Charli Persip; Oscar Peterson Trio; Flip Phillips; Sonny Phillips; John Pierce; Bucky Pizzarelli; Al Plank; "The Platters"; Paul Plummer; Bernard "Pretty" Purdie; Sonny Redd (nee Sylvester Kyner); Melvin Rhyne; Dannie Richmond; Ben Riley; Max Roach; Timmie Rogers; Sonny Rollins; Bobby Rosengarden; Charlie Rouse; Ernie Royal; "Rutgers/Livingston Jazz Professors"- Larry Ridley(Leader), Ted Dunbar, Kenny Barron, Frank Foster, Freddie Waits; Davey Schildkraut; Hazel Scott; Tony Scott; Don Shirley Trio; Woody Shaw; Wayne Shorter; Horace Silver Quintet (w/Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Roger Humphries, later Tyrone Washington); Zoot Sims; Pete (La Roca) Sims; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Jimmy Smith; Willie "The Lion" Smith; Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra; Jimmy Spaulding; Marvin Stamm; Slam Stewart; Sonny Stitt; Clarence (Scobey) Strohman; Frank Strozier; John Stubblefield; Sun Ra Arkestra; Ralph Sutton; Lew Tabackin; Buddy Tate; Grady Tate; Arthur Taylor Jr.; Billy Taylor Trio, Les Taylor Jr., Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson, Clark Terry, Sonny Terry; Ed Thigpen; Bobby Thomas; Willie Thomas; Charles Toliver; Ross Tompkins; Tommy Turrentine; McCoy Tyner; Jerry Tyree; Earl VanRiper; Joe Venuti; Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson; Freddie Waits; Earl "Fox" Walker; Cedar Walton; James "Jabbo" Ware; Dinah Washington; Chuck Wayne; George Wein; Frank Wess; Randy Weston; Josh White; Joe Wilder; Cootie Williams; Earl Williams; Joe Williams; Richard Williams; Tony Williams; Larry Willis; Gerald Wilson; Phil Woods; Jimmy Wormworth; Richard Wyands; Cecil Young; David Young; Snooky Young; "Young Giants of Jazz" (Joe Henderson, Jimmy Owens, Gary Burton, Cedar Walton, Roy Haynes, & LR); Trummy Young; Kiane Zawadi; Attila Zoller; etc.