Larry Kart

On the other hand, Morty never lacked for female companionship.

Of course she wouldn't mention it -- look at a photo of Morty.

I see from a story about classical composer Joan Tower in today's NY Times that she was once married to jazz pianist Hod O'Brien. This brings to mind other little-known classical-jazz liasons: Morton Feldman/Anita O'Day Aaron Copland/Marian McPartland Nadia Boulanger/Sidney Bechet On the other hand, Ned Rorem/Annie Ross is a canard.

Yes.

Nice little nod Larry Ridley gives to Red at solo's end. Red does some lovely, dauntingly inventive things rhythmically here, all from a stance of total relaxation -- look at how loose his arms and body are.

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/searc...orvo-1974_music Such a happy solo. Bless him.

Take a look at the Donald Byrd discography: http://www.jazzdisco.org/donald-byrd/discography/ Lord clearly is wrong (whoduh thunk it?). The discog says Nov., 1957, which in itself proves nothing, but Byrd's sound on his 1959 recordings proves everything.

Jim is right, and Byrd doesn't yet seem to be quite the player who can sustain a whole album of ballads with strings (in terms of technique and feeling), but on the whole it's a plus for me, in part because of Fischer's fairly adventerous at times, "tasty" (or perhaps just tasty) writing. BTW, I took a look at the Donald Byrd discography: http://www.jazzdisco.org/donald-byrd/discography/ and the amount of recording he did that year is mind-boggling. In any case, for $3.99 you can't go wrong. It makes me uncomfortable to say so, but Lonehill has added tp the album the tracks (stolen from Blue Note's reissue of the Transition material) that Byrd and rhythm (Ray Santisi, Doug Watkins, Jimmy Zitano) recorded in Boston in 1955. In his own arguably unspectacular way, Byrd sure was a shape-changer. I was going to say "a chameleon," but it wasn't so much a matter of him emulating, say, Clifford Brown, (which he certainly did for a while to some extent) but of him trying on different, basically self-generated ways of playing, technically and emotionally. I recall reading once that Byrd became enamored of the so-called "no pressure" system (there was his later brief affair with the pocket trumpet, on which he definitely sounded different), and he studied composition (with Nadia Boulanger?) in France and probably beforehand as well. Not my favorite player of that era and style, but there are some marvelous things, e.g. his solo on "Nica's Dream" with the Messengers.

The sound was the same size as recorded (not that all Ammons was recorded the same, but you know what I mean). It filled the room, though I don't recall it as loud particularly, more large and immensely warm; it just filled the room (and the listener). Consistency was high (no play on words intended). Stage presence was relaxed glowing authority -- not unlike Dexter but each in his own way (two big men who inspired much affection). Princely.

I know, I shouldn't have bought it; my excuse (if it is one) was that it's at Berkshire for $3.99 http://www2.broinc.com/search.php?row=0&am...p;submit=Search but the liner notes state that arranger Clare Fischer "made his first recording with Pee Wee Hunt's Dixielanders in 1946 and would record numerous sessions with Hunt, Frankie Laine and Mannie Klein through the early fifties." Damn, the doofus who wrote that (one Arthur Kramer) was thinking of bandleader-composer Carl Fischer, who with Laine co-wrote "We'll Be Together Again." Nice to know that Lonehill is a class outfit all the way.

Josh Berman at The Hungry Brain in Chicago.

A log-time favorite of mine as well, it really helps keep me regular. There's a virtual trombone seminar on "Walkin'" from TIHIFAJ -- a series of solos and exchanges from Urbie Green, Frank Rehak, and Jimmy Cleveland. Nothing flashy (though Cleveland is characteristically swift), just thoughtful, soulful playing. It's like they're playing to and for each other.

Nothing after 1957 -- say, Red Garland's "Sugan." There are exceptions to this rule, but if you follow it you will IMO miss nothing of importance and avoid lots of annoying (again IMO) Woodsian "jazziness." There's some excellent Woods on the all-around excellent Quincy Jones album from 1956 "This Is How I Feel About Jazz," now coupled with the also excellent "Go West, Young Man," where QJ did no writing (insert punchline here) but served as producer. The latter's date with with four altos (Art Pepper, Benny Carter, Charile Mariano, Herb Geller) is choice, and on TIHIFAZ there's some pretty astonishing work by Mingus as a sideman and wonderful playing from Lucky Thompson.

It's my impression that on these performances the band itself pretty much takes control of Maninci's pieces and comes up with something that suits their own hot and loose sense of how things should go. The "look" of the band (e.g. C. Candoli's arm gestures, M. Flory's semi-smashed grin, the leer with which Frank Capp delivers the triangle bit on "The Pink Panther") versus the arms-length demeanor of Mancini pretty much confirms this, as does the inspired solo work.

Love it when someone can tell a joke right. Economy/timing, bingo.

Chuck, I listened to "A1 Tal 2La" several times in the past few days, based on your post. I like "A1 Tal 2La", and find it very interesting and a fine piece of music. However, if this is what brings tears to your eyes, it is an example of the diversity of the human species--which I am all in favor of celebrating. Can't speak for Chuck, but I get a great feeling of delicate, practical, in-the-moment tenderness from the piece/performance -- it's like tracing the contours of someone's face with your fingertips. Specifically, the passage around 4:30 when Roscoe is in the upper register and Malachi is playing harp-like figures; and the one that begins around 7:50 when Roscoe's line begins to descend in pitch and become a bit shadowy in tone -- I'd call that melancholic and farewell-like except there's no mood-painting here in the sense of depiction of emotion from a vantage point. It's all almost unbelievably specific, note to note, and that a rare thing, especially when you don't have the advantage of getting excited or "energetic."

from the marvelous Plas Johnson, the Candoli brothers, and an out of his mind Carl Fontana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechpnavTyA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBupII3LH_Q&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBTK_qzKbvk...feature=related This is less than a year before Getz's death, but the power of his sound! Also, dig Jack Sheldon and Candoli and digging him.

Probably 2not.

Not with that dancer, not in a million years. Havana, maybe? Or Puerto Rico? BTW, I remember watching Cuban league baseball games broadcast from Havana and picked by a local Chicago station in the year Castro took over. The atmosphere in the stands was something else.

Guess it takes one to know one. Larry, Jim, why is this bigoted jerk still posting? You can only have one poet per family. Bertrand. You are calling this sick, homophobic racist a "poet"? You Must Be is the younger brother of U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic (Kay Ryan recently was named to take over the post): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic You Must Be, then, is not the poet of the family.

I wasn't questioning the quote for real, just trying to make a little joke.

He didn't say, "We're gonna get high and listen to some Miles, man"?

When you take in the whole history of the music, the possibilities are mind-boggling (the Morton et al. dates that Chuck mentioned from the '20s, pretty much the entire swath of Ellington small group sides from the '30s), but it might be a good idea to divide things where possible into multi-horn dates where the focus is still more or less on the solos (e.g. "Hub Cap," among the Blue Notes, though Melba Liston's chart on that Randy Weston piece is fine; the Hampton RCA multi-horn things, the Condon Commodores and late '30s Bud Freeman recordings, all those H.R.S. sessions, etc., the Goodman Sextet, the Mulligan Sextet, etc.) and multi-horn dates where the focus is more or less on the writing and/or the overall ensemble statement (the Mortons again, Birth of the Cool, oodles of Mingus, Rod Levitt's things, the list could go on and on -- as could the other list).

Others may disagree, but having been a teen and then a young adult in that era, I found the first few episodes of the show to be ludicrously overdrawn and/or "Let's just make up some shit -- Who the hell will know the difference?" absurd, and stopped watching, though I'm well aware that bizarre entertainment-industry fantasies about times one has direct experience of are what all of us have to look forward to. One potential corrective would be to watch some of the many films of that era that attempted to grapple with aspects of that present at that time. Lord knows, the range is broad -- from solemnly pinched board room dramas like "Executive Suite," to comedies of sentiment like "The Apartment," to dark satires like "Sweet Smell of Success" -- and no one would say that those films themselves were not fables to some extent, but they couldn't help but be anchored in their times in terms of verisimilitude of behavior, decor, etc., etc. to a degree that made "Mad Men" seem (at least to me) ... mad. The simplest thing, and among the most basic (because of what the guys in "Mad Men" do for a living), is the smoking. Of course, people smoked like chimneys then -- I was one of them when I was old enough to get away with it -- but they didn't smoke demonstratively, as everyone I saw on "Mad Men" seemed to do. There was no reason or need to; smoking a whole lot was ordinary then. Geez, you'd think they'd get that right. I'm reminded of the era of the so-called "adult western" -- films that, in their "At last, in this brave new modern-era we can tell the truth about the myths of the Old West" strategies, essentially substituted an even more mythical (though of course grubbier on the surface) "truth" for the old myths -- which at their best had a potent organic coherence, while the new stuff was often merely and thinly "wised up" (I except "The Wild Bunch" from this blanket condemnation). Back to "Mad Men" -- it's not the same social setting or era, but for films of not too distant vintage that IMO convincingly recreate the feel of times prior to the times in which they were made, I think that Scorsese's "Good Fellas" and "Casino" show what can be done. But then I'm among those admirers of Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" (potent '50s essences divined and bottled at the time, which is when I first saw it) who despised "Far From Heaven" (2002), Todd Haynes' period recreation of/ variant on "All That Heaven Allows," which tried to turn the tale into an inter-racial romance from one in which the barriers to be crossed are those of class, age, and propriety. Not an impossible task, and certainly not a dishonorable one, but Haynes' methods had some of that implicitly wised-up, "We know better; we're adults now" smugness that spells death for drama.