Larry Kart

Leonard Featherweight.

I love Eubie's Warner Brothers LP "Marches I Played On The Old Ragtime Piano," ragged-up marches (Sousa, etc.) with Milt Hinton, Panama Francis, Buster Bailey, and Kenny Burrell on rhythm guitar. Swings like a tidal wave. The man's time was something else. Recorded in 1959, when Eubie was still in his late adolesence.

At some point I told myself to stop worrying about or trying to explain (to myself or to anyone else), or especially just "accepting" the enigma that is Sonny Rollins. I think the simple answer for some time has been -- to invert JS's conclusion while adopting his "at face value" approach -- that it is what it isn't.

When was the last time Moye was around town? Baby Dodds? Dave Tough? Ike Day?

So sad. In the words of Pres: "It's the same all over, you fight for your life until death do you part, and then you got it made..."

New name to me. Have to check him out.

Did Dexter have an aura or what?

The full quote -- and I can re-create the moment in my head precisely -- is "Ah, yes, the Hankenstein. He was so hip." Another remark from the same encounter, which might be rendered thus: Did you ever expect to see a bebop tenor saxophonist looking down on Michigan Avenue about to order ca-viar from room service?

Could be, but it sounded like he was making everything he tried for, with no particular strain. BTW, I'm sure this has come up before, but in page 99 of Ira Gitler's "Swing to Bop," Bailey says of fellow Clevelander Freddie Webster: "I happen to know ... that on the [Charlie Parker] recording of 'Billie's Bounce' that [Miles Davis'] solo was exactly the one that Freddie played for that particular blues. Evidently Miles said he was nervous and couldn't think of anything to play, so he did Freddie's solo note for note." It's a lovely chorus and certainly sounds Webster-like.

Right -- but there he was the leader of a team and interpreting a chart, not stepping out front and telling his own story.

For instance, don't you get the feeling that BB liked playing in a section more than he did taking a solo? Not that the former can't be great thing to do if you're in the right band, but for some guys it may also be a way of hiding out.

About 1) it's not that there were fewer musicians then as that so many of them were so distinctive. I mean, off the top of my head, who could mistake Bill Hardman for anyone else? While, again off the top of my head, I like and respect the work of Alex Sipiagin, Scott Wendholt, Jeremy Pelt, Greg Gisbert, etc. but am not sure I could tell one from the other automatically.

Hard to say at this distance, but IIRC it was like he'd play some alarmingly great stuff and then seem to indicate -- through body position, facial expression, and a general air of withdrawal -- that he wished he could take it back, as though he too were alarmed by it. Perhaps this had something to with the fact that the general outlines of his approach were so boldly dramatic (huge tone, wide leaps, wide dynamic range, etc.), while some part of his soul might have been withdrawn and diffident.

Caught him live once at the Jazz Showcase in the late '70s or early '80s, maybe also once at the Jazz Fest later on. A marvelous player, but he also seemed to have some hard-to-define emotional hangups about playing, as though the necessary ego force one needs to have to actually step up there and play out as a soloist was perpetually troubling to him.

BTW, Danimal, I'm sure we're at some of the same performances. If so, say hello.

Even if Hamid Drake counted, I'm in EDC's camp on him. Don't know Marcus Evans or Makaya McCraven. Avreeayl Ra has never done much for me, so damn loud (sorry, I was thinking of Vincent Davis there); if he's still around, I preferred Dushon Mosley. Don't want to get into this now, because I'd need to get out more to really back this up, but it's been my impression that the last wave or so of AACM players are not what one would have hoped -- the stature accorded to the rather lightweight Nikki Mitchell not being a good sign in my book, while Corey Wilkes gives me migranes. (Talk about guys who flaunt their chops.)

How could I forget the great Steve Hunt (of Hal Russell NRG Ensemble fame) who probably is the best if you're going to pick one, but I don't much like the only group he seems to play with these days (with Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, and Jim Baker). There's also Damon Short. Marc Riordan, and Ted Sirota, though I haven't heard enough Sirota to make up my mind. Dana Hall, too, but as good as he is, he's in a somewhat different area in my mind. Mike Reed is very fine, has grown a lot in the last year.

Interesting - maybe our tastes diverge at the drummer spot or maybe I haven't heard him enough. I've seen him live probably 6-10 times and half those times I was seriously unimpressed, but he seems to get better every time I've seen him. Still, I can think of a number of drummers I'd rather see. Are there any other recordings he's on where you're fond of his drumming that I should check out? The two Keefe Jacksons on Delmark, especially the more recent one (Frank is fine on both, but the latter is a better recording), the Chicago-Luzern Exchange's "Several Lights" (Delmark), Jason Adasiewicz's "Roll Down" (482 Music), both of Toby Summerfield's "Never Enough Hope" recordings (Contraphonic), and no doubt a good many other things that I'm not thinking of but can't get at right now to check because of the aftermath of basement flooding (the CDs aren't ruined, just stashed away in stacks upon stacks where I can't get at them). What drummers on the scene do you like? There are some other very good ones, for sure -- Tim Daisy, Michael Zerang, John Herndon, Dave Williams, the now back in Japan Nori Tanaka, the rather flabbergasting Dylan Ryan all come to mind -- but Frank's "compositional" feel seems special to me. Dare I say he reminds me of the late Philip Wilson?

Don't think there is any.

Frank is the best drummer in town IMO.

From his web site, referring to those years: "Often he goes out of his way to give pleasure to his old friends."

The one with Philly Joe (and Dick Katz and Milt Hinton) was recorded at Mintons in 1953 and is his first date under his own name apparently. The other track I was thinking of was recorded at Fort Monmouth, N.J. in '53, with Sid Bulkin on drums.

I remember when I was a kid liking a Tony Scott 10-inch "live" Decca LP, recorded at an Army camp IIRC with Philly Joe on drums, but everything that I've heard from him since he moved to RCA in '56 or so has struck me as unlistenable. All he does is twiddle and twiddle -- and pretty much the same damn twiddles regardless of the tune or where he is in it. I guess you could call that wriggling outside the harmony. Also, FWIW there was Bill Crow's "famous" put down of Scott as an egomaniac in a record review in the old Jazz Review (June 1959), which inspired a letter in defense of Scott from Bill Evans. Crow review excerpts: "When he is around it is always a show, and it is always Tony's show, unless a bigger ham upstages him. Tony wants to be a star. He uses every situation as a stepping stone in his energetic scramble not for artistry, but for fame. He is so intent on his goal that he doesn't even realize how badly he uses his associates.... He plays in a tortured, rigid, sensationalistic manner that successfully attracts attention but has little to do with playing music.... His affectations of humility are loaded with egotism.... [H]e falls back constantly on his three favorite devices: five note descending chromatic runs, ear-piercing squeals and glissandos, and hysteric noncommital twittering around the changes...." Then Crow really lets him have it. And you thought it was the critics who are unkind to jazz musicians?

What's weird about this is that while Q's own writing had a readily identifiable clever-hip sound (too clever-hip for some, but certainly clever-hip) -- it can be heard on all the material he produced for various EmArcy dates and on his own fine ABC-Paramount album "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" --none of the stuff that he did not write but did but put his name on (good though it might be) had any trace of that "Q" sound at all. You'd think that either he or his "ghosts" would want those faux Q charts to sound like something Q had in fact written.

Thanks, Mark; I had totally forgotten what I said there. In fact, IIRC that was one of the last jazz reviews I wrote for the Trib. Some time in the spring of '88 I became an editor in the Books section, then became editor of the Books section, then an editor elsewhere in the paper, then took a buyout offer and left in April 2002.