Larry Kart

Though Ruby no doubt was fond of SH's playing, did he think he was better than Sam Margolis? Also, frequency of appearances together on record is not necessarily proof of what you seem to think it proves. Witness, Al Cohn and Osie Johnson, Milt Jackson and John Lewis, or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Larry, What label did Franklin and Eleanor record for? :<) Would you clarify the Al Cohn - Osie Johnson issue? That's one with which I am unfamiliar. While recording together does not always prove a lot, when a leader selects sidemen to travel with and to record with, in the large majority of cases, it does prove a great deal about what the leader likes. Sorry, Peter -- I've been asleep at the switch. Cohn and Johnson may not have been an ideal example; what I meant, though, was that while they made a ton of records together for A&R man Jack Lewis in the '50s at RCA, maybe more than Al made with any other drummer, I'd surprised if Al said that Osie was his favorite drummer. Rather, while they were quite OK together, I'd guess that this was more a matter of Osie being a member of the RCA house rhythm section of the time and of Osie being a very reliable guy and a good reader too, if it came to that. By contrast, one of those RCA Cohn-Joe Newman sessions had Shadow Wilson instead of Osie IIRC; the difference in zest and drive was striking IMO.

Here's a poem by Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski (b. 1941) that perhaps touches on one of the things that I think Jim was saying: Again someone somewhere is speaking about the generation of the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties. But I don't like sadism or masochism; I don't consider the old wiser than the young or the young wiser than the old; my ancestor, too, was Utnapishtim who lives on Dilmun island, with its fountain of youth; my children piss in their pants and play in the sandbox; my brother is the northwest wind in the branches of the willow; my sister is the sunlight edging a white cloud; I myself am a blind stone frog in an empty room, with a scar on my knee from the time I fell from my bike on a highway near Kärevere, when bottoms were still flooded and in the forests of Tiksoja violets bloomed and on the banks of the ditches and in thickets there were still patches of snow.

Yes, I'd include Jimmy Smith, although he did come out of and always could fall back on (if that's the way to put it) the world of "greaze" -- as was the case I think with Ammons, in his own way. About Bill Barton's point: "I strongly disagree that remarkable players aren't here right now and plenty more coming up." There are and will continue be (I hope) a good many such players, but I'd be astonished if any of them becomes popular on the scale, and in the way, a musician like Garner did -- that is, attracting and knocking out the "common man" without compromise.

Been very impressed by her in-person in recent years (first heard her about 10 years ago, maybe more, when she was student at, I think, DePaul U. in Chicago) but haven't felt so far that her records have come up to that level. Sounds like this new album might be the one.

One part of the problem is that there needs to be highly individual, arguably great (or at least very good) players whose music inherently possesses the virtues of near-immediate comprehensibility and charm, even though they aren't "playing down" (in some cases, couldn't play down) to anyone. Jazz used to have a lot of those players; the last of them, to my mind, was Erroll Garner. Almost everyone, except for misguided snobs, dug Garner; and most everyone who did was was digging a good part of what was really there. Ahmad Jamal? Maybe, but with Jamal I think there was some division between the genuine subtleties that made him remarkable and his trio's attractive surface (for lack of a better term) "sound." Paul Desmond? Not without "Take Five," I don't think. Likewise, perhaps, not Getz without "Desifinado" and "The Girl from Ipanema." Brubeck? Probably popular enough on his own terms in his heyday, but IMO he just wasn't that good. But Garner was all of a piece, terrifically good, completely individual, and would have been eaten up by the pretty much the same-sized audience that did eat him up if there had never been a "Misty." Gene Ammons, for sure, was another, but wasn't Ammons' appeal a good deal more tightly wrapped in his, so to speak, milieu than Garner's was? Take away that mileu and you've got Dexter Gordon after his "return" -- a great player at the top of his game, but the audience for him, though certainly large enough, was more or less that of pre-existing jazz fans. In any case, it's been a long, long time since jazz has seen a figure such as Garner, and I don't think we'll ever see one again. Jazz still has and will continue to have players that are as good as Garner was artistically, but their artistry doesn't and won't take the form of near-immediate comprehensibility and charm, while those jazz players who do manage to produce such music won't be (and won't regarded as) terrifically good players artistically. I could try to explain why, but there's probably no need to. Briefly, though, the evolving and virtually inescapable complexities of the music per se mean that if there were players who clicked a la Garner, they would almost certainly have to be "playing down" or be genuinely simple/catchy to the point where those who are interested in the music as music would soon be bored. Remember George Winston? Was he a cynic or a genuine mope? I'm not sure, but except when that thing was happening, who cares?

That's some performance, EDC. Also, as I think Chuck recently said on that Scriabin thread, the use to which pianists of Mehldau's vintage have put AS is mostly a pain in the butt. For all its undeniable, fragrant charms, there's a reason that AS's music was a virtual dead end.

A variant: Custer: "Those drums, those incessant drums -- they're driving me mad!" Indian scout: "Trouble come only when drums stop." Custer: "Good Lord -- what happens then?" Scout: "Bass solo."

Borrowed and slightly modified from another site: Two East Coast-based musicians are traveling to their next gig in Chicago in separate cars. First musician gets to the club and is told that his buddy has died tragically on a bridge in Indiana. First musician says: "There is no bridge in 'Indiana.'"

It would take a Rhino Box to hold the present-day Aretha.

Help -- let me out of here! I'm innocent, I tell you, innocent...

There we are, three musical families. And Scott Robinson is f------ nuts, in a good way.

It sure is. Never heard anything of his that didn't intrigue me, though I wish there were more of it. On the other hand, a la Webern, the smallish size of his output is a sign of an at best sublimely fastidious mind at work.

It turns out that the Berger book is accessible. Here is the passage, from an April 24, 1953 review of a New York Philharmonic concert: "Mr. Rochberg, who is in his early 30s, was the 1952 winner of the Gershwin Memorial Contest, which is open to young American composers. One of the substantial rewards for winners of this contest is performance of the prize work by the Philharmonic, and it was thus that we came to hear 'Night Music.' It turned out to be a meager ten minutes of m usic by a young composer who knows how to reproduce the tenuous orchestral colors of Impressionism with a fair degree of expertness. "According to the program notes provided by the composer 'Night Music' was from a symphony that had one movement too many, and the name was given to the piece after it was extracted from the symphony. We are told that 'night' is to be interpreted in a broad way as 'a symbol of whatever is dark, unknown, awesome, mysterious or demonic.' Both this program and the grotesque opening solo for contra-bassoon immediately put me in mind of the modern dance events on Fifty-second St. Valiantly as the player tried to redeem this solo in the deep dark pitch regions that seem almost below the margin of hearing, the result was a highly unprepossessing opening. It sorely c4ried out for some strakm eexpresionsitc, tortured stage counterpart. "There followed a promising section that verged, in a mild way, on a valid episodic, spasmodic contemporary chromaticism. But in less than two minutes this gave way to a far too easy solution for the piece as a whole, namely, a prolonged sonority consisting largely of muted harmonies on the strings, against which the cello play a long improvisatory solo after the fashion of Bloch's 'Schelomo.' Laszlo Varga's cello tone was very pretty, but the music was empty and banal. "'Night Music' dates from four years ago. The composer tells us that it preceded his 'first efforts in the technique of twelve-tone composition,' and we may assume from this intelligence that he means to say he has gone on to higher things since. The Gershwin committee must have had very slim pickings, indeed, to come up with this work as the prize-winner." Sure, there may be some envy at work here on Berger's part, but "empty and banal" would-be soulful lyricism against a backdrop of the table-pounding grandiose ("'night" as "a symbol of whatever is dark, unknown, awesome, mysterious or demonic" -- love that "whatever") is exactly how most Rochberg hits me.

Larry -- I'd be interested to know more about your experience with the Rochberg quartets. While I like the few of his early chamber works that I've encountered ("Serenata d'estate"), I'm sitting on the fence with respect to much of his other work. Not essential, and not easy to track down, but I have a mid-50s Columbia recording that pairs Lukas Foss' String Quartet No.1 with William Bergsma's String Quartet No. 3. Both interesting examples of how American composers at mid-century were trying to work around the overwhelming influence exerted by serialism. Glorious mono to boot. Probably I should hold off on answering for a while, because my somewhat inchoate sense of dissatisfaction with Rochberg's music of any period (not just when he turned neo-Romantic, or whatever you want to call it) was perfectly crystallized by a review by composer-critic Arthur Berger of a prize-winning Rochberg work of the late '40s or early '50s, which is collected in a Berger book, "Reflections of a Composer," but most of my books are inaccessible to me right now. (Berger BTW is a fine composer.) It had something to do with Rochberg's music making all these sweepingly dramatic, flexed-muscle gestures, but there was so little musical substance, or even real moment-to-moment musical activity, underneath all the leaping and grunting. Whatever, Berger really nailed it, and I think it was in a review that he had to write back at the paper (the New York Herald Tribune) right after the concert.

Zemlinsky and Krenek. Rochberg. And I used to own them all, or all that were recorded. What a feeling of enlightment/liberation when I realized they needed to be dumped.

These two Andrew Imbrie (3&5) quartets (Sessions-like tough but quite individual) have never worn out their welcome with me: http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Imbrie-String...5057&sr=1-1

Don't forget Janacek and Szymanowki. Only two each, but...

Rawsthorne 1-3 on Naxos with the Maggini. There's also a Flesch Quartet disc of the Rawsthorne quartets disc that includes an early quartet from 1935. The Maggini performances are better, but I keep both discs.

Sounds like it should have been Groucho, but it's commonly attributed to Red Skelton. It's Harry Cohn BTW, subject of a famous line from Herman Mankiewicz (screenwriter of "Citizen Kane"): What Columbia Pictures released depended on Harry Cohn's determination of what Columbia Pictures should release. "When I'm alone in a projection room," said Cohn, "I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that." To which Herman Mankiewicz retorted, "Imagine, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

And don't forget Vic and Uncle Fletcher's good friend Rishigan Fishigan from Sishigan, Michigan.

They might have changed the name, but those are still the colors. Orlo Spatz is excellent. My wife recalled from her parents' generation or thereabouts Clyde Baysore and Delbert Finniger. On "Vic and Sade," members of Vic's lodge included Hunky J. Sponger, Y.Y. Flirch, J.J.J.J. Stunbolt, Harry Fie, I. Edson Box, Homer U. McDancy, H.K. Fleeber, Robert and Slobert Hink, and O.X. Bellyman. And Vic and Sade themselves were Victor and Sadie Gook.

Though Ruby no doubt was fond of SH's playing, did he think he was better than Sam Margolis? Also, frequency of appearances together on record is not necessarily proof of what you seem to think it proves. Witness, Al Cohn and Osie Johnson, Milt Jackson and John Lewis, or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

And they didn't see that coming? Well-played.

Your Dad was a Warrior?

Depending whether or not you regard the piano as a percussion instrument, the multi-talented Feldman's skills were confined to one family of instruments, two tops.