Larry Kart

About "...entertainment uber alles. Looking at it as anything else - pro or con - is so much 'wishful' thinking," I demur and offer an example, the beginning of Robert Pinsky's witty long poem, "An Explanation of America": A country is the things it wants to see. If so, some part of me, though I do not, Must want to see these things -- as if to say "I want to see the calf with two heads suckle I want to see the image of a woman in rapid sequence of transparencies projected on a flat bright surface, conveying the full illusion and effect of motion in vast varying scale, with varying focus swallow the image of her partner's penis..." etc. Even more to the point, though I don't have the book at hand and can't quote from this part, Pinsky goes on to recall a time when he was in rural England and visited a county fair, where he saw a group of people -- men and women of all ages, maybe some childen were there too -- eagerly paying money to go see something. Advancing through the crowd, Pinsky discovers what's up: In a muddy pit, somewhat deeper and bigger than a grave, a naked woman lies on her back. Then rats are introduced to the pit and proceed to scuttle back and forth over her body as she remains as impassive as possible, while the assembled audience raptly continues to watch. As I recall, Pinsky speculates that while he could imagine some Americans arranging such a event for their own private "amusement," he could not imagine a public American social gathering in which this was, as it clearly was in this part of rural England, a form of show business. But to speculate that this might have some wider meaning is wishful thinking? One hell of a gig, though.

This is very interesting. I wasn't aware that there was this feeling around in the late seventies. The idea that jazz was then turning its back on its audience, existing or potential, is quite extraordinary, since in that period hundreds of jazz LPs made the pop or R&B charts. Even Sonny Criss had a hit album! But of course, these hit albums were mostly disco, as was Sonny's, or fusion, and I can readily understand why that group of people wouldn't have been interested in that stuff (and much of it really is junk, by anybody's standards). But setting all that music aside with no further comment, if this bunch of audience was looking for musicians who could and did play their music the way this audience wanted it played, there was a whole raft of mucsicians who fitted - yes, Percy and Hal, but also Plas Johnson Kenny Burrell Al Grey Illinois Jacquet Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Jimmy Forrest Milt Buckner Billy Mitchell Wild Bill Davis Red Holloway Houston Person Willis Jackson Eddie Chamblee Arnett Cobb Harry Edison Rhoda Scott Teddy Edwards Junior Mance Tiny Grimes Ray Bryant Lionel Hampton Benny Carter Johnny Lytle Lou Bennett Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson Slide Hampton Norman Simmons Bill Doggett Blue Mitchell Bobby Forrester Ronnie Cuber (Oh, and there were a few around who could play that way, but were making money making disco albums - Stanley Turrentine is a case in point.) Now the big problem is, most of those guys had been around for a while, some of them a very long while. Only the last two made their debut albums as leaders in the late seventies. Of that list, only Plas and Kenny recorded for Concord in the late seventies. A very large proportion of them had to go to Europe to find a record company willing to put out their material - thank heavens for Black & Blue and Barclay. Norman Simmons made a number of DIY jobs. So, if there was an audience - and I have to assume that was the audience Carl Jefferson thought he could tap into - why didn't it latch on to most of these guys? Why wasn't Concord rampaging through the US and Europe trying to pick up these musicians? I think Jim Sangrey nailed it when he mentioned Scott Henderson's "dirty little secret" - only it wasn't a secret in the cases of most of the musicians I've listed; they'd all done time - valuable time, as far as I'm concerned - in R&B. Indeed, some were great names in R&B, while others had contributed classic solos to R&B hits. (And should I point out that only two of them were white? - but Cuber had long hair at the time; don't know about Forrester's hair.) So, although this audience may have SAID that it wanted music such as you've described, Larry, one's forced to conclude, since they didn't in fact want so much of the really quite significant amount that was available, that they really wanted something else but didn't want to come right out and say so. Would such an attitude give conflicting signals to the musicians who were hired? I dunno. Someone else would have to answer that. MG I think you're onto something here, MG. In particular, as you suggest in the last paragraph, what they wanted above all perhaps was for the music of their fondly remembered past to return in the guise of a young generation of players, to believe that the audience's past was or might be the wave of the future (or maybe, pace JSngry, they didn't consciously think it out like that but felt some sense of satisfaction about the Swing Kids thing that ran along those lines). About the racial component, I'm pretty sure that all of the Swing Kids were white, but I recall that the lineups at the Dick Gibson jazz parties, which preceded and fed into the Swing Kids thing, usually were racially mixed. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the black musicians at those Gibson parties were a tad creeped out by the country-club nature of much of the audience.

Well, yeah, but otoh, I doubt that too many people who are really into this stuff to the exclusion of anything else are really thinking about it this hard. Whether or not they should be is another thing, but it kinda begs the question - if all you're looking for is a good time, and somebody gives it to you in a way that satisfies you, isn't it sort of a victimless crime? I mean, I know for a fact that Dan digs Percy France hard, but is the average "Scott Hamilton Fan" really aware enough of what the difference is to even think about it, much less think at length about it? Nah... Bottom line for all concerned in this scene, I think, is that it's about entertainment & craft, two venerable qualities of no small importance to Life In General. As far as that goes, they do it well enough to keep each other happy, and they, unlike the Marailisians (no BN, I'm not referring to you specifically) tend to leave the rest of us alone. I know a few people who have a few Scott Hamilton albums who've never even heard of too much of anybody else, nor do they really care to. It's "lifestyle music" to them, and hey, good for them about that. This is one case where "live and let live" has a happy ending for all concerned, at least in my experience. Would that is was always such. You're right -- it's not usually about "thinking about it this hard," but a lot of stuff that people kind of just do has ideological roots (sorry about that) that are virtually forgotten in one sense but are still very active in others -- perhaps more effectively active because the roots are forgotten. About Percy France or Hal Singer etc., a key question to me is, if the typical SH fan encounters some PF, HS, etc. would he hear much difference? And if he did, what would he make of it? "Live and let live"? Hell, I'm as mean as a snake.

Tom in RI (and Dan and probably others her, too) -- About the "wrong" part, one of the fundamental premises of the whole Neo-Swing movement (actually going back to the mainsteam label and movement that arose initially in Britain in the mid-1950s) ... well, perhaps I'd better quote a chunk from my book before going on with this thought: "The term 'mainstream”' is in jazz parlance not merely descriptive. Coined in the mid-1950s, reportedly by English critic Stanley Dance, it arose from the belief in some quarters that bop, and modern jazz in general, was something of an artistic wrong turn, and that a number of still vigorous Swing musicians (for example, trombonist Dicky Wells, trumpeter Joe Thomas, and tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate) were far less visible on the jazz landscape than they ought to be. Thus the labeling of such musicians as mainstream was at once an expression of aesthetic preferences and an attempt to translate those preferences into permanent values. But even though the style of music that led to the coining of “mainstream” has now edged over into revivalism, if only because almost all the original Swing stylists are no longer with us, when the term is used today it retains some of its original ideological wishfulness. The belief or the hope is that within shifting stylistic boundaries a majority of musicians still agree on how the music can and should be played, that it is within this area of language agreement that the music’s most genuinely creative figures are at work, and that the course of the music will and should flow along in this manner. In fact, things are a bit more complicated than that." Me back in the present now: So "mainsteam" thinking (and beginning in the mid'70s the Swing Kids thing) is in part based on the idea (entertained by some but not all of its players and probably by more of this music's audience) that, as I said above, "bop, and modern jazz in general, was something of an artistic wrong turn" -- "wrong" in part because some of it was felt to be alienatingly hectic, angry, or just ugly (remember Coltrane and Dolphy being labled "anti-jazz"?), and/or needlessly complex, and devoid of attractive, recognizable, warm human/humane values; and wrong as well in practical commercial terms, in that jazz once was a popular music and now much of it figuratively was turning its back on any chance to connect with its surviving former audience and any new audience of similar size to boot. So the moral gauntlet was thrown down here initially by the formulators of the "mainstream" ethos, and such thinking pervades many (but not all) revivalistic or preservation-of-the-noble-past movements in jazz. (See Wynton and J@LC for the most familiar, "Fire of the Fundamentals" examples, musically and in terms of moralistic table-pounding. That the Swing Kids movement arose a few years before Wynton arrived on the scene may or may not be an accident.) In any case, want I want to hear from those musicians who explicitly or implicitly claim to be in touch with the touchstones of the jazz past (and to be of artistic value in their own right in part because they are in touch with/are inspired by those touchstones) is some evidence in their own playing that they really do understand, musically and emotionally, those elements of the jazz past that they profess to love. Tad Shull, for instance, pretty much convinces me that he is knowledgably, truly inspired by Byas and Lucky Thompson, and I'd say the same of Mark Turner's obesience to Warne Marsh, and Grant Stewart's synthesis of Mobley and Rollins (though I'd prefer fewer explicit "Sonny-isms" from Stewart and more energy at times from Turner). Among the no longer young Swing Kids per se, though (including SH, who again seems to half-fallen into the "movement" aspect of the thing au natural), I hear a lot of guys who seems to me to present some of the surface aspects of their models as though that were enough. If so, doing that alongside the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral-aesthetic claims to "rightness" that their music makes or that is made for their music, kind of pisses me off. For example, even though it's just a phrase and SH himself didn't come up with it, a website devoted to SH says that he has "The Perfect Mainstream Tenor Sound." As I said in a previous post, the Swing Kids movement was in effect looking or for just such a guy who had just such a sound, and I think that for a fair percentage of that audience, the presence of that sound and the fact that it was coming from a somewhat romantic-looking young man, was close to enough. As Allen Lowe might say: "What about Percy France? Any gigs here for Hal Singer?"

Jim -- Given what you've just said and looking back at the points you made on that old thread, I'd like to adopt your position on SH almost wholesale. He was not really one of the Swing Kids, just ended up being packaged that way -- to his benefit in some ways up to a point. I wonder, though, whether the whole thing would have gotten off the ground quite the way it did if it weren't for SH's existence; it's like the movement needed a young tenor player of that type for it to feel right, in that "Geez, maybe history can run backwards" way that, say, the existence of Coltrane et al. made so appealing in those circles. (A player I know whose career has been largely based in the Swing Kids thing, though now he's no longer a kid, acknowledges having benefitted from it but also complains bitterly about being circumscribed by it creatively -- that is, those audiences only want to hear that thing from him, though he certainly can be quite creative doing that thing.) BTW, nothing against R&B backgrounds over here. And nothing against revivalistic impulses and movements per se. It's just that in my experience jazz revivalism tends to be a very tricky thing -- yielding unique precious metal at times (e.g. Dave Dallwitz, the Bell brothers, Ade Monsborough, et al. in Australia; Jean-Pierre Morel and his pals in the Les Petit Jazz Band in France) but more often producing what seems to me to be fools' gold. The crucial factor, aside from sheer talent, seems to be nostalgia or the lack of it. Love for certain things of the past because they speak to you, excite you, yes; but embracing pieces of the past because it feels, or you think it would feel, more comfortable to be there rather than here is usually a recipe for disaster.

About SH's early background, the Wikipedia entry on him says: "He began playing in various rhythm & blues outfits in Providence (Rhode Island), but subsequently shifted to jazz and the tenor saxophone." Feather-Gitler amplifies some: "Began on piano and clarinet. Played blues harmonica in local groups 1968-70. Began focusing on tenor sax at age 16. Gained experience with tenor-organ gigs in Providence. New York-New England '71-'76 with Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames." Etc. One question would be, what kind of band was the Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames? The name suggests to me what I said before, but never having heard the band myself, I can't say for sure. On the other hand, it certainly seems likely that if SH was playing tenor-organ gigs, his style either already was implicitly big-toned and oriented toward rhythmic drive of a certain direct sort, because that's how virtually all tenormen in organ combos play; it goes with the territory, both in terms of standing up to the organ and in meeting both the expectations of audiences who go to hear tenor-organ combos and the expectations of clubowners who hire them. In any case, given that likely stylistic orientation on the part of the young SH (which probably was as much internal and it was externally determined), he then in the mid-1970s when he moved to NYC became explicitly bonded to the burgeoning neo-Swing movement, which in effect virtually wrapped itself around him and had (and still has) I beleive the somewhat revivalistic basis that I described in the piece in my book that gave rise to this dispute. By contrast, I'll mention another big-toned tenorman of Hamilton's vintage, Tad Shull (b. 1955), who is explicitly beholden to Don Byas and Lucky Thompson and has worked in some neo-Swing settings but who seems to me to be a very in-the-moment player who just happens to be oriented toward those models rather than, as in the case with many neo-Swing guys IMO, a player where the arguably respectful summoning up of the models almost inevitably implies a mood of fond nostalgia, especially in the audience. As far as revisiting specific Hamilton performances, I can't do that right now (and probably not for a long time, even if I wanted to) because the only Hamilton album I currently own is an LP of "Soft Lights and Sweet Music," with Mulligan, though I may also have a R. Clooney LP or two with him; and because, thanks to a failed basement-waterproofing job and subsequent damage, the only music I can listen to at home right now are the CDs that happened to be within immediate reach when the flood was discovered last Sunday; everything that was in the basement on shelves (including maybe 4,000 LPs and 130 boxes-worth of books) is inaccessible, packed away down there and, in some cases, no doubt completely ruined by water-damage. But I can't get at anything down there to eeven look at it until the water-proofing problem is solved, the basement can then (I hope) be reasonably remodeled, and finally everything can be unpacked and put back on new shelves.. At the moment, I'm sadly not sure that will ever be possible. So we'll have to leave our SH disagreement where it is, unless you want to burn a CD of favorite SH performances and send it to me. BTW, do you know Tad Shull's work? Also, does anyone here know a lot about basement waterproofing, especially what if anything you can do if you've been played for a fool?

Chick told me a few years after his time with Stan that he thought of himself then as filling the role of Stan's "keeper" (as in "minder"). Clearly a daunting task, and if someone wasn't doing or trying to do it, chaos could ensue, Likewise, perhaps, when I asked Gary Burton in an interview (the Chick remark was just conversation) how he'd learned to be so good (apparently) at taking care of business across the board, he said ironically that he owed it all to Stan, that he'd learned from working with Stan to do everything just the opposite of what he'd seen and experienced there. As I may have said before here, Stan somehow ran across or was told about that remark and at least two years later brought it up when we ran across each other at a club, emphasizing how deeply hurt he was by it. IIRC Jim McNeely was within range when Stan said this, and from the look on McNeely's face (which Stan couldn't see), it was fairly clear that he was now occupying the "keeper" role.

Personnel for "This One's For Basie": Pete Candoli, Harry Edison, Conrad Gozzo (Trumpets), Buddy Collette (Clarinet/ Tenor) Bob Cooper (Tenor), Frank Rosolino (Trombone), Bob Enevoldsen (Valve Trombone), Jimmy Rowles (Piano), Joe Mondragon (Bass), Bill Pitman (Guitar), Rich.

Take this with a grain of salt perhaps (or perhaps not) because I'm not a big Oscar Peterson fan, but the "Plays Count Basie" album is really nice. Among other things, when Buddy Rich was doing neo-Jo Jones, he was not only damn good at it but also seemingly pleased as hell to be doing it. You can almost see him grinning. Same groove on Rich's nice mini-big band Granz album from about this time with Marty Paich charts, "This One's For Basie."

Thanks, Mark. That's about how it was, but with Airto too. Damn -- Tony Williams should still be in this world.

That is a good one. Don't know if it's available. Speaking of "Captain Marvel," I saw that band "live" at The London House in Chicago. Probably one of the ten best performances I've ever heard. What a rhythm section -- and what loss it was when Stanley Clarke eventually went away in effect.

The interaction among Horace, Gene Taylor, and Louis Hayes during Horace's solos is something else -- Hard Bop par excellence, on a level with the interaction among Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe on the title track of "Cool Struttin,'" which in its own way is as compositional as Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Back to the Newport album, the whole band sounds so fresh and foxy -- everyone is digging everyone else and bouncing right out to us their pleasure in what's bouncing back at them from their fellows. Yummy.

Several Naxos Bartok CDs are excellent, and I assume/hope these performances are on emusic: Jena Jando's piano music (but you're already covered there with Sandor), Jando/Andras Ligeti's Piano Concertos, Gregory Pauk/Anton Wit's Violin Concertos, and a Pauk-Jando chamber music disc that includes Contrasts. Can't comment on the Naxos Bartok String Quartet performances by which quartet I don't recall, haven't heard them.

One of my favorites, sadly not in print in the U.S. now, is "The Soft Swing," though it may be available in MP3 form. Unbelievably relaxed and lyrical, and Stan, while typically lyrical of course, wasn't always that rhythmically relaxed IMO. I'm also very fond of "Hamp and Getz," a very excited and exciting record all around. A celebrated one that I find a bit hard to take is "Focus." Have no problem with Sauter's writing for strings; it's that Stan was into his "moo-ing"/"oy-vey" bag at the time.

BTW, you'll note that the Gershwin-Kern Garner compilation contains two versions of "Someone To Watch Over Me." Sample them through the link and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how joyfully different they are. It's a nice example of how Garner was always Garner but always in the moment.

Brute -- There are quite a few well-packed inexpensive Garner compilations available. These for example: http://www.amazon.com/Magician-Gershwin-Ke...ks_all_1#disc_1 http://www.amazon.com/Dreamstreet-World-Co...=pd_sim_m_img_3 http://www.amazon.com/Thats-Kick-Gemini-Er...=pd_sim_m_img_1 http://www.amazon.com/Erroll-Garners-Fines...=pd_sim_m_img_5 Each of the first three (released under Glaser's aegis after Garner's death) combines two LPs from the latter phase of his career, and thus are good bargains. Musically, Garner never faltered. The last one above collects material from his Mercury days, before Columbia. One should definitely hear Garner from that period, for while he always remained fresh IMO, this was his early maturity. Another one on Telarc, like the first three, from the latter phase combines an LP I love ("At the Movies" -- Garner's sense of humor, always present, is almost beyond belief here at times), but it's combined with a Garner with big band LP, "Up in Erroll's Room," that I recall wasn't so hot.

I recall that her Strayhorn album on Concord with Jerry Dodgion, Steve LaSpina, and Joey Baron is very good: http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/...y+Strayhorn.htm

So far, Roy Haynes' "My Shining Hour" -- all live material with the 1994 Jazzpar Prize group (tenorman Tomas Franck, pianist Thomas Clausen, and NHOP) -- is very good. They'd played enough to sound like a working group yet are fresh and edgy/excited-to-be-together too; I probably prefer this to any of the albums I know by Haynes own good quartet(s) of the '90s. Didn't know Franck except for some solo spots on Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra albums; he's a real player (muscular a la Brecker to some extent but a good deal more melodically inclined than most Trane-influenced tenorman of his vintage [b. 1958] and with an attractive, personal "throatiness" to his tone); Clausen's a real player too.

Copies can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00...5238&sr=1-1

This, from the Songbirds site, was then confirmed by a poster there who knew Ella quite well: The following was part of Ephraim Hardcastle's column in the London Daily Mail on Tuesday 19 February. "Bonnie Greer's new play, 'Marilyn and Ella' at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East - is about the touching relationship between movie star Marilyn Monroe and the great black sing Ella Fitzgerald. The actress helped the singer cross race lines. Ella once said: 'I owe Marilyn Monroe a great debt. It was because of her that I played the Mocambo Club, a very popular (New York) [actually Los Angeles-area: LK] nightclub in the '50s. She personally called the owner and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and, if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. Marilyn was there, front table, every night. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.'" They say you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, but I do hope this is a true story. Anyone heard it before?

Grrrr.

Hell, I've been listening to jazz for nearly thirty years now and I still don't pretend to know shit about it! Okay....well good luck with that. Well I just started reading Kart's book, so in about a week I should know as much as Larry... That's why, as some rabbis believe is the case with the Torah, I deliberately decided not to include in the book certain vital bits of information. Mankind should not know too much.

How the hell did Herbie Nichols get in there? Also, while Desmond stuck with his style to the end (and why not?), he more or less invented it; Scott Hamilton more or less assembled his from pre-existing parts.

About Scott's development as I understand it, I tried to be clear, but I guess I failed. I said that out of his initial R&B bar-band bag, Hamilton then "got curious" about the Swing Era sources for that kind of sax playing. I would think that "got curious" implies that this move primarily was self-motivated, which is what I believe. I mentioned the Dick Gibson Jazz Party/Concord connection, in terms of the nature of the audience both of those things drew/draw upon, because given the existence of that audience, that meant there were good gigs there, which then plays or can play some significant role in further shaping the styles of players like Hamilton and Vache and Howard Alden and Ken Peplowski et al. who are musically inclined in that neo-Swing direction, if only because they're then consistently playing that kind of music with like-minded souls and being rewarded for doing so. As for the Gibson thing and Concord, I believe that the latter more or less grew out of or was continuous with the former. In both cases, one had men who had made a bundle outside the music business (Waterpik/Gibson, car dealership/Jefferson) and felt they could pour their money into the kinds of music they enjoyed -- more power to them and others like them, should there be anymore. About Scott and ballads, to me the irony is that the intention, and some of the surface mannerisms, were taken for the deed itself. Again, I thought I had made that point already.

Trolling through some of the fine Garner on YouTube, e.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EByVyGKpv9s...feature=related I thought what a natural a collection of his voluminous Columbia material would be for Mosaic. But I assume his all-powerful, all-controlling manager Martha Glaser (or her estate, if she's no longer with us), makes that impossible. I know that Glaser blocked just about anything that anyone proposed re: Garner if she didn't think of it first. Perhaps Chris Albertson knows more.