Larry Kart

Or compare this excerpt from the opening of Alma Petchersky's "Rudepoema" http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?...style=classical to Hamelin's frigid YouTube performance

Compared to Nelson Friere and David Bean, for two, MAH's Rudepoema is nada. As for the "best we have" syndrome, especially with a composer as quirky as Alkan who needs special understanding and advocacy, I can't count the number of times I've settled for that "the best we have" crap, only to discover that you're not only much better off with someone who gets it, no matter his or her less than perfect pianism, especially with a composer where "getting it" is so crucial, but that some of those "best we have" performances are so misleading as to be almost worse than nothing at all. For Alkan, I'd much rather be in the various and variable hands of Raymond Lewenthal, Ronald Smith, Huseyin Sermet et al. than listen to MAH's fluent inconsequentiality. As for Medtner, I'm forgetting some good people right now, but certainly there's f------ Medtner himself.

I've heard tell that this Joanna Domanska Szymanoswki recital is as good as it gets: http://www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com/cgi-b...Some&RPP=25 A copy is making its way toward me. Haven't heard Hamelin's Szymanowki but have never liked anything he has done that's crossed my path. In particular, I can't stand his Medtner, which would be not a good sign for his Szymanoswki, for me at least. Here are two back-and-forth posts about Hamelin's Alkan from the estimable pianist Nicolas Hodges that say everything I could say about Hamelin and much more: Nic: You simply hear the notes with Hamelin, not the music. >I think his playing the Concerto is one of the most masterful performances >by a pianist today, precisely because he is able to ignore issues of the >music's difficulty and concentrate entirely on an effortless demonstration >of Alkan's structural integrity. Nic: He demonstrates only his own deafness to harmonic change. This is apparent on page 1, and on. I can take you through it's weaknesses bar by bar if you'd like. Seriously. The Hyperion Alkan disc is much better - and the only disc of Hamelin's which to me sounds like the work of a musician of any stature (and I have virtually all of them, for my sins). >Generally speaking, Hamelin is not an >UNDERLINER of harmonic changes. He doesn't feel the need to present >details to his audience on a silver platter. Nic: It's not a matter of underlining but of following what (for me at least) are the basic, undeniable impulses that come about because a modulation is something other than a change in a pattern of dots. >For his admirers, the >details speak by virtue of his clarity, sensitivity, and concern for the >long-line. Nic: Clarity yes, but not of structure, only of text. Sensitivity to what? Not to line, not to harmony, not to texture (ever heard him produce a half-light?). For me at least, Hamelin denies the music its very existence. Some examples: p2, line 2, first 3 bars. Passing through 3 keys, but Hamelin plays them all the same. There is no sense of modulation, or of moving up, or moving anywhere come to that. p2, line 3, bar 3. Alkan reiterates the f of the start, implying either a further reinforcement or a return after some different colouring. This is a crucial moment in the first paragraph. It's the highest point registrally and the most impassioned. Hamelin plays this chord as cleanly and flatly as everything else before it. No sense of arrival, or questioning. This is a disaster structurally. p2, line 3, last 3 bars. Passes through 5 keys in the space of 10 beats, Hamelin again fails to notice it, or do anything with it at all. p2, line 4 and 5. Two fortissimo phrases identical on the page apart from harmonic position and function. It would be suicide to play them the same. What does Hamelin do? He plays them the same. And it's tedious. p3, line 1. Why is this verbatim repetition there? Does Alkan want intensification, confirmation, a dance-like swing? Either way Hamelin does nothing with it. Each of the three repetitions is identical. The first time Hamelin does anything differently from a player piano is p3, line 2, bars 3-4. He is sensitive to something for a moment (it passes), but it has taken 31 bars for him to find some music. Need I go on?

These clips, and even more so a few others on YouTube from 1959, where he's leading a group of Canadian All-Stars, make it clear that MF was one hell of an in-there, body-language bandleader, a la Dizzy but in his own way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7CC43w2hE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX24hA2Qhrs...feature=related Soloists in addition to MF are Joe Farrell, Frank Hittner (dig his Serge Chaloff lick on "Old Man River"), Willie Maiden (second tenor solo on "Old Man River"), and on alto either Lanny Morgan or Jimmy Ford (sounds more like the latter to me but someone else IDs the former). Pianist is Jaki Byard? Drummer is Rufus Jones; you'll see why his nickname was Speedy.

Now there's a concept! To be fair and egalitarian about it we should urge the inclusion of Stanley Crouch in any future statuary project. Who would be in what positions?

A link to Soderblom's website: http://www.kennyandleah.com/main.php In her blond guise, Kenny's vocalist-wife reminds me of Marge Helgenberger of "CSI."

A three-cushion billiard shot. Note in this piece about a recent Soderblom concert who one of the "guest soloists" is, "international jazz trumpet player [and former Sun Ra sideman] Arthur Hoyle." An Evening of Jazz" with Kenny Soderblom at The Players Theatre Renowned Sarasota Musician Kenny Soderblom returns to the state of The Players Theatre with An Evening of Jazz entitled "From Blues to Fado and Back." Kenny, has lined up a band of stellar musicians to light up the stage. Soderblom is a tenor saxophonist who has played with Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, and Tony Bennett among others. Instrumentalists for the performance are drummer Chuck Paar, pianists Eric Dorey and Richard Drexler, and Dominic Mancini on bass. Guest solosists include Leah, who will sing in five languages, international jazz trumpet player Arthur Hoyle and musicial sensation from Pensylvania, Mark Williams on guitar. All seats for this delightful evening of Jazz are reserved at $ 18 for adults and $11 for students. Group discounts for parties of 10 or more are available. "An Evening of Jazz," is a Players Theater Special Event, funded in part by a grant from the Sarasota County Board of Commissioners through The Sarasota County Arts Council.

Noticed one error on this fascinating site: "Except for the Cool and Dixieland pieces, everything heard in the film ["The Cry of Jazz"] seems to have come out of the Arkestral book. The composer credits in the film list Le Sun Ra and Julian Priester as composers (the latter being responsible for "Urnack"). Paul Severson is a fictional jazz band leader, for whom Alex, the character who serves as Ed Bland's spokesman, works as an arranger. We have no idea who Norman Leist was. Eddie Higgins, on the other hand, was a White jazz pianist who was rising to prominence on the Chicago scene." Paul Severson was not "a fictional jazz band leader" but a very real Chicago trombonist and sometime bandleader who made at least one recording back then, I believe in conjunction with talented Chicago saxophonist Kenny Soderblom (who is still very active at age 82, based in Sarasota. Fl.). Goggle "Paul Severson" and you'll find that there's a fair amount of music for trombone arranged by Severson and trombone method stuff by him as well. IIRC Severson passed away a few years ago.

We know for sure that Sun Ra worked as a pianist with Fletcher Henderson in 1946-7 and then as an arranger at the Club De Lisa -- the Club De Lisa being the major South Side nightclub, with floor shows, etc. (The DeLisa was where Basie "discovered" Joe Williams.) These facts alone guarantee that whatever unusual musical ideas were already percolating in Sun Ra's mind, he was able and at the time willing to function with ease in musical situations that were at once fairly sophisticated and conventional and in which the dictates of show business had to prevail. It would be difficult to imagine Ornette doing the same in LA -- or in Chicago or on the planet Pluto; he had neither the temperament nor the "skills" to fit in (and by "skills" I mean only the ability to function in conventional contexts without calling undue attention to his individuality), though no doubt LA was also more inhospitable to unusual African-Americans than Chicago was.

I'm thinking we need a time machine.

Just guessing, and I haven't read Szwed's book. but my guess is that the number of people who paid attention to Ra's music in Chicago back then, small as that number might have been, was significantly larger than the number of people who paid attention to his pamphlets, lecturing/whatever etc. -- if only because, as Chuck pointed out, the city was such a " stew of prophets, pamphleteers, public declaimers, independent thinkers and crackpots." Again, I could be dead wrong here, but my guess is that if Ra's pamphlets etc. of the time were placed alongside other such material from that time from figures who, unlike Ra, made no significant further mark on the world (with names and certain dead-giveaway phrases covered over), you'd be hard-pressed to sort all this out on the basis of what's actually there, absent the associations that later Ra brings. Again, my guess is that two things are going on here -- backwards validation/attribution of weight to early Ra across the board because he later proved to be a figure of weight, plus maybe the whole "outsider art" thing, plus the investment that those who promulgate the whole "outsider art" thing have in the chunks of outsider art that they're promulgating.

Chuck, Larry, anybody, any thoughts on this aspect of a potential Ra "influence" or lack thereof? I'm no expert on the "social climate" in Chicago in the 1950s jazzwise other than how I experienced it/observed it at the time, and I didn't turn 18 until 1960 and lived in a northern suburb until I graduated from high school and went to college in Hyde Park (on the South Side), so my opportunities were somewhat limited by age and location. Part of that experience did include Sun Ra's own Transition recording when it came out in 1957. Can't say that it struck me as a big deal, the way later things like "The Magic City" would -- it sounded maybe like a melting-watches version of Dameron, with it being hard to tell whether some of what one heard was the result of adventurousness or half-assedness, both in conception and instrumental execution. I'm not saying I was right in thinking that, but it's what I recall thinking at the time. What that says, if it says anything at all, about Ra's influence at the time, cultural or musical, I don't know. Certainly some highly accomplished players were working with him -- e.g. Gilmore, Spaulding, Priester, trumpeter Art Hoyle. I would venture to say, though, that there was so much going on jazzwise in Chicago from the the mid-'50s on -- in a wide range of styles, some of them fairly "advanced" -- that it might not be wise, until proven otherwise, to read things backwards from Ra's later accomplishments and assume that he made a big impact early on in Chicago, relative to all the other things that were going on. Also, and this may be the main rub, my guess is that for someone like Roscoe, who was 18 in 1958, early key experiences were a matter of the immediate environment (older schoolmate Donald Myrick, later of Earth, Wind, and Fire), encounters with recordings he liked, schooling, etc. -- all this being reacted to by his own questing, adamant spirit. In particular, I would guess that for Roscoe et al., this was (as it was for many of us) a time when one felt that figures such as Rollins and Coltrane, then Dolphy and Ornette, were writing in letters of flame on the palace walls. One possible effect of this was to reinforce a provincialism that had not, in fact, previously been the case in Chicago versus the larger jazz world by and large -- one of the things that the AACM did, both in terms of collective attitude and individual talent, was to not surrender to/believe in/give in to/what have you that template and be by and large right in doing so; that is, the music made matched the attitude, though perhaps George Lewis's book will go into the chicken-egg aspects of this. IIRC, based on brief glancing encounters with Roscoe in particular in the mid-1960s, he gave off every indication that he felt that he stood at the virtual center of the musical universe. As Miles I think said of Sonny Payne: "Looking good is half the battle." But Roscoe I believe gave that impression because he was, in effect, splitting atoms in his lab; he was very busy/determined because he needed to be.

Sorry -- that should be Boomie Richman.

The Muggsy Spanier-Bud Freeman V-Disc sessions on Storyville is a gem. Some fine Lou McGarity, and this is the most inventive Peanuts Hucko I've heard (eventually he became, or seemed to me, something of a routiner). Multiple takes of some tunes, for those who don't like that, but I found a lot of freshness on, for one, the three takes of "You Took Advantage of Me," especially from Bud. V-Disc lengths (typically close to five minutes/track) are a plus. On the Bud date, Yank Lawson sounds like he's wielding a blowtorch at times. Nice to hear tenorman Boomie Richmond on the first date, with Pee Wee also in the front line there and taking some bizarre chances (even by his own standards). On "Pat Blues," I think, Pee Wee does what sounds like a slap-toned thing that is just nutty and not like any slap-toned playing I've ever heard from anyone (if in fact it is slap-toned; if not, I give up).

Skeleton.

Corbett quote from the above: "A lot of the Art Ensemble were aware of the Arkestra’s presence and would go watch them play before they left in 1961. Malachi Favors (founding Art Ensemble member) even rehearsed with the Arkestra a couple of times. What’s interesting about that is that Malachi introduced the ‘little instruments’ concept to the Art Ensemble, and it comes from Arkestra. If you listen to the 1958-59 Arkestra recordings, you can hear this. It’s a South Side independent grassroots music thing.” Actually, that last sentence should read: "It’s a South Side independent grassroots music thing, man.”

Oops. I'm confused about the nanny , i watched the first half or at least a good chunk of it . Did the nanny say he was at the party ? On the late news last night they were still saying that mcnamee was lying about that . Nanny's account clashes with Clemens' says the headline http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20...sp&c_id=mlb

And for those new truths to prevail, all who were there then and remember will be denigrated or dismissed on the basis of their alleged "interests." Report to your local re-education centers; you know who you are.

I think McGarity could be described as "rather unknown" only if your experience of jazz trombone began with J.J. Johnson. McGarity was prominently featured on lots of Condon and Condon-related sides, plus he got lots of spots with Goodman and was celebrated among those who paid attention to sidemen.

Second thoughts on the Duke Jordan Storyville. Having listened to it all now, it's very nice, though not quite at the level of the solo albums he did for Steeplechase in the 1980s.

That Getz-Coltrane encounter on "Rifftide" (with Oscar Peterson, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) is fun. Must have been about 1958?

Great show -- choked me up unexpectedly a couple of times e.g. Monk's verbal intro to "Pannonica," followed by the piece. One error: It's said that Nica's New Jersey apartment was formerly that of Josef von Sternberg, famous film director and husband of Marlene Dietrich. Von Sternberg and Dietrich were not husband and wife.

This rather lengthy article makes as much sense as anything I've read on the subject: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/12/l...ca_n_85794.html

Tippett's Piano Concerto -- I fell in love with that work about 40 years ago, thanks to John Ogdon-Colin Davis recording. Just picked up the new Stephen Osborne 2-disc set on Hyperion, with the concerto (cond. by Martyn Brabbins) and the four piano sonatas. First movement of the concerto (all I've tried so far) sounded a bit literal-mind and earthbound to me (this is a "poetic" work in the best sense), but I can't get at the Ogdon-Davis right now to compare. Also have one with Tippett conducting and M. Tirmio (sp?), which I don't recall very well. Did hear some orchestral details in the new Osborne performance that were new to me, but... And the sound seemed a bit congested.