Larry Kart

But didn't Clemens' people compile the stats/charts they originally promulgated in an attempt to demonstrate that his big late-career uptick was not an anomaly?

I've been disappointed by the little I've heard of that one so far; just perfunctory statements of themes, a chorus of embellishment, theme and out.

Definitely on the plus side are the Goodman and the Mildred Bailey. That 1946 Goodman band was excellent, especially the bass-drum team of Harry Babisin and Louis Bellson. The groove that Bellson gets into behind BG and then the ensemble at the end of "Rattle and Roll" is something else. He sounds different than he would later on -- earthy and guttural, not so smooth. His final break there ... I'd like to to know what other drummers think of it. It's like he's whirling in two contrary directions at once; may or may not be awesome in pure drum terms, but it sure works musically. Reminds me of Shadow Wilson's famous vertigo-inducing break on Basie's "Queer Street." Bailey -- what a soulful, creative, swinging singer. And I love her speaking voice too, that drawling accent, like she's humming inside every word. And her radio show band was pretty impressive, with Red Norvo, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Shavers, Remo Palmieri, Al Hall, and Specs Powell at its core (virtually the combo that would make "Congo Blues," et al. that year, 1945, with Bird and Diz), and the full orchestra's string section was uncommonly good and unsoupy.

Hope it's not too late, but I now know from experience that the previous warning to avoid the Tubby Hayes should have been followed. By that time in his life he sadly had very little left, had a hard time getting enough air through the horn. Also to be avoided is the Howard McGhee-Teddy Edwards. Goodish Edwards, but McGhee is in horrible shape -- every phrase is fumbled, intonation is shocking, and you haven't lived until you've heard an out-of-tune trumpet. It borders on a date that should never have been released or allowed to go forward.

That's a typo for E. Parker McDougal. Chuck told an amusing story about him here: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...amp;hl=McDougal A fine player.

Tapping her would be an accomplishment in one sense -- like breaking into a cave where the world's entire supply of PMS was stored -- but not much fun, I reckon. I think otherwise! Film at 10.

No wonder Ellis died young; several numbers like this per night would take a year or two off right there. I love Ellis' conducting toward the end; looks like he might turn himself into a pretzel. Anyone know the provenance of the performance? A shame if there's only this.

Agreed. She should have adopted a Bre'r Rabbit posture.

I forgot that one.

He has been, and there's fine music there, but Finzi's setting of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Mortality" when it gets rip-roaring exuberant, seems ludicrous to me, the English massed-choirs tradition at its most square and gallumphing. Try movements 5 and 12: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_m/103-25...p;x=12&y=17 On the other hand, putting Wordsworth to music probably isn't going to work, no matter what. The words not only don't need need music but seem to outright resist it. I can imagine an instrumental response to Wordsworth from a non-existent English Debussy.

Hey, I know Halvorson from a Taylor Ho Bynum album I can't get at right now because the basement's all f----- up. She's really good.

I particularly admire Bridge (a wide stylistic range there; I prefer the later, prickly-modern, arguably even tormented Bridge of the Piano Concerto and "Enter Spring" to the earlier, more pastoral work, though that's fine of its kind), and was led to Ireland's piano music by the late pianist-composer Robert Help's enthusiasm for it. Elgar to me is not of the Englishery strain, just (at his best) a great composer. Vaughan Williams at his best, too, though there the Englishery strain is present. Among those of a later generation than Bax et al., I've always found Alan Rawsthorne very interesting. Constant Lambert, too. (They were friends, and Rawsthorne married Lambert's widow.) Lambert's Concert for Piano and Nine Instruments is one of the most melancholic pieces of music I've ever heard, almost suicidal. My taste for Lennox Berkeley may be a weakness, but it's one that I've developed after hearing a work of his (maybe Symphony No. 1) on a Lyrita recording that was put out here on HNH in, I think, the early '80s. Judith Weir is excellent, but now we're into modernists or post-modernists -- a whole other book.

Given only who she's played with and is playing with, I'm sure she is.

Only promos I've gotten since the late 1980s, when I left my Chicago Tribune gig, are from Arbors. (Promos go to the person who holds the gig; when I left, they went to my successor.) I paid a visit to a Randy Sandke-led Arbors recording session a few years ago (Randy is an old friend -- in fact, I'll be having dinner with him tomorrow before he plays at a Chicago-area club), and Dan Morgenstern, who also was there, asked if I got Arbors things. I said no, and Dan said that he'd ask Matt Domber to put me on their list. Don't think I've said anything here about an Arbors recording, but I guess I would if I was moved to, perhaps with a disclaimer. It just hasn't come up. Oh, yes. Chuck has been kind enough to send me Uptown things that he has worked on, and I think I have said things about them. But how could you not say something about the rare/early Mingus and Bird and Diz at Town Hall CDs? Those are history.

Some real gobbly-dee-gook from Ratliff here: "...in her own tossing, prickly trio..." "tossing"? "Mr. Smith’s style was similarly unsentimental..." Smith, the drummer, is "unsentimental"? What would a sentimental drummer sound like? Please pass the word soup.

Tapping her would be an accomplishment in one sense -- like breaking into a cave where the world's entire supply of PMS was stored -- but not much fun, I reckon.

Many people have paid a visit to Fresh Sound/Lonehill's offices; few have returned.

Why not? For one thing, Giuffre did discover some stuff that hadn't been found before. And his ability to, in effect, keep his hands off it is pretty remarkable at times. The funny thing about Giuffre to me is that at some underlying level (one that's probably not visible after a certain point in his career) there are good-sized chunks that don't match up -- in particular, his somewhat clunky, walking-the-bar time (those neo-R&B things he made early on were no accident) versus the nice, personal fluidity of time he got when he lightened/softened things up (this in both "free" and metered settings). The most interesting late examples of this are the few sides he made in the late' 50s or early '60s when he was trying to integrate a good deal of Sonny Rollins (plus maybe his response to early Ornette). Some nice stuff, but boy does some of it sound funny -- like Giuffre's playing the first swinging, "muscular" solo ever, and doesn't quite know how to do this. The good part is that there's virtually no net; the funny parts are when he hits the floor. A lot of what Larry is talking about is admirably exemplified in a recent Giuffre reissue, "Live In 1960" (Jazz Beat 503). This album combines an album he did for Verve, with a live recordings from a Paris concert. Both Giuffre and Jim Hall (with Buell Neidlinger, b, Milford Middlebrooks, b (Paris), and Billy Osborne, d) are in top form, and very "muscular" in places. There are moments when Giuffre actually elicits r&b-like responses from the audience by using a repeated guttural phrase ... This was obvioulsy a transition period for Giuffre, and one of his last recordings that could be called "straight ahead'. I used to own the original LP and never quite got into it; but for some reason (perhaps my tastes are maturing), this reissue gives me great pleasure. That's the reissue that refreshed my memory of this, though I recall hearing at least one other Verve back then that had similar feeling. Two perhaps related things about Giuffre: Given that early Giuffre (say at the time he wrote "Four Brothers") must have involved that uncommon fusion of some Pres with some honking R&B impulses (though I don't know what Giuffre's attitude was toward the latter), he must have thought of himself as, or been thought of as, something of an odd man out among the actual "Brothers" and their kin (Getz, Sims, Cohn, Steward, Brew Moore, Allen Eager, et al.), who were much more sophisticated as players. Then, of course, there were Giuffre's studies with the seemingly guru-like Wesley LaViolette, who I think had a somewhat Cage-like Eastern spiritual thing going, as well as all the "progressive" contrapuntal material that Giuffre picked up on. Finally, I vaguely recall an interview in which Giuffre said that in the '50s he had a huge, ugly, at times quite uncontrollable ego, which bothered him and bugged a lot of his fellow musicians. Hard to credit, but that's what I recall. I also recall that he said that he began to turn things around as a person when he married George Russell's ex-wife, Juanita Odejnar. I wonder how that all shook out.

Why not? For one thing, Giuffre did discover some stuff that hadn't been found before. And his ability to, in effect, keep his hands off it is pretty remarkable at times. The funny thing about Giuffre to me is that at some underlying level (one that's probably not visible after a certain point in his career) there are good-sized chunks that don't match up -- in particular, his somewhat clunky, walking-the-bar time (those neo-R&B things he made early on were no accident) versus the nice, personal fluidity of time he got when he lightened/softened things up (this in both "free" and metered settings). The most interesting late examples of this are the few sides he made in the late' 50s or early '60s when he was trying to integrate a good deal of Sonny Rollins (plus maybe his response to early Ornette). Some nice stuff, but boy does some of it sound funny -- like Giuffre's playing the first swinging, "muscular" solo ever, and doesn't quite know how to do this. The good part is that there's virtually no net; the funny parts are when he hits the floor.

OK -- one more time. "Pimped out" (passive) doesn't mean the same thing as "pimping herself out" (active) or its equivalent; and I think the latter makes much more sense here. To take your example, yes if I did a tour for my book, I'd be "pimping" it, but if Chuck came along only because I told him that he had to and he was spouting lines that I told him he had to say, he'd be being "pimped out." Not at all the same thing. Sure, "in another generation or two, a news personality using Shuster's lingo will not be uncommon." But why has this cropped now, attached to this person?

Reminds me of something I ran across again last week in the book "Morton Feldman Said," a terrific collection of Feldman's interviews, lectures ,etc. At The Club in the early 1950s (The Club being the place in NYC where the inner circle of the so-called Abstract Expressionist painters met), John Cage gave two well-received talks: "Lecture on Nothing" (about his own music) and "Lecture on Something" (about Feldman's). Feldman said that they were very good talks, but that the titles should have been reversed. Giuffre as you say seems to regard just about everything that he summons up, comes up with, etc, as an object, and responds in a kind of "can you believe this?" manner -- like a kid at the ocean for the first time who is awed by the fact of every shell. I don't know the Lacy material you mention, but he's always struck me as an "essentialist" -- as in "Find the irreducibles [in the music, in himself, and in his instrument] and rub them against each other until you've got something new that's irreducible too."

1) That be the question. 2) How many "regular guys" have "contacts"?

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I don't agree for at least two reasons. First, "being pimped out" implies that Chelsea is being operated by Hillary and Bill by remote control; "pimping herself out," or something like that, would mean that she's doing this herself. As I said a post or two ago, how many adult children of prominent politicians in recent memory have done all they could to support their parents' ambitions (Rudy's kids, again, being the interesting exception)? It's a natural thing to do, and I don't see why it's necessarily a matter of cold-blooded expediency. Chelsea is supposed to grow up in that household and not more or less share her parents' interests and "values"? Geez, she spent her childhood and adolesence in the Arkansas governor's mansion and the f-----g White House. Second, while I believe it's probably wrong to say that Chelsea is merely doing Bill and Hillary's bidding, even if that were true, there are or should be other ways for MSNBC news show hosts or reporters to express that thought, unless there's suddenly been a decision at just this point to change the rules of the game. I mean, I've seen David Shuster do his stuff on MSNBC literally thousands of times in recent years, and never before have I heard him use (arguably affected) "street" lingo to refer to anyone. It might have been refreshing if Shuster, during say the Scooter Libby trial, had said that Libby was acting like Dick Cheney's "punk," but that or anything like that you never heard from him. And now he thinks it's cool. Again, as I think I said before, no need for a hue and cry but certainly an interesting symptom.

And therefore all clubhouse-shaped behavior should get a pass?

As someone pointed out elsewhere today, whose children haven't been campaigning for and/or speaking out on behalf of their political parents in recent times? The Cheney daughters? The five Romney boys? (Not Rudy's kids, though, which tells you something.) John Edwards' daughter? (I think it's his daughter.) But Chelsea (age 28 BTW) is the pimped-out one? And I'm not a Clinton supporter. The problem here IMO is that David Shuster was trying to be (or pretending to be) comfortable in Chris Matthews' clubhouse and, to that end, do some loose, hardy-de-har, "insider" shit-slinging, the looser the better. With Matthews and his ilk, it's one kind of deal -- and I don't like it. But Shuster was just posing -- which is another deal altogether. What it shows you, though -- if I'm right about this -- is how potent the clubhouse vibe can be.