Larry Kart

Sarah Silverman is one who looks like a girl.

My method, which makes sense to me (and I have a large classical collection): Up until about Schumann or Mendelssohn, most everything is strictly chronological (i.e. by composer birth dates), with occasional pockets within that chronological approach for distinctive national schools (e.g. Spanish Renaissance, Elizabethan-Jacobean-Purcell, French Baroque, Italian Baroque -- with chronology being followed within those pockets). Then from maybe Brahms on, everything is by national origin and chronological within those groupings. At one point I drew a line in the sand and grouped all "Modern" music together, with national pockets within, and then a final separate grouping of "Avant-gardists," but that got confusing, in part because it was easy to forget where those lines should fall. The way I have things now, I find it hard to lose track of anything, even if there's a certain weirdness in placing, say, everyone from Faure to Boulez in the same mid-19th Century to the present "French" bin. Of course, I'm talking about actual CDs on shelves. Are you talking about stuff you have on your computer?

Excellent Bruce Turner video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXJ-Ea5ePxs I'm very fond of his autobiography "Hot Air, Cool Music."

Ordered these: 1 76629 ARTIE SHAW 1945 SPOTLIGHT BANDS 5.98 1 76633 BENNY GOODMAN LIVE SWING SESSIONS 9.98 1 76653 DUKE JORDAN ONE FOR THE LIBRARY 6.98 1 76678 HOWARD MCGHEE TEDDY EDWARDS WISE 5.98 1 76707 MILDRED BAILEY RADIO SHOW ORIG 1945 5.98 1 76714 MUGGSY SPANIER BUD FREEMAN COMPL V 6.98 1 76720 RED MITCHELL WARNE MARSH V1 BIG TWO 5.98 1 76722 ROY HAYNES MY SHINING HOUR 5.98 1 76732 TUBBY HAYES QRT IN SCANDINAVIA 5.98 1 77288 COOTIE WILLIAMS IN HI FI 5.98 Lots of other good stuff there that I already have, and in fact I may already have the Mitchell-Marsh. Can't check because everything in the basement is packed away so that waterproofers can do their thing in a few days.

I hear it as "Straw-ber-ry Fi-elds For-e-ver," with the accented syllables being hit pretty hard. In speech it would be more like "Straw-berry Fields For-e-ver," with the accented syllables being hit rather lightly. One could even argue that the way the song is sung, it consists mostly of stressed syllables that are stressed heavily, paired with syllables that also feel stressed but a bit less heavily, with only a few syllables unstressed, like this: "One-two-and-three-four-and-five-six. In that case, it might the units of paired stresses (heavy-medium) that were among the song's germ ideas.

Here's the piece from the book: STANDARDS AND ‘STANDARDS’ [1985] The greatest gap in American popular music may be the one that divides rock ‘n’ roll from the so-called “standard” tradition of songwriting and singing--the tunes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter and the vocal styles of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire (to name just a few of the major figures). Arising after World War I, and artistically and commercially vigorous until the end of World War II and a bit beyond, this was the music that several generations of Americans grew up on. And as the “standard” tag suggests, it was a music that seemed likely to remain in the forefront for some time. But rock ‘n’ roll changed all that, with the crucial dates probably being 1956 (when Elvis Presley's “Don't Be Cruel”/”Hound Dog” single climbed to the top of the pop, country, and rhythm-and-blues charts) and 1964 (when any doubts about the staying power of rock were erased by the advent of the Beatles). Rock in its various forms is undeniably the popular music of our time, while the standard tradition is close to being a museum piece--a development that many find regrettable but one that certainly can't be denied. Obvious, too, although time has healed some of the wounds, is the fundamental opposition between rock and the music that came before it. In fact, rock can be seen as a reaction to and a rejection of almost everything that the standard tradition represents--an attitude that a knowledgeable rock-devotee summed up when she referred to the music of Gershwin, Porter, and the rest as “all those songs about women getting in and out of taxicabs.” It was merely a sly dig in the ribs on her part, and at the time it made me laugh. But that remark has lingered in my mind; and the more I think about it, the more it seems to mean. For one thing, that remark had a point to it only because its perpetrator and I both knew that the songs of the standard tradition are supposed to be “sophisticated”-- a body of music about people who live in big cities, have a fair amount of cash, and work out their bittersweet romantic problems with a certain world-weary flair. But all that, my friend implied, is a crock--a set of attitudes that had nothing to do with the way she and most of the people she knew lived their lives, and that probably had little to do with the way most people lived their lives at the time those songs were written. And if there ever was a group of women who kept “getting in and out of taxicabs,” my friend’s first impulse would be to give them a swift kick in the shins. What that boils down to, I think, is a belief that when most standard-tradition songs are measured against the way things happen in real life, they turn out to be false. And by the same token, a good many rock fans and rock musicians seem to believe that their music is good not only because of its visceral kick but also because it is somehow more genuine--more realistic and natural--than the music that came before it. Now there is something to be said for that way of looking at things. Place a typical Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart lyric alongside something from Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, and most people would say that “Born in the U.S.A.” and “It's Alright, Ma” are less artificial than “I Get a Kick Out of You” or “There's a Small Hotel.” But such a judgement probably would rest on the verbal content of songs, on the kinds of stories they try to tell--which is far from the only way to measure the realism and naturalness of a piece of music. Consider, for instance, one of the most basic questions that arises in the mind of every singer and songwriter: How do I make the words and music fit together? One way to do this, and the way that became the norm during the standard era, was to come up with a melody and a rhythmic scheme that allowed the words of the song to emerge as conversationally as possible--in the patterns of everyday, person-to-person speech. (This was, of course, a practical necessity as well as a stylistic choice, because so many standard-era songs were written for the musical stage and had to flow easily out of spoken dialogue.) So if one simply speaks the lyric of any good standard song (say, Porter's “What Is This Thing Called Love?”) while trying to forget the melody and the rhythms that go along with it, there are two likely outcomes. First, the lyric can be spoken in a conversational tone of voice. And second, the words one would emphasize in normal speech are the same words that are emphasized when the song is sung. Natural, no? And while one wouldn't claim that this is true of every Cole Porter lyric, the story of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” doesn't seem very artificial either--measured against the world of 1930 (the year the song was written) or the world of today. But when songs of the rock era are looked at in this way, one comes up with some unexpected results. Not only do the lyrics tend to be more “poetic” than speechlike, they often don’t fit the music that goes along with them--that is, the words that would be emphasized if the lyrics were spoken are not the words that are emphasized when the songs are sung. For instance, in Dylan's “It's Alright, Ma,” the word “return” is sung by Dylan as “re-turn,” while in Springsteen's “Backstreets” “became” is sung as “be-came”--choices of emphasis that the rhythms of those songs demand but ones that run counter to the normal rhythms of speech. If you think that these are off-the-wall examples, look at the lyric sheet of your favorite rock album--first trying to speak the words in a conversational tone of voice and then listening to how they are sung. Quite often there will be a vast difference between the words you emphasized and the words the singer did. And when was the last time you heard anybody say anything the way the Beatles sing the title phrase of “Strawberry Fields Forever”? So what is going on here? While a cranky Rodgers and Hart fan might say that lack of craft is all that is involved, that's not quite the case, despite the amateurishness of much rock--if only because the same devices crop up in the work of such undeniably slick songwriters as Burt Bacharach and Barry Manilow. No, the problem is that we're stuck with two different notions of naturalness--one that takes off from human behavior as we commonly experience it and one that believes there is a deeper, “truer” nature that is at odds with the patterns of everyday life. Follow the first path and you have songs that stick close to the texture of normal speech and singers who interpret them that way. (One of Frank Sinatra's chief virtues is his ability to make almost any lyric sound intimate and conversational.) But when the second path is followed, you have songs and singers who not only feel free to shout, mutter, swoon, and groan but also tend to twist words this way and that to fit a pre-existing rhythm or melodic design. (On “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for instance, the non-speech-like word emphases of the title phrase arise because at that point composer John Lennon was interested in superimposing a patch of six-eight rhythm on the song’s prevailing four-four beat.) As a child of the “standards” era, I have my preferences. But I also know that this is not a matter of right or wrong. In fact, a glance at the history of music suggests that the kind of “natural” wordsetting that prevailed during the era of the standard song is less common than one might think. Seemingly built into the very idea of music is the belief that it is a language in itself, a sensuously ecstatic flow of meaning whose power to move us far exceeds that of common speech, and that it also does so in a deeper, more “poetic” way. Music’s desire to overide the patterns of discernable speech has been constrained at times (once, in the sixteenth century, by the Roman Catholic church, which decreed at the Council of Trent that the liturgical use of polyphonic music was permitted only if the texts of such pieces were not obscured), but that desire has never been suppressed, for in the long run both composers and listeners will resist. So perhaps no one should be surprised that we no longer live in an era when our pop songs were a kind of humane heightened conversation. What is surprising, perhaps, is that any of us grew up in a world where words and music were one thing. P.S. No doubt I'd want to think again about some of this, 22 plus years later. But not right now.

Thanks, MG. The point I was trying to make in that piece IIRC was not that "standards" (i.e. songs of the "standard" era) are unique in that "speech accents are the same as sung accents" respect but that a lot of Rock music doesn't work that way. Though we might disagree about a few specific examples, your evidence that a lot of blues, R&B, Soul, etc. lines up with the "speech accents are the same as sung accents" approach seems to me to bolster my point -- which I believe then led me to ask (or if it didn't, it should have) what the benefits and/or the necessities of the other approach are. Don't believe, if I asked that question, that I came up with a comprehensive answer -- probably would take a lot of scholarship and whole different book to do that. Whatever, without the "other" approach, you would, for one, have almost no Bob Dylan.

FWIW, McWhorter is something of a neo-con, not unlike but less flamboyant than Stanley Crouch: http://www.racematters.org/mcwhorter.htm

Many thanks, Jazztrain.

Or as the vintage Mad magazine parody "Captain Marbles" had it: "Shazoom! -- Strength, Health, Aptitude, Zeal, Ox (power of), Ox (power of another), Money." Cracked me up at age 12, and it still amuses me.

Here's a longish post I made on the Songbirds list last night. A fairly full account of Johnny Janis's life can be found at his website: http://www.starwellmusic.com/index.html along with ways to order his recordings. I would say that a great many of us would be knocked out by "Jazz Up Your Life," with Ira Sullivan and Dodo Marmarosa -- Dodo in great latter-day form as accompanist and sometime soloist (Janis is no longer sure when this previously unreleased album was recorded but thinks early 1960s and obviously in Chicago). On "The Start of Something New" Janis is backed by the Billy Wallace Trio (yes, the Billy Wallace who was on Max Roach's "Jazz in 3/4 Time"), though the trio's approach is quite Garlandish, and Wallace gets only a few brief solos. The rest of what I say below probably explains itself, and I believe there are song samples on Janis's website, but the sheer elegance of his voice is remarkable, as are his deep, jazz-like instincts, though he is essentially a romantic balladeer. In this he reminds me of some of David Allyn and Johnny Hartman (though Janis is a tenor). Thanks to Frederick Stack's post I found my way to Johnny Janis's website, have now bought and listened to four of Janis's albums -- "For the First Time" (ABC-Paramount, 1956), "The Start of Something New" (Columbia, late 1950s?), "Jazz Up Your Life" (previously unreleased, rec. 1961-62?), and "Once In a Blue Moon" (recorded 1965) -- and am pretty much astounded by the best of what is here. (I've also talked some to Janis on the phone, reminiscing about old Chicago days and musicians we both heard.) Janis began with remarkable vocal equipment (he also played and plays guitar) -- a rhythmically supple, tenorish, wide-in-range voice, with an appealing warm-fuzzy "nap" to it -- though on the "For the First Time" that nap is also linked to a certain callowness of approach, which on the one hand can lead him toward an artificial, finger-popping hipness ("I Got Plenty of Nothing,'" "I'm Gonna Live Till I Die") ) and on the other hand can veer toward moist sentiment ("Hush-A-Bye," "Golden Earrings"). But on two fine songs that are somewhat similar in what might be called their "throbbing" or "strumming" qualities -- Arlen's "When the Sun Comes Out" and Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well" -- Janis begins to come into his own. Typically for him, the warmth and ease of these interpretations seems to spring directly from his response to the purely musical elements of the songs; one feels that he first engages with a particular, congenial-to-him melodic shape or harmonic event, then moves from there to the lyric and overall story-telling, though he is, then still rather young, not yet fully "there" on that level. "The Start of Something New" also is not quite in focus or mature emotionally throughout, but its best performances, three slowish ballads -- "I Got It Bad," "In Other Words," and "The Nearness of You" -- are virtually full-scale, subtle re-compositions of songs that are, of course, quite distinguished in themselves. Janis's musical choices here might be described as hip without being "hip" -- he planes down rhythms and alters given pitches and melodic shapes so that upcoming harmonies are anticipated, this with a grace that recalls, say, Stan Getz. And, again, the results remain wholly songlike; the silky virtuosity is there to be detected, but it is never obtrusive. Now two masterpieces. "Jazz Up Your Life" is aptly titled because it features two superb jazz musicians -- trumpeter-tenor saxophonist Ira Sullivan and pianist Dodo Marmarosa (plus bassist Jerry Friedman and drummer Guy Vivaros, both excellent). Marmarosa -- one of the bebop greats whose dexterity had slowed down some by this time, though there is a new Thelonious Monk-like, craggy depth to his playing -- is the most important accompanist. As Janis said on the phone, Dodo's accompaniments were conceived as single units that ran elusively parallel to the song itself (Monk-like in this respect); and while Dodo's so-to-speak "shadow" comping was potentially tricky for a singer to negotiate, Janis found it inspiring (though devoid of hip mannerisms by this time, Janis himself has the instincts and skills of a fine jazz instrumentalist). In emotional terms, one is struck in particular by how dramatically specific the romantic moods of "Too Young" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" are -- the former wholly believable as a cry from or reminiscence of adolescence at the hands of unfeeling adulthood; the latter performance a virtual postlude to "Too Young," as Janis's sweeping lyricism at once summons up and balances out active pangs of regret. At times, though, one still feels that these and other strong dramatic moves on Janis's part are to some extent at the behest of the songs as music per se; nothing wrong with that, but "Once In A Blue Moon" reveals that for Janis a new integration of music and drama was to come. The album is all slowish ballads, some of them so slow (e.g. "Melancholy Baby") that one can hardly believe that forward movement is being maintained; the orchestrations by Don Costa are, allowing for taste, gorgeously lush, often quite inventive within that lushness, and superbly played (those French horns!); while Janis's voice has taken on just the degree of graininess it needed to "cut" its innate elegance and add an unavoidable edge of reality. Janis still works outwards emotionally from the songs' purely musical elements, but that engagement with the songs per se now meets with a certain resistance on the part of Janis's vocal equipment and his own (one assumes) somewhat-weathered-by-experience self. He's still a more elegant vocalist in 1965 than just about anyone then singing, but one now detects in every choice, every move that Janis makes his desire to reach out for what he then does grasp; thus one also feels that these choices and moves are being made in a world where, as we know and he knows, many things that one desires are ungraspable or fall away from us. In this respect, Billie Holiday comes to mind, but Janis's "Once In a Blue Moon" is unique -- in part because his vocal elegance is innate and much of it remains intact, in part because some of the songs he is drawn to (Arlen and Mercer's "I Had Myself a True Love," the old Ruth Etting ballad "Crying for the Carolines") demand a good deal of range, timbral finesse, and sustaining power if they're going to be sung at all. But listen also to the handsome, grave simplicity with which Janis inhabits several songs that demands to be handled in just that way -- "If I Had You" and (complete with its verse) "Melancholy Baby." This is an album of great American singing, from a great American singer. Larry Kart P.S. One of the songs from "Once In a Blue Moon" I've never heard of before, "If You Want To Love" by Hague and Roberts. Does anyone know where this song comes from and who Hague and Roberts are? I'm usually good at finding things via the 'Net, but I'm coming up with nothing. (I know of Albert Hague, of the musical "Plain and Fancy" and the song [among others] "Young and Foolish," but no online mention of that Hague links him to "If You Want To Love.")

Well, maybe not you, but that's what happened to me. Seriously? MG No -- but look at what "JazzDrummer" says in the post just above: "It's nice to see that many jazz musicians would like to come to Andalucia and jam with me! Come on! I will pick you at Gibraltar airport (low coast on British Airways and other european companies). I'm trying to organize a network for jazz musicians around the world: bed, food, drinks and music for some days..." Hmmm.

Two Morton Feldman passages about Boulez: "It is Boulez, more than any other composer today, who has given system a new prestige -- Boulez who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only in how it is made. No painter would talk that way.... The preoccupation with making something, with systems and construction, seems to be a characteristic of music today. It has become, in many cases, the actual subject of musical composition." (1965) "Yes everybody keeps saying that ["One must learn the rules if it's only to" -- or "in order to" -- "break them"]. I've never understood it. I never understood what I was supposed to learn and what I was supposed to break. What rules? Boulez wrote a letter to John Cage in 1951. There is a line in that letter I will never forget. 'I must know everything in order to step off the carpet.' And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream ... to crown himself Emperor. Was it love of knowledge, love of music, that obsessed our distinguished young provincial in 1951? It was love of analysis -- an analysis he will pursue and use as an instrument of power. "....You were asking about the rules. There's a parable of Kafka's about a man living in a country where he doesn't know the rules. Nobody will tell him what they are. He knows neither right nor wrong, but he observes that the rulers do not share his anxiety. From this he deduces that the rules are for those who rule. What they do is rule. That's why all my knowledge doesn't make me understand what Mozart did that I should also do in order to reach a state of artistic grace." (1967)

This is some of most ridiculous (in the common sense of the term) playing imaginable: http://www.danielsmithbassoon.com/ Click on the links to this guy's two "jazz" albums.

BTW, any of you Michiganders know/know of violinist/violist Christina Fong? She seems to be based in Grand Rapids.

I also highly recommend this somewhat related disc from the same source: http://www.amazon.com/Maria-Alvear-Fuerzas...pd_bxgy_m_img_b

It's my impression that much sorting out needs to be done with A.H., but this one is a gem (works and performances): http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Hovhaness-Violi...a/dp/B00005RL83

"Porgy" was written by Fields & McHugh for the revue "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928," which of course featured African-American performers -- notably Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Elizabeth Welch, and Mantan Moreland. In addition to "Porgy," addressed by a woman to the by then familiar main character in the popular Dubose Hayward novel (pub. 1924), the score includes "Diga Diga Doo," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", and "I Must Have That Man," all by Fields & McHugh.

Well, maybe not you, but that's what happened to me.

From an email I wrote to a friend today: My problem, leaving Ross aside for the moment, is that the score took itself so seriously in such a self-conscious manner. Among other things, all that "The coalescence of a wide range of notes into a monomaniacal unison may tell us most of what we need to know about the crushed soul of the future tycoon Daniel Plainview" crap from Ross ignores what to me is the most obvious and dramatically inappropriate fact about the relationship between Greenwood's music and what we're seeing -- the music wears "a modern, or formerly modern, European art music" badge (if not by outright intent, that's where those sounds come from directly or indirectly: Bartok filtered through '50s-60s Polish angst a la Pendercki) and thus it says among other things, though to me it says this quite strongly: "These sounds we're hearing come from another world than the one we're seeing and in which Plainview and the rest are acting [A higher one? A future one that's looking back and judging Plainvew's behavior and his early 20th Century mileu? Etc.], and don't you forget it." I'm not saying that such a dialogue between a soundtrack and what we're seeing couldn't be meaningful, even marvelous, if it were done just right; I'm saying that here it sounds to me like neither Anderson nor Greenwood understood what the likely effect of that "classy" modern music ansgt would be on the film -- or they thought that that it would have one sort of effect whereas, for me at least, it very much has another. As for Ross, this piece seems to me to be another example of him whoring after, in at least three directions at once, the holy grail of relevance. Modern music still has a "real" role to play, damn it, he says, stamping his foot -- and even better, it comes here from Mr. Radiohead, so it's relevant in the sense that you and your kids are really on kind of the same page here, if only you knew it and/or were awake enough to smell the coffee -- as Ross is here to tell us he is.

I particularly like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Three-Bones-Quill-Gene/dp/B0002MOMUU which is available again. Quill is the one who, when someone said to him (I'm paraphrasing here), "You're just a Bird imitator," replied (paraphrasing again): "You think that's easy to do?" Actually, though Quill was drenched in Bird, he had an easily identifiable, personal voice -- its hallmarks being a penetrating, slightly (but attractively) acidic or acrid tone and exceptional rhythmic fluidity. Quill's fate was a sad one -- he was mugged in 1977 in Atlantic City, ending up in blind one eye and partially paralyzed; he died in 1988. He's in great form on "The Ballad of Tappan Zee" from Johnny Richards' "Wide Range." The album above pairs him with the trombone section from the Richards band -- Jimmy Cleveland, Jim Dahl, and Frank Rehak -- and that may be one reason it's so together.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musi...crmu_music_ross BTW, when I say "awful" I mean that it was IMO awful in its own right but mostly awful as a score for that film -- grossly obtrusive, imposing a sense of soupily sentimental, "moody" narrative that was at war with what director P.T. Anderson seemed to me to be up to -- but then I didn't like the film much either, so what do I know? But Ross watchers will want to take a look at this paen.

Watch out -- they're just luring you to Andalucia to beat, rob, and rape you.

Far be it from me to defend the Flowbee, but it didn't really suck your hair off. The idea was that it vacuumed it upright to the length you'd selected (by picking one of the plastic tubes), and then ... well here's the deal: http://www.flowbee.com/ Just the thought of it still frightens me. Also, as one of the three moderators here (with Jim sitting above us when needed), I want to say: We are watching you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kean_(musical)