Larry Kart

I agree about "The Soft Swing" rhythm section versus the electrifying Levy/Vinnegar/Levey rhythm section in (so to speak) absolute terms, but the Allison/Farmer/ Segal team does have a distinctive loping feel that probably has something to with Stan's playing on TSS being among the most relaxed, at best sublime, Stan on record. On the other hand, a little birdie in my head tells me that the degree and nature of Stan's relaxation on TSS might have had something to do with the amount and nature of opiates that could have been coursing through Stan's system at the time. On TSS he sounds at once sufficiently alert and utterly stoned. Also, while no one, other than perhaps Horace Silver, probably could be more legitimately bluesy than Kenny Drew, Lou could be very bluesy too -- hear his "Lou's Blues" on "A Most Musical Fella."

Ira Gitler on Levy in "Swing To Bop": "There are a couple of records Levy made with Chubby Jackson -- the band that went to Sweden -- and his solos on 'Boomsie' and "Dee Dee's Dance" in particular have that crazy intensity of the bebop period. He captured an essence in those solos." I believe I have those on a Xanadu LP collection, "Bebop Revisited, Vol. 1,"; if so, will listen and report.

Listened to "Jazz In Four Colors" (with Larry Bunker on vibes, Leroy Vinnegar, and Stan Levey) and one of its RCA successors, "A Most Musical Fella" (from I think the following year, 1957), both on Fresh Sound LPs from the mid-1980s; and fairly nasty, blurry-sounding transfers or (more likely) needle-drops they are of what originally was crisply recorded material. If they are needle-drops, it sounds like those Barcelona bastards played back the LPs on a 1956 Webcor console. In any case, the ear does adjust enough to make reasonable estimates. "Four Colors" is nice but at times a bit glib and/or slick; in particular, certain chordal patterns Levy is fond of tend to recur more than one would wish. By contrast, "Musical Fella" (a trio date with Levey and Max Bennett) is mostly incandescent; there are at least three up-tempo solos here ("Yesterdays" and Levy's way up "Apartment 17," in particular) that are in the vicinity of Bud Powell at his most inspired -- the melodic continuity, digital dexterity, and sheer mental agility are pretty staggering. Also, Bud is Bud, and Lou is Lou -- while there would be no Lou without Bud's example, Lou had his own thing. In this respect and others, Chuck's "white Kenny Drew" is spot on. One of the things that Lou and Drew have in common, at any tempo but especially when things get swift, is a sense that there's a gyroscopic motor turning inside them at least twice the speed they're playing -- an implicit doubled-up or twice doubled-up feel, a la boogie woogie perhaps. Among other things, this gives them a marvelously secure rhythmic base from which they can dart and dash seemingly at will. I agree that Lou could get "over romantic," but on "Musical Fella" the rhapsodic out-tempo passages, when they occur, are also for the most part full of damn musically subtle thinking, as with much vintage rhapsodic Drew. Also in such moods, the playing of both men can have a welcome undertone of vinegary bluntness; they themselves are not swooning. And does Lou ever play some "sideways" things on this album, harmonically and rhythmically. In particular, dig the way he radically smooths out the melody of "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads," utterly eliminating the song's "ring-ring-a-ling-a" hook and thus turning it into a Gil Evans-like hovering hallucination. Also, and this has something do with the "sideways" things, Lou seldom if ever has a harmonic idea that isn't also a rhythmic one -- or better, for him thoughts that seem to be harmonic can become rhythmic and vice versa (and back and forth again) very rapidly. It isn't always at that level, but when it is.

IIRC, "Jazz In Four Colors" is nice (Ill try to listen to it tonight) but my fondest memories are of Levy's sideman appearances -- especially the previously mentioned "All Music," "West Coast Sessions," and "Hamp and Getz" (what a day in the studio that was!) There's a Levy original on "Jazz in Four Colors" whose title was his nickname, "The Grey Fox" -- after his prematurally grey hair and, one assumes, his rhythmic and harmonic foxiness as an accompanist. He was Peggy Lee's accompanist for many years, and I recall there was interesting passage or two about him in Peter Richmond's "Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee" -- one of them, I think, about a time that Levy and Lee got very crosswise with each other. (BTW, "Fever" is not a book to read if you're inclined to be depressed; the downward slope of Lee's life in later years is painful stuff.) Perhaps it was when Lee and Levy were on the outs (and after Sinatra's longtime accompanist Bill Miller and Sinatra had their own falling out in 1979) that I heard Levy back Sinatra at a Chicago concert in the early '80s. That was something to hear -- in particular, a ballad with just the two of them.

Ham and cheese omelet. Didn't want to cook either, and this was the closest I could come and still have something warm.

I probably represent a part of Borders' problems. Here's an actual thought I had a few weeks ago, with some Border's 30 percent off or 40 percent off coupons in hand. I can drive five or ten miles in winter pre-Holiday traffic to one of the two nearby Borders stores that are decently stocked, though at both of those stores the classical and jazz CD stock is far from what it once was. Also, even with the coupons, I can get the same things from Amazon, and with their typical discounts, and with a free-shipping-sized order and no sales tax, I'm about at the same point price-wise. Also, if Amazon has what I want, I know that they do; at Borders, even if I check online to see if they have it, they may not. The only drawback with Amazon is that I have to wait a few days till the stuff gets to me, but so what? On that day, with snow in the forecast, Borders lost out. The only reason it might not is if I were going that way for another non-impulse reason.

If that Herman Storyville set is at one Half Price Books store, it's probably at many of them. Also picked another potentially interesting Storyville there, though I haven't listened to it yet -- a collection of material from Rolf Billberg (1930-66), the gifted, Konitz-influenced Swedish altoist.

One key difference is that Wynton came wrapped in an aggressively worked-up and marketed ideology about "true jazz" -- its nature, its supposedly threatened by charlatanism recent history, and the routes that would lead to its salvation. Without all that, I believe, Wynton would have been just another talented young trumpet player and probably much better off musically than he would become when he began to play and write so as to live up to his role as a noble cultural role model.

My wife's folks lived in later years in Springfield, Mo. When we went to visit, I'd notice that (for many years at least) the upper half-page opposite the editorial page in the Springfield News-Leader was devoted every day to freshly written religious (i.e. Christian) poetry submitted by readers.

I'm no expert on Frank's recorded work, what there was of it, because the way he sounded "live" (when in compatible settings) could be so overwhelming that I just assumed that none of his recorded work would measure up to it. There is this one, though, which is very nice: http://www.amazon.com/Hooray-Marty-Grosz-H...boutThisProduct Samples of what Frank was like can be heard on the excerpts here from "Sorry" and "Clementine," maybe on other later tracks from the album as well. Speaking of "live" Frank, the best playing I ever heard from him -- in the 1970s at a North Side Chicago club, the Edge Lounge, with trumpeter (or was it cornetist?) Nappy Trottier, pianist Bob Wright, and drummer Wayne Jones (plus at least one sitter-in, trombonist Bill Bentley) -- was recorded at a professional level of quality IIRC over several nights, and I believe those tapes still exist. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons that I have some anecdotal knowledge of but definitely not enough hard factual knowledge to speak with authority, that music has not yet been made available commercially. But it did and probably still does exist on tape, so there may be some hope.

Thank you so much for that thought.

Jim -- Geez, I should have read past the headline. That stuff is unbelievable, right up there with the best of Bob and Ray, with a hint of Jonathan Winters.

I paid a visit to Frank on Wednesday, having stopped by the week before with Terry Martin, who was playing the major role in helping Frank out as much as that could be done at this point. (I live about 30 minutes from the nursing home where Frank was; for Terry it was about an hour-and-a-half up there and as much as two-and-a-half hours getting back. When my time comes, I hope there's someone who cares that much.) Though Frank was not in good shape physically, worse off this Wednesday than he had been the week before, I was surprised that he had gone downhill so rapidly from there. On the other hand, Frank definitely knew that there was no way back for him from where he was. Wednesday and the week before, Frank was still all there mentally -- remembering incidents from the fairly distant past with photographic detail and abundant, wry (sometimes caustic) wit. Lord, could he play. He loved "sheets of sound" Coltrane almost as much as he did Pee Wee; I have a tape I made (in the mid-1970s I think) of Frank rehearsing wtih pianist Bob Wright where, among other things, they play superbly Trane's "Lazy Bird" and Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now." On Wednesday one of the recordings Frank mentioned as a particular favorite was Trane's version of "You Leave Me Breathless." He also told a very Frank story about his encounter with Lester Young in 1957 in Pres's hotel room in (I think) Indianapolis, where Frank was playing at a club and Pres was in town with a non-JATP package tour. The drummer in the band Frank was part of, Buddy Smith, suggested that they pay Pres a visit after teh gig, and when they got there, Frank ("I'm shy," he said), hung back while the other guys gathered around Pres. Having noticed this bit of behavior, Pres beckoned Frank to come closer, addressing him softly as "long-distance man." Probably a meeting of kindred souls.

I kid you not: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituar...0,4775203.story

Speaking of very dry, a bit sick though accidental humor, check out the headline on this obit in today's Chicago Tribune: "Prolific knitter kept busy."

Picked up this two-CD set of material from two nights of a Salt Lake City gig (at a place called The Lagoon) in July 1956 for $7.98 at Half Price Books (it's on Storyville, issued in 2000 with the co-operation of the Herman estate). An annoncer is heard at odd moments, but it's not aircheck material; sound is excellent, better than a lot of studio recordings of the time, recording has to have been made in the hall, very vivid, good balance, almost a stereo spread. This particular edition of the Third Herd is in some respects unfamiliar to me; it may in fact not have made any commercial recordings. Gus Gustafson, drums, rather than Chuck Flores; Vince Guaraldi, piano; Victor Feldman, vibes; Jay Cameron, baritone; the three tenors are Kamuca, Bob Hardaway, and (tah-dah) ARNO MARSH, who gets a good deal of solo space and sounds excellent -- more flowing and/or less abrupt in his phrasing than he was in the '52-or-so edition of the Herd. Annotator Mark Gardner hears a lot of Wardell Gray in Arno here; I suspect that this was more a matter of kinship than influence. Perhaps Randissimo can comment on this. Also, as always, Bill Harris plays his ass off; his solo on "Bijou" here is not a re-creation of his solo on the famous record. Trumpets are John Coppola, Dick Collins, Burt Collins, Dud Harvey, and Bill Castagnino. Coppola (who I know of but don't recall hearing as a soloist before) gets most of the trumpet spots and sounds very good and individual, has a broad, rich Benny Bailey-like sound; probably Coppola dug Navarro and Freddie Webster. Burt Collins gets some spots too. Apparently only one solo from Dick Collins, who used to be the main trumpet soloist in an earlier edition of the Third Herd. If it's still available, this is definitely recommended if you like the Third Herd. Also, you can tell from the way the band sounds on these two nights that they could hear each other on the stand and were enjoying what they heard.

BTW, MG, I'm not saying that you need consciously to be aware of or brood about these details. But genuine hotness is made up of such things, such differences between this way to do it and that way, no matter how spontaneously or casually we take them in. If we don't notice them somehow, though, what have we got?

Well, my point was to try to describe with some precision what the difference was between one night when he was hot and one night when he was not. For instance, there may be a few ways for a major league ballplayer to hit a home run by accident (or there may not be any such ways), but I'm sure that there are many thousands of ways and reasons for a major league ballplayer to miss a pitch completely. Now if both things I've just said are so, and I'm interested in how people who hit successfully do it and how those who do not do it do not, then I want to look closely at just what's going on when things work out well and likewise when they do not. It's not like I'm a coach or anything, but just by chance I was about to post something elsewhere that stems directly from this way of looking at/responding to things, so now I'll post it here. It's about Horace Silver's comping on "The Milt Jackson Quartet" (OJC). In a rather quiet way for Horace -- whom one thinks of from the way he often backs soloists in his own groups as a very aggressive accompanist -- his playing behind Bags on this album, particularly on "My Funny Valentine," is so subtly suggestive-supportive that I'm filled with a blend of something like joy and awe. Further, as one might expect, the sense of collaboration here is so total that it's possible to get kind of choked up about what artistic and emotional heights this music can attain -- and this in a performance that one can take as pleasant background music if one isn't paying attention. I'm saying then that to detect and enjoy the heights when they're there, we probably need (in our various ways) to take fairly close notice of what's actually going on. Otherwise, how do we really know when someone is hot and when they're not? But then I guess that's where my home run analogy breaks down a bit. In baseball there's an obvious external sign of successful effort: the ball leaves the park. In jazz there's only the music-making itself, its functioning details.

Nobody as far as I can tell is saying anything negative here about Peterson that they didn't say here long before his death. His playing pro and con (and why pro or con) has been a lively topic here several times over the years. I think the nub of your complaint might the second word in the phrase "negative emotions." There are times (and I've been there myself) when expressing a negative thought is, for the person who does it or who feels it being done nearby, like letting something dark and potentially uncontrollable and pervasive slip out into the social/moral landscape. Obviously not a good thing when that happens, but while YMMV, I don't think that is what's happening here. Swtiching to OP as an accompanist, I ran across a somewhat strange and interesting test case/set of examples -- the album "Stan Getz and J.J. Johnson at the Opera House." Recorded "live" during the 1957 JATP tour, the performances on the original LP issue (recorded in mono) were not from the tour's Chicago Opera House concert of Sept. 29, 1957 but from its Oct. 7, 1957 concert at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Then the album was reissued on LP in the late '70s or early '80s, with the four (recorded in stereo) performances from the Opera House concert taking the place of the Shrine performances of the same four tunes, with one of Shrine performances remaining as before. The liner notes of this LP reissue claimed that the stereo Opera House performances were musically superior to the mono Shrine performances -- not so at all IMO, for reasons that in part have to do with OP's comping (BTW the rhythm section is the same on both dates: OP, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay). Then the generously filled CD version came out in 1986, with all the material from both concerts, except for the Opera House version of "It Never Entered My Mind." To finally get to my point, on the three longish "blowing" tracks ("Billie's Bounce," "Crazy Rhythm," and "Blues in the Closet") the horns and the rhythm section are in inspired form at the Shrine, and not so hot at the Opera House. In part I think that Getz is the problem, at least initially -- on what could be the first piece from the Opera House concert (it leads off the CD), "Billie's Bounce," Getz sounds quite fragmented at times and probably for that reason goes on a fair bit too long in an attempt perhaps to get his legs beneath him. In part the problem might have been that things were being recorded in stereo there, which could have called for more separation among the players than was desirable musically. But one of the main problems with the Opera House blowing tracks is OP's comping. His choice of figures is much the same as on the galvanic Shrine performances, but time and again his comping falls not inside but to one side or the other of the soloists' phrasing; and when it's on the front side, it doesn't sound anticipatory (harmonically or rhythmically), just a bit out of phase. The feeling one gets here is that Getz and J.J. are riding a horse at top speed, and the horse (and thus the saddle beneath their butts) is not moving quite in rhythm with them, which serves to distract them some and saps their energy. By contrast, on the Shrine blowing tracks, OP, the rest of the rhythm section, and the soloists are thinking and feeling "one" right together, and the whole thing takes off. Another factor, though it could be cause or effect, is that all the Shrine blowing tracks (especially "Billie's Bounce") are swifter than their Opera House counterparts. Perhaps there's not enough evidence here to draw definite conclusions, but the unsual test-case nature of these performances -- same players, on tour together, recorded nine days apart -- does suggest pretty clearly to me that when OP's comping is not what it might be/should be, it is in large part because it's literally hanging a bit outside (fore and aft) the phrase shapes of the soloist, and again not in ways that anticipate or resolve the soloist's thinking.

Yes, that's me with the squeeze box in that cartoon. I was trying to sound like Mat Mathews. It did attract girls, but after the set I could never unhook and pack away the darn thing quickly enough.

Regarding some of what Big Beat Steve and EDC said above about Tatum -- Tatum was at best and above all a surreally witty virtuoso of harmonic thinking; the digital dexterity, rhythmic fluidity, and range of/control of touch were all essentially in the service of that. Fact is -- quoting a friend of mine and a great Tatum admirer -- most jazz fans don't really listen harmonically, not that much; thus they hear Tatum's speed and flourishes but tend not to get what he is actually up to. On this, take a look at Felicity Howlett's Tatum entry in Jazz Grove or even better her notes to the 2-LP Smithsonian Tatum set (if you can find it). That the same or similar complaints were made about both Tatum and OP's virtuosity doesn't prove that they were virtuosos of a similar kind. In terms of speed, maybe. In terms of range of touch, no. And in terms of subtlety of harmonic thought, and the centrality of that thought to the rest of each man's style, not even close, although IIRC there is some overtly Tatumesque OP on the MPS solo albums that's very tasty.

The reason for starting this thread was twofold: 1) Some people on the other thread were bothered by criticism there of a recently dead artist, so here we are now; those who don't want to hear this kind of talk have an easy option 2) Trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff among jazz artists, and within the career of a single jazz artist, seems like a fairly natural and arguably necessary thing to do, unless you're one of those "It's all good" people. Don't we all do a lot of that sorting out in the course of our lives as jazz fans? Now doing that in a public forum does add some stress and suggests that mere name-calling might be not a great idea. But are you suggesting that doubts about the value of OP's playing should now never be expressed, or that the subject of what his flaws as a jazz musician might be is of absolutely of no interest?

Actually -- and I know enough OP to suspect that this is true but have never sat down to do the necessary extensive research -- within seemingly not that broad stylisistic boundaries, there's a heck of a lot of variation in OP's recorded output IMO, though not having done the research, I'm not sure how it all breaks down. For instance, I was pleasantly surprised a while back by the CD repackaging of OP's Granz-era album of Basie material -- relaxed, inventive, relatively free from the mechanical bluesiness that drives some OP listeners from the room. For another, the famous Stratford Shakespearean Fest album deserves its fame. As I think Gunther Schuller said, it is a remarkable feat of small-combo orchestration and execution and a lot of visceral fun. Likewise, OP's famous early (I think JATP) trio performance of "Tenderly" with (I think) the Kessel version of the trio, much of it in OP's version of the locked-hands style, is a formidable, albeit worked-out feat of orchestration and execution that holds one's attention (at least it does mine) throughout. OP as an accompanist is where I'd really need to do careful research to sort out what I think is going on. My sense at the time was that after a certain point in his Granz house-pianist days, maybe 1957, he was a chugging drag on many dates, though many of those had enough going on otherwise to be overall pluses. On the other hand, I recall a fair number of Granz OP sideman dates from a year or two before this (the Hampton-DeFranco "Flying Home," most of the Jam Session series, etc.) and some things from later on (e.g. the Ella and Louis albums, the album with the OP Trio and Getz), where OP seems to me to be fresh, alert, energetic, and sensitive to what others were playing. About the downside of OP the accompanist, though, echo-ing something EDC said, compare the way Jimmy Rowles plays behind Ben Webster on Harry Edison's "Sweets" to the way OP plays behind Webster on any Granz session.

Ellington's childhood piano teacher was, indeed, Mrs. Marietta Clinkscales. See "The Duke Ellington Reader," p. 6. The line about "don't sit down at the piano after..." is just Ellington recycling an old joke, a la the one about the New York concert debut of some new piano virtuoso, say the young Horowitz. Rachmaninoff and Fritz Kreisler are seated in the front row, and after Horowitz rattles off a piece or two, Rachmaninoff says, "Is it getting hot in here?" To which Kreisler replies, "Not for violinists."

I could tell you more, but then, as they say, I'd have to kill you. Actually, you'd have to write a good and good-sized novel to attempt to capture Harriet. She was smart, could be quite imperious, had terrific instincts as an editor (was at once very down to earth and very romantic about the newspaper business), liked to try to run other people's lives and had some success at doing that, loved traditional jazz first (though her tastes were broad) and got along well with musicians of that generation or two (or three) in particular. She left the Tribune after she told higher-ups one too many times that she knew how to do their jobs better than they did; she then went to work for Universal Features (handling travel writers, comic strip artists, etc.). Haven't heard from or about her in a while, but I'm sure she's still motoring along at a good clip. She'd be about my age -- 65. I see a mention for her on the 'Net under "Harriet Choice Communications." That sounds about right.