Larry Kart

I like Green, who was reputed to be (and certainly sounds like) a genius instrumentalist as well as a very tasty player, but I don't think he had as much saxophone conception going as Bert and Dennis did. Also, a certain rounded-off shapeliness of phrasing seems to come so readily to Green (as did just about everything else on the trombone) that I feel that he often rested content at that admitttedly elegant level, while for Bert and Dennis it was more like ever onward. BTW, Green fans should look for the Fresh Sound reissue (on a single CD) of his two (or two of his, don't recall which it is) ABC-Paramount albums, a small group date with Jimmy Raney and a big band album with John Carisi charts, including "Springsville," which features Green and is treated as a kind of walking ballad. The big band date is not as adventurous as one might wish -- the goal seems to have been to produce a musically superior version of Les Elgart -- but within those limits the playing and writing are very good.

Great Ware on that album, also on its Riverside/OJC prequel Johnny Griffin Quartet with the same rhythm section partners as on Sextet, Kenny Drew and Philly Joe. What a team! I think they recorded together only one other time, on Drew's Riverside (and I hope OJC) album of music from "Pal Joey." On the other hand, don't be fooled into getting the Drew-Ware OJC duo album, originally on Judson I think (a Riverside subsidiary), of tunes by Harry Warren and another composer (Harold Arlen?) Drew's playing on this one is not only quite "straight" but also almost Carmen Cavallaro-like in its flamboyant, cheesy stiffness (would like to know the story behind this date, because Drew, left to his own devices on ballads, could be at once fairly florid/romantic and damned interesting). As for Ware, he is both wholly underwraps here and virtually inaudible.

Doh! And the thing there about Fast and "Fat Albert" is also someone trying to be funny.

BTW, that Wikipedia bio of Howard Fast I linked to above has at least one piece of nonsense in it: "In 1952, Fast married the beautiful singing sensation, Reba McEntire." No. And if he had, he and Ms. McEntire would have wed when she was age minus-three.

Howard Fast bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Fast He is, of course, the author of "Spartacus," But I didn't know that he also gave the world "Fat Albert."

In our house when we were kids our "Happy Hannukah" string of cut-out letters spelling out the phrase, which we would tack up in the front hall, somehow lost its "ann" one year. This led my little sister to celebrate the holiday then and thereafter by saying, affectionately, "Happy Hukah" (as in "Hookah"). Also, I associate Hannukah with Howard Fast's young-adult novel about the Maccabean revolt, "My Glorious Brothers" (1948), which I read several times when young. A skilled, potently sentimental writer, Fast here (as in much of his fiction) was constructing a parable that was aimed in large part at furthering the cause/vision of the American Communist Party, which Fast had joined officially in 1944. Reading that book was enlightening, because while it certainly was a ripping yarn, full of shining heroes and dark villains and IIRC a downbeat ending that was true to the historical facts (the revolt eventually met with defeat when Rome weighed in), I did begin to detect the magnetic pull of Fast's underlying propagandistic intent, without at first even knowing enough about the world at large to have a clue about what he was up to there. But I could tell that I was reading two tales at once -- the exciting tale of the Maccabean revolt and a tale about the feelings that a right-minded person was supposed to develop, nurture, and apply because of the tale that he or she was reading. This was at once very seductive -- because it gave (and was very much meant to give) one the sense that one now had a chance to possess special knowledge, special righteousness, special powers, membership in a brotherhood of the unfailingly good and true -- and very creepy, for the same reasons just mentioned.

Add more good wishes to Brownie. Deep jazz knowledge, class, knows the ways of the world (a grown-up), etc. You probably could learn important stuff from watching him brush his teeth or put on his shoes.

I love Gullin, but he and Adams (whom I like a lot when he's on his game -- i.e. not too lick-oriented) are such different players that they might as well be playing two different kinds of instrument. And Harry Carney is playing yet a third kind, and Serge maybe a fourth. Likewise with some other fine bari players, though other fine ones do seem to share a corporate instrumental identity. It's a very interesting horn.

One of the finest saxophone-influenced (specifically Lester Young) trombone players, along with Willie Dennis. Jimmy Knepper, too, but Knepper is so Knepper that he strikes me as being more in a zone of his own; with Bert, Dennis, and a few others, the kinship seems clear. There's also Earl Swope (1922-68), who kind of took one part Lester and added two parts Dickie Wells (easy to do, at least conceptually, given the great Basie recordings where Pres and Wells both solo). Swope was very influential but not, I'm fairly sure, on Bert, who also was born in 1922 and was soloing on record with Red Norvo as early as 1941-2. Getting back to Bert's playing in itself, the melodic continuity/rhythmic fluidity and overall freshness of his playing on "Crosstown" and "Kaleidoscope" is something else.

Posted this on another, more general thread, but it probably belong here: QUOTE from Jim Alfredson @ Dec 5 2007, 02:35 PM) As for moderation, I would like to have at least one helper. My brother used to help me, but he is also very busy and doesn't have as much invested in this community anymore anyway. I think the most logical person would be Sangry, but it is a job that requires a time commitment and I do not blame anyone for not wanting to be a part of that. Or maybe, as suggested, the chair can rotate every few months. Me: I might be your man for that, Jim, for starters, but tell me a bit about what's involved -- in terms of time but mostly in terms of what kinds of things have to be decided and other practicalities, not that what I just mentioned only has to do with practicalities. I can guess, of course, but I should say first that having poked my nose into almost every thread or kind of thread on Organissimo since the dawn of the forum, I've seen very few things that made it onto a thread that I had any doubts should have been there. I would tend to err on the side of freedom, though at the same time I think I have a good sense of when trollishishness is present; and that I loathe and probably would tend to try to stop in its tracks, if only because trollishness can easily destroy large portions of the landscape. Argument, even fairly angry arguments with some degree of name-calling -- OK. Mere provocation -- never.

Don't like (1) or (5) -- the latter for the same reason as J Larsen -- and (6) would make me sad if it meant the end. I voted for (2) because I almost certainly have more dough than I can spend in what's left of my life, given my tastes and needs, and I can't think of a better place or use for it. Hell, tell me what the total annual bill is and I might just pay it, but not if it would make Jim or anyone else feel creepy, as I could see that it might. What I'm saying is that if there are any fat cats here (not that I think of myself that way, but there is what I've just said), then no one should think that the support of those who can afford to give support without pain means that those people then have one iota of ownership or control. This place belongs to Jim, because he's Jim and has done what he's done, and to everyone else who's here -- evenly and equally.

I might be your man for that, Jim, for starters, but tell me a bit about what's involved -- in terms of time but mostly in terms of what kinds of things have to be decided and other practicalities, not that what I just mentioned only has to do with practicalities. I can guess, of course, but I should say first that having poked my nose into almost every thread or kind of thread on Organissimo since the dawn of the forum, I've seen very few things that made it onto a thread that I had any doubts should have been there. I would tend to err on the side of freedom, though at the same time I think I have a good sense of when trollishishness is present; and that I loathe and probably would tend to try to stop in its tracks, if only because trollishness can easily destroy large portions of the landscape. Argument, even fairly angry arguments with some degree of name-calling -- OK. Mere provocation -- never.

Very interesting, as Joe said. I'm reminded of what a young, Chicago-based at one time and very good IMO saxophonist told me when I said something positive about his playing after a set -- that he was afraid of, tired of, bothered by (one or all of those or something like them) playing on the stand what he'd been practicing all day.

Organissimo feels like, and is, home -- more so than any place I've been at or around on the 'Net and as much as or more so than many places I've been anywhere. I've thought, said, and felt things here that I probably never would have done otherwise. I'm very sad about the closing, though Jim has to do what he thinks he has to do.

"handy"?

And I about you.

Hmm -- I'm really getting cranky in my old age.

Yes, it was that that had me worried.

Sorry about the following "deviation," Jim, but about using culture as a club, I'm reminded of the line (often misattributed to Hermann Goering, sometimes to Heinrich Himmler or Josef Goebbels): "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning." ("Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning.") It's from Nazi playwright/Poet Laureate Hans Johst’s play "Schlagater,” about an executed (in 1923) member of the nascent Nazi Party, Albert Leo Schlagater, who then became one of the party's chief martyrs, a la Horst Wessel. What I mean to suggest by this (and again, it's something of a deviation from what we've been talking about) is that while all acts of what might be called culture arguably have political/social meaning, the too-ready, too-eager desire to leap from the one realm to the other (or even to decide that there is at bottom only one realm -- that of political-social action) has a fairly long and unpretty history behind it. On the other hand, if none of the above rings a bell, at least Organissimo now knows where that ""Wenn ich Kultur höre ..." line came from.

And sometimes some sort of new or newish shit is happening, and some people jump up and down proclaiming this not so much because they're that excited by the new shit in and of itself but because they see an opportunity here to beat up on and/or browbeat the people who aren't yet or (because of temperament, prior affiliation, or personal history, etc.) never will be excited by this particular shit. In effect, a kind of power operation -- the appeal of wielding culture like a club. One side of the '60s, IIRC. And, again, I'm not thinking of you here, Jim.

Well, yeah. It happens. Fact of life, no? It's also a fact of life that some people (and I don't mean you here, Jim) say things like "...something is happening here/But you don't know what it is, etc..." as part of a power operation -- in order to imply that they know which way the wind is definitively blowing and that anyone who isn't moving in that direction is already half-dead or deserves to be dead all the way. In such cases, it's not necessarily about any actual wind or its direction; it's about who gets to call himself a weatherman.

BTW, the Dylan-expressed attitude I was thinking of, though I guess it's also in "Blowin' in the Wind," is particularly present in "Ballad of a Thin Man": "Because something is happening here/But you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?"

Jim -- Dare I say that you're beginning to show or to develop some thought-police tendencies here. In particular, the yoking of "unfamiliar" and "realities," as though as anything that is unfamiliar and real (as in, it "exists") is also a semi-metaphorical "reality" -- i.e. something that any sensible, truly sophisticated person needs to take into account. Also, that ever so handy Jefferson quote, which always implies to me, "Hey -- we get to be vigilantes!" How about, Who will guard the guardians? Also, the assumptions that IMO underlie this from a previous post: "Surely you're not suggesting that Taborn's intent ... is improper or is otherwise one that you couldn't get to if you wanted to. Young folk ain't always gonna court the old folks' favor, doncha' know, and more power to 'em for that." Sounds like a blend of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and that old journalist's line, "We got two kinds of publicity -- which kind do want?" In other words, get with the steamroller flow of history, mister -- a flow to which we have an infallible road map -- or be prepared to be squashed real flat.

Well, serendipitously I just found and listened to some J Dilla (if he has any bearing on this), and I'm interested.

"Thanks" to your son or to Taborn? Surely you're not suggesting that Taborn's intent (if your son is correct) is improper or is otherwise one that you couldn't get to if you wanted to. Young folk ain't always gonna court the old folks' favor, doncha' know, and more power to 'em for that. So, did you ask your son to hip you to some of the Detroit hip-hop being referenced? Thanks to my son -- ironically. I am suggesting (but only suggesting/speculating) that if a musician of much skill in my experience (i.e. Taborn) produces something that seems to me to be by and large fairly uneventful (note: not peculiar, strange, aggressively off-putting or anything like that, just kind of droopy/spacey/snoozy with a pinch or two of what might or might not be artiness), then the fault (if you want to call it "fault") might not be in me, the old folker. Sure, I'd find some of that Detroit hip-hop and try to break to code of "Junk Music" (assuming my son's info about it being so referential is accurate), except that I've heard a whole lot of music of lots of kinds in my life that called for or benefited from background info that I didn't initially have, and none of it IIRC seemed as bland and boring to me as much of "Junk Music" did. And I listened to it several times. Life, I decided in this case, is too short -- and you know that I'm not incurious for an old folker.