Larry Kart

Thanks, MG, now it makes sense, which is what I expect from Larry. But of course.

... in the Book of Life.

... in the Book of Life.

More on the "Big Dick" flourish that Jaws did in that clip and that Jim mentioned -- from http://www.jazzwax.com/2007/08/index.html Lockjaw Davis was a confident, no-nonsense tenor saxophonist whose sound was infused with a raw, roadhouse sense of the blues. Lockjaw knew only one way—a full, rich, exciting sound that was both relentless and soulful. He also had an entertainer's knack for the dramatic, handling his tenor as though it were made of balsa wood. As Lockjaw explained in Stanley Dance's The World of Count Basie (1980), there was a reason why he always gave his tenor a little heave after every solo: "I deliberately handle the horn the way I do, to show I'm its master! I've always noticed how delicately so many tenor players handle it, as though it were fragile, as though it commanded them. I try to show that I have command of the horn at all times, whether I'm playing or just holding it. You take charge, it's yours, and I want the audience to feel I'm in complete command. Otherwise you can give the impression the horn is too big for you, whether you play it well or not. The visual impression is quite important."

An excerpt from my book that may or may not clarify things a bit. The main thing is the quote from the now-deceased Bruce Turner (a lovely player): ...At one time, so the argument goes, jazz musicians were content to think of themselves as entertainers, not self-conscious artists. If the practitioner of modern jazz wants to please himself and his peers first and the audience second, if at all, he must endure the consequences of this unrealistic, willful act. The problem with that argument, though, as British saxophonist Bruce Turner says in his whimsically titled autobiography Hot Air, Cool Music, “is that scarcely any jazz musicians are able to recognize this picture of themselves. There are some jazzmen who are great entertainers. Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Lionel Hampton come immediately to mind. But they are the exception, not the rule. For the most part those of us who play jazz for a living do not know any way of entertaining an audience other than by making the best music we are capable of…. The ‘jazz is entertainment’ theory is only about money, when you boil it down. Jazz finds itself sponsored by the entertainment industry, and in return the latter feels entitled to demand its pound of flesh. Fair enough, but why in heaven's name confuse the issue? The distinction between what is done for love and what is done for quick cash is an obvious one.”

A strain of mutants.

Is that also the case with the "Cats of Any Color" title above? I considered all of the titles suggested above and went ahead and got most of them. Thanks everyone again for the great suggestions. HG Does he treat the subject there? Yes, probably more so in "Cats." Is what he says there b.s.? That's my opinion; YMMV.

Usually makes me laugh out loud at least twice per episode -- which is an amazingly high standard in my experience. Also, Tina Fey has improved a lot as a comic actress since the show began; her sense of physical comedy is excellent now, without being broad. And the syncopation of the writing and directing! It's like the show is moving to a different beat and at a swifter tempo than anything else on the air.

Hey -- two whole real musicians have read my book. Or at least they said they did.

No, I never at that one. Where can it be found?

The casual horn toss @ 2:04 tells you all you need to know. You bet.

Fascinating. Great stories too.

I see your point, but given the fact that there was so much Bird on record after a while, which couldn't help but reveal what he actually was doing musically, I would imagine that most players who dug Bird did so on the basis of what they were hearing him do rather than on what the Chili House anecdote and others like it said that he was doing.

Lockjaw with Basie: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8u6t7jWtLs Hide the woman and children. Also, do you know that Scottish tenorman, Lochjaw Davis?

More about this -- and related statements by drummer Gus Johnson, bassist Gene Ramey, Don Byas, and Dexter Gordon about supposed systematic use of substitute harmonies by Bird -- from Brian Priestley's "Chasin' the Bird" (pp. 115-16): "It is hard to find recorded examples of anything [like this] ... in Parker's playing..... [And] it was unusual for him to compose lines that relied on complex harmonic movement, obviously preferring to reserve an optional complexity for his spontaneous improvisations. His use of harmony was extremely sophisticated, but what distinguished his mature style was the ability to take any principle of chord complication, whether derived from Tatum, Ellington, Gillespie, or Young, and make it work in a totally non-programmed and non-schematic way. Put more succinctly, the polyrhythmic approach was essential but the polyharmonies were less so....

I was making, or trying to make, a joke (or wisecrack) by conflating the terms used for methods of recording music with Jim's metaphorical use of "analog" as he spoke of ways of responding in words to music.

Another big problem with the Biddy Fleet chili-house breakthrough anecdote is that what it says Bird did on "Cherokee" -- use "the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and [back] them with appropriately related changes" -- was not in fact something that was characteristic of his playing. Rather, these were methods used by some bop-era composers. Bird's solo work was not as schematic, and to the degree that it was schematic, it was not so in that way.

As its title suggests, Lees's "You Can't Still a Gift" also contains much b.s. from him on this subject.

I too sense a major paradigm shift in the works, one that will erase from the universe virtually everything I know and care about. This will be done not from outright malice mostly but as a semi-incidental consequence of the need to reshape things, a la what happens to what's in the way when a really big parking lot needs to be built. What saddens me, in particular, about what I expect will happen is that in the process large parts of the past -- our individual and collective historical memory -- will be bulldozed and thus probably lost forever, all this in the name of supposedly simple necessity. One perhaps oblique example of what's to come, the term "IslamoFascism." One knows why and more or less by whom it's been dreamed up, but the "need" to do so means that the historical reality of what Fascism actually was has been turned to dust. (For a powerful pocket example of some of that reality, check out the recent movie "Pan's Labyrinth.") I assume that Jim has fairly nice cosmic things in mind for the paradigm shift he sees coming, but thoughts of the major reshaping that would have to be involved leave me with almost no optimism; the major reshapers of the world in my lifetime have been sick, brutal fucks by and large.

My critical writing is "digital," not "analog," and it's 100% "effective." That's why those in the know don't stand too close to it.

Actually, I searched for it but with no success. I tried author/title/ and keyword with no luck. Do you have the exact title? You Can't Steal a Gift http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Steal-Gift-...9445&sr=1-1

"Sure"? Don't get out much, do you? I do, but let's not have this tired discussion again. "This" tired discussion? OK -- I give up. And in all "macro" senses, too.

"Sure"? Don't get out much, do you?

That's his story, and I believe it. Dern doesn't need drugs to be, as he refers to himself at times, "the Dernser." And he dosn't drink or smoke either -- all this having something to do initially with his background as a gifted middle distance runner. For a good while once he became an actor he'd run 50 or more miles a day -- like to and from his house and where the movie was being made, if that was in the LA area. He had to change course a bit, literally and figuratively, when a lung collapsed and a doctor, when Dern told him he'd been training in Griffith Park, said that that particular chunk of LA had the highest level of pollution on the planet. In any case, as a result of his lifelong taste for running, Dern has such a low pulse rate that when he takes the physical you have to take when you make a movie, he often has to tell them that he doesn't need to be rushed to the emergency room. His ambition is to live to 100 and still be working. Finished the book last night. One of the best parts comes late, when Dern makes a movie directed and written by his ex-wife Diane Ladd (Laura Dern is their offspring) that's essentially a replay from Ladd's point of view of their long-gone, very messed-up marriage (among other things, their first child died at an early age in a swimming pool accident). The atmosphere on the set is a bit sulphurous, but Dern, you might say, needs to be there.

Here's an email I sent to a friend who, like me and his wife, is a graduate of New Trier High School on Chicago's North Shore -- the school that gave us Charlton Heston, Ann-Margret, Donald Rumsfeld, Rock Hudson, Ralph Bellamy, Liz Phair ... and Bruce Dern (among others). Picked up at the library a copy of Bruce Dern's recently published and aptly titled autobiography "Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have." As totally in the voice and persona of the author as any book one could imagine, it's fascinating throughout but especially to me (and perhaps to one or both of you) on Dern's upbringing as a quirky child of much privilege in Glencoe (his mother was from the family that founded Carson Pirie Scott; the Derns lived in a lakeside estate, adjacent to the estate of Mrs. Dern's parents, whom she spoke with at length every morning before speaking to or with anyone else), then as a student at New Trier. Never met Dern, b. 1936, he was six years older, but a great deal of what he says about the North Shore in particular and in general rings a bell -- in part because he was a fraught, shrewd observer. One story: In his disfunctional family, perhaps the second most important thing on their hit parade was anti-Semitism -- this no doubt longstanding attitude being inflamed afresh because after WWII a fair number of Jews began to move into Glencoe, a community that his mother's ancestors virtually had founded after the Chicago Fire. So Bruce decides he wants to be actor, drops out of college, and eventually enrolls in the Actor's Studio (all this much against his parents' wishes). Dern is good, gets cast in a small part in O'Casey's "Shadow of a Gunman" and is brilliant in it, getting rave notices from Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr. Kerr's review, however, mistakenly identifies him as Bruce Stern. Mom sees the review, calls up Dern and disowns him on the spot, saying "You've gone over to them." That is, she thinks that Dern has changed his last name to "Stern" for the nonce to get in tight with what she presumes to be the essentially Jewish-run world of NYC theater. Bruce explains that it's just a typo, but she refuses to believe that and maintains her stance of total estrangement from her son until her death, some 20 years later. (In this, as in almost all family things, the position of Dern's father was one of near-total detachment -- while he himself came from "good" stock, his father had been Secretary of War under FDR and governor of Utah, the money was on his wife's side.) Yes, Mrs. Dern (sister of poet Archibald MacLeish) apparently was not entirely sane, but in her circles she had no trouble fitting in. Some great Jack Nicholson stories, and a funny one about a simulated sex scene Dern has to do with Ann-Margret for the movie "Middle Age Crazy" while her edgy, protective husband, Roger Smith, stands just outside of camera range. Also, Dern knows a great deal about acting and how movies are made and about the people who make them. Fairly goofy himself, I suppose, but also very smart and very soulful, in sometimes unusual ways.