Larry Kart

How 'bout the motherfucker's just nuts? Don't mean he's not sharp or nothing. That ain't got nothing to do with it. But you know, you gdt these crotchety fucks, and they get to goin' on some shit that's personally upsetting to them for whatever reason, and next thing you know, they're hard off into Looney Land. Not at all uncommon if you stop to think about it. World's full of people like that. At least Texas is. :g :g I could be wrong, but just nuts or real crochety doesn't seem to cover it. I've met plenty of smart looneys and real crochety types, but the combination of extreme hostility and self-sabotage (this in the midst of that same hostile assault -- not to mention self-sabotage that the person involved would almost have to be aware of) is unique in my experience, especially when it's done in public in circles where most everyone knows who everyone else is. It's as though someone were making an enraged charge of rape while attacking themselves fore and aft with a dildo -- and doing so in broad daylight right out in front of the local saloon.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm nuts.

Actually, reading that book and writing that review left me with a very bad, creepy feeling that still remains. For one thing, there's the undoubted value, often the brilliance, of much that Max has written over the years. On the other hand, there was/is my growing conviction that Max is in some ways quite nuts. As a frequent reader of Jazz Monthly (later Jazz and Blues Monthly) when that excellent publication was around, one often encountered examples of Max's compulsive iconoclasm, though "iconoclasm" is a paltry term for whatever actually is buzzing around in his skull. On particularly bizarre instance came when either Max or Hughes Panassie made a point about a particular Fats Waller solo recording that was based on a claim that the form of the piece (a Waller composition) was thus and so. Again, I don't recall who went first and who replied, but the exchange quickly escalated on Max's part to fierce cries of ridicule and execration against Panassie, who of course had many marks against him in that sphere, given his own history of imperious, dismissive statements. Problem was that in this case, as was made clear by everyone else on the Jazz Monthly roster who cared to weigh in, Max was wrong (having miscounted the number of bars in one section of the Waller piece) and Panassie was right. But Max would not give up, raising the ante of his rage (and refusing to admit the truth of what he had to know by now was true) to the point where the editor of Jazz Monthly, Albert McCarthy, finally had to declare the matter closed. In the book reviewed above, there's another bizarre and perhaps revealing instance -- Max's claim that there is absolutely no connection between Bartok's music and Eddie Sauter's "Focus." That the target here is Martin Williams may be the gist of the thing, because Max nurtured a profound contempt for both Martin and Gunther Schuller, apparently because both Schuller and Williams had or had worked toward acquiring a relatively "highbrow" standing in the world of jazz criticism and were, or acted as though they were, coming from a position of relative musical literacy (i.e. technical musical literacy). Now Martin in fact was a good less musically literate than one might think he was from the tone of his work (though he often had good instincts in this regard, and his heart often was in the right place); while Gunther, who is of course, a very musically literate man, has at times an unsure historical and aesthetic grasp of older jazz styles, coupled with an at times somewhat blinkered "progressive" orientation and an "I'm the only really literate musician in this room" ego -- all of which has led him to make some dubious assertions, both negative and positive. On balance, though, one would have to say that the world of jazz is/was better off because of Martin's and Gunther's work, not only because they did much good but also because it's not that hard after a while to sort out their virtues from their flaws. For Max, though, so it seemed, the very existence of Williams and Schuller was a raw wound -- in part because, as a musically literate, classically trained figure himself, Max found Schuller occupying a slot that he perhaps felt belonged to himself alone, in part because Williams' implicit "I'm the only (or chief) highbrow in this field" stance again placed another man in a slot that Max felt ought to be his own due. Whatever, the really creepy thing was that while Max's attacks on Williams and Schuller were often near-sadistic in their over-the-top tone, they also were in effect (and perhaps in intent) masochistic at heart. That is, as in his take no prisoners "there's no Bartok in "'Focus'" assault on Williams, Max not only had his facts wrong but also had to know this and thus had to know that many others would know this too and would be .. well, here the mind (or my mind at least) begins to reel. I mean, how nutty is this? And it's a pattern that crops up in Max's work time and again. In one sense, I'm bewildered by this sort of thing; in another I'm not but find so disturbing what I think is going on here that I'm almost afraid to look.

A somewhat different view of Max's later work (from the Annual Review of Jazz Studies, 2002): Max Harrison, Eric Thacker , Stuart Nicholson, The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2: Modernism to Postmodernism (London and New York: Mansell, 2000, 889 pp., $82.95 cloth, $41.95 paper) Reviewed by Lawrence Kart One had high hopes for The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2: Modernism to Postmodernism , if only because one of its three co-authors , Max Harrison, is among the best critics jazz has ever had, with a broad range of sympathies, acute analytical gifts and the ability to grasp and vividly express the essential aesthetic issues . To borrow a phrase from the book’s introduction , he is one of the “few great contemporary listeners,” and we have been benefiting from his work for almost half a century. An Englishman, Harrison began writing about jazz for Jazz Monthly in 1955, and later, on classical music, for The Times of London and The Gramophone . A selection of his jazz pieces was published as A Jazz Retrospect 1 ; The New Grove Gospel, Blues and Jazz 2 includes the brilliant main article on jazz that he contributed to the 1980 revision of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and he has played an increasingly prominent role in the series of books that have preceded the one under review -- Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years: 1917-1967 (with Albert McCarthy, Alun Morgan, Paul Oliver and others)3; Modern Jazz: The Essential Records 1945-70 (with Alun Morgan, Michael James, Jack Cooke and Ronald Atkins) 4; and The Essential Jazz Records Volume 1, Ragtime to Swing (with Charles Fox and Eric Thacker)5. The best of those books was the second, Modern Jazz: The Essential Records 1945-70 -- not only because all the participants (frequent contributors to the late, lamented Jazz Monthly), were gifted, knowledgeable critics of broad sympathies but also because there were five of them. This made it much more likely, as 200 different records (i.e., entire long-playing albums, not individual recorded performances) were dealt with in 131 pages (individual entries averaging about 500 words) that each man would be writing about something he wanted to address and that no recording that called for comment would lack a sound commentator. The Essential Jazz Records Volume 1, Ragtime to Swing, which dealt with some 250 records in entries that often were of considerable length (there were 552 pages of text) had only three co-authors , and neither the sound but sometimes rather stolid Eric Thacker nor Charles Fox, broadly experienced but perhaps by this stage in his career too often the genial phrasemaker, were up to the level that Harrison and his collaborators had reached in Modern Jazz: The Essential Records 1945-70. And, perhaps inevitably, there were times here when one felt that a particular writer was dealing with a particular recording only because he had drawn the short straw. Before he died in 1997, Thacker contributed many entries to The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2, and his virtues and flaws remain the same; while he rarely puts a foot wrong when it comes to judging the value of an individual work or its place in the historical scheme, moments of genuine critical illumination are uncommon. Further, though the breadth of Thacker’s sympathies was admirable, he seems to have been more at home writing about the jazz of the ’20s and ’30s than he was writing about , say, Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler. Replacing Fox, who died in 1991, is critic/journalist Stuart Nicholson, author of biographies of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. The role Nicholson plays in this book is, in my view, a near-disastrous one; the reasons for that estimate should become clear below. As for Harrison, brilliant though he often is, he also is something of a professional iconoclast -- an enemy, so it seems, of received opinion in all its forms. (A typical Harrison remark : “Though by no means its only sign of virtue, this [recording] is the kind of music that has never found much favour with jazz fans, still less with those who write for them.”) (709). However habitual Harrison’s oppositional stance might be, it can yield valuable results -- for example, his discussions in The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 1 of the Chicagoans and the Red Nichols -Miff Mole axis, his reconsideration of the Casa Loma Orchestra, and his detailed, definitive refutation of the too commonly held view that the Louis Armstrong of the late-1930s to mid-1940s was a lesser artist than the Armstrong of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. But Harrison’s iconoclasm, and the tone of exasperated sarcasm that so often accompanies it, can become quite rigid at times; and as these traits proliferate in The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2, they begin to threaten the intellectual coherence of the entire enterprise. I wish it had been possible for me to deal with this book wholesale and head-on. But having lived with it for more than a month now, and having tried and failed to write about it in that manner, I’ve had to adopt a more piecemeal approach. Here, then, are examples, good and bad, of what in my view makes The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2 a book that is both stimulating and deeply disappointing . • Three examples of Harrison at his gem-cutter best. On Art Tatum: “Other features of his work … were the packing of so much music, not just a lot of notes, into short time lengths and -- another aspect of the same thing -- his often compositional shaping of each performance as a whole instead of as simply an episode of open-ended improvisation on the chords. It was all done with an ease so extreme as to suggest ironic detachment.” (12) On Dizzy Gillespie: “Restless in attack, his style was dramatic, full of sharp contrasts which created a dynamic sense of insecurity in listeners…” (17) On Jimmy Giuffre: “A whispering barker who offered amazing reductions...” (371) • An example of how Harrison’s need to sneer can lead him to make remarks that border on willful inaccuracy: “[Fat’s Navarro’s] dates with ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, an arch vulgarian who subsequently found his true metier as a cog in Basie’s ponderous latter-day machine…” (39) Harrison is free to dislike the music of both Davis and the latter-day Count Basie band (long a Harrison bugaboo); what he is not free to do is imply (as he surely does here) that the 1946 recordings that Davis made with Navarro are at all representive, even of Davis’ early work. A full two years before this, with Cootie Williams, the young Davis stands revealed as a callow but earnest Ben Webster disciple; on his recordings with Navarro the tenor saxophonist clearly is attempting to emulate (undoubtedly for commercial reasons) nascent R&B gestures. The titles of two of the pieces -- “Hollerin’ and Screamin’ ” and “Stealin’ Trash” -- would seem to be good clues as to what was going on. • Nicholson proclaims that Charlie Parker, “even in live performance, seldom played more than three choruses.” (61) It would have been nice if he had been aware of the album “Charlie Parker -- The Apartment Sessions,” discussed by Thacker , who notes “the exuberant continuum of invention which [Parker] threads through 15 or so choruses of a fast Little Willie Leaps…”(54), or this passage from Carl Woideck’s Charlie Parker: His Music and Life: “When Parker and Strings played in nightclubs, they sometimes modified the arrangements to allow Parker multiple choruses of unbroken improvisation (reportedly as long as fifteen minutes)…. ”6 Another example of Nicholson’s taste for making dubious sweeping generalizations : Instancing Max Roach’s “singularly detached,” “boorishly metronomic” playing behind Thad Jones on “Thedia” from the album The Magnificent Thad Jones and speculating that this may have been a reaction on Roach’s part to Clifford Brown’s death two weeks before, Nicholson adds: “This unyielding and unsupportive aspect of his ensemble playing … is a criticism that can be levelled at Roach’s drumming in general.” (103) But, surely, it is quicksilver, polyrhythmic responsiveness that is the essence of Roach’s style -- as could be confirmed by anyone who has listened to, say, Roach behind Brown and Sonny Rollins on such performances as “Pent-Up House,” not to mention virtually all the recordings Roach made with Parker. One can attempt to argue that this commonly held view is false, but one can’t, especially in a book of this sort, merely assert the opposite. • An example of Thacker at his best, with empathy leading to understanding , then to illumination: “Clarity of tonguing and light sound … go with subtle control of minute contrasts within [tenor saxophonist JR] Monterose’s melodic syntax: a sense of interior dialogue and of a passion which increases, though with a wry deceptiveness.” (114) Again, one wishes that Thacker were engaged to this degree more often. • Harrison writes of a 1955 recording by composer/arranger/tenor saxophonist Jack Montrose (not the same man as JR Monterose): “Both Montrose and [baritone saxophonist Bob] Gordon were unfortunate. Pointedly ignored by writers on jazz, they have gone unmentioned in histories, have been dealt with perfunctorily in works of reference or omitted altogether, and their records have not been much reissued…. Montrose played for many years in non-jazz situations…. He was on Frank Butler’s The Stepper … in 1977 but did not make another record under his own name until … 1986. And musicians pretend that the good or bad opinions of writers on jazz make no difference!” (164) Yes, those “good or bad opinions” make some difference. But does Harrison really believe that the shape of Montrose’s career (or that of any jazz musician of Montrose’s era who possessed comparable musical goals and gifts) could have been significantly altered if he had been praised more often by jazz writers, or that it was the lack of good notices that led Montrose to work in Las Vegas show bands for several decades? 7 • Discussing the composer/arrangers who wrote for the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra, Harrison refers to “the obscure Tommy Talbot.” (204) The still-active Tom Talbert -- who has several albums (both reissues and recent recordings) in print -- might be less obscure in the future if his last name had been spelled correctly here. Also, Bert Howard (256) is Bart Howard, Gunter Hempel (451) is Gunter Hampel , Irwin Helfer (757) is Erwin Helfer, Michael Brecker ( 752) attended the University of Indiana, not Indiana State, and despite two sneering “sic”s from Harrison, “Shubert” is spelled correctly in the title of the album Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley. (265) (Shubert Alley, the center of Manhattan’s theater district, is named after the theater-owning family , not the composer of Winterreise.) Then there is Harrison’s assertion that Eddie Sauter’s writing for strings on Stan Getz’s “Focus,” which he notes critic Martin Williams has described as “derivative of Bartok,” in fact bears “no stylistic resemblance “ [to Bartok] at all” (382) -- to which he adds in a arch footnote: “Bartok’s influence here … can be heard by those who do not know the composer’s work yet not by those that do.” (811) But the first piece on Focus, “I’m Late, I’m Late,” is clearly based on the second movement of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, a fact that is confirmed in the liner notes of the compact disc reissue of Focus8 by Jacob Glick of the Beaux Arts String Quartet, the first chair violist on the album. • How do the authors of “The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2: Modernism to Postmodernism” regard the jazz avant-garde? That is among most the important questions one could ask of a book that covers the period from 1941 to the present, for the nature and quality of that music and its relationship to the rest of jazz remain a fierce bone of contention -- rivaled only by the contentiousness over the nature and quality of jazz-rock and over the jazz neo-conservatism exemplified by Wynton Marsalis. (Jazz-rock is dealt with here almost exclusively by Nicholson, a fervent advocate of the genre, on grounds that rather indiscriminately mingle the aesthetic with the economic and the sociopolitical -- see his comments on the Don Ellis Orchestra below. Marsalis’ music is discussed only once, dismissively, by Nicholson, who deals with it in a manner that again seems less aesthetic than sociopolitical -- “in the context of jazz as a whole ,” he writes, “it appeared as a narrow elitism.”) (739) As for the avant-garde , Nicholson begins to lay his cards on the table here: “[Don] Ellis was among the first jazz musicians to realize that a rapprochement with popular culture was necessary to invigorate jazz as much as to retain its audience ….” (225) And he continues, with these remarks: “For many, free jazz became the anthem that screamed rejection of racial inequality….This inevitably posed problems of critical evaluation, free jazz sometimes weighing more heavily on critics’ consciences than their pleasure centers and a certain critical discretion preceded valour lest posterity marked the denigrator of a new Picasso or Joyce. … For several years free jazz remained impaled on the barriers of sociopolitical issues, part rhetoric, part artifice….” (553) And these: “…European freedom, with its arcane preoccupation with the radical and, one might unkindly add, the marginal… “(569) “…f there is one thing that jazz has always needed, it is a flourishing avant-garde, if only to keep the mainstream honest….” (581) The values on display here are vulgarly journalistic at best, complete with imputations of bad faith (Nicholson knows what is going on in other people’s “pleasure centers” and whether or not responses to music are sociopolitical) . Then there is the assumption that that which is radical and marginal (i.e. less than widely popular) is on the one hand not artistically vigorous , while , on the other hand, “a flourishing avant-garde” (of the non-radical sort?) is “always needed … if only to keep the mainstream honest.” Thacker makes no such general remarks about the avant-garde, and Harrison more or less retires from this part of the fray, though not before emitting this drastic encomium to Albert Ayler: “Even decades later, on listening to Ayler’s courageous, bewitched, desperate music, we are haunted by the strange and disquieting impression that we are out on the very limits of the expressible, out on the last dangerous fringes where the ice of what we normally call art is so thin that we can almost see through into the depths below, into the mysterious thing-in-itself from which we abstract the all-too-human conventions of music.” (502) But for reasons that Harrison nowhere explains, his interest in the post-Ayler avant- garde seems to be virtually non-existent ; aside from Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and four European figures -- Tomasz Stanko, Bernt Rosengren, Zbigniew Namyslowski, and Gyorgy Szabados -- he deals with no post-Ayler avantgardists in the book. There are some glancing remarks, though, that suggest that he and Nicholson agree on some points. Of Don Ellis’ How Time Passes album, Harrison writes: “In reality several of these pieces … arrive at overall forms considerably more free and varied ... than most of those found elsewhere in what in those years was called ‘the New Thing’.” (638) Of the John Mayer- Joe Harriott Indo-Jazz Fusions album, he writes: “The kind of exoticism represented here offered a viable alternative to free jazz in the 1960s even though, for reasons that had little to do with music, free jazz received nearly all the attention.” (729) And expanding on the “exoticism as viable alternative” point, he writes of the mid-1950s Lighthouse All-Stars recordings that featured Bob Cooper on oboe and English horn and either Bud Shank or Buddy Collette on flute: “The permanent establishment of these instruments in jazz was part of a general expansion of that music’s colouristic and textural resources … [that] in turn was part of an increase in the expressive resources of jazz which can never be simply a matter of expanded melodic, rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies.” (438) One welcomes Harrison’s focus on musical rather than sociopolitical matters, but one wonders how exoticism, or an expansion of “colouristic and textural resources” that does not involve an expansion of “melodic, rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies,” could possibly be a recipe for long term aesthetic success. Again, Harrison’s remarks merely hint at what his view of jazz’s present and future might be. And that brings us to what may be the book’s most peculiar and frustrating omission,9 for it deals with three key figures of the jazz avant -garde -- guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Evan Parker, and the late percussionist-bandleader John Stevens of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (and such related figures as bassist Barry Guy, trombonist Paul Rutherford and percussionist Paul Lytton) -- by, for the most part, not dealing with them at all. Whatever one thinks of the music of Bailey, Parker, et al., it has been prominent for more than 30 years and remains widely influential . (While the “European freedom” that Nicholson dismisses has other points of origin, this music certainly runs parallel to it -- a “type of free improvisation [that],” in the words of critic Victor Schonfield, “has become accepted as a common language for an army of improvisers throughout the world.”10 ) But Parker is mentioned only as a sideman on Peter Brotzmann’s “Machine Gun,” (507), Bailey is referred to, once, by Nicholson as “an arcane visionary” (782), while Harrison also confines himself to a lone remark, saying of a musician he admires that “he has even collaborated with Derek Bailey.” Stevens and the others do not appear at all. And yet in the March 1973 issue of Jazz and Blues Harrison wrote of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble: “The most notable thing was not this performance’s varied sensuous impact but the way it established its own rules of expression and organization…. [T]he threads are drawn together, trombone, bass and drum parts forming a unified texture wherein each line is acutely responsive to the others…. The group here [on the album Karyobin] displays a perfectly individual method and style…. although the instrumental lines are unsparingly discontinuous the vitality of the whole is such that everything finds a meaningful place….”11 Of course, Harrison is free to change his mind, and it is possible that either he feels that that this music has decayed and/or gone astray, or it ought not to be regarded as jazz, or that back in 1973 he was mistaken about its value. But one would think that he, and this book, owe us some response to this music other than Nicholson’s seemingly market-oriented claim that it is “marginal.” • Nicholson seldom misses the opportunity to mention the presence of harmonic commonplaces (we are often told of ii-V-1 sequences being resolved) and to outline a pieces’ chorus structure, e.g. this account of Wayne Shorter’s “Dance Cadaverous”: “It is a long , 64-bar composition with an ABAB1 form, comprising four 16-bar sections: Intro (8 bars) + A (8 + 8) + B (8 +8) + A (8 + 8) + B (8 +81).”(335) But the point is what, other than Nicholson’s having demonstrated that he can count and that he knows that ii-V-1 sequences exist? As someone once said, “A difference, in order to be a difference, must make a difference.” Nicholson himself proves the point when he nicely describes how Red Garland’s “omitting the root of the chord from the bottom of some of the voicings he used to accompany soloists .. . particularly on dominant seventh chords … gave a feeling of harmonic ambiguity which suited [Miles Davis’] … horizontal style of improvising [and] also suited Coltrane’s vertical approach … for a rootless dominant seventh chord can sound like two chords at the same time in certain circumstances...” (278) • While discussing Miles Davis’ “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” Nicholson states: “In bop and hard bop, complex themes were the province of the front line, while the accompaniment provided by piano, bass and drums followed established conventions of clarity and simplicity. ” (583) But as Jack Cooke said of Art Blakey and Horace Silver , in his classic formulation of the hard bop aesthetic in Modern Jazz: The Essential Records 1945-70: “With Blakey … the high-hat … cymbal is introduced on the second and fourth beats … the [ride] cymbal beat is emboldened to match , and the various accents raised to the degree of becoming strong , lengthy rhythmic designs in their own right, setting up in polyrhythmic opposition to the basic beat. Inevitably, this is a style in which the drummer no longer functions as accompanist pure and simple but often, and for long periods, becomes a contributor on the same level as the soloist , playing parallel with him, competing with him, sometimes even dominating him. … Silver was building the same kind of attacking method for the piano .. and he and Blakey became a rare team of wit and ferocity…”12 Would it be too much to say that Cooke’s description amounts to fact, not opinion? And what , then, does that make Nicholson’s “in hard bop … the accompaniment provided by piano, bass and drums followed established conventions of clarity and simplicity ”? In sum, The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2: Modernism to Postmodernism is a deeply flawed work . In part that is because the task that the authors of this book and The Essential Jazz Records Volume 1, Ragtime to Swing undertook -- to provide “ a critical survey of the whole field of recorded jazz … to see both the wood and specimens of significant individual trees” (x) -- is such an inherently daunting one . Even so, the flaws of this project are finally those of the individuals involved -- especially Nicholson the breezy pontificator and Harrison the professional iconoclast. I will, however, consult this book again for all that the other Max Harrison has to say about the many musicians he has so much to say about -- Jimmy Giuffre, Gil Melle, Martial Solal, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Conte Candoli, Wardell Gray, Fats Navarro, Bob Cooper, Lennie Tristano, Lars Gullin, etc. Would that this Max Harrison were the only one. 1. London: Quartet Books, 1976. 2. New York and London: Norton, 1986. 3. London: Hanover Books, 1968. 4. London: Hanover Books, 1975. 5. London: Mansell, 1984. 6. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, page 186. 7. A comparison between Montrose’s career and those of two comparable figures, saxophonists Bill Perkins and Bud Shank, might help to explain why Harrison’s "And musicians pretend that the good or bad opinions of writers on jazz make no difference!" is such a naïve and peculiar statement. Perkins, Shank, and Montrose all worked in the same West Coast milieu in the mid-to-late 1950s, all three received positive attention from a number of jazz writers and from their musical peers, and all three made recordings under their own names and as sidemen. None of them, however, made a living for any significant stretch of time as the leader of his own group; instead, the chief source of profitable work available to them was in Hollywood film studio and television industry orchestras. The multiply demanding lifestyle of studio work was, however, not to the taste of every jazz-oriented musician: Perkins left it to work as a tape editor in the recording industry, returning to the studios intermittently and with reluctance; Shank remained in the studios for many years, then moved to Port Townsend, Wash.; and Montrose chose or took the Las Vegas show band option. One would imagine, then, that among the chief reasons Montrose made so few records after his mid-1950s moment in the sun, while Perkins and Shank have continued to record under their own names from time to time, was that Montrose simply was "off the scene" -- working in another city, and one that is not a home to the recording industry, as Los Angeles is. Lack of favorable reviews from jazz writers had little or nothing to do with any of this. 8. Bill Kirchner, liner notes for Stan Getz: Focus, (Verve 314 521 419-2). 9. Also peculiar and frustrating is the fact that Mischa Mengelberg’s album Change of Season, which is devoted to music of Herbie Nichols, is discussed but not any of Nichols’ own recordings. 10. liner notes for Evan Parker, London Air Lift, (FMP CD 89). 11. Harrison, Max, 1973, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Jazz and Blues, March 1973: 8-9. 12. London: Hanover Books, 1975, page 69.

No -- plick.

I believe that in one sense that's exactly what W B-C had in mind, because "Joyce Hatto-Hoax" places him and his perversities forever front-and-center. It's as though, you should pardon the expression, he now has a stiff p---- for all eternity.

The isinglass curtains would be rolled up out of sight at the edges of the roof (probably hidden by the fringe) so they could be "rolled right down, in case there's a change in the weather" -- isinglass being waterproof. The surrey as depicted doesn't have sidelights visible, but you can guess where they would be and what they would be for -- nighttime safety, like reflective tape on a pair of running shoes.

Calm me! Calm me!

I didn't say that, but I think it's clear from your post that aren't agin 'em at all.

I took the liberty of sending Jim's "I can't stress this enough" post to Ethan Iverson at Do The Math, identifying who Jim is (a challenge, believe me). Sorry if that was out of bounds, but Jim's point was so on the money, and I think that Ethan and his readers needed to see it.

The mysterious "Alan Watkins" was a regular RMCR poster, supposedly a native of Great Britain who had spent most of his adult life working as a tympanist with orchestras in Eastern Europe, mainly Czechoslovakia. Watkins, coming on like a a parody of an amiable old buffer, would typically reminisce about marvelous performances of marvelous Dvorak and Smetana works that he had been part of, usually conducted by semi-obscure but terribly underrated (by his account) Czech conductors. No particular red flags here, but there was in retrospect a consistent air of passive-aggressive self-importance in Watkins's posts, in that his persona was on the one hand humble and shambling and on the other hand quite insistent that he was a man who was brimful of special knowledge -- an actual professional musician (albeit, and this was perhaps crucial, on an instrument of relative obscurity i.e. opine about the violin or the piano or even the French horn, and others who know those instruments will show up on such forums; opine about the tympani and orchestral percusssion in general and you'll probably hold the floor), and a specialist in the Czech repertoire and how it should be played (music of undoubted importance but not music that a whole lot of people know inside out, as Watkins claimed to do). In any case, having established himself as part of the RMCR landscape, Watkins weighed in with much fervor early on and throughout the Hatto affair as someone who had acquired and loved all her recordings, had met and talked to Hatto, who endorsed every aspect of W B-C's tale and who, from within his amiable old buffer pose professed to be shocked and dismayed that our world had come to such a pass that anyone would suggest that there was a fraud going on here, especially when it involved thinking and saying bad things about a sick and now dead lady. Again, I can't recall all the details, but as the hoax became impossible for anyone but a lunatic or someone who was in on it himself to deny, Watkins began a crablike (if crabs can shamble) retreat, though he gave up ground in the W B-C manner, as though one should give him sympathy and moral credit for doing so rather than remain suspicious of how much was still being concealed. Eventually, IIRC, it turned out that there was no record of anyone by the name of Alan Watkins ever having played tympani in the Czech orchestras he claimed to have been part of (other parts of Watkins's stated bio previously had been tested and found improbable or impossible), and that Watkins (whoever he really was) and W B-C had been connected in some manner for decades (if indeed there really was an "Alan Watkins" at all). I'm sure that there are many further details to this aspect of this twisted tale, but at some point Alan Watkins ceased to post on RMCR. Hurt feelings, I suppose. BTW, speaking of the amiable buffer persona, it just occurrred to me: Alan Watkins = Dr. Watson?

Too old, too tired (at least I have been for a while), and too many "life issues" to deal with. Posting here and accepting an occasional liner note job for a record that I like seems to be what fits. But it could be fun. In particular, I sometimes think what it would be like to have Ratliff or Chinen's gig, to be able to hear all that you physically could hear, react to/think about it right quick, and then put your thoughts in print immediately. From prior experience, there's a mutually stimulating rhythm that can develop between yourself and the scene under such circumstances. I believe Mark Stryker has been/is operating along those lines.

Also, if Hatto did have cancer and it was diagnosed in 1966 (IIRC that was the story), she then lived another 40 years? And I don't recall that remission was part of the tale. Probably not utterly unprecedented, if true, but way out on the edge somewhere.

Hard for me now to recall everything that was said about the Hatto hoax on rec.music.classical.recordings before and after the hoax was uncovered, but, again IIRC, Singer's New Yorker piece struck me as much too credulous. The only thing we know for sure about Hatto is that she played the piano at one time; as far as I know, virtually everything else that has not been firmly established to have been faked/fraudulent has NOT been nailed down, including two things in particular -- did Hatto have cancer and when did she die? I know that her husband says June 2006 for her death date (mighty convenient in the light of all that has happened), but I wouldn't be surprised if that was faked too and that Hatto died years ago. Yes, people supposedly talked to her on the phone in recent years, but I can easily see hubby W B-C doing "Hatto" a la Peter Sellers or Dame Edna. As for her oncologist, who is cited here and there along lines that don't quite support W B-C in one or more senses but do support him in others (e.g. Hatto did have cancer? was she alive until 2006?) -- again, has anyone seen this dude face-to-face and verified who he is? I know in my bones how guys like W B-C operate, and one of their key, near-infallible moves is to thrust alleged sad weakness before us (unfairly neglected woman dying of cancer) and then, when the jig threatens to be up, "admit" to certain things that in effect bolster some remaining aspects of what almost always is a wholesale ongoing fraud -- wholesale beyond the wildest imaginings of a sober, human interest-y New Yorker writer. What keeps the W B-Cs of the world going is their ability to maintain some shred of the basically fraudulent under all conditions and at all times; the core of their identity is their ability/need to get you to believe in real time, while they bear witness to your belief, something that they've made up almost completely, working in just enough bits of fact. I would hazard the guess that their biggest thrills come when the jig is up (or it seems so to us), when they can semi-confess to the likes of a Mark Singer while still keeping their working hand moving about covertly in their pants.

Answer: Because Ankiel doesn't yet have any stats of consequence? Also, because Ankiel has been sold to us as a three-part human interest story -- phenom, then wildman-headcase-failure of spectacular proportions, finally as a comeback kid and at a whole new position to boot (guess that makes it a four-parter). Given all that, it's understandably tough for most citizens to get their heads around a switch from that story arc to an utterly new and downbeat one. Oh, yes -- and Rick isn't Black.

At work (a textbook publishing house) in 1970. Interestingly, perhaps, an older married friend there had mentioned to me, when I was lamenting various aspects of a long semi-ugly relationship that had come to an end several months befor and obviously never should have begun, that men are like animals in the sense that when it comes time for them to mate (as in pair off) they will (probably for the first time in their lives) begin to find/see the kind of women that they should pair off with -- and if you're lucky, it will be one women, and she'll feel the same way about you.

At least OK earned a portion of his ego by helping start a label and actually work with the artists involved. What did Feather ever do, based on Albertson's letter, besides write a book and allegedly write some songs? That's a tough call, between LF and OK. As Chuck says, LF did a lot of good and other things that were not good. In the former category, in addition to his assiduous and often valuable journalism, LF produced a number of recordings, organized concerts, and played significant roles in the early careers of Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and (especially) George Shearing -- though how significant his role was in Washington's case is, as we know, a matter of some dispute. In the latter category, in addition to his bodacious ego and Machiavellian ways, LF's championing of modern jazz in the mid-1940s definitely had its dark side, because LF felt that championing etc. demanded that much so-called traditional jazz be sneered at. Thus, for example, in LF's scheme of things Jelly Roll Morton was an incompetent fraud, a "fact" that LF never ceased to proclaim. In the annoying "moldy fig" versus "progressive" wars of the '40s, which wasted so much energy, polluted the atmosphere, and were even hurtful to some musicians, LF was among the key figures. Oh, yes -- his Blindfold Tests (an idea that I'm pretty sure LF originated; he certainly claimed so, and I don't recall anyone weighing in to the contrary) were often marred by LF playing bad and/or unrepresentative recordings by musicians he didn't like and which he hoped would then be put down by the musician taking the Blindfold Test. As for OK, Chris's accounts here and elsewhere of OK's work at Riverside make it clear that in his view, which I trust, Bill Grauer, not OK, was the key figure there, and that at recording sessions in particular OK was seldom a significant party and sometimes a person who hampered things. It's my impression that OK's later career in the jazz record biz has been in tune with that estimate.

Grig is my second-favorite composer, right after Bethoven.

There's an earlier recording from two months earlier, also with Urbie Green on board but with a smaller ensemble, for a John Carisi album that wasn't released at the time. It's in the "RCA Victor Jazz Workshop - The Arrangers" compilation (it also has a new take on Carisi's "Israel"). F I know that "Springsville" too (it's great); just assumed that the Green came first and didn't check. Both performances definitely need to be heard, though; they're different in tone and detail.

Chris -- I've heard tales of Leonard's, shall we say, personality, but I'd never encountered him in his own semi-private words before. Wow. Actually, I did have one passing encounter with LF at work that matches up with his review of your Bessie Smith biography. Back in 1988 I wrote a very negative review of "The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz." Then, I don't recall from whom, I got a copy of the fairly thick, slick-paper program from the L.A.-based Playboy Jazz Festival. In the program was a piece (not written by LF but by one his young acolytes; LF played a prominent role in the festival) in which my review was quoted from extensively and was praised for its accuracy, wit, etc. This all seemed a bit odd and shoe-horned in -- why was there an article in a Playboy Jazz Festival program that focused on a book review written several months before for the Chicago Tribune? -- but after a minute, I figured it out. "The New Grove" was the chief rival of LF's "The Biographical Enycylopedia of Jazz," and LF wanted to take down "The New Grove," though he was aware that a direct assault by him on "The New Grove" in this context would be seen as self-serving. So he got this acolyte to write a piece in which abundant references were made to a negative review of "The New Grove" by a third party. Neat.

Depends on what kind of stuff you like, but if that's the one with Doug Mettome and Al Cohn on bass clarinet, I found it to be very nice. Not a date of pulse-pounding excitement, but that's not Green's thing anyway. The Fresh Sound repackaging of Green's two ABC-Paramount LPs is definitely worthwhile. The big band date has John Carisi arrangements, including the first setting of Carisi's "Springsville."

Who was on top?

Oh, you mean - Blatherings From the Underbrow (or - Pavarotti Died & Nothing Personal, But I Really Didn't Give Too Much Of A Rat's Ass, But Then Joe Zawinul Died & It Touched Me A Little Bit)? Still looking for an editor. I don't have the balls to approach Larry... If I can find the time, I'd be delighted. Seriously. But the ball's in your court.

Here's some images of Lars Sjosten: http://www.sami.se/art/sjosten/sjosten.htm

Based on recordings I've heard on which Dylag appears, he was more fluid/fluent than this guy.